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Palast & David Cay Johnston: How Trump Stole 2020 — A Warning!

They don’t steal votes to steal elections. They steal votes to steal the money. If you can steal an election, you’ve stolen the keys to the treasury — our treasury. In this conversation, award-winning investigative reporters and authors Greg Palast and David Cay Johnston follow the (stolen) money, and expose the billionaires and ballots bandits who are systematically stripping the United States of its assets, just as a vulture fund would with a corporate entity caught in its talons.

The post Palast & David Cay Johnston: How Trump Stole 2020 — A Warning! appeared first on Greg Palast.




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I Got Nothin'

I suppose I really don't. It's a horrible situation and even the supposed "good guys" at the federal level, who don't run things entirely but who aren't entirely powerless, have shown no signs of having any sense of the catastrophe that is unfolding. "No one" panics unless stonks are tanking, and the Fed is making sure that doesn't happen.

As long as "the market" is happy, rich people are happy, "everybody" is happy.





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We'll Know Better Next Time

I don't have the entirety of The Discourse jacked into my head, but I see very little acknowledgement from the people in power, or even people with big microphones, that this is an unfolding disaster that can't be remedied with the equivalent of a few band aids. Things are fucked - short term, long term, structurally - and they can't easily be unfucked. Fixing the Great Recession was easy and "they" failed at that. Fixing this one is hard and even with unimaginable unemployment numbers coming in there doesn't seem to be much urgency.

It's been 8 weeks since Mitch McConnell took his 3 day weekend and Democrats pretended to be mad about that. Pelosi won't let the House do anything except vote for bills she hands them 5 minutes before, and we have evidence from minute one that Pelosi and her people are bad and incompetent about what needs to be done.

Just a reminder:


That's Pelosi's Deputy Chief of Staff. Anyone knew that one way or another trillions were about to go out the door to save THE MARKET (through the Fed, Treasury, etc.) and they were worried about whether Don Jr's $1200 check might be too generous for him.




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Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord $37.50 -- cdkeys.com (PC/Steam)

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is currently $37.50 on cdkeys.com. Yesterday it was $41. 

 

https://www.cdkeys.com/pc/games/mount-and-blade-ii-2-bannerlord-pc

 

On Steam its MSRP is $50 with a limited time sale going on now for $45. The game just came out to Early Access 3/31.

 

The question now is: jump now on the good price, or will the price continue to fall?

 

Note: It's in Early Access and has been in development for like 8 years. Expect some clunk.




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RiteAid BonusCash rewards for Apr 5-11, 2020 ... 20% ROI on Xbox, GameStop, Apple, Google, Netflix, Nike, Panera, Fandango, AMC, & Regal GC's

It's a bumper crop of BonusCash at your local Rite-Aid this week, with not 1, 2, 3, but 4 gaming GC's, and 1 of those gives you even more options!

  • Nike, GameStop, Netflix ... $5 BonusCash when you buy $25 of these items.*
  • Google Play, AMC Theatres, Apple AppStore/iTunes, Fandango, XBOX, Panera Bread, Regal Theatres ... $6 BonusCash when you buy $30 of these items.*

FYI, "GameStop" is a big win, because not only can you purchase (additional) XBOX, PSN, Nintendo, and Steam credit there, but you order the GC credit from their website, and get a redemption code instantly after checkout.
 
For those who are new to the "Rite-Aid wellness+ reward BonusCash" program, you'll receive the $$$ amount when you purchase the minimum amount specified. Gift-cards within the same bullet-point share the same "limit 2 offers per customer", but you can earn rewards on the other bullet-point lines as well. For example, you can purchase $25 each of GameStop & Netflix (or $50 of GameStop) ... and still be able to purchase another $60 mix of Google & Apple & XBOX, and can stagger your 4 GC purchases throughout the week.

Screenshot of 2 separate GC offers (bullet points) included here:

Spoiler


Small print (at bottom of weekly ad) and BonusCash T&C's included here:
Spoiler


FYI ... the limit of "2 offers per customer" is tracked by your "wellness+ rewards" account, so you'll need to limit yourself to 2 offers per line item throughout the week, and not just "2 per transaction" or "2 per day". At the time of purchase, your printed receipt will indicate how many of the "limit 2" you've met, but neither the website nor register will indicate ...

  • if you've met the limit of 2 items per BonusCash group with the current transaction, or
  • if the transaction you're about to complete exceeds the limit of 2 per week, or
  • when your BonusCash rewards will expire.

Luckily the mobile RiteAid app (and website) list your individual accumulation & cashing out on a per transaction basis, so that's a good way to keep tabs on the expiration dates, since you only get 30 days to spend the BonusCash once earned. Good luck!

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    PlayStation Move Motion Controller Two-Pack & Tilt Brush Bundle - $99.99 @ PlayStation Direct

     
    NEW, free shipping automatic at checkout for any order over $70.
     
    Tilt Brush on PSN - $19.99
     
    Deals on these a far and few between. New Move controllers are out of stock in a lot of places. This is direct from PlayStation and likely to be the newest batch of manufactured controllers as they are in a new box with a digital code included.
     
