Primary sources for the keyword hijacking theory.

[Bruce Dazzling]

THAT type of primary source doesn't exist, and we all know it.

But that's not to say it couldn't. We have primary documentation of dozens if not hundreds of covert ops, all the way up to the Kennedy assassination. Operation Northwoods, rendition, covert wars, CIA assassinations, the secret team, UFo coverups, faked Osama tapes, dirty tricks, false flags, etc. It's not patently ridiculous to hope for. And neither is it ridiculous to permit the lack of such documentation to color one's view of the theory.

Well, it may not have been patently ridiculous to hope for at the beginning of this thread, but if Hugh was going to lay the smack down, he probably would have done so by now.

Btw, is this Hugh's blog?

Singularity
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Keyword Hijacking: the Force has a great effect on the weak-minded...

And what's more weak minded than a search engine?

...move along, move along, these aren't the Droids you're looking for..

...this is not just a software search engine decoy tactic although the advent of the internet gives keyword hijacking (KH) a whole new efficacy in exploiting the aphorism, "Out of sight, out of mind."

KH has been used as a mnemonic counterpropaganda device for decades
The first example I've found that I strongly suspect is KH is from 1944 and is related to Pearl Harbor.
The first example I've found that I know is KH is from 1945 and is related to Project Paperclip.

Consider that stealing someone else's keywords for your own purposes is as old as lying or trying to make your viewpoint on a topic dominate others or copyright infringement or plagiarism or decoys....etc.
It is a very basic linguistic device, so basic that some don't realize this.

But the covert use of keyword hijacking by military-intelligence to-
inoculate a target audience against negative associations with a keyword that exists in a hostile narrative by deploying the same keyword in a benign narrative
-dates back to the founding of the OSS in WWII and then CIA afterwards.

Once 20th century war came to rely on the media management of civilians using the new sciences of psychology and propaganda, focus on the nuts and bolts of language and memory determined that tremendous value was ascribed to keywords which were the 'face cards' of the vocabulary deck. (See 'Zipf's Law' regarding the hierarchical structure of associations.)

The use of KH in movies and television increased significantly after 1961 when cognitive scientist, William J. McGuire, introduced the concept of Inoculation Theory.
McGuire suggested that the brain's memory could be inoculated against ideas the same way the body was inoculated against disease using vaccines.

The common inoculation dynamic is intentionally introducing just enough elements of a hostile entity to induce defenses against it.
Counterpropaganda is anything done to minimize the effect of hostile information.
Thus keyword hijacking to induce mnemonic inoculation is done as a counterpropaganda tactic.

So keyword hijacking is used to do
>postive framing of keywords that encourage supporting US government goals
>negative framing of keywords that discourage supporting US government goals.

The most important goal is to prevent negative associations with a keyword that impedes USG goals. It doesn't have to be positive instead although that is the best case scenario.

Pre-internet example of KH:
The USG would much rather that you associated the keyword "Garrison"
-with the 1967-1969 television show called "Garrison's Gorillas"
than associate it with
-the 1967-1969 prosecutor investigating the murder of JFK, "D.A. Jim Garrison."

Pre-internet example of KH:
The USG would much rather that you associated the the keyword "Fonzie"
-with the television show character on of that name on 'Happy Days'
than associate it with
-a JFK investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, "Gaeton Fonzi."

Here are two more pre-internet examples of keyword hijacking the word "purple" with an explanatory reasoning chain:

>Military recruiting is considered by the US government to be critical to national security.

>Anything that impedes military recruiting would be considered hostile information and warrant counterpropaganda.

>In 1941 US cryptographers had broken Japan's Purple Code with the plans for attacking Pearl Harbor but this pre-knowledge was suppressed to assure the attack would happen as the only way to get the American public to stop overseas fascism.

>If Americans knew this, they'd be very skeptical about anything their government told them about war.

>It would be advantageous to military recruting and national security if Americans did not associate the keyword "purple" with the hoax of Pearl Harbor covered up for decades with the Purple Code being central to the narrative.

>Any chance to provide a different mnemonic association with the keyword "purple" helps dilute that dangerous association in the minds of the general population.

>Associational memory follows a path-of-least-resistance that is reinforced by frequency, intensity, and social reinforcement.

>Memory is strongly biased towards first definitions about words, a first-come-first-served dynamic left over from surviving in a pre-abstract world of nature where things only needed one definition.

>Using the keyword "purple" in idealized fictional narratives can cause many people's memories to be strongly biased towards recalling those narratives when seeing that keyword even if the Pearl Harbor association is somehow known to them.

>The use of the keyword "purple" in a fictional context of pre-knowledge of a military attack has been used several times including:

-2/12/1960 Twilight Zone, 'The Purple Testament'
-12/5/1964 Outer Limits, 'The Keeper of the Purple Twilight'
(notice this was just two days before the anniversary of Pearl Harbor)

There are many other Pearl Harbor cover-up "purples" but there are two to go with the two "Fonzies" that are pre-internet to show that this isn't just an internet search engine tactic. It is a memory manipulation that is intended to prevent or minimize what the USG considers to be bad memories.

Giving the Guvmint entire credit for this kind of thing is blowing up your conspiracy theory way beyond it's proper bounds. The government as a whole is way too clumsy for this kind of manipulation. However, some individuals in sensitive positions sure aren't.

http://spacetimecurves.blogspot.com/200 ... great.html

[barracuda]

Well, it may not have been patently ridiculous to hope for at the beginning of this thread, but if Hugh was going to lay the smack down, he probably would have done so by now.

Oh, I agree entirely. I was pretty much finished after page one.

Btw, is this Hugh's blog?

I don't think so. That's post links right back to RI. Just another ardent admirer...

Giving the Guvmint entire credit for this kind of thing is blowing up your conspiracy theory way beyond it's proper bounds. The government as a whole is way too clumsy for this kind of manipulation. However, some individuals in sensitive positions sure aren't.

[brainpanhandler]

Read this post and tell me if I'm wrong to understand it as pretty much incapable of any kind of meaning at all absent an implicit foundational premise that, were it stated, would be something along the lines of "Keyword hijacking cam act both proactively and retroactively to impair, impede and/or prohibit what amounts, in effect, to cognition itself in adults."

