Hyperindividualism, Toxic Narcissism, Social Media and Gematria

More psychology today instead of finances and economics.

In accounting, your balance sheet represents a snapshot of where you are at today.  Your profit and loss statements represent how the company is doing that leads to that snapshot.  Notice that the P&L part is pluralized.  Statements, not statement.  It’s not entirely fair to assess the health of a company by one year’s statement alone.  Trends are important, the company that had one bad year because they didn’t get that big contract that they expected, or a key person passed away, is not as bad off as a company that continually hemorrhages cash.

The tricky part is the timing.  Deciding when to pay attention to the problems and let it go or make changes.  Humans, and this odd need for attention do a particularly bad job of looking at the long term big picture.  In the Decade A - well it’s not too hot yet, climate changes is bullshit.  Decade B - more people are talking about this, maybe there’s something to it, ah we’ll be fine.  Decade C - starting to think they’re on to something.  Gosh I hope somebody fixes this so I don’t have to worry about it.  Decade D - maybe I should do more to help, but gosh this sucks.  Decade E - holy shit, the planet’s on fire.  Why didn’t anybody do anything about this decades ago?

In the grifting world, you bypass any concern for whatever decade your in.  Our accountants may be in a position that they are heavily invested in fudging the numbers to disguise that they never realized that nothing is going to save the failing company - those financial statements if honestly presented show the reality doesn’t match the dialogue.  So they do the grifter thing.  Pick a scapegoat, psychologically project their own problems on others, muddy the waters, double down - anything to avoid the harsh reality that the slow burn has caught up to them.  Maybe they can get away with getting caught being handled with, “Uh, I’m sorry?!?”

The grifting on the internet is the short con.  What are people talking about today?  What can I throw shade on today?  I’m never actually going to put the effort into buying the Eiffel Tower, upgrading it and selling it for an overpriced amount.  It’s just a matter of finding the right gullible people to convince that’s the plan and to invest in my pyramid scheme for them to purchase their very own genuine Eiffel Tower.

Some of the more entertaining movies about con men are the long con.  The group of lovable rogues hatches and executes a brilliant scheme.  The Sting, Ocean’s 11, House of Games.  These movies would be much shorter if it wasn’t the long con.  But they do have scenes of the short con, a plot device to show how skillful these guys are.

Hyperindividualism is how people insist that they are all edgy and cool by displays of their individuality.

https://brill.com/display/book/9789004444836/BP000044.xml

Getting those piercings was fun in college, but as a job seeker in a professional office, maybe you need to give up on that.  Maybe that garter snake was a fun and different pet, but the herpetology got creepy and weird when you insisted that you should be allowed to be an individual and NEEDED a black mamba.  But Dad, that garter snake is boring!  How dare the city for having a law about not possessing dangerous wildlife!

No wonder there’s a mental health crisis in our youth.  There’s an encouragement to allow individuals to be individuals and there’s a line in the sand society draws that you shouldn’t cross.  And all the while the internet grifters encourage the division - what makes you the coolest TODAY?

The psychological slow burn is how this has been building up for a long time.  Employment - fight tooth and nail to be making maximum salary and perks, the dream of home ownership and freedom that money brings.  And even giving up and faking interest in a job just to pretend to fit in and get a paycheck that your capabilities don’t deserve.  The opposing ends of the spectrum lure the middle class to the ends.  Garter snake versus black mamba versus no snake at all.

I’m skeptical on the quoted percentages of toxic narcissists.  There’s a link between Hyperindividualism and narcissists.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5783345/#:~:text=Some%20studies%20have%20provided%20empirical,lead%20to%20narcissism%20%5B41%5D.

I think there’s not just the math of more people x the expected percent of narcissists, but an increase in narcissists by percent.  The grifters are magnifying identifying as an individual versus a member of a society. Now you can’t just settle for being the coolest person in your family, now you have to out cool everyone on social media.  Your confirmation bias got you this far, so let’s do the last thing you should, and ally yourself with grifters on social media.  The grifters on the internet have no intention of paying attention to the long term consequences.

Gematria is in a phase currently of settling in to build up for a new round of major shitstorms going on.  They are quiet, too quiet.  The sports pickers are just picking sports.  The crypto bros are just doing crypto.  The Jesus is coming soon guys are just Jesusing.  The spiritual synchronicity crowd is just synchronizing.  What isn’t changing is the fresh crop of not the most stable personalities having experienced a mix of happy versus tortured childhoods.  And all it takes is one more unseen event, the next crisis, for the cycle to start anew.  The next big hoax that isn’t a hoax will have some tiny and insignificant numbers.  And no amount of government funded therapy mambas is going to be enough to drag upcoming generations from the miasma of polarizing content.

