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Born on December 7, 1928, Noam Chomsky was raised by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia. Though his father was a Hebrew scholar who studied medieval grammar, Chomsky lacked direction through school and university and only committed to the study of linguistics when he took up a post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955. It wasn't long, however, before the young unknown scholar single-handedly revolutionized the field of linguists, his book Syntactic Structures (1957) kickstarting his concept of "transformational grammar" that argued — contrary to the behaviourist fad of the time — that our linguistic capacity is genetic...

Left-wing academic Noam Chomsky says President Trump is not a “nationalist" because Trump doesn't care enough about his own nation, regardless of Trump's controversial embrace of the term this week. Chomsky told the Washington Examiner the term is used in "all sorts of ways." But while the term has been used to describe world leaders such as Adolf Hitler, the linguist and social analyst said he's less concerned about that connotation and more irked by the falsity of Trump's claim. “I do object to the term for different reasons," he said. "A nationalist is someone who is concerned for the...

A growing body of evidence shows that language doesn’t just give people a set of words to express their thoughts. It actually can have a heavy influence on those thoughts and on the behaviors they lead to. What would this mean for the thinking and behavior of a person who learns a “pure language”?

Thursday, from Al Jazeera: “Yemen ‘on Brink of New Cholera Epidemic,’ Charity Warns.” The piece details how recent developments in the Yemeni civil war — specifically, the possible siege of the port city of Hodeidah — may cause a surge in cholera cases. There were over a million reported cases of cholera between the fall of 2016 and spring of 2018, the largest documented outbreak in modern times. The rate of infection had slowed, but observers now fear resurgence. Since the conflict began, medical services have been devastated across the war-torn country, and children in particular have been affected, with...

A public university is paying a radical 89-year-old linguist hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach his famously leftist brand of politics, according to records obtained by Judicial after a months-long battle with the taxpayer-funded institution. Judicial Watch launched an investigation after the University of Arizona (UA), located in Tucson with an enrollment of about 40,000, announced that it hired Noam Chomsky to teach a general education course for undergraduates titled “What is Politics?” In the announcement UA describes Chomsky as a “world-renowned linguist” and one of the “most cited scholars in modern history.” The reality is that Chomsky is...

Andrew Sullivan says the man who heckled Rummy was Not some crazed lefty. The man who demanded that Rumsfeld answer the questions we all want to have answered turns out to be the man who gave former president George H. W. Bush his daily intelligence briefing. And he was right in the exchange; and Rummy was factually wrong. Yep: Rumsfeld lied. Quelle surprise. No not some crazed lefty. The man was Ray McGovern, who Sweetness and Light noticed was part of Daniel Ellsberg's Truth Telling Project. Here's the relevant blog entry from the Belmont archives: Sweetness and Light has...

The left-wing "Antifa" movement is rising in prominence after clashing with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., but one progressive scholar says the anti-fascists feed the fire they seek to extinguish. "As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant." Many activists affiliated with the loosely organized Antifa movement consider themselves anarchists or socialists. They often wear black and take measures to conceal their identity.

Left-wing academic Noam Chomsky has declared that the Republican Party is the “most dangerous organization in human history” for their stance on climate change. Chomsky, still considered to be a darling of the left, told the BBC that, unlike ISIS or North Korea, the Republican Party is “dedicated to destroying the prospects for organized human existence.” Asked whether Donald Trump would damage America, Chomsky argued that the “main damage he will do is to the world, and it’s already happening.” “The most significant aspect of the Trump election, and it’s not just Trump, it’s the whole Republican party, is their...

...AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this comment that you made that the Republican Party, you said, is the most dangerous organization in world history. Can you explain? NOAM CHOMSKY: I also said that it’s an extremely outrageous statement. But the question is whether it’s true. I mean, has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of. Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it...