That is essentially correct, if what you mean to say is that cognition requires accurate recall, which obviously, it does. You will note however that Hugh emphasizes the effects on children and obviously, since children by definition know less, he is emphasizing the proactive effects of innoculation and interference theories.

I agree that if an adult is already familiar with Greg Rambo of Kent State (which as a matter of fact I'm not) then the introduction into my brain of John Rambo of first blood fame will not likely impede my ability to recall that knowledge. I think it's conceivable though that it might if I wasn't, which I wasn't, until now.

>Rambo? Do you think of Sylvester Stallone's fictional character or Greg Rambo at Kent State?

>Leonard McCoy? Do you think of the fictional doctor on 'Star Trek' or the real Leonard V. McCoy in CIA counterintelligence on the wrong side of a dangerous schizm related to Dealey Plaza?

>Fonzie? Do you think of the greaser on 'Happy Days' or the first lawyer to take on Arlen Spector's 'magic bullet' disinfo then working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations?

>Captain Kirk? Do you think of the fictional space ship captain or the former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence who was blabbing about the Pearl Harbor hoax in the early 1960s?
etc.

>Howard Beale? Do you think of the crazy suicidal ranting news anchor on 'Network' (1977) or the Australian politician who wrote his Cold War tell-all memoirs in 1977, Sir Howard Beale?

WRT Zipf's Law, See explanation at link following hmw quote (no math) ---

See Zipf's Law. Studies of brain function have been all about memory and words for all the 20th century.
The many thousands of words in our vocabulary is like a deck of cards where keywords are the higher-value face cards. So the brain's MNEMONIC behaviour is a keyword economy even before the internet comes along and search engines magnify this 'out of sight out of mind'-dynamic.

Zipf’s Law

I can't vouch for the credentials of Dr. Richard S. Wallace, but his explanation of how Zipf's law illustrates a "keyword economy" seems to make sense to me. The frequency with which certain words and combinations of words appear in a language imply a hierarchical economy to the way our memories work which is a fact that theoretically could be exploited by the bad guys and that's what Hugh theorizes. Since our brains don't have the computing power of computers they have to be efficient by other means. It's those means which can be exploited, theoretically.

[compared2what?]

Read this post and tell me if I'm wrong to understand it as pretty much incapable of any kind of meaning at all absent an implicit foundational premise that, were it stated, would be something along the lines of "Keyword hijacking cam act both proactively and retroactively to impair, impede and/or prohibit what amounts, in effect, to cognition itself in adults."

That is essentially correct, if what you mean to say is that cognition requires accurate recall, which obviously, it does. You will note however that Hugh emphasizes the effects on children and obviously, since children by definition know less, he is emphasizing the proactive effects of innoculation and interference theories.

Since I cannot note any such thing, it's not really a question of whether I will or won't. I shall not, though. And that's that. Because it is not the case. Hugh sometimes focuses on children's media, true.

But first of all, most of the time he either deals with:

(a) works (such as Network or Rambo or "This American Imperial Life" on National CIA Public Radion or whatever) that are produced for and primarily consumed by adults and adolescents; or, alternatively,

(b) works (such as Star Trek or Happy Days or some obscure Jerry Lewis movie from the way back in the days of glorious TechnicolorTM) that are produced for and consumed by some combination of adults, adolescents and children. Almost all of whom are -- neurobiologically and developmentally speaking -- somewhere in the same nameless stage of steady, undramatic vocabulary acquisition occupied by all people on earth between the ages of, roughly, nine and whatever-highly-variable-age-greater-than-thirty-five at which the way their brains encode and retrieve new memories has changed enough for word recall to have become a slower though not necessarily a significantly lower-functioning process than it once used to be.

And second of all (as well as much, much more pertinently), 100-fucking-percent of the time, without exception, always, and by definition, he's maintaining that the insidious mind-manipulating powers of the CIA-media arise from their ability to induce a kind of deep, incident-and-context-rich semantically associative set of cognitive processes that operate jointly and cumulatively to produce a little something I like to call "adult levels of comprehension."

Which is a near-impossibility in childhood, although I guess that a very, very exceptional child could probably give a good superficial imitation of it if, by some bizarre quirk of fate, he or she had some reason to do so. That I can't imagine him or her having.

But never mind that. My point, which I can hardly believe I have to state in so many words, is:

The entire KWH-highjacking enterprise would just be wasted on children, for at least two reasons:

(1) Children don't eternally think about the information that they acquired in childhood exactly as they did in childhood. And pretty much can't, really, after they've gained enough life experience and general knowledge to think about it from an adult perspective. Because by then, it's not even meaningfully the same information.

(2) Interference theory has next-to-no applicability at all for the young unless they're really, really chronically overloaded with information all the time. There's a lot of individual variability, obviously, but as I more or less already said, on a strictly neuronal level, brains stay quietly sponge-like wrt memory encoding well into adulthood. So if you wanted to create impediments to learning and memory in non-developmentally challenged children, you'd have to do it the good-old-fashioned social-environmental-deprivation-and/or-trauma way. Speaking of which, for inoculation theory to be applicable at any age, the inoculation has to be focused, systematic and pervasive. (IOW, you'd either need to have enough control over the child's environment to keep him or her from encountering all the alternative beliefs and messages that he or she might otherwise prefer or you'd have to limit yourself to very simple and short-acting messages within very well-defined parameters, such as: THIS TOY IS A NECESSITY, YOUR LIFE WILL BE FOREVER INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT.

I agree that if an adult is already familiar with Greg Rambo of Kent State (which as a matter of fact I'm not) then the introduction into my brain of John Rambo of first blood fame will not likely impede my ability to recall that knowledge. I think it's conceivable though that it might if I wasn't, which I wasn't, until now.

All other things being equal and assuming, for the sake of argument, that it's only possible to remember one, the odds are that over the long haul, you'll remember whichever one you recall more frequently. Especially if you don't just quietly recall it, but also do something like speak or write about it. You lose what you don't use over time, at least to some extent, as I'm sure you must know from experience. I used to be able to read Virgil in Latin, and now I can't even translate the kind of three-word mottos you see on college library lintels or in pre-war neo-classical office building lobbies. Which I very much regret.