Online Scams - It’s Not Just Fun and Games With Gematria

I'm going to take some time to go over the financial aspects of the conspiracy grifting world.  There’s no doubt I would have made a pretty effective grifter if I chose to take that path.  Every time some progress has been made something happens to counter it.

I’ve often said that in contrast to the 419 advanced fee scam (Nigerian Prince) that these days it’s way easier.  In the olden days you received a fax or email, which even with mass marketing to millions narrowed the further effort down to a select few - those gullible enough to reply.  Now, with the never ending push of conspiracy content the target audience can find the old rabbit hole and come to you.

Some statistics from the FTC bear out the increasing exponential impact:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/01/social-media-gold-mine-scammers-2021

Your politicians love to complain about the cost of immediate projects.  How much to send to the war in the Ukraine.  How much to fund the problems with immigration.  What to do about interest rates and inflation.  When something like gematria sports picks comes along it just seems odd and weird.  Why bother paying attention to something that’s utter nonsense that nobody would be foolish enough to believe?

Well there’s this thing called math, and enough people get involved and will continue to be involved in believing in something too good to be true.

When prices are set for food, part of the cost is already factored in for loss due to pests, disease and product expiration.  When cars are priced for sale, the math on odds of a mandated safety recall are factored in.  Insurance premiums are based on how many gazillion dollars the CEOs expect each year.  Everything has a hidden cost that you are paying for.

Promoters of conspiracy content rely on astute psychological understanding of human nature.  It’s not a goal to believe in the “product” for the rest of your life.  The cognitive bias of short term benefit vs. long term impact is super powerful.  Unless we are expected to evolve into a species where everyone steals from everyone else and that’s a good thing there’s no winners.

In that link, note that the romance scam is still a solid money maker.  The scammer invests some short term energy into pumping up the ego of the target.  You are so funny, smart, wonderful.  The romance attaboys, hiding behind a fake account that may even be the opposite gender of what you expected.  Following a script to help them through the rough spots on common skepticism.  Then, ironically, being identified as a good person, the target is hit with some tragedy that only their money can solve.  You are not a good person if you don’t send that money, whether you self identify the need to send that money immediately or suffer through more external pressure to guide you to that conclusion.  An analogy is the mega church operators and their ilk. You are not a truly religious person unless you buy the miracle spring water that will magically erase your debt.

Gematria got merged into the conspiracy world of how everything is an animal in Australia that wants to kill you.  Instead of selling a temporary feeling of joy of being a good person, the product is hatred.  You can find numbers for everything you hate.  The other political party.  The wrong religion.  Your government authorities.  Law enforcement.  You are no longer a good person if you don’t demonstrate your hatred by giving them your money.  If you’ve awakened to how it makes no sense that the results of your sports prediction weren’t really a prediction, no further effort will be wasted on you.  They are looking for someone with more staying power.  The ones that demonstrate a consistent enough hatred to keep going to present the next level of funding.  What started as jollies by analyzing your favorite team’s numbers is met with pressure to do more for the community.

The mid level believer is the kind of person who will double down instead of admitting they are wrong.  They are susceptible to the double dip, where the first scam certainly didn’t help their situation and the next get rich quick scheme seems like a good idea.  Now you aren’t even making sports picks anymore.  Now your being groomed for cryptocurrency, sovereign citizen, political donations on a large scale type scams.  You’re already armed with the cognitive bias of the gambler’s fallacy.  You are due.  Because you are a loyal hate filled person that has picked the scapegoat of the day whether that is someone of the wrong gender, skin color or sexual orientation.  The math bears out that there’s always a significant number of these.

Here’s somebody on Twitter getting gematria groomed:

 

Of course you’ve seen for yourself it’s always correct.  There’s always correct numbers.  There’s also a million times more incorrect numbers that you could have latched on to.  I looked at the profile and recent posts.  This person is now getting into crypto and political donations type content.  Using my amazing powers of gematria prediction, I expect loss of money in a significant amount, getting along with the family problems, and pressure to put out more scam content because the cause is more important than just what’s going on in your life.  The scam promoter admits to the confirmation bias.  Whatever it is I’m searching for, I’m sure to find.

This is the background for a series of posts.  Make sure to not join my nonexistent Patreon and not donate to my PayPal account for more.

