Now, where are [Mexican illegal immigrants] fleeing from? Mostly from Central America, where they’re fleeing from the results of <b>our</b> policies. - Noam Chomsky

It is important to understand just what properties of language were most striking to Descartes and his followers. The discussion of what I have been calling “the creative aspect of language use” turns on three important observations. The first is that the normal use of language is innovative, in the sense that much of what we say in the course of normal language use is entirely new, not a repetition of anything that we have heard before and not even similar in pattern – in any useful sense of the terms “similar” and “pattern” – to sentences or discourse that we have heard in the past. This is a truism, but an important one, often overlooked and not infrequently denied in the behaviorist period of linguistics to which I referred earlier, when it was almost universally claimed that a person’s knowledge of language is representable as a stored set of patterns, overlearned through constant repetition and detailed training, with innovation being at most a matter of “analogy.”

Rather, democracy is when every free citizen has authority and oligarchy is when the rich have it. Democracy is when there is a majority of free, poor men who have authority to rule, while oligarchy is when it is in the hands of the wealthy and well-born, who are a minority.

China is by no means saintly. Plenty of criticisms you can make of China. But I would like to describe the world situation as it is, not as it’s presented by US-British propaganda.