I am now tired, and you are doubtless now bored. But I'll answer your inquiry tomorrow if you're still interested and I can do it in under ten thousand words, okay? I mean the inquiry that starts with

I would be interested in your opinion on the validity of the argument that Inoculation via targeted (keywords) Proactive Interference could work to steer some small portion of a target audience away from information deemed injurious to the interests of the whatevers capable of doing such a thing.

in case it's been so long that other inquiries have since replaced your memory of it.

Although fwiw, the short answer to that part of it is that it's my opinion such an argument has some validity when the objective is to influence some small portion -- or, for that matter, some large portion -- of the target audience to favor one out of two or at most three directly competing brands of some kind. If you're targeting people whom you know to be interested in the competition already. Or, I guess, a captive audience.

Beyond that, by itself, it just doesn't have enough impact reliably to do anything to anybody, however. In my opinion.

[brainpanhandler]

Do please keep in mind I'm just playing Hugh's advocate here.

You will note however that Hugh emphasizes the effects on children and obviously, since children by definition know less, he is emphasizing the proactive effects of innoculation and interference theories.

Since I cannot note any such thing, it's not really a question of whether I will or won't. I shall not, though. And that's that. Because it is not the case.

Well, but... see bolded text below in passage you supplied.

What? An adult discussion about psyops history and science with out snarky tweens and troll mods? No!
I was just banned for 7 days by barracuda for discussing this topic. Beware.

.....
OK, I've perused a few of these links.
......
My understanding of Hugh's KWH theory is that the control points are at the "keyword" level, i.e. at the level of the atomic substructure of the meme. I don't understand how this can work..
......

See Zipf's Law. Studies of brain function have been all about memory and words for all the 20th century.
The many thousands of words in our vocabulary is like a deck of cards where keywords are the higher-value face cards. So the brain's MNEMONIC behaviour is a keyword economy even before the internet comes along and search engines magnify this 'out of sight out of mind'-dynamic.

So keyword visibility is a form of planting the definition flag on the cognitivie surface of the brain.
The spooks used SEMANTIC PRIMING for decades before the internet came along.
It is just a way to use metaphor or a bunch of other ways of evoking keywords, themes, and phrases in memory.

And the younger the brain the more sticking power to the first definition/association with a keyword.

Mnemonics follows a path-of-least-resistance chain of associations where keywords linked to other keywords create a close-proximity domino effect of one leading to another aided by covert repetition in decoy narratives.
This is REINFORCEMENT. ("Finding Mnemo...." yup.)

INTEFERENCE THEORY and INOCULATION THEORY do just the opposite, creating impedence between keyword associations through mirror narratives that have key components exactly reversed, like a fake city map where all the one-way streets go in the opposite direction to mess up your ability to navigate.

None of this memory science has been negated in 1990s.
It has been made more sophisticated with things liked MASKED PRIMING.
The Jim Carrey movie called 'The Mask' is like a psyoperator training film, a bit of insider humor illustrating/decoying the cognitive tricks-of-the-trade that refer to a paper by Posner and Snyder (1975) about directing attention.
"Pose"..."snide"...etc.

If KWH is to have validity, then hitting a few atomic elements can have an effect on a whole narrative; in other words, the effects are highly nonlinear. OK, fine....

Exactly right. The keyword effects ARE nonlinear. *ting*

I fail to comprehend, at a similar level of detail, the neutralizing effect of obscuring a keyword in one meme by using a similar-sounding keyword in an entirely different meme in an entirely different narrative. This can only work in an associative framework that is more common to my understanding of the theory and practice of magick.

Competing associations with keywords, themes, and images.
There's a game theory logic to this basic strategy of COMPETING ASSOCIATIONS to pre-bias the brain, especially young ones, face-to-face discussion, and the internet.
I

f I am going to be convinced by any datum presented in support of KWH, Hugh will have to show the following: (1) the ultimate target meme is a critical component of a target narrative [and to his credit Hugh usually does this];

Right.

(2) the catalyzing meme (i.e. proximal target) is potent enough in the culture at large - either at the liminal or subliminal level - that a diversion from the ultimate target to the proximal target actually has a high probability. Hugh usually fails in this latter condition.

>Rambo? Do you think of Sylvester Stallone's fictional character or Greg Rambo at Kent State?

>Leonard McCoy? Do you think of the fictional doctor on 'Star Trek' or the real Leonard V. McCoy in CIA counterintelligence on the wrong side of a dangerous schizm related to Dealey Plaza?

>Fonzie? Do you think of the greaser on 'Happy Days' or the first lawyer to take on Arlen Spector's 'magic bullet' disinfo then working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations?

>Captain Kirk? Do you think of the fictional space ship captain or the former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence who was blabbing about the Pearl Harbor hoax in the early 1960s?
etc.

>Howard Beale? Do you think of the crazy suicidal ranting news anchor on 'Network' (1977) or the Australian politician who wrote his Cold War tell-all memoirs in 1977, Sir Howard Beale?

I could give you hundreds of examples from around 1938 on.

And second of all (as well as much, much more pertinently), 100-fucking-percent of the time, without exception, always, and by definition, he's maintaining that the insidious mind-manipulating powers of the CIA-media arise from their ability to induce a kind of deep, incident-and-context-rich semantically associative set of cognitive processes that operate jointly and cumulatively to produce a little something I like to call "adult levels of comprehension."

Which is a near-impossibility in childhood, although I guess that a very, very exceptional child could probably give a good superficial imitation of it if, by some bizarre quirk of fate, he or she had some reason to do so. That I can't imagine him or her having.

I think the idea is to lay a groundwork.

The entire KWH-highjacking enterprise would just be wasted on children, for at least two reasons:

(1) Children don't eternally think about the information that they acquired in childhood exactly as they did in childhood. And pretty much can't, really, after they've gained enough life experience and general knowledge to think about it from an adult perspective. Because by then, it's not even meaningfully the same information.

But theoretically, the competing, associative keyword innoculation and it's interference effect would remain. We're just talking about confusing someone's ability to recall a doorway word or two.

(2) Interference theory has next-to-no applicability at all for the young unless they're really, really chronically overloaded with information all the time.

Which in my experience they generally are, although I can't really quantify that, obviously.

