An Idioglossary For Our Reading in the Info-Glut (Partial)

Last I wrote to you few weirdos, I groped toward a small section that I and possibly you encounter in your reading: your readings and their apparent effects on your sensoria.

Another approach would be a gathering of terms. If you're able to make use of even one term, I'll be happy. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

I aim my personal lexicon-blunderbuss, exhale, and fire:

exformation: In my previous blogspew I quoted David Foster Wallace on this term. Here are three other interpretations I've seen: 1.) Everything we don't actually say but which we have in our minds when - or before - we say anything at all. Whereas information is the demonstrable and measurable (in the Shannon sense of the math of information) utterance we actually come out with. 2.) "Useful and relevant information" 3.) A specific sort of information explosion.

I don't have in my notes who I am quoting in #2. I know it seems trivial, and perhaps it is...to you. And that's the very point. #3 seems a lot like DFW's gloss ("a certain quality of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient") to me. #1 reminds me of all those riffs you and your friends have about not coming up with the perfect comeback in time. It's only later when you think, "Oh! That would have been the perfect riposte!" I think the Italian term fare secco qualcuno means this, but I don't quite trust my memory on this...which is an example of exformation?

HERE is the current Wiki on Exformation. That which was not said and that which was explicitly discarded? Tor Norretranders - the neologizer for exformation - wrote a book on consciousness that came out in Unistat around 1999. He said that which our consciousness rejects is the most valuable part of ourselves. Our brains are fantastic processing systems meant for survival. Apparently we make an image of the world in our heads, which is a fantastic strategy for biosurvival, and this nervous system processing information from within and from the environment...including an image of the imager itself, that very helpful phantasm: our "selves." It seems this idea about consciousness keeps being rediscovered and reframed. Just three days ago, George Johnson of the New York Times reported on consciousness in this way. It violates almost all of our notions about our "self" but there we go: my digression is already out of the way for this particular blog article.

Exformation seems to bear some sort of anti-matter family resemblance to Ezra Pound's idea of excernment, which was "The general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed. The elimination of repetitions...The ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues." - Pound, as quoted in Christine Brooke-Rose's A ZBC of Ezra Pound, p.18. It's one of the functions of the critic, according to Pound.

                               a random beautiful fractal image, because why the hell not?

Noocene Epoch: I forgot how to place the umlaut over that second o. O well. I found this term in another 1999 book, The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader: "How we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we've created." The Noocene seems like a subset time-frame of the newly minted Anthropocene: the period since humans created massive Industrialization.

"Knowledge," not information. We all have our favorite ways to define the difference between these two phantoms. I see knowledge as of drinking age, and it's been around the block. Knowledge tends to grate on our nerves by being a know-it-all, but then it can be contrite and quite charming. Info tries to get away with whatever it can. It's underage, hangs around the pool hall and smokes cubebs stolen from its grandpa and who the hell knows where info will end up? Let's hope it makes good use of itself and doesn't kill somebody.

Wisdom watches both of them and shakes Its head.

componentiality: An aspect of modern consciousness. "Technology induces a cognitive style we call 'componentiality' - breaking up reality into separate components that can be analyzed and manipulated." - found on p.121 of Peter Berger's Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist, when writing about his 1973 book The Homeless Mind

At first glance: what a stupid term. But we swim in a componential world; obviously there were many millennia when human consciousness did not know of such a Damned Thing. It therefore seems manifestly not a stupid term. In fact: Sing to me! O Goddess! Of words that describe something right in front of my face, that I never noticed! I owe you one...

apophenia: German psychologist Klaus Conrad (d: 1961) coined this term, but I picked it up while reading William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, and he gave at least two glosses in different spots in the book: 1.) "The spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things;" 2.) "Each thing conceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy." (pp.115 and 294)

Possibly related ideas: metanoia, paranoia, abduction in logic, reading Chinese, gestalting, pronoia - all or some of these terms as cited by the OG in the current context as being (possibly?) an example of apophenia. If I have been apophenic here, I blame it all on my reading. Don't look at me. I didn't do it.