    Much better than dealing with the used PS3 era Moves with degraded batteries.
     
    Alternatively, purchase an open-box from Best Buy for $84.99. 
     
    Not a blazing deal, but if you are in the market for these it might be the best you'll find for a bit.




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    PM Studios "Stay Safe" Sale - Featuring Switch/PS4, and Limited Run Games.

    PM Studios online store is back and they made a new sale featuring new reprints, overall deals and restock on rare out-of-print titles from Limited Run Games.

     

    https://twitter.com/PMStudiosUSA/status/1253401043414781959

     

    Also all orders over $49.99 will get Cytus Alpha Limited Edition Original Soundtrack CD for free with the Coupon "FREEGIFT".

     

    Kinda sick move they did now.

     

    https://www.pm-studios.com/store

     

    Edit: Price list.

     

    Reprints/Pre-Orders: 
     
    Horizon Chase Turbo (Switch) - $29.99
    Ministry of Broadcast (Steelbook Edition) (Switch) - $39.99 
     
    Deals:
     
    Deemo (Switch) $39.99 - $19.99
    Opus Collection (Switch) $39.99 - 19.99
    Horizon Chase Turbo (First Print - PS4) $29.99 - $14.99
    Hover (Switch) - $29.99 - $24.99
    WILL: A Wonderful World Limited Edition (Plush, 120 page Artbook, etc) : $79.99 $69.99
    WILL: A Wonderful World - Artbook: $29.99 - $24.99

    Limited Run Games products:
    Mercenaries Series Double Pack (PAX Exclusive): $69.99
    Mercenaries Wings Limited Edition (PS4 - LRG) : $59.99
    Mercenaries Wings Limited Edition (Switch - LRG): $59.99
    Musynx First Print (Vita - LRG): $29.99
    Deemo: The Last Recital (Vita - LRG): $29.99
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    Iffy's Online Store 20% Off Everything, Golden Week Sale, Ends 5/6

    "Happy Golden Week! Receive 20% off all items added to your cart until 5/6!!
    Free shipping on all US orders over $57.99!"

     

    https://www.iffysonlinestore.com/

     

    Limited Editions included.

     

    A couple Switch recommendations (prices before discount),

     

    Moero Chronicle Hyper Standard Edition $29.99

     

    Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force Standard Edition $39.99

     

    Enjoy.




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    Fortnite Darkfire Bundle (PS4/XB1/Switch) $14.99 & BOGO Fortnite Figures at Best Buy - DotD

    Fortnite Darkfire Bundle (PS4/XB1/Switch) $14.99  msrp $29.99

    Amazon has the PS4 version for the same price.

     

    BOGO Fortnite Figures

     

    Other Fornite deals:

    Buy any v-bucks card, get the SteelSeries - Arctis 1 Wireless Stereo Gaming Headset for PC for $59.99

     

     

    Here's what the Darkfire Bundle includes:

    https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/darkfire

    Spoiler
  • -->




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    i want elleair's +water!!!

    kyaaaa~~~ finally something hopefully useable from jun's endorsements though i bought both his fasio mascara, and used them, but erm... honestly hor, they suck anyway,look out oct 1st^^http://www.elleair.jp/




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    everyone love 'em^^ oricon style fav artist!

    congrats!!2010年09月09日18時00分音楽ファン2万人が選んだ好きなアーティスト 毎年恒例となった好きなアーティストランキングの結果が、ついに発表となった。2万人にアンケートを実施し、栄えある第1位に輝いたのは、男女ほぼ全世代から支持されたモンスターグループ、嵐だ。10代総合、20代総合、30代女性、40代女性ランキングで軒並み1位に上り詰め、さらに女性総合ランキングでも1位になるなど、その人気はとどまることを知ら




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    Fox's Judge Napolitano Slams ‘Dangerous’ McConnell Plan To Shield Businesses From Coronavirus Lawsuits

    Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano said on Thursday that a Republican plan to shield businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits is “dangerous.”

    Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) suggested that he would not support additional relief funds to households and businesses unless the package also includes a measure shielding businesses from liability for coronavirus infections.

    But Napolitano argued that the provision would be anti-conservative and violate states rights.

    “Can the Congress tell state courts that they cannot hear claims of liability when someone goes into a public accommodation and contracts coronavirus?” the Fox News analyst explained. “Congress has been very reticent to do that. Conservatives who believe in states rights have been very reluctant to interfere with the operation of state courts.”

    Napolitano pointed out that the only other instance where Congress has restricted state courts is a law that prohibits gun manufacturers from being sued over gun violence.

    “I think that this liability shield business is very dangerous,” he added. “The decision of whose fault someone was harmed by should be decided by juries and not by politicians.”




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    Trump Signs Executive Order Greenlighting 'Corporate Takeover Of Oceans'

    Donald Trump issued an executive order late Thursday that environmentalists warned will accelerate the corporate exploitation of oceans by relaxing regulations on and streamlining the construction of industrial offshore aquaculture facilities, which critics deride as "floating factory farms" that pump pollution and diseases into public waters.