This is an audio excerpt from the book, "Seven Miracles That Saved America: Why They Matter and Why We Should Have Hope" (http://tinyurl.com/j2x2pym) detailing some of Chomsky's anti-American views. An audio snippet of Howard Zinn can also be found here: https://youtu.be/u1f0rllGZdU

On Nov. 8, Donald Trump managed to pull the biggest upset in U.S. politics by tapping successfully into the anger of white voters and appealing to the lowest inclinations of people in a manner that would have probably impressed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels himself. But what exactly does Trump's victory mean and what can one expect from this megalomaniac when he takes over the reins of power on Jan. 20, 2017? What is Trump's political ideology, if any and is "Trumpism" a movement? Will U.S. foreign policy be any different under a Trump administration? Some years ago, public intellectual Noam...

It has become the fact in American political talking points, even Mr. Trump insists that what is going on in the Middle East today is the result of the President Bush’s 2003 policy in Iraq that opened the doors to chaos and the creation of ISIS. No one, however, is going back to search for the root causes of the events in today’s complicated and problematic Middle East. The facts are, notwithstanding the forever continuing Palestinian/Israeli war, that the Middle East was kept relatively peaceful and political Islam and its terrorism was kept under control in a secular Iran until...

In an interview with Chris Hedges in 2010, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist and dissident intellectual, remarked that he has “never seen anything like this.” By this, he meant the state of American society, relative to the time in which he was raised — the Depression years — and to the tumultuous state of Europe during that same period. “It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky said. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and...

Bill Ayers. Remember him?: Unrepentant terrorist, SDS riotmaker, pal and political mentor of young Barack Obama, and putative author/ghostwriter of Obama's famous 1995 memoir, Dreams of My Father. In 2011, Ayers (shown) publicly claimed authorship of Dreams (see video of Ayers here) after Dr. Jack Cashill's forensic literary analysis - in a 2008 article and his more extensive book-length analysis in 2011, Deconstructing Obama had convincingly made the case that Ayers, a talented wordsmith, had written the book for the unskilled Obama to help launch the up-and-coming young comrade's political career. During Obama's 2008 run for the White House, his...

In a bid to pump up his anemic African-American support, Bernie Sanders very publicly chowed down yesterday with rapper Killer Mike, who at a subsequent rally endorsed Sanders. Reporting on the meeting of the unlikely duo, the Washington Post wrote that among other things they discussed "their mutual appreciation for the work of the philosopher Noam Chomsky." So Bernie digs Noam Chomsky. You remember Noam: condemned the killing of Bin Laden and said that George W.'s crimes "vastly exceed bin Laden's;" self-described anarchist-socialist; member of Marxist Industrial Workers of the World; agnostic on the Holocaust, doesn't think Holocaust denial is...

A global robotic arms race "is virtually inevitable" unless a ban is imposed on autonomous weapons, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and 1,000 academics, researchers and public figures have warned. In an open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aries, the Future of Life Institute signatories caution that "starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control". Although the letter, first reported by the Guardian, notes that "we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many...

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

The Obama administration is looking favorably at the plan by a Chinese economist to collateralize China’s enormous US debt with a huge swath of America’s Heartland which is, coincidentally, populated by a Conservative voting bloc. Our valuable real estate, infrastructure and profitable corporations, all in RED STATE territories, are now under the evil gaze of liberal operatives whose hatred for any and all things American is exceeded only by their greed and globalist nature. “Yu Qiao, a professor of economics in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsighua University in Beijing proposed in 2009 the plan for the...

In total, 39 English language books were found at bin Laden's Pakistan compound along with a wealth of other written materials: The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim America's Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias America's 'War on Terrorism' by Michel Chossudovsky Al-Qaeda's Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier...

A pair of activists in the state of Washington are promoting an anti-Israel curriculum that high school social studies teachers are considering adopting. Ed Mast and Linda Bevis, of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, have developed “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Bevis gave a presentation on it in October at the Washington State Council for the Social Studies annual meeting, Edward Alexander reported in The Weekly Standard on November 10, 2014. “In 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza from Egypt and Jordan,” the “Teaching Trunk curriculum reads. “Israel instituted a military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank—which...