Another text I read says people with mental disorders are prone to apophenia. Okay, so maybe I am a little "off." So what? Anyway...here's an interesting Q, and it gets to near the heart of problems of Info-Glut 2016: are experiences of apophenia the symptom of mental illness, or the cause?

enmindment: I'm pretty sure the poet/classics scholar/writer on the "Deep State" Peter Dale Scott minted this term. He contrasts it with "the Enlightenment":

I believe in enmindment
the translation of light
into awareness of the dark
and understanding of that fear
we return to
whenever we forget
-from Minding the Darkness, p11

At first glance, lapping into second, this seems part of the overtone series for exformation, but it addresses an emotional component of it. It certainly seems to address all that reading we do that is not "fiction" that nonetheless makes us feel like we've been reading a horror story, eh?

Kampung culture: Another term copped from Peter Dale Scott. It means "narrow world-view" in Javanese culture. PDS was trying to find out more about Unistat's involvement in the slaughters of East Timor. Suharto, Sukarno, CIA and Dutch imperialism all appear. See p.213 of Minding the Darkness, but I hafta warn ya: it's not pretty. This unpacking of "narrow world-view" can take on some nasty hues. Even after the Dutch left, the Javanese still bathed in the blood of their brothers. Why? Kampung culture:

PDS quoting Pramoedya:

Even in the belly of Dutch power
Java still glorified

its Kampung culture
they bathed in the blood of their brothers
right up through 1966

And because Java was no longer
in the belly of European power
the slaughter reached an unlimited scale
Etc.

Suffice to say: It Can't Happen Here!

Giambattista Vico used the term sapienza volgare, or "popular wisdom," which to Vico were ideas expressed through myth, rituals, traditions. I do not see this term as the "same" as Kampung culture, but it seems related. (via my own apophenia?)

anamnesis: An SAT-like word I shouldda known, but didn't: To remember. A recalling to mind. Plato's use: all souls need to be stimulated in order to remember an eternal Truth, or to accept axioms as self-evident. Chomsky seems to like this idea. I get it.

jouissance: Obviously French (cough): Enjoyment, or our French brothers and sisters seem to mean "Whatever gets you off." It seems aimed at our transcending of our ordinary/primary "reality." It's probably a good description for why I read. Leo Bersini considers jouissance intrinsically self-shattering and disruptive of the "coherent self." (possibly see McKenna, Terence?) In my delvings into glosses of jouissance a competing term, plaisir, often shows up, trying to get in on the conversation. Plaisir sounds like "pleasure," but it seems to strengthen dogma and individual me-ness. Roland Barthes eloquently defines plaisir as a "homogenizing movement of the ego." Plaisir might be defined as going for what you already know - more of the same stuff - while jouissance seems like an attempt to fracture the structure of the ego, whatever the ego "is," after reading about exformation...

Einfuhlen: Gore Vidal says he got this term from Johann Gottfried Herder, German polymath who died in 1803. Vidal unpacked it thus: "The ability to get into the past, while realizing that it's not just another aspect of the present, with people you know dressed up in funny clothes." I tend to link this term in my own thinking with Vico's entrare, which Vichian Isaiah Berlin described as the force of imaginative insight used to understand remote cultures.

I had always wondered vaguely about this when reading history, and fearing my imagination was falling short. This term helped remind me of how much is missing in history, which I guess we'll just have to learn to live with. The "missing" part, that it. Let us continue to develop our historical imaginations till death parts us! Why? Oh, all the usual reasons, but also: it might help stave off Kampung culture where you live.

unthinking: As opposed to re-thinking: I first noted this term in Immanuel Wallerstein's Uncertainties of Knowledge, p.104: He wanted to emphasize very deep-seated notions that, even though physical sciences have shown to be inadequate, nevertheless stay with us and lead us epistemologically astray. The great anthropologist Weston Labarre gave me a term similar: group archosis: "Nonsense and misinformation so ancient and pervasive as to be seemingly inextricable from our thinking." Thomas Vander Wal coined the study of folksonomics/folksonomy as the ordered set of categories - or "taxonomy" - that emerges from how people tag items, which works in cognitive anthropology. Oh hell: let me drop in another fave here: logophallocentrism, which Robert Anton Wilson interpreted as "We have a social system based on belief in the special magic power of words and penises."