    The Don't Cage Our Ocean Coalition, which was formed to oppose ocean industrial fish farming, said in a statement that Trump's Executive Order on Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth "mandates federal agencies to craft a program for rapid authorization of industrial offshore aquaculture facilities, which use giant floating cages to cultivate finfish, allowing toxic pollution to flow into open waters."

    "The federal government should strengthen local food security during this health crisis by supporting sustainable seafood, rather than allowing corporations to pollute the ecosystems we depend on."
    —Marianne Cufone, environmental attorney

    read more




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    The Trouble With 'Working From Home' With Cats

    Cats can be great companions, or they can sit on your keyboard.

    Mine converted my Chrome "language" into Arabic.

    You can see more videos at Furball Fables.

    Open thread below...




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    Mike's Blog Round Up

    It's Saturday, and I'm still shocked that our Attorney General Bill Barr was an accomplice in undermining justice in America. Our only way out of this mess is to vote in overwhelming, historical, legendary, epic numbers; we can't go on living like this.

    Sky Dancing presents... Banana Republicans!

    Greg Fallis says that the Rule of Law is most sincerely dead.

    Boomer Dem-Nation didn't sign-up for this!

    Bonus Track: Juanita Jean and God don't split hairs. But Ted Cruz does!

    Round-up by Tengrain who blogs at Mock, Paper, Scissors. You can follow Tengrain on the Twitters, too. Send tips, requests, and suggestions to mbru@crooksandliars.com (with For MBRU in the subject line).



    • mikes blog round up

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    Trump On Pence Staffer That Tested Positive For COVID19: 'I Don't Know What Happened'

    After it was revealed Friday that Mike Pence's spokesperson, who is Stephen Miller's wife, Katie Miller, tested positive, Trump gave an illogical and moronic response to the media about her and coronavirus testing in general.

    Trump said, "She tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of a sudden today, she tested positive."

    That's the way any virus spreads, especially one as infectious as COVID-19. One day you don't have it, and the next, if you're not protecting yourself, you've got it.

    Trump said he and Pence tested negative after her results came back.

    "So she tested positive out of the blue," he said.

    A person doesn't test positive out of the freaking blue. They were contaminated by somebody else. It's Basic Science 101.

    Trump continued, "This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great."

    Trump has admitted how much he hates the idea of testing Americans in general, not because they are unreliable, but because it affects the number of cases that are reported, and makes him look bad.

    What a swell guy.

    Then he made another baffling statement that makes no sense in any reality. Trump said, "The tests are perfect, but something can happen between a test where it’s good and then something happens and all of a sudden…”

    read more




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    Of Course It's The Pandemic, Stupid!

    In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville came up with one of the most famous campaign slogans in history when he pinned a note to the bulletin board of the campaign headquarters that said “It’s the economy, stupid.” There was a lot of stuff going on at the time, the tail end of the first Gulf War, the Rodney King Riots, Ross Perot’s quixotic campaign among other things. But we were in a recession that wasn’t particularly deep but it seemed to be hitting certain people very hard. Carville understood that everything flowed from being able to address that problem.

    It seems that the Trump administration thinks that slogan applies to their circumstance. And it is true that the record high unemployment claims and the small business crisis is as acute as anything we’ve ever seen. They believe they can just “open the country” and everything will fall into place as people just go back to normal, maybe with a few adjustments and people over 60 staying inside their houses for the foreseeable future.

    But, as always, they are missing the point. This piece in The Atlantic explains why:

    read more




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    Cops Didn't Enforce Law On Anti-lockdown Protesters, COVID-19 Spread

    Remember the April 15th "Operation Gridlock?" in Lansing Michigan? In my piece on April 21st I said we needed to start tracking these protesters to show that they will spread the virus to other communities. Well, someone did.

    Cellphone data shows 300 of the people who had gathered in Lansing for "Operation Gridlock" scattered throughout the state after the protest. The color of the dot represents device activity: yellow is more activity, red is lighter Image from: Doctors at the Committee to Protect Medicare

    The people at the Committee to Protect Medicare released data which shows the protesters dispersing to smaller communities across Michigan in the following days. The map above shows that cellphones that were in Lansing on April 15 scattered across the state. (Link)

    read more



    • anti-lockdown protests
    • coronavirus. COVID-19
    • First Lt. Darren Green
    • Michigan Department of Health and Human Services
    • michigan protests
    • Michigan state House
    • Michigan State Police
    • Robert Gordon

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    COVID-19 spread is fueled by 'stealth transmission'

    Cases of COVID-19 that fly under the radar — without being diagnosed — appear to fuel the rapid spread of the disease.




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    In the Interest of Safety, NFPA Cancels June 2020 NFPA Conference & Expo® in Orlando

    At this time, the world continues to be significantly impacted by COVID-19 and we no longer believe it is possible to host and conduct the NFPA Conference and Expo in June. NFPA is a safety organization and we would not hold an event where the well-being



    • nfpa conference & expo
    • home fire sprinklers
    • 2019 nfpa conference & expo
    • home fire sprinkler advocacy

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    Where do baby magnetars come from? Mysterious 'fast radio bursts' may provide clues.

