Primary sources for the keyword hijacking theory.

[vanlose kid]

...

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.

Have you been an un-American?
Just you and your idol singing falsetto 'bout
Leather, leather everywhere, and
Not a myth left from the ghetto
Well, well, well, would you carry a razor
In case, just in case of depression
Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors
Blushing at all the Afro-Sheeners
Ain't that close to love?
Well, ain't that poster love?
Well, it ain't that Barbie doll
Her heart's been broken just like you have

All night
You want the young American
Young American, young American, you want the young American
All right
You want the young American

You ain't a pimp and you ain't a hustler
A pimp's got a Cadi and a lady’s got a Chrysler
Black's got respect, and white's got his soul train
Mama's got cramps, and look at your hands shake
I heard the news today, oh boy
I got a suite and you got defeat
Ain't there a man you can say no more?
And, ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw?
And, ain't there a child I can hold without judging?
Ain't there a pen that will write before they die?
Ain't you proud that you've still got faces?
Ain't there one damn song that can make me
break down and cry?

*

[norton ash]

Thanks, Vanlose. Bowie's downright prophetic here.

I've always been curious... is Vanlose a reference to Copenhagen or Van Morrison... or both?

[vanlose kid]

Thanks, Vanlose. Bowie's downright prophetic here.

I've always been curious... is Vanlose a reference to Copenhagen or Van Morrison... or both?

hey, no sweat.

van morrison, mos def, he's my go to guy.

but vanlose is in copenhagen. he lived there with his girlfirend i think.

*

[Bruce Dazzling]

...

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.

Have you been an un-American?
Just you and your idol singing falsetto 'bout
Leather, leather everywhere, and
Not a myth left from the ghetto
Well, well, well, would you carry a razor
In case, just in case of depression
Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors
Blushing at all the Afro-Sheeners
Ain't that close to love?
Well, ain't that poster love?
Well, it ain't that Barbie doll
Her heart's been broken just like you have

All night
You want the young American
Young American, young American, you want the young American
All right
You want the young American

You ain't a pimp and you ain't a hustler
A pimp's got a Cadi and a lady’s got a Chrysler
Black's got respect, and white's got his soul train
Mama's got cramps, and look at your hands shake
I heard the news today, oh boy
I got a suite and you got defeat
Ain't there a man you can say no more?
And, ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw?
And, ain't there a child I can hold without judging?
Ain't there a pen that will write before they die?
Ain't you proud that you've still got faces?
Ain't there one damn song that can make me
break down and cry?

*

Best lyric of Bowie's carrer.

Maybe my favorite rock lyric ever.

[compared2what?]

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.

Thank you for the link. I didn't mean I didn't understand that -- per Zipf's Law -- the frequency with which the words of a language are used conforms to a pattern where frequency is inversely proportional to rank, so that the second word appears half as many times as the first word; the third word one-third as many times; the fourth one-fourth as many times; et cetera. I just meant that since I can't do the math, I can't play with it in its native habitat, or have original thought about it that are fully independent of the source that explained it.

However, fwiw, I don't really see how frequency of word use has any implications for the way our memories work. It seems to me far more likely that the frequency with which any particular word occurred would be a reflection of that particular word's utility.

And see? Here are two Zipf-List Top Fifty's for words ranked by the frequency with which they were used by the CIA-media, from here.

Bear in mind that the fiftieth word occurs one-fiftieth as often as the first:

Statistics from the TIME collection, a 1.6 MB collection of 423 short TIME magazine articles (245,412 term occurrences). Top 50 terms are:



Statistics from the WSJ87 collection, a 131.6 MB collection of 46,449 newspaper articles (19 million term occurrences). Top 50 terms are:

___________

And that's all. Just bear it in mind, if you feel like it.

Yours, wordily,

c2w

[elfismiles]

"Psywar" by S DN

http://exposureroom.com/members/Durruti ... d16d53d55/

www.metanoia-films.org

http://911blogger.com/news/2010-08-23/psywar

PSYWAR trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48rvEPeY1LY

SOURCES


Beder, Sharon – Consumerism: an Historical Perspective
Chomsky, Noam – What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
Darwinia – WWI Propaganda
Ewen, Stuart – Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture
Lazere, Donald – American media and mass culture
Lutins, Allen – An Eclectic list of Events in US Labor History
Millies, Stephen – The Ludlow Massacre and the Birth of Company Unions
Parenti, Michael – Super-Patriotism
Simpson, Christopher – The Science of Coercion
Smith, Sharon – Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States
Snow, Nancy – Propagnda, Inc., Selling America's Culture to the World
Stauber, John and Rampton, Sheldon – Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq ; Toxic Sludge is Good For You
Tye, Larry – The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR

http://metanoia-films.org/sources.php

[compared2what?]