Vance Astro’s Armpits

This is a story about how old the climate change issues are, how for ages we’ve put off much needed effective changes socially to put out the current fire without concern for the upcoming fires.  Why put it off tomorrow when you can put it off today.  Out of sight out of mind.  It’s also a true story of the impact of what’s deemed as non serious literature on this teenager and how there are nuggets of wisdom in the oddest places.  At least food for thought.  Certainly more thought provoking than insisting meaningless two and three digit numbers mean something  of earth shaking significance. Within this true story are the seeds of how this person as a teen got a firmer grip on misinformation’s effect on people.

As a bit of background, Stan Lee’s letters to the Marvel Comics staff had a frivolous and fun reward for the sharp eyed clients.  If you were able to dredge up an old secure reference and be the first to point it out, you won a No Prize prize.  Bragging rights.  If you by any chance know of Vance Astro and the speech I’m about to relate, consider yourself seriously No Prized.

Teams of heroes were a popular source of storylines, adding flavor to the good guys versus the villains.  Different groups facing off, civil wars in the membership ranks, proud announcements of new members, the heartbreak of an old comrade moving on (with or without death that is never really a true death, because hey, it’s a comic book).  There’s no burden of the star in the film growing old and spending money on digital de-aging CGI.

There’s precious little new innovation in books and film.  All the good ideas are mostly taken from old material and rebranded.  Like how The Last of Us is just The Walking Dead with a twist.  What makes it worthwhile is if it’s well done.  And you never know when a story worth retelling is going to hit home for the first time as youth matures into adulthood.

The Avengers, sure we all know those guys by now.  The movies have been plastered all over cinemas and TVs for over a decade.  And oh boy those are retelling of old stories.  Anyway, there was a second group that was fairly popular called The Defenders.  The lineup featured Dr. Strange, the Hulk and Valkyrie and rotating lesser know members as needed.  Those first three, all of those are in the Avengers movies.  And there was also a Guardians of the Galaxy back then.  Their leader was Vance Astro.  So here’s a link to a preachy little bit the writers worked into the story.  Defenders #26

https://everything2.com/title/The+Defenders+%252326

Here’s the key paragraph

Holy shit, Marvel.  I’m supposed to be reading about superheroes beating up supervillains.  Why you do did to me?  Now I’m in high school absorbing different peoples attitudes towards pollution, overpopulation and the conflict between those who understand the scientific method and those who don’t.  And those that don’t care because grifting is more important than truth.

Back in 1975 when this was produced the fossil fuel industry was already ass deep in lying about the science to make money.  Almost 50 years ago, and it’s blatantly obvious to people today that even if they don’t trust the scientific consensus SOMETHING IS WRONG.  Gone are the days when I could grab a comic book and sit outside on a plastic lounge chair and read.  I have to be careful about taking my senior dog for a walk, because it’s just too fucking hot.  A 10 minute drive from work back home isn’t enough for the car AC to cool off the blistering heat on the steering wheel completely.  Air conditioning is a necessity, not a luxury.

Add to this (and let me assure you, it sucks to have great long term memory), Vance’s speech was presented to a young boy who breaks down crying about the awful future that awaits us.  “But that couldn’t really happen here, could it?”  It’s a time travel story, and Doctor Strange assured the boy it’s just a POSSIBLE future.

I found that comic book recap by Google searching for VANCE ASTRO ARMPIT.  If I were a conspiracy grifter I’d call that predictive programming where 50 year old material shows the future with somewhat frightening accuracy.  I’d also throw in a whine about how you don’t hear the ozone layer stuff anymore.  We did put out that fire, but the dry tinder is still there in the whole population/pollution/economic impact problems.

The grifters do not want you to understand that a comic book boy is now an avatar for scientific expertise.  How a fluffy superhero story has more relevance to the world than their free speech of stupid ideas.  The more chaos there is, the more background noise that exists to ignore the science side in the battle of good science versus making money, the better.

It’s hard to imagine what these conspiracy theory Avengers have for an Endgame.  A world where those who steal the best are the winners is a loss.  If that story were to get rebranded today it would replace dry armpits and ozone with disinformation, climate change and vaccinations.  The little boy in the comic will be crying about not knowing who to believe.  And Dr. Strange will step in and point out that at least you’ll get gematria sports picks, so it’s not all bad, eh?

Rebranding

Twitter is now X.  Facebook is Meta.  Lots of other corporate entities have rebranded over time.

A true rebranding is a fresh start.  It might start with a name change, yet usually indicates dropping the old and bringing in the new.  A radio station might change their name.  New management comes in and after doing some market studies decides that the audience numbers are suffering and instead of Classic Rock it’s time to go with lots of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and that more modern set.