    Magnetars — highly magnetized, rapidly rotating super-dense stars — are among the most enigmatic creatures to inhabit the cosmos and their origins are shrouded in mystery.




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    How amateur satellite trackers are keeping an 'eye' on objects around the Earth

    Around the planet, a loosely knit but closely woven band of amateurs monitor the whereabouts of satellites — be they secretive spacecraft, rocket stages, orbital debris or lost space probes.




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    'Star Wars': Summary of the franchise and its effect on space technology

    A long time ago — roughly four decades — the world was introduced to Jedi knights, lightsabers, droids and the Force. Before long, elements of the space fantasy had an effect on real-life space technology.




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    The UAE is going to Mars. Here's the plan for its Hope orbiter.

    The United Arab Emirates had its sights set on Mars the day before it launched its second satellite ever.




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    The moon isn't 'dead': Ridges on lunar surface show signs of recent tectonic activity

    The moon isn't "dead" after all: Newly discovered ridges on the moon's surface are leading scientists to think that the moon might have an active tectonic system.




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    On This Day in Space! May 4, 2011: 1st official 'Star Wars' Day celebration

    On May 4, 2011, the first organized "Star Wars" Day celebration happened in Toronto. See how it happened in our On This Day in Space video series!




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    Scientists keep debunking 'monster black hole' discovery. So, what's the deal with binary system LB1?

    As scientists continue to weigh in, one thing is clear: the "monster black hole" discovered in 2019 doesn't exist.




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    Disney Plus drops epic 'Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga' trailer for May the Fourth

    "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" arrives on Disney Plus for Star Wars Day today (May 4), putting all nine films from the Skywalker saga in one place for fans and yes, there is a trailer.




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    The 2020 Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks tonight! See 'crumbs' of Comet Halley rain on Earth

    The Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks overnight tonight (May 4), with the best views arriving before dawn on Tuesday (May 5).




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    Elon Musk shows off Starship prototype's rocket engine ahead of test fire (photo)

    SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk just tweeted an image looking up at the belly of the latest Starship prototype, the SN4, which is on the test stand ahead of a key engine firing.




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    Chaos reigns in detailed new views of Jupiter's icy moon Europa

    Scientists have gotten their best look to date at three chaotic patches on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa thanks to decade-old images from a long-defunct spacecraft.




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    Official: Taika Waititi to co-write and direct 'Star Wars' film

    "Thor: Love and Thunder" writer/director Taika Waititi has signed on to write and direct a "Star Wars" film.




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    Negocio Sucio: Falta de Equidad Menstrual en las Cárceles Colombianas

    By Charlie Ruth Castro

    Read this post in English

    Vamos a hablar de menstruación, el proceso más natural y necesario para la buena salud reproductiva entre las mujeres, pero aquel que culturalmente nos han enseñado a aborrecer, ocultar o incluso a hacerle burla. Y por otro lado voy a hablar de un negocio sucio perpetrado por ciertos funcionarios del INPEC -la institución nacional a cargo de la política penitenciaria- en muchas de las cárceles de Colombia: el desvío de presupuestos para el suministro de toallas higiénicas ... More

    The post Negocio Sucio: Falta de Equidad Menstrual en las Cárceles Colombianas appeared first on Our Bodies Ourselves.




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    Book week 2019: Jane Setter's Your Voice Speaks Volumes

    Welcome to the first review post of Book Week 2019. See the intro to Book Week 2019 to understand more about what I'm doing this week.

    I'm starting with the most recent book in the ol' pile of books from publishers:

    Your voice speaks volumes
    it's not what you say, but how you say it

    by Jane Setter
    Oxford University Press, 2019


    Jane is Professor of Phonetics at the University of Reading (UK) and a recipient of the prestigious National Teaching Fellowship. (As you can see, we are on a first-name basis, as we travel some of the same Public Linguist circles.) I mention the teaching fellowship because it is relevant: Jane is excellent at making linguistics, particularly phonetics, crystal clear for the uninitiated. She uses that talent to great effect in her first book for the general public. 

    This book speaks squarely to a general British audience — and to those who want to know more about English-language issues and attitudes in this country. I'm writing this on a day when my social media feed has given me (a) the story of a man wrongly arrested for public drunkenness in Brighton—because the police had mistaken his Liverpool accent for slurring and (b) a misreading of the relevance of accent in the US (as a means to say something about how accents are read in the UK). But I'd have at least two such things to tell you about on any other day when I might have written this post. Accents make the news in Britain because they matter inordinately. Differences that might not be discernible to those from other countries are imbued with layers and layers of meaning and subjected to piles and piles of prejudice. 

    As I warned in the intro to Book Week, I have not been able to read the whole book. But I was able to get through much more than I thought I'd be able to in a single evening (four of the seven chapters: 1, 2, 3, 7). Part of my speed was because I could skim the bits that were explaining linguistic facts that I already knew. (That's not to say that the facts here are too basic. I've just had a helluva lotta linguistics education.) But it is a zippy read throughout. Setter uses personal and celebrity stories to demonstrate the everyday relevance of the phonetic and sociolinguistic facts that she's explaining. (Hey look, I seem to revert to last-name basis when I'm reviewing someone's book.) 