Ain't it the truth. That the real battlefield is in the mind, I mean. In every sense and at every damn moment, it's exhausting.

Though I'm sure there are truths on the other side of the linkage, too. I just haven't clicked through to them, yet. But Edward Bernays is right up there with Einstein, Freud, Marx, and whoever the other equivalently influential individual persons who had an epoch-defining impact on culture and society in the 20th century that I can't think of right now are. IMO.

[brainpanhandler]

(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.

And that is why I've always thought retroactive interference would not work in the way that Hugh suggests it would. So as far as I'm concerned your argument here completely dispenses with that notion and as written can serve as as good an argument against the keyword hijacking theory as it relates to retroactive interference as can be formulated, to which in the future I can refer someone still confused by it.

What I narrowed Hugh's application of keyword hijacking down to a long time ago was proactive interference as evidenced in media directed at children and adolescents because it seemed to me that if there was any chance that there was any validity at all to Hugh's theories then that's where it would be found.

When I first encountered Hugh here I was intrigued and had a lot of free time (something I have again). At first my curiosity was enough to fuel my reading and thinking about Hugh's weird matrix of media analysis and the bonus was that I never had to leave the comfort of my easy chair to do it. Over the course of several months and now years I've read enough here and there to discard all of kwh theory proper except perhaps proactive interference theory. Since in the interest of fairness I wanted to leave absolutely not even the smallest shred of thought or data left unconsidered I have kept that door ajar so that one day I'll be able to say to Hugh with total honesty that I completely and thoroughly considered his evidence and arguments above and beyond any reasonable demand. I completely agree with you that retroactive interference relative to kwh is bunk. You could not have skewered it to death any more clearly than you just did and anyone unable to conclude that will not be helped with any further explanation from you or anyone else. But let's continue our consideration of proactive interference just a bit further. (and you'll duly note I'm sure that this will require some contortions) Just to stick with the Rambo example, is it possible that an average citizen of the united states having been almost certainly exposed with a fair amount of frequency to the name Rambo of first blood fame prior to the name Greg Rambo of Kent state fame (as an aside, fame might be too strong a word for Greg rambo as so far as I can tell among all the names related to the kent state massacre Greg's is fairly minor) would be somewhat less likely to explore the history of greg rambo as a result of careless reading and an aversion to the film Rambo, for which there might be many sound reasons? (First Blood was published in 1972. The film was released in 1982)

Following is what David Morrell, the author of First Blood, had to say about the origins of the name Rambo in the wikipedia article on John Rambo:

Origins
David Morrell says that in choosing the name Rambo he was inspired by "the sound of force" in the name of Rambo apples, which he encountered in Pennsylvania. Peter Gunnarsson Rambo sailed from Sweden to New Sweden (SE Pennsylvania/Southern NJ/Northern Delaware) in the 1640s, and soon the name would flourish in New Sweden. Today, many of his descendants can still be found in this region of the US. Morrell felt that its pronunciation was similar to the surname of Arthur Rimbaud, the title of whose most famous work A Season in Hell, seemed to him "an apt metaphor for the prisoner-of-war experiences that I imagined Rambo suffering".[3] Furthermore, an Arthur J. Rambo was an actual U.S. soldier in Vietnam, but he never returned. His name can be seen on the Vietnam War Memorial wall in Washington, DC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rambo

[brainpanhandler]

However, fwiw, I don't really see how frequency of word use has any implications for the way our memories work. It seems to me far more likely that the frequency with which any particular word occurred would be a reflection of that particular word's utility.

Ugh... I could make a half assed attempt to explain why I think it does, but that would be a huge waste of your time and my time and I doubt I would be successful anyway. Linguistics makes my head hurt and since my head hurts already I see no reason to add to my pain with so little chance of a reasonable payoff for you or me or the poor reader.

[brainpanhandler]

Was this chart derived from a british source?

[compared2what?]

Was this chart derived from a british source?

I don't know. But I betcha that if it was, its early stuff was heavily influenced by the recordings of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the sounds of Motown, and/or the Delta blues. Because say what you like about our bloody foreign wars, when it comes to ROCK'N"ROLL, we 'Murricans fucking own that shit, yo.