Let's hope all that categorizing leads to something we can cash out and invest in the Sanity Sweepstakes...RAW reminded us we seem to have inherited a lot of our ideas from the apes. No wonder this crap is so hard to root out and overcome! This all seems something akin to...

unspeak: I found this term used by Steven Poole. It's language that "says one thing while really meaning that thing, in a more intensely, loaded and revealing way than a casual glance might acknowledge." I think I know what Poole was getting at here, but I may need to make more multiple glances. Is this like "enhanced interrogation"? I suspect so. Orwell's doublespeak, let's remind ourselves, was a form of language that says one thing while really meaning the opposite. So far, of the thousands of real-life examples, I like Bush43's "Blue Skies Initiative" which would have gutted the Clean Air Act and allowed corporations to dump their toxic garbage - or "negative externalities," in economist's-speak - anywhere they wanted. I may as well tack on cognitive policy, which, according to George Lakoff, is the policy of getting an idea into normal public discourse, which requires creating a change in the brains of millions of people. (see The Political Mind, p.169)

campus imperialism: Coined by Jaron Lanier, as far as I know. He touches on it HERE. Representatives of each academic discipline assume something like a Philosopher-King's eye view of all other disciplines, which are subsumed under their own. It gives rise to thinking such as the very common idea now - I touched on it earlier - that we humans are merely sophisticated computing machines. It's all data-processing, all the way down. While I side with Lanier and other qualophiles (a term I got, ironically, from Daniel Dennett, who seems a qualophobe of some sort): our own experiences seem not covered by any academic domain, while each area of the campus has its own particular ways to model what it thinks is my experience. Okay, this is at least my second digression, but while I'm on it I may as well: currently I see the admittedly brilliant Nick Bostrom's notions about the "Simulation Hypothesis" as taking up a lot of cultural space, perhaps deservedly so. However, a small gaggle of minions will make of this idea - an astounding one for sure! - more than perhaps it deserves: campus imperialism? I will admit the Simulation Hypothesis leaves me pretty damned spaghettified, which is a more extreme step - or colorful phrase! - than having one's mind "blown" or "stretched" by a novel set of facts or ideas.

Which brings me to another German term:

Unbehagen: something like "uneasiness." Einstein felt this in the face of the quantum theory, and he tried to get rid of it the rest of his life, to no avail. Because I'm a Soft Whorfian, I think Germans who use this word mean something a little more than uneasiness, but I don't have the German chops to say so or not. Bostrom's "Simulation Hypothesis" - that there's a better than 50% chance we are all simulations made by other Beings -  makes me feel Unbehagen, but even if it's true I don't know why it should matter. I mean, we were all getting along fairly well before the Sim Hyp, weren't we? Please say we were. Oh hell, it's all just campus imperialism anyway, right? Right?

Much of my reading, on the other hand and ironically and paradoxical to boot, seems to chase after this feeling of Unbehagen. Some H.P. Lovecraft can do it. Much of actual history does it. Certain conspiracy theories can do it. Borges does it, and even Argentines without means do it.

depressogenic: One of my favorite scientist-writers, Robert Sapolsky, used this term in an essay about what might be in all our futures. "Why do I assume we'll all be getting sadder? Mainly because it strikes me that there is so much in our present civilization that is depressogenic." - found in The Next 50 Years.

No comment...

ideology: "Ideas serving as weapons for social interest." - one of my favorite definitions, from Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, in a discussion of Marx.