    The chapters I haven't yet read are those that I'd probably learn the most from: on the use of linguistics in forensic investigations, on voices in performance (including accent training for actors and why singers' accents change in song—which she should know, since she's also a singer in a rock band), and on transgender and synthesized voices. I started with the chapter that relates most to my work ('English voices, global voices') and then went back to the beginning where I was most likely to run into things I already know. That's good from a reviewing perspective, because I can say with confidence that Setter covers well the things that I know need to be covered for her audience. But as I got further into the book, the more unexpected things I learned. I ended in the chapter on women's and men's voices, and I will tell you: I learned some things! To give an example, I liked her interpretation of a study in which women and men were asked to count to ten using various kinds of voices, including 'confident' and 'sexy'. It turns out men generally don't have a 'sexy voice' to put on, while women do, and this might tell us something about what we're sociali{s/z}ed to find sexy—and why.

    It's hard to write about sound —and especially about linguistic sounds for a general audience. Writing for linguists is easy, because we have a lot of practice in using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). But you don't want to fill a book for non-linguists with letters that don't make the same sound as they make in English spelling, or letters they've never even seen before. Setter mostly talks about accents without having to get into the kind of phonetic minutiae that excite linguists and make laypeople glaze over. Where she does need technical terms (e.g. lexical sets), she explains them carefully and clearly. But happily for all of us, Setter wrote this book in the internet age. Throughout the book, there are scannable QR codes by which one can hear the sounds she's talking about. (You can get there without a QR reader too, the web URLs are provided.)

    For readers of this blog with an interest in US/UK issues, there is plenty of comparison between UK and US and discussion of "Americani{s/z}ation". These are discussed with an assumed familiarity with British Englishes and less with American Englishes.

    This book is an important instrument for fighting accentism and other linguistic prejudice in the UK. It might make a nice gift for that person in your life who says they "care deeply about the English language", but really what they mean is "I like to judge other people's use of the English language". 

    But more than that, it is a great demonstration of what the study of phonetics can do. I really, really recommend it for A-level students in English (language) and their teachers, as it touches on many of the areas of linguistics taught at that level and would surely inspire many doable research projects. 

    Let me just end with: congratulations on this book, Jane!




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    Book week 2019: David Adger's Language Unlimited

    Welcome to the second review post of Book Week 2019. See the intro to Book Week 2019 to understand more about what I'm doing this week. Next up we have:

    Language unlimited
    the science behind our most creative power

    by David Adger
    Oxford University Press, 2019


    This is a book for people who like to think about HOW THINGS WORK. It's a serious work of popular science writing, which carefully spells out the mysteries of syntax. And by mysteries, I mean things you've probably never even noticed about language. But once they're pointed out, you have to sit back and say "Whoa." Because even though you hadn't noticed these things, you know them. Remember a few years ago, when the internet was hopping with posts about how we subconsciously know which order to put adjectives in? That's kid's play compared with the stuff that Adger'll teach you about the things you know but don't know about.

    Adger (who is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University, London) describes the situation carefully, clearly, and engagingly, using copious examples and analogies to communicate some really subtle points. (I particularly liked the explanation of form versus function in language, which drew on the form versus the function of alcohol. Chin-chin!) He draws in evidence from neurology, psychology, and computer science to both corroborate his points and to introduce further questions about how language works.

    As I said in the intro to Book week, I have not read all the books I'm reviewing absolutely cover-to-cover. In this case, of the ten chapters, I read 1–3, 7, and 10—and skimmed through the other chapters. The early chapters make the case that there's more to linguistic structure than meets the eye and that human linguistic abilities must consist of something special—they must be qualitatively different from the types of cognition that other animals use and that humans use in non-linguistic communication. Later ones cover issues like how children experience and acquire their first language and what happens when computers try to learn human language. Throughout, the examples feature Adger's partner Anson and his cat Lilly.  I almost feel like I know them now. Hi Anson and Lilly!

    Adger makes clear from the start that his book makes a particular argument in favo(u)r of a particular way of explaining language's mysteries—and that particular way is a Chomskyan way. This means that he makes the case for a Universal Grammar that underlies all human language. I was struck by his willingness and ability to take this all the way for a lay audience. By chapter 9, he is explaining Merge, the key tool of Chomsky's Minimalist Program

    Now, here I have to say: this is not the kind of linguistics I do. It's not just that I'm not a syntactician—though I have, from time to time, dipped my toe into theories grammatical. It's also that I lost faith in theoretical monotheism when I moved from a very Chomskyan undergraduate degree to a more ecumenical linguistics department for my (post)graduate studies. When I arrived for my PhD studies, the department wanted to know which syntactic theories I'd studied, so they could determine which courses I needed to take. I could not tell them. After four years of studying Chomskyan linguistics, I thought I had spent four undergraduate years studying "Syntax". No one had told me that I was studying a theory of syntax, just one among several theories.

