CounterPunch

We are at that point in American history where politicians and pundits look at Kent State and Jackson State as models of tough discipline for American students instead of an atrocity never to be repeated…It’s worth asking why the National Guard has to be brought in to brutalize students camping on college lawns, when the average police force for a medium-sized city has more firepower and a higher body count. Maybe the National Guard just wants their cut of the action…

No longer considered a public good where ideas and important social issues are nurtured, debated. and interrogated, institutions of higher education are being transformed into indoctrination centers where critical ideas and imagined futures are held in contempt, transformed into apparatuses of censorship and hopelessness. Derided as a haven for critically informed social criticism, the far-right wants to reduce teaching and learning to what might be called cloning pedagogies, designed to clone culture... Читать дальше...

In the state’s closing arguments jurors were treated to the spectacle of the prosecutor in Brenda’s case, Gayland Gieger, hauling a suitcase toward the jury box, from which he extracted a pair of her thong panties, which he waved in front of them, saying, to audible gasps in the courtroom: “This [dangling a pink thong] is what we found in [the suitcase]. It’s been introduced into evidence. The grieving widow packs this [brandishing a red thong] to run off with her boyfriend. The grieving widow... Читать дальше...

As an undergraduate at UC in the late 60s, I wondered why the name of one of the world’s greatest physicists who had worked there was absent, whereas that of his colleague, Ernest O. Lawrence, had been affixed to the sprawling Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and the Lawrence Hall of Science on the hill above campus as well as to the Lawrence National Laboratory in Livermore south of Berkeley.  A prestigious award and endowed lectureship also bore his name which features prominently in The Centennial... Читать дальше...

In striking at the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1 Bibi Netanyahu has made himself an April Fool. Israel has been bombing Syria for years with no provocation or retaliation by Syria. For years it has bombed its airports which disrupted humanitarian aid to Syria’s civilian population who were suffering in its long civil war. Iran responded to the Israeli strike on its Damascus consulate by asking its allies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, to refrain from... Читать дальше...

It’s never been so bad. The Great Barrier Reef, which is one of nature’s most iconic mosaics of biodiversity, is on the ropes because of extreme global warming. Coral bleaching at the World Heritage-listed reef is “experiencing its worst mass bleaching event on record.” (Source: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is ‘Transforming’ from Repeated Coral Bleaching, More

How will Biden conceal the inflation rampaging throughout his term? The latest scheme appears to be draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the last drop. It’s already down to 17 percent, because Biden opened the spigot when his idiotic sanctions on Russian energy back in 2022 boosted prices at the pump into the stratosphere, always a terrifying development for homo politicus. Biden tamed gas prices by emptying most of the SPR. Now he may finish it off, because no, he can’t have gas prices rising before the election... Читать дальше...

No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 people — seventy percent of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more More

The recent presence of police on the campus of Columbia University to stop pro- Palestinian protesters is reminiscent of turbulence on the same campus in 1968. While the past and present issues of contestation at Columbia are different, the issues of free speech and student activism reflect an ongoing tension between students and universities in More

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote Manufacturing Consent in the late 1980s to describe the structural forces which cause an otherwise free media—one lacking government censorship, fear of prison for journalists (aside from those sharing designated government secrets), and staffed with people who genuinely see themselves as holding power accountable—can nonetheless produce systematic propaganda, with a highly More