How much of what we read fits into this definition of ideology? Keep your powder dry. (Or is it "powders"? Let us keep our various powders and powderings dry...)

Alright, I've done enough harm for today. My intent was to maybe give you one term that you might make good use of, not to make you feel even more annoyed (you know the definition) than you already were, which would defeat the purpose of this post.

                                           conception graphique par Bobby Campbell

Five Reasons the MI6 Story is a Lie

[From OG: see end of article: author's postscript! - OG]

by Craig Murray:

The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie.

1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation.

3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.

4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.

5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?

There you have five reasons the story is a lie.

Author’s postscript:

The site is under a strong denial of service attack from a bot trying to crash it by overloading with millions of pings from multiple locations. I presume the objective is to take down the revelation of the fake MI6 Snowden story, which had been read by tens of thousands already and is now really taking off.

While the copyright in that article remains mine, I grant permission for it freely to be reproduced by anybody, anywhere. I shall be grateful for multiple copies to be posted around the web so it can’t be taken down.

OG-added addenda: If even CNN exposes you for what a Murdoch whore you are, you have problems. WATCH THIS.

On Gossip

I once worked in a music store that was owned by a good Christian family man who had been arrested for molesting children (or so the allegations held). His name appeared in the paper but he never went to prison. This was a long time ago, and I remember finding this out, thinking of my previous moments with the guy (who seemed pent-up but like a decent guy), and wondering how to know more without appearing that I knew more: what Robert Anton Wilson calls the Burden Of Nescience in a hierarchical social system. I was merely one of many music teachers in the guy's store; I made enough to pay my bills and eat, and buy my girlfriend (and myself) drinks. I couldn't afford to know too much.

However, over the years, I certainly heard a lot. I had soon decided to just doubt everything I heard about him. Why? Well, he was never going to get near any of the kids I taught, but the area I lived in was filled with middle-class christian right wingers and I'd read books like Satanic Panic: rumormongering can really get out of hand. In the end I guess I sorta thought, "If he really is doing this and he keeps doing this he'll get caught and won't be able to buy his way out of it and he'll go to jail and the store will either be run by the family or it'll close down and I'll be out of a job. I won't worry about it until then. And besides: what if he's not guilty?  What if there's something else going on and he has enemies who are trying to ruin him? I'd rather give him a part of the benefit of a doubt and remember no jury heard the evidence and convicted. Imagine what it would be like to be unfairly charged."

That's sorta how I feel about Woody Allen right now: he has a very well-known enemy. I, unlike the normally decent Katie McDonough of Salon, will not convict Woody based on what appears to be hearsay.

I've been thumbing through a bunch of books on gossip: Joseph Epstein's Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (appeared pre-Snowden Era), philosopher Emrys Westacott's The Virtue Of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness and Other Bad Habits (also appeared pre-Snowden), and a few others.

Two Alleged Etymologies For "Gossip"
1. It comes from "god-sibling" and originally pertained to the talk between two god-parents of a child, the talk having to do with the child's well-being.

2. George Washington told his spies to "go-sip" by infiltrating Brit troops and drinking with them, trying to learn of military maneuvers.

                                          Anthropologist Robin Dunbar

Problems With Semantics
The Bible has some line about how "Gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret." It's somewhere in the prequel to The New Testament. How many of us have had unpleasant moments when we found out a friend said something that arrived back at us, thinking our secret was held in confidence? Two years ago I said something that I either didn't know was supposed to have been in confidence, or had forgotten because it seemed trivial, or I was drunk on red zinfandel when hearing that which was supposed to have been confidential. And I later heard about it; I got an earful. I felt like an asshole. The information I had conveyed to a third party was gossipy about the good news of a friend's love life. I could go into why I thought it shouldn't be a secret anyway, but all of this feels catty.

In 5th century BCE Athens, once a year, the citizens could vote to not only ostracize but send into exile anyone who seemed to have too much dirt on others, or anyone who seemed potentially too tyrannical or possessed with the idea of power over others. We don't do this anymore, but should we? (Or do we still do the exile trip, but in other ways? We shall see...)