Twitter in particular doesn’t seem like a true rebranding to me, more like an attempt to disassociate from recent turmoil and financial problems.  A reliance on how forgetful people are about how due diligence on digging into the past is important instead of the old conspiracy method of claiming, “I never said that.”  Yes.  Yes you did.  But it’s all just a show to present what your new audience wants to hear.  About how they can become rich and famous by giving you money.

The term is soft rebrand.  Your not totally throwing out the old and making a fresh start.  It’s just a name change with new packaging.  In the old TV days they studied how many shows for a series needed to be produced for a successful run in syndication.  A famous example being Star Trek, which was right at the borderline.  The old rule of thumb was 100 episodes or four seasons.  The average memory has enough time to forget enough about a single episode during the run, so by the time the 108th and last episode finishes and season 1, episode 1 comes back on it’s fresh enough for entertainment value long enough to get butts on the couch long enough to be influenced by the commercials.

So far, there’s only been one true rebranding in the gematria conspiracy theory gang.  When Hubbard dropped the Illuminati/Freemason/Cabal storylines in the FTFT blog and changed to the current Gematria Effect News brand.  Now it’s Jesuits this, Jesuits that, Jesuits everywhere.  With generous commercial slots for reminding the audience that it’s really the “you know who I’m really talking about”.  The subliminal scapegoating of anti-semitism.

I’ve noticed lately that there’s been some dabbling in the rebranding arena from the mid-level tier of the MLM structure.  The kind of people who have been around for years as opposed to moving on to the greener pastures of slightly more lucid conspiracy content.  (Let’s face it, a YouTube channel dedicated to how much you love guns simply because you love guns is a lot more sane sounding.)  It’s all about engagement and keeping butts on the couch long enough to get them lost in the rabbit hole.  Sincere sounding messages are put out about how they’ve changed, usually to be more spiritual and loving than they used to be.  Anecdotal “evidence” provided for the motivation includes run ins with law enforcement, concern over viewer counts on videos, reasons to suddenly get back into gambling.  That evidence may or may not be true.  The advertisers don’t care.  Only now the advertisers are grifters instead of somebody trying to sell something more or less legitimate.  I’ve personally scambaited a couple of them.  The girl down on her luck because she was raped by her father.  The biker chick who has the husband thrown in jail.  There’s a bunch who just go for the old fashioned selling of porn.  All eager to like videos long enough to post a couple comments to see if the ad makes an impact on the unsuspecting.

A soft rebrand is never on the lines of someone talking about how they’ve given up on conspiracy content completely.  It’s always limited to how much I don’t like So and So today.  If there is a hard rebrand they don’t rage quit and announce they are quitting because of So and So.  They just slink away into the night.

Mostly.  The recent rebrands have been renaming the YouTube channel without much change in the actual content.  It’s still about whining about how evil the world is.  Attempts to do a hard rebrand and attacking an entrenched gematria guru always backfire.  New entrants into the pyramid scheme are pressured to attack.  There’s a weird entire economy surrounding conspiracy content where the constant attacks add to the lack of coherence in the overall message.

If you’re interested in genuine research into the disinformation world there’s an opportunity to find some blatant hypocrisy here.  My all time favorite is the Gematrinator posting on blog about how Zach started making accurate sports picks like crazy years ago.  The day after he joined the comments of a Zach Attack video complaining about how much of a pain in the ass he is.  Highly unlikely the rebranding lasted a matter of hours, not even a few days.

To be fair, the newest versions of long timer content are a lot less openly hateful and violent.  In that respect, some progress has been made.  Whether this is a sign of users mellowing or not - ??  It’s not that certain.  Weird is ok.  Being weird doesn’t directly interrupt the lives of others too much.

(And change your channel name as much as you want.  If you don’t join the internet equivalent of a convent we’ll still find you in the comments sections of other videos.)

Bullying In the Truth Community

One of the features of reading through truth so called community posts on social media is division within the ranks; petty squabbling over nonissues and infighting over who is more important to the movement.  I call this The Shill Game, where the cups covering the balls (or shills) are constantly moved around and it’s impossible to predict where the actual target it is.  Nobody ever truly wins this game.  But by accident or design it helps the grifters a lot.  The target audience is already cognitively impaired and is constantly pressured to keep toeing the line, following the rules.  And those rules can change on a daily basis.