Speaking of which, for inoculation theory to be applicable at any age, the inoculation has to be focused, systematic and pervasive.

Which it seems would not have been that hard to do when there were only 5 channels of tv to choose from. Like for instance:

Leonard McCoy? Do you think of the fictional doctor on 'Star Trek' or the real Leonard V. McCoy in CIA counterintelligence on the wrong side of a dangerous schizm related to Dealey Plaza?

I've watched every episode of the original Star Trek series dozens and dozens of times. I've never heard of Leonard v. McCoy, that I know of. I know nothing about it. It wasn't covered in any history class I ever took and I've never run across it in any book I've ever read nor any documentary I've seen nor any conversation I've ever had. But who knows? Maybe I have and because, well.... I'm sure if I went and read up on it I'd be able to recall it in the future.

This:

(IOW, you'd either need to have enough control over the child's environment to keep him or her from encountering all the alternative beliefs and messages that he or she might otherwise prefer

does not follow from the statement:

Speaking of which, for inoculation theory to be applicable at any age, the inoculation has to be focused, systematic and pervasive.

or you'd have to limit yourself to very simple and short-acting messages within very well-defined parameters, such as: THIS TOY IS A NECESSITY, YOUR LIFE WILL BE FOREVER INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT.

That's an entirely different sort of technique. Interference/innoculation would theoretically be much simpler than "THIS TOY IS A NECESSITY, YOUR LIFE WILL BE FOREVER INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT." All it need be is a name or a word repeated several hundred times over a span of time preferrably to include brain formative years.

I agree that if an adult is already familiar with Greg Rambo of Kent State (which as a matter of fact I'm not) then the introduction into my brain of John Rambo of first blood fame will not likely impede my ability to recall that knowledge. I think it's conceivable though that it might if I wasn't, which I wasn't, until now.

All other things being equal and assuming, for the sake of argument, that it's only possible to remember one, the odds are that over the long haul, you'll remember whichever one you recall more frequently.

Well, exactly. Some portion of the population will be able to remember both, probably the majority, maybe even the vast majority and some portion of the population will be more likely to recall Greg Rambo and not John Rambo and some portion of the population will be more likely to recall John Rambo and not Greg Rambo.

in case it's been so long that other inquiries have since replaced your memory of it.

ha

Beyond that, by itself, it just doesn't have enough impact reliably to do anything to anybody, however. In my opinion.

Well but, theoretically it's not a technique that is used "by itself". Rather it is one of many, many techniques in operation and it may be one of the weakest techniques but that does not necessarily mean it is not being used.

Which sort of invites the question as to why Hugh would choose to make kwh the centerpiece of his arguments. I mean the whole search engine, sit at your computer and you too can be an anti-cia propaganda sniffer outer presumably has an appeal for an audience such as one would expect to find on an internet message board, and so there's that, but I don't see why else one would do it.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Well but, theoretically it's not a technique that is used "by itself". Rather it is one of many, many techniques in operation and it may be one of the weakest techniques but that does not necessarily mean it is not being used.

Which sort of invites the question as to why Hugh would choose to make kwh the centerpiece of his arguments. I mean the whole search engine, sit at your computer and you too can be an anti-cia propaganda sniffer outer presumably has an appeal for an audience such as one would expect to find on an internet message board, and so there's that, but I don't see why else one would do it.

Just wanted to highlight this because it's a very important question to me, and I'm sure to a few others here as well.

[Simulist]

Well but, theoretically it's not a technique that is used "by itself". Rather it is one of many, many techniques in operation and it may be one of the weakest techniques but that does not necessarily mean it is not being used.

Which sort of invites the question as to why Hugh would choose to make kwh the centerpiece of his arguments. I mean the whole search engine, sit at your computer and you too can be an anti-cia propaganda sniffer outer presumably has an appeal for an audience such as one would expect to find on an internet message board, and so there's that, but I don't see why else one would do it.

That's not only a good question, but the answer might also be quite revealing.

[elfismiles]

Unless of course his entire shpiel is in fact satire to DIRECT folks TOWARDS the things he is (satirically) alleging the PTB's are attempting to distract folks away from.

Yes, for many of us, it seems self-discrediting, and that is part of PTB disinfo tactics (as HMW will attest) but the fact remains that his efforts have educated me (and doubtless many of you) about several significant parapolitical FACTS.

These Parapolitical character studies are great examples...

>Rambo? Do you think of Sylvester Stallone's fictional character or Greg Rambo at Kent State?

>Leonard McCoy? Do you think of the fictional doctor on 'Star Trek' or the real Leonard V. McCoy in CIA counterintelligence on the wrong side of a dangerous schizm related to Dealey Plaza?

>Fonzie? Do you think of the greaser on 'Happy Days' or the first lawyer to take on Arlen Spector's 'magic bullet' disinfo then working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations?

>Captain Kirk? Do you think of the fictional space ship captain or the former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence who was blabbing about the Pearl Harbor hoax in the early 1960s?
etc.

>Howard Beale? Do you think of the crazy suicidal ranting news anchor on 'Network' (1977) or the Australian politician who wrote his Cold War tell-all memoirs in 1977, Sir Howard Beale?

That's not only a good question, but the answer might also be quite revealing.

Well but, theoretically it's not a technique that is used "by itself". Rather it is one of many, many techniques in operation and it may be one of the weakest techniques but that does not necessarily mean it is not being used.

Which sort of invites the question as to why Hugh would choose to make kwh the centerpiece of his arguments. I mean the whole search engine, sit at your computer and you too can be an anti-cia propaganda sniffer outer presumably has an appeal for an audience such as one would expect to find on an internet message board, and so there's that, but I don't see why else one would do it.

Just wanted to highlight this because it's a very important question to me, and I'm sure to a few others here as well.

[barracuda]

Well, exactly. Some portion of the population will be able to remember both, probably the majority, maybe even the vast majority and some portion of the population will be more likely to recall Greg Rambo and not John Rambo and some portion of the population will be more likely to recall John Rambo and not Greg Rambo.

And some of the population may be able to remember Greg Rambo of the Wonderland Murders, and perhaps even a scant few to recall the libertine excesses of Arthur Rimbaud as well.