Eleanor Roosevelt is usually credited with saying that great minds talk about ideas, average minds events, and small minds talk about other people. How can gossip occur if it's about ideas? I can see certain events having gossipy possibilities. Many of the sections of books and articles I've read on gossip attest to how it's not only unavoidable, but FUN!

Okay, in what sense is it "fun"? At Staffordshire University a study suggests that gossip can be good for our self-esteem, but we need to be nice. Here's how to test it: Say positive things about a fictional person to someone else. Or - but be careful - say nothing but good stuff about a real person. Then note how you feel. Then say a bunch of unsavory things about another fictional person and note how you feel.

In studies about gossip conducted at Berkeley and Stanford, it's suggested that spreading true info about bad actors prevents exploitation, maintains social order, and even lowers stress levels of the gossipers. The researchers emphasize that the content of the gossip in the controlled studies be about "reputational information sharing" and not about petty nitpicking, hearsay unverified, or malicious rumors. The gossip must be reliable. Participants in the study were tested beforehand to determine their relative levels of altruism or selfishness, then they played an online game having to do with economic trust. When it was learned that players can spread gossip (or "knowledge"?) about how another player tends to cheat, the games became more fair, and the most-impacted players were the ones who had scored low on altruism and high on selfishness: knowing that other players know about you and can easily spread info (gossip) about you tended to put you on the straight and narrow.

How does gossip lower stress levels in the gossiper? Answer: Witnessing cheating raised the heart rate; telling someone else about the cheater lowered it.

I read a few articles on the Berkeley-Stanford gossip studies and found them interesting but from what I gathered about the assumptions behind the methodology, it all seems far too artificial and overly-rational. I mean: only "reputational information sharing" was considered gossip (actually: "prosocial" gossip) in the studies? Okay. But in real life, in situ: school, workplace, etc: gossip in more traditional semantic senses can seem fairly malicious. Picking on a kid because he's "weird." Or not beautiful. Or too smart. Or let's all make fun of Helen in Accounting because of that dress. And kids and adults seem perfectly happy to be rumormongers and spread all sorts of malicious hearsay. 'Cuz it's fun! And we're still fairly tribal beings...

Lines from Stephen Burt's poem, "Rue", in which he seems to be replaying his own high school years about The Ramones, what kids wore, how they wrote on every surface, what we all saw going on in the back of the bus between him and her, etc:

Gossip in school makes a kind of electrical storm,
or else
             a medium of exchange:
once you share what you know, then you learn what you can.
-p.42, Belmont

This rings true on a certain anthropological level, and indeed Robin Dunbar's 1997 book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language made quite the splash, the ripples still visible.

So:
Good gossip: spreading true information about actors in a situation
Bad gossip: everything else thought of as "gossip"?

"It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's own back that are absolutely and entirely true." - Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

Other Possible Goods From Gossip
My sources allege that a mild slamming of one's friends and loved ones is understood as "normal" and not egregious. Snobbery has its own occult rules for propriety, to be found out with experience. Snobbery seems related to gossip, but I'm not sure how to delineate it. Rudeness likewise. But: many sources seem to stick up for the salutary aspects alleged by researchers at Berkeley: it could lessen bullying, counteract secrecy, strengthen human relationships, be emotionally cathartic, infuse justice in power structures, and even be a part of Socrates's "examined life."

Or at least that's the buzz around here, lately. This is strictly on the down-low, but the scuttlebutt on gossip is that, if you're relaying true information about good and bad behavior of others in the local environment, it's a socially powerful thing.

I do wonder about the epistemology problems. How does someone know they're relaying something true? It may be called "reputational information sharing" by scholars, but how does a gossiper actually know what they're perceiving is the truth? Perhaps that's beyond the scope of both the researchers' and my own inquiries, but I tend to assume I'm probably missing some information when I engage in this sort of behavior, so I tend to hedge.