Precious little in the truth so called community changes the rules so much.  One person has a screen full of dozens of ciphers.  One person arbitrarily declares that the reduction cipher is the “purest” and using more than the four base ciphers is not legit.  One person finds synchronicity on hundreds of years old events.  One person makes a narrative about predicting the future claiming that the old events aren’t as important as declaring a 90+ year old person in poor health is about to die since the mainstream media declared their hospitalization.  But hey, you where only 67 days off .  That must mean something, right?

And the sports gematria is the worst.  A reasonably rational person can instantly identify a problem with how the Lions and Colts both equal 69 and 66 in the most commonly used ciphers.  A person that is more likely to not recognize this as a problem is the kind of person that went through high school with bad grades and being issued reinforcement that they aren’t performing well.  Psychologically, they are placed into a setting where they receive positive reinforcement for being right on a trivial event.  An event that is nudged along by increasing the statistical chance to create the right answer.  And the methods to create the correct answer are so vast that it gets to the point that it’s impossible to not get a “right” answer.

By changing the rules daily.  Never accepting being wrong.  And toeing the line on who is your current choice for not being a shill.

I’ve been totally not surprised to be reading that there’s a bunch of harassment and bullying ongoing in the -48 crowd with the passing of that cult leader.  This is totally natural as there’s a rush to fill the vacuum by those that are fully aware of the way the grift works and those that qualify as true believers.  The true believers have lost their prime source of positive reinforcement.  They’ve lost that main source of being told they are right all the time.

The chicken or the egg coming first doesn’t matter.  Whether the conspiracy mentality bleeds over into real life or real life pressure turns you to belief in conspiracies, there is a link between being a real life pain in the ass and an online conspiracy spouting bad ass who is never wrong.  And here we see another problem with the mix.  How social media historically has mishandled conspiracy content.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-14751-001

I would like to check that link thoroughly to verify it looks like a legitimate study.  No way am I going to put that much effort into it.  On the surface it looks fine, but it’s blocked off from full view unless I click more links.  Even that short blurb in the abstract isn’t written in normal English.  It’s science talk.  Your going to get a heavy dose of standard deviations, psychology terms and things way outside a high school education for the average kid.  Historically, I personally do a terrible job of communicating higher end concepts.  I’m not the only one, so at least I have that going for me.  It’s way too easy for me to fall into the trap of assuming people know what I’m talking about when I’m just getting a vacant stare, hoping the awkward conversation ends.  I’m also guilty of just giving up on what I deem to be a hopeless situation.

Real life workplace, school, social contact - it’s a never ending battle on dealing with one side that’s a pain in the ass being force fed bad information and constantly being showered with praise even when colossally wrong about important issues and a more knowledgeable community who can’t effectively communicate the correct information.  It doesn’t help when the experts are being attacked because the Alex Jones’s of the world are directing the attacks, going after the experts that can debunk the bullshit.

Compare these statements:

“While the efficacy of H2SO4 on dissolution of plumbing congestion is not to be denied, its corrosive attributes make it an overall less than worthy ultimate answer.”

Vs.

“Don’t use acid for plumbing problems, it eats the hell out of the pipes.”

In the gematria world:

“Astute grifters use psychological techniques to motivate and exploit their target audience.”

Vs.

“I’m important because Zachary Hubbard said so.”

And over the past decade that’s all it has taken.  Support the cause I give you an attaboy.  Stop paying me, or question what I say on even whether 69,66 means Colts or Lions, you are a worthless shill, controlled opposition less than human piece of garbage.

Culture Wars - Barbie, Beer, Boycotts and Building Blocks

There were things in the past that two sides chose to oppose each other on.  There are opposing sides on today’s hot topics.  There will be opposing sides in the future.  All Culture War topics are not created equal and like gematria dumbing it down to a manageable level for the critical thinking challenged, some things explode way out of proportion to their actual relevance.

Returning to one of my old favorites, Scientology - the product being sold is a complete sham.  You did not actually have the souls of angry dead aliens that needed expensive classes to be removed.  The indoctrination happens slowly over time.  You never hear the infamous Xenu story until you’ve been exposed to some slightly more lucid topics.  Maybe you got some benefit from their anti-drug program.  Maybe you dislike psychiatrists and fell for that selling point.  Maybe you fell for the celebrity endorsements and thought your acting career would take off.  Hey, it worked for Cruise, Travolta and Alley, why not me?          

Those with a logic and evidence based outlook often do the eye roll thing when a Culture War topic takes off and develops a life of its own beyond its true significance.  Like it is some hill you choose to die on significance.  Arguably, something consistently proven to be a harmful long term sham like Scientology deserves to be boycotted if governments behave ineffectually.  Still arguably, but less arguably is what happens when people get fired up over things like beer and toys.