    Ever since, I have tended to agnosticism and s{c/k}epticism when it comes to syntactic theory. (This is probably how I ended up as not-a-syntactician; I don't know that it's possible to have a career in grammatical studies without adhering to one theoretical church or another.) Being a lexicologist has meant that I don't have to take sides on these things. And so I play around with different theories and see how they deal with the phenomena I study. When I listen to the evangelists, I listen warily. I tend to find that they oversimplify the approaches of competitor theories, and don't learn as much from them as they could (or, at least, sometimes don't give them credit for their contributions). This is all a very long explanation of why I skipped to chapter 7—the chapter where Adger responds to some non-Chomskyan ideas (mostly personified in the chapter by Joan Bybee).

    So (mostly BrE*) all credit to Adger for spending a chapter on this, and for citing recent work in it. I generally thought his points were fair, but I did what I usually do in response to such theoretical take-downs: I thought "ok, but what about..." I do think he's right that some facts point to the existence of a Universal Grammar, but I also think it's not the only interesting part of the story, and that it's premature to discount arguments that explore the possibility that much of what happens in language learning is based in experience of language and general cognitive abilities. But then, I would think that.

    I definitely recommend the book for people who are interested in the scientific approach to language, but I'd skip the final chapter (10). It is an oddly tacked-on bit about sociolinguistic phenomena, precisely the kinds of things that are not even approached in the theory the rest of the book has been arguing for.

    I congratulate Adger on this strong work that makes extraordinarily abstract concepts clear.





    P.S. Since I'm not doing Differences of the Day on Twitter this week, here's little chart of use of all credit to (frequency per million words) in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, for good measure.





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    Book Week 2019: David Shariatmadari's Don't Believe a Word

    Welcome to the third review post of Book Week 2019. In the intro to Book Week 2019, I explain what I'm doing this week. In the end, there will be four posts. I thought there would be five, but one of the books has (orig. BrE) gone missing. Having had a day off yesterday, I will also have a day off tomorrow, so the final review will appear during the weekend. Probably.

    Anyhow, today's book is:

    Don't believe a word
    the surprising truth about language

    by David Shariatmadari
    Norton, 2019 (N America)
    W&N, 2019 (UK/RoW)


    David Shariatmadari writes for the Guardian, often about language, and is one of the sensible journalists on the topic. The number of sensible journalists writing about language has really shot up in the past decade, and judging from reading their books, this is in part because of increasingly clear, public-facing work by academic linguists. (Yay, academic linguists!) But in Shariatmadari's case, the journalist is a linguist: he has a BA and MA in the subject. And it shows—in the best possible way. 

    The book is a familiar genre: busting widely held language myths. If you've read books in this genre before, you probably don't need these myths busted. You probably know that linguistic change is natural, that the border between language and dialect is unfindable, that apes haven't really learned sign languages, and that no form of language is inherently superior to another. Nevertheless, you may learn something new, since Shariatmadari's tastes for linguistic research and theories is not always on the same wavelength as some other books directed at such a general audience.

    Once again, I'm reviewing with a partial view of the book (this is the practical law of Book Week 2019). In this case, I've read chapters 1, 5, and 9 and skimmed through other bits. The introductory chapter gives us a bit of insight into Shariatmadari's conversion to full-blown linguist, as a reluctant student of Arabic who was quickly converted to admiration for the language and to the study of language as an insight into humanity. "It's not hyperbole to say that linguistics is the universal social science", he writes. "It intrudes into almost every area of knowledge."
    UK cover

    I chose to read chapter 5 because I'd had the pleasure of hearing him talk about its topic at a student conference recently: the popularity of "untranslatable word" lists. Goodness knows, I've contributed to them. What I liked about the talk was his detective work on the words themselves—some of the words and definitions presented in lists of 'untranslatables' are practically fictional. And yet, those of us who don't speak the language in question often eat up these lists because of our ethnocentric need to exotici{s/z}e others. This leads inevitably to discussion of linguistic relativism—the notion that the language you speak affects the way you think—and the bad, old (so-called) evidence for it and the newer evidence for something much subtler. The chapter then goes in a direction I wasn't expecting: introducing Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), an interesting (but far from universally taught) approach to meaning that uses about 65 semantic building blocks to represent and compare meanings across languages. NSM adherents make the case that few, if any, words are truly equivalent across languages. But while any word in one language may have no single-word equivalent in another language, that doesn't mean those words are untranslatable. It just means that translating them can be a delicate and complicated thing.

    US cover
    The final chapter (9) takes the opposite view to David Adger's Language Unlimited (in my last review), and argues that the hierarchical (and human-specific) nature of linguistic structure need not be the product of an innate Universal Grammar, but instead could arise from the complexity of the system involved and humans' advanced social cognition. While Adger had a whole book for his argument, Shariatmadari has 30-odd pages, and so it's not really fair to compare them in terms of the depth of their argumentation, but still worth reading the latter to get a sense of how linguists and psychologists are arguing about these things.

    Shariatmadari is a clear and engaging writer, and includes a good range of references and a glossary of linguistic terminology. If you know someone who still believes some language myths, this might be a good present for them. (Though in my experience, people don't actually like getting presents that threaten their worldview. I still do it, because I care more about myth-busting writers earning royalties than I care about linguistic chauvinists getting presents they want.) It would also make an excellent gift for A-level English and language students (and teachers) and others who might be future linguists. After they read it, send them my way. I love having myth-busted students.