Well but, theoretically it's not a technique that is used "by itself". Rather it is one of many, many techniques in operation and it may be one of the weakest techniques but that does not necessarily mean it is not being used.

But neither does it mean it is being used at all. To assume that it is, is to take a leap of faith.

Which sort of invites the question as to why Hugh would choose to make kwh the centerpiece of his arguments. I mean the whole search engine, sit at your computer and you too can be an anti-cia propaganda sniffer outer presumably has an appeal for an audience such as one would expect to find on an internet message board, and so there's that, but I don't see why else one would do it.

Alright, let's look at the reasons for that, and at exactly what the keyword hijack theory does in a functional sense.

- It allows Hugh to be the sole "expert" in the field. All instances of homonymic congruence among news stories henceforth require his imprimatur and commentary, since "only Hugh Manatee Wins can bring you this information". Definitive interpretations of KWH must go through Hugh.

- It brands the idea of homonymic deflection to Hugh's username, and, secondarily, to this board. There are usernames here, MinM for example, who work to spread the good word of keyword hijacking in tandem with Hugh's username throughout a variety of venues on the internet, usually via a link back to RI. So this venue has become inextricably linked to KWH, and functions as the main repository for the basis of and prime examples of the theory on the internet.

- Like a bad pun in a serious discussion, it can function as a very effective thought- and conversation-stopper. The sidetracking of serious discussion here is one of the key practical aspects of the theory, so much so that a special rule had to be instituted.

- It gives carte blanche for Hugh to label just about any individual as CIA or as propagandist, no matter how ostensibly liberal in terms of their outspokenness, e.g. Steven Spielberg, Roald Dahl, or Jane Mayer. This is aspect is important, as under normal circumstances such accusations might require evidence, whereas under the auspices of KWH, no such evidence is deemed necessary. In other words, it's a smear tactic, and one which has acheived a certain level of acceptedness here.

- And in this way, KWH functions as an authoritative interpretation, which cannot be countered by any normative demonstrations which might be considered proof. In such a manner, examples have been built upon examples, until we are literally in a situation where in order to proceed with a discussion, one must first debunk psyops supposedly located within Dora the Explorer coloring books. There is a cumulative effect of the body of "work" here which becomes debilitating.

- Keyword Hijacking theory is Hugh's original idea. He invented the full flowering of its remarkable knottiness. It is his personal masterpiece, his signature, and is virtually synonymous with his username. It is his real legacy, in a way that the mere historical understanding of state propaganda functioning cannot be. Others have done the definitive research in most areas of Hugh's interest, but in the realm of KWH, Hugh stands alone, towering above all others, offering 94% of all information available. His credibility is at present so intrinsically tied to KWH, that there is simply no walking away. Nor is there a need to. It is, after all, a theory of faith. Primarily, faith that the government has such a level of control over your every thought process that by exposing the public to an integrated program of hidden messages in advertisements, television commercials, movies, etc., the CIA has power over the opinions and knowledge base of the vast majority of American citizens.

[IanEye]

In Letter Factory Little Tad's dad, who runs a factory that creates talking letters, sold a major new client on his product, with help from Tad's brother Leap and sister Lilly, while Tad learned about letter sounds, with the help of eccentric Professor Quigley.
This disc brings back that demanding customer, Mr. Websley, who brings in a massive order he needs the same day.
Thus, it's back to the factory, for more face time with Professor Quigley, who has to help produce the massive amount of words needed to fill the Websley order.



What's a Word Whammer?
It's a machine that teaches all about letter names, letter sounds and how letter sounds blend together to make words!
The FRIDGE WORDS PHONICS set allows you to create over 325 three-letter words, using magnetic letters that sing and teach!



To protect sensitive ears, certain letter combinations that might be perceived as foul language will not be sounded out.
The FRIDGE WORDS PHONICS set will only pronounce letter names for such combinations.


.

[compared2what?]

Do please keep in mind I'm just playing Hugh's advocate here.

You will note however that Hugh emphasizes the effects on children and obviously, since children by definition know less, he is emphasizing the proactive effects of innoculation and interference theories.

Since I cannot note any such thing, it's not really a question of whether I will or won't. I shall not, though. And that's that. Because it is not the case.

Well, but... see bolded text below in passage you supplied.

I did see them. I also noted them, even. I just cannot and shall not note them as significant enough in context to support the general contention that Hugh emphasizes the effects of KWH on children. Because (a) they're not; and (b) they still wouldn't be even if they were true and meaningful statements. Which they're also not.

Actually, this one in particular...

the younger the brain the more sticking power to the first definition/association with a keyword.

...is not just wrong, but for all intents and purposes itself so formally indistinguishable from the kind of intentionally deceptive and emotionally manipulative mass-communications tactics that the PTB actually do routinely employ, it makes me feel something pretty close to despair for the whole human race, not excluding myself and Hugh. (Briefly: If it were an op, what would make it an effective one is that you don't really have to do much in the way of priming people to feel fear for the safety of children than remind them that there are shadowy men somewhere out there plotting to harm children.)

Which is not to say that people aren't primed to feel disproportionately fearful for the safety of children, as a matter of fact. They definitely are, in countless narrative iterations and via a multitude of cultural, social and individual psychological channels and at every stage of life. And for any number of good, bad and indifferent reasons, I should hasten to add.

But nor is it to say that people could be made exceptionally responsive to threats to the safety of children to the point that it's culturally commonplace for them to assume that children are inherently at risk (as opposed to "inherently vulnerable and in need of caretaking," which they obviously objectively are) by media scare tactics or any other externally originating means, just because it was advantageous to powerful interests to foster that attitude.

Basically, if -- for some reason -- cultural attitudes toward, inter alia, children and sexuality in the post-Christian West hadn't evolved as they have in fits and starts over centuries and for a whole fucking complex of uncontrolled circumstantial reasons in addition to the emotionally exploitative moral cant that's been emanating in one form or another from various figures of power and authority, there wouldn't be any force potent enough to override whatever the profoundly rooted attitudes that were central to cultural identity they'd developed instead.