The Barbie movie is the current big issue, and don’t let your inner Dunning Kruger get in the way of thinking it doesn’t have an impact on people other than yourself.  If conservatives get their way Barbie will be banned in all forms except a monogamous housewife spending all her time in the Barbie custom kitchen and the Talking Barbie pull cord only espouses traditional Christian values.  At least from the way they talk about it.  In reality, it’s just another arbitrary scapegoat.  Barbies, when I worked for Toys R Us, were not the money marker.  It was the custom kitchen, clothes, the car and the fringe things in the Barbie World that were the real profit producers.  Putting a GI Joe in a pink car was something that just wasn’t meant to be done.  No real Barbie lover would dare do that and at least admit it in public.

They start the kiddies off young with the Purity fallacy, appealing to the purity dichotomy of boys doing boy things and girls doing girl things.  Mark did his thing, Shania did her thing and never the Twain shall meet.  After growing up, and moving beyond toys, now as a voting age person instead of an appeal to nostalgia to market selling tickets to a movie it’s the end of the world since no true Republican would have anything to do with Barbie.  The funny thing is, if you dig around in history pretty much every toy has been advertised in some way that can be deemed as offensive.  The slow witted just fall for the rhetoric that’s being pushed by the top of the food chain.  The only real solution is no toys at all.

This all or nothing except when I expose my hypocrisy mentality is more emphatic with the Bud Light culture war boycott.  Hopefully you don’t give your children beer since they aren’t allowed to play with toys any more.  No voting age types have put a hit on Bud Light, successfully knocking it off the number one spot on best selling beer list.  Funny thing is Modelo is the new number one.  And everywhere outside the United States is owned by Anheuser-Busch who also owns Bud Light.  If you don’t mind that obvious hypocrisy, if you dig deep enough you can find advertisers try to be inclusive to as much different culture as possible and have at one time or another done something that could set off the boycott brigades.  The only real solution is to not drink any beer at all if you really think Bud Light is so bad.  But the beer situation gets worse.  Now there’s a frivolous lawsuit by a presidential candidate because his state’s pension funds took a hit because his side got his idiots fired up about Bud Light and they lost money.  No true Republican would not sue for creating a problem by making a mountain out of a molehill.

Let’s not forget that you can’t have a culture war without an opposing side.  The liberal response invariably overcompensates by endless talking about these trivial issues, like a big cloud of no true Democrat would ever… arguments to attempt to counter the gung ho attitude of the other side.  Giving the pointless argument fuel and oxygen.  The endless psychological pressure of choosing one side or another by the example of how you spend your money.  The only real winners are the grifters who keep bringing up both sides, going with the flow of what is getting the most engagement.

The real solution is an understanding of building blocks and how the whole is sum of its parts, and not good or bad based on one individual component.  So, I return to my vaccine analogy.  The gematria crowd affiliated themselves with the anti-science crowd.  When Covid hit, the first significant pandemic in quite awhile they climbed on to the Covid is a Hoax bandwagon.  Giving oxygen and fuel to the social media discourse that still doesn’t just linger but like an unruly child screams out for attention, interrupting the adult after dinner talk.  Every single vaccine that ever was, ever is and ever will be is made of chemicals.  No individual element is good or bad, it’s how they are combined that makes a difference.  If your argument is based on boycotting chemicals you don’t like, the only real solution you have, just like not ever drinking beer again, not ever playing with toys again,  is to boycott ever eating again.  Of course there’s “bad” chemicals in your everyday stuff.  Have you ever heard of 💩?

Good luck with that not eating thing.

How Gematria Fits Into The Culture War

 Culture War Wikipedia

Also take a side trap on their link to wedge issues if you have an extra couple minutes.

For the most part the higher level gematria users remain politically neutral.  Naturally, since grifting has been a major part of the program this makes a lot of sense.  You don’t want to antagonize roughly half of your target audience.  But what they do use is make the hot topic wedge issues a primary talking point.  Nonstop.

Personally as a pro cooperation type of guy I hate wedge issues and how they are handled.  Instead of open debate about topics that are genuinely arguable from both sides having some good points inevitably it turns into an all out nothing package deal.  Maybe the losing side gets thrown a few bones and table scraps.  In general there is gridlock where the losers seek to regain control becoming more important for the control than the underlying ideas behind their “culture”.