Also, you know what? I don't know. That caught my eye, too, as I was posting, causing me to vaguely but eloquently address a query to myself along the lines of:

"Wha? "WSJ87" = +/- The Wall Street Journal, 1987? Rr.. Myabe Rprrt Murdch? Na, way way, years-way soon....*...Zzzz. UP! WHUT??? Oh. S'okay-tho, s'okay. Bcause I gave link and said I didn't can has original thought that are Ndepednt source, already. What theywant fr'm me, enway? Verb-noun agreement? Leeches, m'gfking bloodsuckers, gggrr arghh splotcktch."

Plus, honestly, I don't know. However, fwiw: Psst! A search engine can take you to any number of Zipf's Lists for English showing much the same hand of "face cards" that those two do every bit as well as I can, if not better. And what's more, Zipf's Law also applies to many foreign languages for which lists are available on the internet.

And, for that matter, to texts made up of random incoherent strings of letters divvied up to approximate the word-length frequencies and intervals that they'd have if they weren't nonsense words but real English. According to Wiki, anyway.

Although you know what they say. Consider the source.

Nothing but (written by a Welshman, dammit!) love,

c2w

[compared2what?]

But let's continue our consideration of proactive interference just a bit further.

Honey, it's not that I won't but that I just can't. I got nuthin'. But you go ahead. I'll watch.

[brainpanhandler]

But let's continue our consideration of proactive interference just a bit further.

Honey, it's not that I won't but that I just can't. I got nuthin'. But you go ahead. I'll watch.

I know, right. I guess I'm pretty much done as well, for now.

[compared2what?]

But let's continue our consideration of proactive interference just a bit further.

Honey, it's not that I won't but that I just can't. I got nuthin'. But you go ahead. I'll watch.

I know, right. I guess I'm pretty much done as well, for now.

Oh, HELLS to the no.

You couldn't possibly be, absent a kind of unsportsmanslike and insincere intellectual conduct that I know to be far, far beneath you. And we can't be having that. Because at best, it would be very remiss of me to stand by and allow you to hide your light under a bushel under the circumstances. And at worst -- were I, as it seems I must have been, the wet blanket that extinquished it -- it would be an affirmative sin against honest and searching intellectual inquiry for me to do so.

I just can't wittingly be so lax, nor shall I. Curfew must not ring tonight, I say, though my hands be bloody and battered by the efforts necessary to prevent it. Although happily, nothing that extreme or self-injurious is called for in this case, I don't think. In reality, a short recapitulation of the situation as it presently stands should more than suffice. To wit:

You posed a question that -- however carefully surrounded by thickets of qualification it may be -- wouldn't have had any raison d'etre at all unless you strongly believed that the answer to it was capable of somehow validating the KWH hypothesis as something that had (at least in part) a demonstrably sound empirical and rational basis.

Indeed, per your own standards and principles as you freely define them, you're obligated to answer it in the interest of simple fairness. Or, I guess, arguably merely the appearance of the interest of simple fairness. But whatever. It really doesn't matter all that much. Because even if the interest of fairness doesn't demand an answer from you, I sure as hell still do. I positively insist on it, in fact. You have me on the edge of my seat.

So, just to refresh your memory wrt the only points that can accurately be described as "salient," context establishes the question as one that comes as close to being of first-order relevance as it's possible for the powers of impartial reason to conjure wrt reaching a determination on the potential non-bogusness of proactive interference as a practical and operative vehicle via which the CIA-Media can and does exert the influence on young minds that Hugh alleges as fact.

And that question was:

Just to stick with the Rambo example, is it possible that an average citizen of the united states having been almost certainly exposed with a fair amount of frequency to the name Rambo of first blood fame prior to the name Greg Rambo of Kent state fame (as an aside, fame might be too strong a word for Greg rambo as so far as I can tell among all the names related to the kent state massacre Greg's is fairly minor) would be somewhat less likely to explore the history of greg rambo as a result of careless reading and an aversion to the film Rambo, for which there might be many sound reasons?

________________

FWIW, by my lights, a fair consideration is one that adequately accounts for the dismissal of factors and/or evidence that argue against the subject being canvassed as well as those that support it. But I'm kind of old-fashioned that way, I have to admit. Quite apart from which -- and, I hope, needless to say -- I very much look forward to hearing whatever considered response you've got, entirely irrespective of its terms. So please feel free to proceed according to whatever rules and standards strike you as best suited to an effective disposition of the matter at hand.

I'm all ears.

[compared2what?]

SHORTER VERSION:

Not so fast, buster.