Or...Not any outside force, anyway. Self-knowledge (or the lack of it) is exponentially more potent than any piece of received wisdom or propaganda can ever be, ultimately. It isn't very widely recognized or respected as a power, granted. But that's just because it takes a lot of constant hard work that can neither be monetized nor validated to achieve something approximating honest self-awareness at something roughly approaching reliable rates. That doesn't mean it's any less powerful, however. It just means that it's less recognizable as one, due to, you know, the total lack of perceptible rewards.

However, since I assert that as fact on no authority other than my own, I actually wouldn't want and don't expect others to regard it as authoritative. Because, obviously, it's okay for me to hold that I'm in an authoritative position to decide whether my own authority over myself is worth recognizing or not. But it would be pure lunacy for anybody else to think -- let alone base their covert operations on the premise -- that they were equally well qualified. So the media-CIA can fucking dream on, as far as I'm concerned. They'll never know me well enough to emotionally manipulate me better than I can.

So I say the hell with them and their ridiculous presumptions. I'll destroy myself if they pressure me into feeling like it, but I that's absolutely as far as I'm willing to go. After all, I do all the heavy internal lifting around here. So if I don't get credit for it, nobody does. And that's final. They can take it or leave it, I personally don't give a damn.
_________________

[compared2what?]

Oh, right. Sorry.

the younger the brain the more sticking power to the first definition/association with a keyword.

With the usual stipulation for a very wide range of individual variability, plus a bonus explicit statement of something that should go without saying, which is that the human brain is infinitely more complex than anyone can describe or comprehend at present:

Brains are born with something like forty percent more neurons than they'll retain into adulthood, due to a process called "neural pruning." Or sometimes "synaptic pruning." But either way, it means that at various regular developmental milestones, brains shed damaged, weak and/or under-employed neurons. I believe, but am not certain, that neural pruning occurs at adolescence, for example. And it also occurs in a major way in very young brains as they form from (very roughly and at the most generous possible estimate) birth to about the age of eight.

It is therefore thought that the reason newborn brains can acquire complete fluency in any language they're exposed to during the five-or-so-year window during which language acquisition occurs is because they're teeming with so many neurons that they have neurons to waste. Which is what they do with them, one way or another, actually.

In any event. The reason I bring the language acquisition thing up is that I have no fucking clue what the hell else might justify saying that the younger the brain, the more sticking power words have. Or something to that effect. The "keyword" part is just pure invention, and self-evidently so, given how dead common it is for people raised in, let's say, a rigidly devout Roman Catholic family who were educated exclusively in rigidly devout Roman Catholic schools to live the whole of their independent adulthoods according to priorities of their own choosing that have nothing whatsoever to do with Roman Catholic doctrine or the words in which they grew up hearing it repeatedly expressed.

Also, as I will now say for the third and last time, there is no hard and fast neurological brightline between "younger" brains and "older" brains for the kind of memory Hugh is talking about. Typically, brains continue to encode and retrieve memories in general more speedily and effortlessly all the way into whatever point in adulthood they begin to encode and retrieve memories more slowly and more effortfully. Which varies. Plus the comparatively neuron-poor adult brain has many more glial cells than it did at birth.

Which appears to play a key role in facilitating the formation of the stronger and more complex associations that loom so large in that adult-level-of-comprehension thing I mentioned in my last post as being beyond the cognitive capabilities of the most gifted child on earth, incidentally. In connection with which, you could argue that keywords had more sticking power in older brains if you wanted to, I suppose. In a sense, you'd be making a valid argument if you did. It would just be validity of next-to-no practical worth.

Because you can't really draw any global inferences wrt specific levels of functioning from cognitive or developmental neuroscience when it comes to verbal memory or (for that matter) to anything else. Apart from the widely known capacity for multi-linguality in very young children.

Please, please, I implore you, try to appreciate what it means, complete with all its implications, that brains not only naturally have widely variable assets and deficits on an individual-brain-by-individual-brain basis, any individual brain also might perfectly well have a wildly fluctuating capacity to form memories on a day-by-day or even hour-by-hour basis, as a consequence of the one-thousand-and-one known factors (such as the presence or absence of anxiety or hunger) as well as the indefinite/infinite number of factors that are either unknown, unpredictable, or not understood.

One or all of which somehow mysteriously act as what are presently deemed psychogenic factors -- ie, personal identity and all the stuff such as personal preferences and interests that go with it. And except on a very, very crude level, that really is a total mystery. For all anybody knows, psychogenic factors might not even be truly discrete from neurogenic factors. That's the operative premise, certainly, but that's all it is. Because when a psychogenically significant event occurs, it occurs neurogenically. And vice-versa. Assuming that it's not just one great big giant conceptual error to think about it in those terms.

Long story short: All cognitive-neuroscientific knowledge is, by definition, only validly applicable within whatever narrow clinical parameters obtained circumstantially during the research studies that brought it to light. And all cognitive-neuroscientific theoretical models of learning and cognition are exactly that: Theoretical. Some have much better construct-validity than others, of course. Or so it seems at the moment, at least.

But none is so universally foolproof that it has any practical wide-scale application as a remote vehicle for the imposition of social control on a culture as a whole via the manipulation of complex cognition. Therefore, it is nothing but pure unadulterated faith-based woo to say that any -- or as the case may be, some combo-platter of partially digested tidbits from many -- is or can be used for that purpose.

Anyhow. Getting back to neural pruning and the deceptive wrongness of Hugh's assertion:

In the sense that they have unique and superior powers of language acquisition, the brains of very young children might be said to be more sticking-power friendly for words -- though not keywords -- than they ever will be again. However, it's both wrong and misleading to recast that as if it had any implications for the value and meaning that words learned by young brains may or may not have later in life, if they're even retained in memory later in life. Which has absolutely nothing to do with when they were learned, and absolutely everything to do with whether they were used. Because if they aren't, they get taken out with the rest of the neural-pruning trash.

And c'est la vie. I'm sure that everyone can easily come up with their own personal examples, but to give one of mine for the sake of clarity:

I have a number of vividly detailed and crystal clear memories of events, people, and my feelings about them that I can date without question as having occurred between the ages of two and three because they occurred in Beirut. And I know without question that the only part of my childhood (or life) that I've been in Beirut was when I was between the ages of two and three. And when I say "detailed," that includes things that I and others said in that I clearly remember the content and meaning of the conversation.