A hugely oversimplified example, the liberals want to help the poor with social programs geared towards giving them money.  The conservatives believe in capitalism and earning money.  So the conservatives would prefer less government oversight and cutting free lunch programs for school kids, the liberals would prefer writing off student loan debt and funding aid overseas.  There’s always a valid negative to these sides.  Better educated children happy with school should be a plus, money sent to malnourished children in another continent could be used at home.  And through massive propaganda campaigns in the never ending cycle of having control and trying to maintain it versus losing control and trying to get it back a lot of resources that could be better spent on both sides of the culture war get wasted.

Somebody super crazy gung ho one side or the other is a perfect candidate for political grifting, where the campaign fundraising is the goal instead of the means to get policies put in place.  After a gematria newbie gets a taste of the success of easily manufacturing numbers to support something less life altering, like a sports championship, it’s only natural that left to their own cognitive biases they will wander to other aspects of their lives.  And since the gematria topics based on ness headlines are supercharged wedge issue items they get a heavy dose of “pick one side or the other” with a heaping helping of “everything is evil, don’t worry about the other side’s talking points because I have flimsy evidence that shows that I’m right all the time.”

Your semi regular reminder that based on gematria, everyone alive now, lived in the past and will live in the future is evil.  Or good.   But finding evil is a lot more fun so let’s roll with that.

Everybody is paying a hidden cost for the culture war, the cost of wasted resources.  Once the line has been cast and the fish first bite there’s a rush for the grifting economy to suck as much out of the mark while the sun is still shining on the row boat.  Whether the fish on the line is a teen without enough to have the life experiences to recognize that something that sounds too good to be true is too good to be true.  Whether the fish is an elderly person with declining mental faculties who has voted for a single party their entire life.  Whether the the fish is genuinely mentally disturbed.  These are the kinds of people that are beset with enormous psychological pressure that to be a good person it’s not just good enough to be a good person, but evil needs to be found and eradicated to be a good person.  So give me some $$ on some sports picks to fund defeating evil.

Along the way, arbitrary scapegoats are created.  All scapegoats are not created equal.  Some rise to the top by being at least somewhat of a celebrity.  Some are completely uncalled for.  Did we really need a bitter and hate filled gematria grifter claiming Gabby Petito was the Antichrist (or at least there was some sort of “ritual sacrifice” involved)?  No.  Do we really need free speech allowing these comments?  No, but it’s historically something that’s always happened.  So we live with it, although now thanks to the Internet there’s an historical record of how picking an arbitrary scapegoat works for grifting short term.  Getting people fired up about wedge issues in the current news has worked wonders for a long time.  Now thanks to the Internet and Antisocial Media that people use for news instead of real news both sides of the culture war are losing resources that could better be spent on cooperating.

Paradoxically free speech in its current form is ruining your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  Good luck figuring out how to fund stopping climate change.  Good luck figuring out how to golf in 110 degree daily temperatures.  Good luck trying to fund your allies during the next war a dictator starts.  Good luck not just funding the free school lunch program, but actually finding the food for the program.

A good start is to take a step back at least every once in awhile to be a good person instead of the myth of funding politics to eradicate the other evil people.  Misinformation researchers have a phrase for this.

Go touch some grass.

How The Hollywood Elites Ruined the World

The real reason I had taken a lengthy break was I was working on my most mind boggling decode ever.  Like movie hype: 

                         Based on true events

Now I have to explain the first of what is going to be many distractions.  Cocaine Bear - based on true events!  Sound of Freedom - based on true events!  Braveheart- based on true events!  And, numerous gematria clowns introduce their current video as the most mind boggling decode ever, until next week’s most mind boggling decode ever.

As a young, lower middle class movie watcher the theater experience was a joy.  Not so much for the movie at times, but the air conditioning.  As one of the last households to get a window unit AC the chance to not bake while watching mid summer TV, oh boy that was the life.  

Now you should keep in mind that a gematria decode needs to dumb it down to statistically insignificant numerical talking points, so let’s get the numerology all out of the way here to present the rest of the material uninterrupted by that.  Climate Change, Cult Classic and Credit Cards - CC.  CC = 48.  Hoax = 48.  Tickets = 48.  B-Movie = 96 which is 48x2 (because ya gotta through in a make up your own rules type number to encourage others that without real rules you get to make up whatever rules you want)

To be allowed to sit in the theater, you need to buy a ticket.  And doing that you are now a sheeple being part of the problem.  You’ve fallen for the plan and that’s why record breaking temperatures are the new normal.

The movie is just bread and circuses to get you hooked on air conditioning.  Historically people have watched some mind numbingly dumb movies that make it big - the cult classic.  Clearly the film isn’t anything resembling art, but why would it have to be good when the cool air is the real selling point?