Finally here: this business about relaying information that results in salutary outcomes: what of Assange, Snowden, Kiriakou, et.al? If the sort of research results coming out of Berkeley are correct, how does it reflect on The Whistleblowers? Just a thought...

Dishin' It
So...you know the great playwright Arthur Miller? He had a child who was disabled so he dumped the kid in an institution for life, yea. Oh yea. And not long ago I read the wild memoirs of some guy who ran around 1940s-60s Hollywood, and Spencer Tracy? I'd never heard he was gay! (I forget the name of the book, but I could dig it up for you...) Fidel Castro fucked Kenneth Tynan's wife, wow. What do you make of that?

Really: how do you feel when you read that stuff, to whatever degree of truth was there? I feel oddly childish just typing it. And yet: it sort of...seems...kinda...fun. Stanford neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky enjoys talking about People magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People issue, because he says it shows how we're just like the baboons he's spent decades studying in the wilds of Africa: they are intensely social, like us. They have status hierarchies, like us. And they like hanging with their friends, like us. But when two baboons get into a fight? It's just like the rubberneck session on the freeway: everyone must slow down to gawk at the carnage, the primate-drama of it all.

I Hear This Site Is Really Something To Look At
Hell, I have looked at it. And you probably have too. Frank Warren calls his PostSecret.com  site the "largest advertisement-free blog in the world."

Internet Trolls and Malice of Forethought
Much of the latest "gossip can be good for us" research points out that the scads of heinous, vicious, stupid and downright disturbing comments on the Net are due to anonymity. When there's no price to be paid - from gossip? - viral hatred has free reign. Point well-taken. It's a problem and we're working on it.

Ian Leslie's piece in Aeon
It's here. Why do we overshare online? Because this Net thing caught us evolutionarily off-guard. For most of our existence as hominids we had no walls. Although our saner minds on this issue say we have an instinct for privacy, the evidence shows we have almost no sense of how privacy works on the Net. "Every day, embarrassments are endured, jobs lost and individuals endangered because of unforeseen consequences triggered by a tweet or a status update." Indeed, when I read Leslie's piece it reminded me of a haunting and criminally underrated (so far!) book called Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, that does a fairly thorough job on this phenomena. I found it a page-turner of a non-fiction book, but like a real-life horror-story, seeing as how Niedzviecki wrote it before the Snowden Era and I read it while the Era was giving birth to itself. Sobering as all get the fuck out...Indeed, Leslie in his Aeon piece has a line about the type of person at the NSA who's supposed to be monitoring us that fits in with Niedzviecki's thesis that we're all already spying on each other anyway.

Daniel Kahneman
In another semantic sense of "gossip" the Nobelist in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow freely uses "gossip" as something he wants to encourage: the vocabulary about unconscious biases and their mechanisms that he and his colleague Tversky found and named? He wanted this vocabulary to worm its way to the "water cooler" at work. He thinks it's all gossip-worthy stuff! (And I agree with him. I just wish it actually played out more than it seems to...) (See index or even just pp.3-4)

Wilson's Jocoserious Use of Gossip
Humans' "instinct to gossip" shows up in Robert Anton Wilson's work in a few places. In one of two footnotes on p.302 of his novel The Widow's Son, the 'patapsychologist and "theo-chemist" de Selby has advocated for the flat earth "on the grounds that nobody has 'encountered and endured' a spherical earth (which is a theory generated by 'the instinct to gossip.')" In a piece titled "The Persistence of False Memory," encountered and endured in Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology, RAW argues that the "instinct to gossip" is AKA public opinion, and falls under the rubric of Preposterous Perception as found in 'Patapsychology, and seems similar to the role of Nietzsche's "will to power" in his books and "the Id" in Freud's books.

Wilson makes us wonder how much of "reality" - our everyday, taken-for-granted assumptions about what is unquestionably "real" - how much of this was generated by gossip? If we keep talking about stuff we can't see, smell, taste, hear, touch, or even detect with any manmade instruments...how "real" is it?