Despite which I don't recall one fucking word of any of the parts of it that I know in an abstract sense were spoken in Arabic.** Which I didn't understand or speak fluently, ever, but which I did somehow comprehend well enough to follow a conversation that included Arabic if it was spoken in the context of conversation that was primarily in English.

None of which is surprising or unusual in any way. I've often recalled those particular events, people, and my feelings about them throughout my childhood and lo unto this very day. Because they're pleasant memories of stimulating and fun events involving people who were sweet and special to me. Whereas there was nothing at all of either an internal or external nature that frequently prompted me to activate whatever neurons had formed an ad-hoc Arabic-vocabulary-comprehension network. So they either got lost to pruning or devoted to other resources.

And that's memory for ya. So don't believe the hype.
______________

** With the three following exceptions: The Arabic phrases for "God willing" and "Let's go," both of which I remember because they continued to be used as household argot until....I don't know. At least until I was ten or eleven, maybe later. But definitely until then, because prior to that, I'd long assumed that they were Yiddish phrases, and have a not-very-vivid-or-detailed memory of being surprised to learn that they weren't at somewhere around that age.

I also remember the Arabic word for the kind of bread called "pita" in the United States. Because there was no pita in suburban America until, IIRC, maybe the first five years of the '70s. Then there was. At which point I recognized it as a food item that I could have called by name. And would have, if not for the inconvenience entailed by using a different name for something than the one under which it's recognizable to anyone else in the community.

On consideration, it strikes me as very probable that in the last case, my memory was prompted by hearing one of my parents use the Arabic word and not just by the spontaneous recognition of a familiar item. But if so, I don't recall it. I just can attest to remembering the word since then without interruption, as well as knowing what it meant before that though possibly not continuously and actively to recalling it for the whole of that time.

Fascinating, I know.

[compared2what?]

And second of all (as well as much, much more pertinently), 100-fucking-percent of the time, without exception, always, and by definition, he's maintaining that the insidious mind-manipulating powers of the CIA-media arise from their ability to induce a kind of deep, incident-and-context-rich semantically associative set of cognitive processes that operate jointly and cumulatively to produce a little something I like to call "adult levels of comprehension."

Which is a near-impossibility in childhood, although I guess that a very, very exceptional child could probably give a good superficial imitation of it if, by some bizarre quirk of fate, he or she had some reason to do so. That I can't imagine him or her having.

I think the idea is to lay a groundwork.

Any groundwork you laid for a structure you were going to build years later out of material that was substantive enough to cohere lastingly in the form you intended it to have would have itself to be made out of material that was (a) capable of supporting that structure; and (b) still intact as you'd laid it by the time you were ready to build.

The remembered meaning that words had in a past context is neither strong nor durable enough to meet those criteria. Unless they're words that mean something of exceptionally great and lasting importance to you, possibly. But even then, they would have to be words that had always had an overtly profound meaning and an overtly stable, unchanging structural relationship to one another, which you'd always consciously understood them to have.

As, say, with a prayer or creed, maybe. The names of characters on television shows, however obsessively passionate you'd once felt about them as a child, could not conceivably support the weight that KWH theory places on them under any circumstance short of a floridly pathological major emotional bond with a fictional character in whom you'd invested all your frustrated, conflicted and brutalized feelings about core aspects of your own identity and that of others.

FWIW, if you've seen the documentary Crumb, the first example that springs to my mind is the love Charles Crumb felt for the little boy in the Long John Silver movie.

The entire KWH-highjacking enterprise would just be wasted on children, for at least two reasons:

(1) Children don't eternally think about the information that they acquired in childhood exactly as they did in childhood. And pretty much can't, really, after they've gained enough life experience and general knowledge to think about it from an adult perspective. Because by then, it's not even meaningfully the same information.

But theoretically, the competing, associative keyword innoculation and it's interference effect would remain.

No. A memory of what a word had meant in a past context might remain. Or might not remain. But it wouldn't be in the same weight class as what it was competing with, or even a contender in the same competition unless PLEASE SEE ABOVE

We're just talking about confusing someone's ability to recall a doorway word or two.

I have no idea what that even means. Absent having experienced a thorough and systematic formal program of mental and physical coercion of the kind used by cults on their members and by we the people on enemy combatants, what in life can you think of that's of enough matter and moment to a living human being that obstructing his or her ability to recall it would make any consequential difference of any kind at all is there that's accessible exclusively via a single doorway made up of one or two words?

What, I ask you, what?

(2) Interference theory has next-to-no applicability at all for the young unless they're really, really chronically overloaded with information all the time.

Which in my experience they generally are, although I can't really quantify that, obviously.

I'm not even going to dignify that one with a rebuttal until you put a little more sweat into it. Please be serious.

Speaking of which, for inoculation theory to be applicable at any age, the inoculation has to be focused, systematic and pervasive.

Which it seems would not have been that hard to do when there were only 5 channels of tv to choose from. Like for instance:

Leonard McCoy? Do you think of the fictional doctor on 'Star Trek' or the real Leonard V. McCoy in CIA counterintelligence on the wrong side of a dangerous schizm related to Dealey Plaza?

I've watched every episode of the original Star Trek series dozens and dozens of times. I've never heard of Leonard v. McCoy, that I know of. I know nothing about it. It wasn't covered in any history class I ever took and I've never run across it in any book I've ever read nor any documentary I've seen nor any conversation I've ever had. But who knows? Maybe I have and because, well.... I'm sure if I went and read up on it I'd be able to recall it in the future.

Dude, first of all, please allow me to clarify. When I say "focused, systematic and pervasive," I mean one of two things. And they are:

(1) You personally would have to be the focus of a systematic and pervasive program of non-optional activities that occupied and exhausted you to the point that they interfered with or impeded your freedom of mind; or

(2) The objective would have to be inducing you to take a very narrowly focused, discretely and clearly defined, very simple action one time, as one who attended a movie or bought a pair of sneakers due to the longing to do so created by an advertising blitz. Which would only interfere with your ability to remember the things that were important to you -- including artificially cued longings of a nature that no movie or pair of sneakers would fulfill -- if you never learned to stop trying to satisfy them by buying sneakers.