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    Book Week 2019: Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet


    Welcome to the final review post of Book Week 2019. In the intro to Book Week 2019, I explain what I'm doing. The 'week' has turned out to be eight days. If you're perturbed about that, I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your subscription fees for this blog.

    On with the show. Today's book is:


    Because Internet

    Understanding the new rules of language (US subtitle)
    Understanding how language is changing (UK subtitle)

    by Gretchen McCulloch
    Riverhead, 2019 (N America)
    Harvill Secker, 2019 (UK)


    Gretchen McCulloch describes herself as an internet linguist: writing about internet language for people on the internet. She actually does a lot more than that, with daily blogging at All Things Linguistic for years and being one half of the Lingthusiasm podcast team and writing on all sorts of linguistic themes for all sorts of publications. So, I expect many readers of this blog will already know her and have heard about this book. 

    US Cover
    I expected Because Internet to be good, knowing Gretchen's work, but I also probably (in my grumpy, middle-aged, oh-do-we-have-to-talk-about-emojis-again? way) expected it to be faddish. There have been too many just-plain-bad, (orig. AmE) jumping-on-the-bandwagon books about emojis, and I've got(ten) a bit sour on the topic. 

    This book is so much more than I expected it to be. 

    I should have known better. Having read and heard much of her work, I should have expected that this would be a truly sophisticated approach to language and to general-audience linguistics writing. So far in Book Week 2019, I've recommended the books as gifts for A-level students/teachers, science lovers, and language curmudgeons. This book is good for all those groups and more. 

    UK cover
    The key is in the subtitle(s).* This is not just a book about emojis and autocomplete (and, actually, autocomplete isn't even in the index). This is a book about the relationship between speech and writing and how that's changed with technology. It seamlessly introduces theories of why language changes, how change spreads and how communication works in a time when the potential for change is high and the potential for changes to spread is unprecedented. 

    That seamless introduction of linguistic concepts is the reason I've started this book from the beginning and not skipped around (unlike for other books in Book Week—where the rule is that I don't have to read the whole book before I start writing about it). In most books about language for non-linguists, I'm able to skim or skip the bit where they talk about the basics of how language works and the classic studies on the topic and the ideas springing from them. McCulloch covers those issues and those studies (the Labovs, the Milroys, the Eckerts), but since this is intertwined with looking at how language is changing in the 21st century—because (of the) internet—it was worth my while to read straight through. The great thing about the language of the internet is: even when it looks really different from non-internet language, it's still illustrating general principles about how language, communication, and society work. But it also shows how society is changing because of technology, particularly in changing who we are likely to interact with or hear from, In the process, it gives a history of the internet that's enlightening even for those of us who've lived through it all. (I've just flipped open to a section about  PLATO at the University of Illinois. One of my student jobs was working in a PLATO lab, playing Bugs-n-Drugs [aka Medcenter] while signing people in and out. That game was not good for my hypochondria, but I have awfully fond memories of PLATO.)


    Another thing to appreciate about McCulloch's book is how unreactionary it is. She doesn't set up her discussion as "You've heard people say these stupid things about the internet, but here's the TRUTH." (A style of writing that I can be very, very guilty of.) She mostly just makes her case gracefully, based on what the language is doing, rather than reacting to what other people say the language is doing. Rather than 'This, that and the other person say emoji are a new language, but they're not', she just gets on with explaining how emoji fulfil(l) our communicative need to gesture. It's a positive approach that academic linguists will have had trained out of them by the requirements of academic publishing.

    This is a bit of a nerdview 'review'. Usually reviews tell you some fun facts from the book they're reviewing, whereas I'm telling you what I've noticed about its information structure. That's because that's what I really look for in books as I prepare to write a new one. In terms of information, in this book you'll learn, among other things:
    • which "internet generation" you belong to and how your language is likely to be different from other generations'.
    • what punctuation communicates in texting/chat and how that differs from formal writing
    • how language change can be traced through studying strong and weak social links and geographic tagging on Twitter
    Inevitably, the book is mainly about English, in no small part because English rules the internet. But it does make its way to other languages and cultures—for instance, how Arabic chat users adapted their spelling to the roman alphabet and how emojis are interpreted differently around the world.  In the end, she briefly considers whether space is being made for other languages on the internet.

    It's a galloping read and you'll learn all sorts of things.


    So, on that happy review, I declare Book Week 2019 FINISHED.


    * I love the transatlantic change in subtitles, since it completely illustrates the point of chapter 8 of The Prodigal Tongue: that Americans like to talk about language in terms of rules, and Britons in terms of history/tradition. I've also written a shorter piece about my personal experience of it for Zócalo Public Square.




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    'X's Y' versus 'the Y of X'

    [I had said I'd be blogging weekly, but that didn't happen when I had to travel for family reasons. I have got(ten) back to it, not that you'll always notice. I've decided that my goal is to *write* for the blog each week, but not necessarily to publish. So, I started writing this one last week, finished this week.]