Last Word: Prof. Carlin
Here's something I never knew. Prof. Carlin simply drops this tantalizing hint on p.57 of Napalm and Silly Putty: "At one time there existed an entire race of people whose knowledge consisted entirely of gossip."

I wish he's elaborated, but he was wily that way, even cryptic. But I want to know more. Heck and golly: Enquiring minds want to know.

FLOTUS Flouts Humility Yet Again; Practically Waterboards Entire Nation!

First, fellow Americans, choke this 54-second clip from the Liberal Media down, if you can take it:

Michelle Obama must be stopped, ladies and germs. She's out of control and obviously in the pocket of Big Water. Her latest extremist liberal agenda? To force more water down our throats! Where is the outrage?

Oh, here's some:

I knew Rush Limbaugh would be there for me, and he is. And thanks for digging deeper, Rush: she's not only in the pocket of Big Water, but Big Soda too. And liberal (which means socialist which means communist which means Nazi-Stalinist-Bin Laden Lovers which means Traitors) bloggers think they're funny with lines like, "If Mrs. Obama asked the nation to smoke more cigars and go for nightly Oxycontin and mayonnaise smoothies, Rush would suddenly be against that." Yea, real funny: Har...Har...Hardy-Har-Har! (golf-clap).

                                Meet the new Public Enemy!

Alyson Goodman of the CDC thinks her study of the supposed hydration deficit among the citizenry indicates we are probably choosing less healthy "beverages" than water. Oh? So water is now a beverage is it? How Orwellian! I don't know about you, friend, but when I'm settling in with something called a "beverage" I better be gettin' good and hammered. I'm sorry, Michelle, but I'll quote another First Lady and Just Say No to you and your Big Government water-pushers.

Why do they hate America? Why do they want to control what we drink? Why do they hate freedom so much? Isn't it enough that the thing they are now telling us can improve our health (water) is the very same thing that has MURDERED so many people in Boulder, Colorado recently? Does the First Lady have no sense of decency?

I'm afraid, fellow Americans, that Rush has only hit the tip of the ocean-liner-killing iceberg: water is far more dangerous than my fellow Americans know. I used italics in that last sentence to highlight how grave I see the situation. What I aim to do is provide a little relief with some FACTS.

Friends: you start off small. Maybe on a hot day you have nothing better to do but grab a bottle of water at the Try 'N Save and the next thing you know you're hooked: soon your body will eerily seem like it's made of water. And you can't get enough. It's insidious! The next thing you know you're living on a shack in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is largely made of...used plastic water bottles! The kind Michelle Obama got you started on! You're condemned to live in a desolate, floating, watery grave. Is this what you want, Mrs. Obama? Dear Reader: THINK!

Oh, it gets worse, yes in-deedy.

You say, "But Overweening Generalist-dude, you're overreacting..."

Oh, I'm "OVERREACTING," am I???

"Yes: I'll just drink a little bit more water from my tap," you say.

I thought you'd say that. Tsk tsk tsk! You poor, unwitting sap. Lemme pour you a tall cool glass of FACTS, straight-up: your tap water is laced with Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil...all those "antidepressants." Stuff like Dammitol and Repressitol. It's...depressing, frankly. Hell, maybe you should drink the water. But you need to take the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face: SSRIs are in your tap water, friends! 

Maybe it's a set-up. I wouldn't put it past her. Get the public so loopy on funny-pills that don't even notice their water lacks a certain...taste. Then they take your farm because now you're living on/in the Pacific Garbage Patch, wandering around like a zombie, all wasted on Dammitols. (Good luck with the farm in the American Southwest, suckers!: No water!)

Call me Mr. Fancy Pants, but I don't care: water tastes boring to me. If you wanna indulge a little, hey, it's a free country (for how long under the Obamas I don't know). If you wanna live all sedated on a patch of floating garbage the size of Texas, it's your funeral. Water for me lacks...I dunno...bourbon? Anyway...