In which case, your exposure to television commercials would be the least of the cause of your numerous problems, chief among which would be how lost you got as an emotionally neglected and/or abandoned and/or isolated and/or unloved child. Which you'd still have to deal with if the CIA-media evaporated overnight or never existed in the first place.

Second of all, do you seriously feel that your ability to comprehend or remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy as an event of whatever dimension it is that you personally have concluded it has from where you sit has been compromised by your either never having learned of Leonard W. McCoy or forgotten it if you did?

And if not, then so the fuck what?

This:

(IOW, you'd either need to have enough control over the child's environment to keep him or her from encountering all the alternative beliefs and messages that he or she might otherwise prefer

does not follow from the statement:

Speaking of which, for inoculation theory to be applicable at any age, the inoculation has to be focused, systematic and pervasive.

Please see my clarification above.

or you'd have to limit yourself to very simple and short-acting messages within very well-defined parameters, such as: THIS TOY IS A NECESSITY, YOUR LIFE WILL BE FOREVER INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT.

That's an entirely different sort of technique. Interference/innoculation would theoretically be much simpler than "THIS TOY IS A NECESSITY, YOUR LIFE WILL BE FOREVER INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT." All it need be is a name or a word repeated several hundred times over a span of time preferrably to include brain formative years.

No, no, a thousand times no that is not all it would need be. What it would need be is, forsooth, not much simpler than "THIS TOY IS A NECESSITY, YOUR LIFE WILL BE FOREVER INCOMPLETE WITHOUT IT," but much more complex.

Also, I'm having a hard time believing that you're not just toying with me. To be quite candid about it. People aren't networked computers, they're people. As you know perfectly well.

Fondly yours,

c2w

[brainpanhandler]

Also, I'm having a hard time believing that you're not just toying with me.

No, no... but I did issue the disclaimer, "Do please keep in mind I'm just playing Hugh's advocate here.", which you might have missed amidst all the hub bub. It's a dirty job and no one really has to do it except Hugh, but in the predictable absence of our sirenian friend and since I have an abundance of free time at the moment I'm filling in.

At the risk of appearing to rest in the shade sipping a cool drink without even the slightest chance of breaking a sweat while I watch you vigorously perform your mental gymnastics let me ask you a simple question:

Have you ever had the experience of trying to recall a name or a word only to confoundingly and repeatedly recall another similar name or word instead?

[compared2what?]

Also, I'm having a hard time believing that you're not just toying with me.

No, no... but I did issue the disclaimer, "Do please keep in mind I'm just playing Hugh's advocate here.", which you might have missed amidst all the hub bub. It's a dirty job and no one really has to do it except Hugh, but in the predictable absence of our sirenian friend and since I have an abundance of free time at the moment I'm filling in.

At the risk of appearing to rest in the shade sipping a cool drink without even the slightest chance of breaking a sweat while I watch you vigorously perform your mental gymnastics let me ask you a simple question:

Have you ever had the experience of trying to recall a name or a word only to confoundingly and repeatedly recall another similar name or word instead?

Not precisely. But I have often had the experience of trying to recall a name or a word only to confoundingly and repeatedly be left with the sense that I'd gone most of the distance and could -- figuratively speaking -- almost smell, hear, or see the shape of what I was after for all the good it would do me, which was none since I still couldn't recall the name or word. Which is very, very similar, functionally speaking. In fact, I'd say that it was near enough so as to make no difference at all in any very important regard.

I can further contribute these (to me) useful and mildly illuminating facts:

(a) For me, this occurs much more frequently with names than with words; I can recall having been left groping for a word in conversation only in that I have a neo-sense memory, except that it's more like a psychosocial memory. I remember an associated feeling, basically. But I can't think of a specific instance of it. Whereas with names, I can think of several with no effort and could probably think of between 65 and 80 percent of whatever my lifetime total so far is if I really concentrated on it.

(b) The reasonless blanking on names I knew that I knew didn't start to occur more than very, very rarely and/or under exceptional circumstances until I was at the age when that kind of memory declines slightly for most people;

(c) It's limited almost entirely to the names of famous people or fictional characters and not to the names of people I know and interact with; and last but far from least

(d) It doesn't impede or otherwise have any negative impact on my elective cognition at all apart from the minor delay and minor inconvenience it involves. Because I can always recall every piece of information about [JOHN OR JANE DOE] relevant to the thought I'm pursuing apart from his or her name. Which means retrieving the name is never more than (at most, if I'm just sittin' around by myself, thinking, and have no one to ask) a phone call or internet search away.

My point is: I lose nothing apart from the time it takes me to say or think: "Oh, you know, dammit, the French singer who's best known for "La Vie en Rose," who was nicknamed "the little sparrow" in French, who wasn't a collaborator during the war like Viviane Romance was, who [so on and so forth], what on earth was her name?"

And my additional point is: Even if I never recalled that singer's name, my capacity for informed thought related to that singer wouldn't be diminished or obstructed at all and my capacity for informed discourse related to that singer would only be diminished by whatever percent of conversational partners would no longer charmed to speak with me now that I'd developed my very own extremely minor but exceedingly bizarre conversational handicap.

Plus, just for good measure, my point stated plainly is: I don't actually need to remember Edith Piaf's name to think every thought I have it in me to think that's either about or proximate to Edith Piaf. Because by itself the stark data point encoded by the words "Edith Piaf" is not and never has been crucial to my understanding or knowledge of anything worth thinking about. Not one single thing. In isolation, verbal memory is a very, very tiny part of the whole of memory. And there's absolutely no basis in either reason or research that I'm aware of that suggests it's possible to make people forget all the information they've ever associated with a word or a name by fucking with their verbal recall on a keyword-by-keyword basis, unless you did it until all humanity had either perished or fallen mute, whichever came first.

Obviously, a wholesale decline in verbal recall would be a significant impairment to both cognition and function, no matter what caused it. But since KWH doesn't propose such a decline, moot point. It wouldn't be if we were talking about the No Child Left Behind Act, or the defunding and pseudo-libertarian opposition to the public school system, or any number of other off-topic subjects. But -- as I'm sure you'll have no trouble remembering -- we're not, are we?

It's like deja vu all over again. I think I'll uncork a fresh bottle of one-time sig-line just to celebrate the nostalgia.