    I'm doing a lot of reading about the genitive case at the moment. Grammatical case is some kind of marking (e.g. a suffix) that shows what 'job' a noun is doing in a sentence. You might know a lot about case if you've studied German or Latin or Finnish (or some other languages), which have case suffixes on nouns. You'll know a little about case from being an English speaker who knows the differences between they, them, and theirs. Modern English marks pronouns for case, but not other nouns, except...

    Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had a robust case system, which it got from the ancestor it shared with German. The case suffixes pretty much died during Middle English. (English lost a lot of other kinds of suffixes over the centuries too, in part because suffixes are the kinds of things that get swallowed up in speech and in part becuase they're the kind of thing that become vulnerable when different languages come into contact—as happened for English and Norman French nearly 1000 years ago.) But one English case suffix, rather than disappearing, morphed into something else, and that something is the scourge of English spelling, the apostrophe-s: 's

    So in the Old-English poem Beowulf, you can read about Grendles guðcræft. That -es on the name of the monster Grendel is the forebear of 's. We can translate it as something like 'Grendel's power' or 'Grendel's warcraft'. That (masculine, singular) genitive case marker says that there's a very close relation between Grendel and the guðcræft. Grendel is the power's source or its possessor.


    But when that poem gets translated into Modern English, the translators sometimes translate the -es as an 's and sometimes not:
    the might of Grendel (Francis Gummere)  
    Grendel's power of destruction (Seamus Heaney)
    That's because something else happened in Middle English: English started using of in the way that French uses de to express genitive relations—because French got all up in English's business at that point. Because of that change, of occurs only 30 times in Beowulf (where it has its original meaning of 'away from' or 'off'*), but over 900 times in Gummere's translation of it (where it means next to nothing).

    So English has ended up with two ways of expressing those kinds of relations. We tend to talk about them as being 'possessive' relations and of the X in X's Y or the Y of X as 'the possessor'.  But the relation is not necessarily possessive. Think about something like the theft of the bicycle and the bicycle's theft: the bicycle doesn't possess the theft. The relations between the nouns in 's/of expressions are varied and hard to pin down (but they are very close relationships, covering a lot of the same ground as the genitive in Old English).

    We don't exactly use 's and of interchangeably, though, and even where we can use both we often have preferences for one or the other. One of the strongest predictors of whether it'll be 's  or of is the animacy of the thing in the X position (the 'possessor'). Linguists often talk about an animacy hierarchy in which expressions that refer to  animate things are preferred in certain positions in sentences over non-animate things. In terms of what's animate, humans (the teacher, Heidi) come above animals (the badger, the parrot) and collectives (the company, the union), which come above objects (the table, the book).  All of the below noun phrases are "grammatical" but the higher up the list we go, the more apt people are to use the 's instead of the of phrase, all other things being equal:
    the teacher's size        the size of the teacher
    the badger's size         the size of the badger
    the union's size           the size of the union
    the table's size            the size of the table
    A lot is going on in that 'all other things being equal' (a phrase used in both AmE and BrE, but AmE also likes all else being equal). Some other things that swing a possessive in favo(u)r of 's phrasing rather than of phrasing are:
    • heavier (more syllables/more complex syntax) possessed NPs rather than lighter ones
      (the table's dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge vs the dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge of the table)
    • the need for denser texts, as in newspaper headlines 
    • speech (rather than writing)
    • informal writing style (rather than more formal writing styles)
    • the dialect being spoken
    So, on the last point: English in general used to be a much stronger avoidance of 's on inanimate object names. Inanimate possessors have become more and more accepted in English over the last 200 years or so. But that change has been happening faster in American English than British. This is like a lot (but not all!) of other changes in English (see The Prodigal Tongue, or if you really like to read about statistical methods, Paul Baker's book)—the change has roots deep in English's history, but goes faster/slower in different places. In this change's case (like some others), the "newer" form ('s on inanimates) is perceived as less formal and it's more condensed (and therefore quicker to say/read). Both of these properties might characteri{s/z}e some differences between the cultures that maintain the "standard" versions of English in the two countries. AmE tolerates more informality and more brevity in more situations.

    So, having been thinking about all this, I did a Difference of the Day on Twitter, showing these two charts:


    Here you can see that North Americans are much more happy than others to say the book's cover or the book's title or the table's edge or the table's width (or whatever other nouns might go after book's and table's). Here's the flipside, the of versions, which I didn't post on Twitter.



    The table chart goes with what we'd expect to see: BrE doing a lot more with of than AmE. But the book table has AmE doing more of the book than BrE. You know why? Because American talk about books more. No, really:


    So that's a lot more detail than you needed in order to see the AmE/BrE difference, but, hey, reading is good for you!

    *Why does off look like of? Because they used to be the same word!

    Some of the things I've been reading that influenced this post:
    Carlier, Anne and Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2013. Genitive case and genitive constructions: an introduction. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Carlier, Anne, Michèle Goyens and Béatrice Lamiroy. 2013. De: a genitive marker in French? Its grammaticalization path from Latin to French. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Lars Hinrichs. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Terttu Nevalainen, IrmaTaavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, and Minna Korhonen (eds.), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.




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