But wait: it gets even worse. (Worser? Worsier? Worsy? Worsiestlier?) It's bad.

                       This image seems to say, "I'm Michelle Obama
                      and my husband and I are bent on world 
                      domination, please vote for us!" What do you
                      make of it? Or are you too AFRAID to say?

If you live in some parts of our great-great Nation, you can turn on the tap and drink a brain-eating amoeba! Yep: some All-American boy in Louisiana was playing with the Slip 'N Slide and one drop of water from the hose went up his nose, which was all the amoebas needed and now the child's brain is colonized by a microbe that literally eats away the precious grey goo and kills. That's the bad news. I call that a Slip 'N Slide of Death, friends. Let's not sugarcoat it.

The good news is this: they blame the rise of brain eating amoebas in US waterways on global warming, which we know is a Liberal Plot, so therefore nothing to fear. They can't scare us. Also: did you read that article? The sources are NBC, the CDC, NPR, National Geographic and "scientists." All of them I'm Smarter Than You and I Drive a Volvo and Eat Brie Liberals. Therefore the news is false. And Katrina was just a fluke anyway. (By the way, watch where you step in Louisiana, as you can pick up a nasty fluke...)

You ain't heard the end of the implications of Mrs. Obama's attempt to get more water into us. Did you know you can drink too much water and DIE? It's true. You can call me a "cup half-empty" kinda guy, but friends: I say we take no chances here. Call me rather a Cup Bone Dry guy. 

The evidence against the seemingly harmless chemical compound of two hydrogens atoms bonded to one oxygen seems like a little thing. And indeed it is. Until you add it up. Pretty soon: you're staring at a big glass of water. Murderous, Obama-endorsed water. And just look: that sweaty glass of water seems to be staring right back at you, just laughing. (Sure, that's probably only my reflection, but I think my point holds.) And you say you're gonna drink that? What have you been smoking?

Now I lay the hammer down and cinch my case against Mrs. Obama and her attempt to water-log the citizens of the United States of America: Not long ago a man who studies such things - and yes, he's a scientist, but sometimes they actually know something worth knowing - Stanley Falkow of Stanford, who studies bacteria, said that the "world is covered in a fine patina of feces." Talk about the Straight Poop!

And why is the world covered in micropoo? Because people don't wash their hands! They think they do, but they don't. And it stands to reason that the closer you get to the bathroom, the more concentrated the patina. And where are you going to be spending more time if you listen to the FLOTUS? Think about it: you drink all those cups of water They want you to drink and suddenly, you're getting far more shit - literally- on you than ever before. Because you're gonna hafta pee, let's face it.

You can call me alarmist, but I think I know a thing or two when it comes to poo, and you followers of Mrs. Obama don't know shit: patinas of feces carry patinas of microbes, brain-eating types and every damned thing else you can think of. 

Sadly, fine citizens, I'm forced to believe that this latest plot by the Obamas is all about making us sick, infecting our very bodily essences with feces and microbes - call it a Bataan Death March Into Obamacare - while causing some of us to literally drink ourselves to death, all while Nature has seen fit to hit us with a drought. If we live, we're destined to wander like zombies, zonked out on Zoloft from the tap water, along the rim of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And the Cubs will still have never won the Series.

My recommendation: strong beer or red wine or bourbon, straight. Wear gloves. Everywhere. Even to bed. Don't shower anymore than is necessary. Less, even. Sure, you'll smell like...a patina of feces. But the Good News is: only the Good Americans will smell too. Ye shall know them by their smell, which be like unto feces. Get used to adult diapers, even if you're a teenager. It's a small price to pay to maintain our freedom.

Anything else and the Liberal Agenda wins again. You can thank me in your prayers. Not this time, Mrs. Obama! Sorry!

I remind us that there were some who knew this all along! Clemenceau! Communist subversion!