It’s even worse than you think.  It’s deliberately bad so that the cool air becomes more memorable than the content of the film.  The only parts of the movie the guys are going to remember are the boobs and the blood.  And there’s another distraction break - you often have to bring up racism in a decode so people easily confused by biases get the subliminal bump to remember that they have had their lives ruined by <insert scapegoat here>.  Misogyny works the same way.  And why exactly are the girls there?  They don’t want to see this crappy movie.  It’s a date.  And how do you keep your date interested in staying through the movie instead of bailing at the first sign of gore?  Date numerology.  No, no, wait - 

Popcorn

And what do we know about popcorn?  It’s made of chemical elements.  And it blows up when heated.  What else blew up?  THE BIG BANG.

Every subatomic particle that ever was, is and will be including YOU may have gotten rearranged in weird ways was created in the Big Bang.  Every piece of popcorn is a result of the Big Bang.

Back to date night.  You don’t want to appear cheap, so you suck it up and buy the popcorn.  But instead of two small popcorns because you really can’t afford it you buy a large for her and act all noble and generous.  But it’s more than she can eat, so you think she might share.  But there’s that darn cheap looking problem again.

So you turn to the conspiracy world for inspiration

You steal some.  Maybe she takes a bathroom break, or is distracted covering her eyes by a particularly bloody scene.  Whatever, you get a taste of the popcorn, you like it, and now you’re officially part of the bread (popcorn) and circuses (movie) loving complex that loves AC and stealing.

Now you’ve done it, and you get married.  She pretended to be interested in the now cult classic and you have to watch romantic comedies for the rest of your time together.  At home.  In your central air conditioning upgrade.  With more popcorn?  Hell no.  Now it’s kale and veggie platters and the celery doesn’t even have peanut butter.  So once every month you and the guys plot out an excuse to have a cult classic movie night for the nostalgia.  Now it’s beer and popcorn while the significant others think you are preparing a report for the Monday work group meeting.

Back to the Big Bang.  All intelligent life (and conspiracy theorists) that will ever exist was created then.  And shocking - popcorn is a self perpetuating intelligent life form disguised as a snack.  Astrophysicists look for signs of life by examining chemical signatures, like if an exoplanet has signs that radioactive isotopes exist that only could have come from nuclear fission.  Actually, they are looking for popcorn.  Enough popcorn gets made it eventually pulls itself into a massive popcorn star, a neutron star made of nothing but popcorn.  Eventually the gravitational pull of all the popcorn stars fuse them together.  All matter returns to a universal central point.  Then there’s a new Big Bang - the Great Reset.

Really, think about it.  What are they called movie stars?  Popcorn stars.  You take on credit card debt to buy AC for your home.  Because popcorn wants you to.  Climate change?  Popcorn wants it hot enough to pop without a microwave or other human made devices.  Eventually we’ll stop producing traditional food crops like, well corn, and produce nothing but popcorn.  Because it’s more fun to steal popcorn than to produce regular corn.

The real Hollywood Elites are the ones that make the B-movies, not the blockbusters.  The Roger Cormans that make a movie because <gasp> it’s entertaining, at least superficially.  All driven by power mad hyper intelligent popcorn with its new Big Bang agenda.  You’re now paying for your movies with a debit card (credit card) because it’s part of plan, not convenient.

————————————————————

As strange as it seems this is not that far off of Qanon style content.  It’s all gibberish and on the whole makes no sense.  But it throws out little hooks to grab at those who can’t grasp the difference in fiction and reality.  Gender inequality (racism), stupid take on science, a completely non existent conspiracy driven by a cabal, popular culture references.  You just never know what the hive collective will latch on to and blow out of proportion.  No good truther will call out another on the contradictions or lack of coherence.  Pizzagate, gematria, the self proclaimed Queen says you don’t need to pay your bills, blah, blah blah.  A lot of it driven by the gravitational pull of grift magnetism.  If you’re gullible enough to believe that two and three digit numbers have anything to do with astrophysics, you’re gullible enough to think you don’t need to pay off your mortgage.

Professional Debunkers

Some people have combined their intellect, a moral compass worth admiring and a dedication to stopping grifting into a decent monetary career.  As much as there is instant hatred towards a scientific expert able to get to the root of what is wrong with crank ideas, the monetized debunker must be hated even more.

Having a paid job working for Snopes, Reuters, Logically and other fact checking services isn’t too high profile.  I imagine there’s a lot of vague hiding behind a computer without your name being known as the main source on an individual fact check.  The fun debunkers are showman who can put the debunk on in front of a studio audience.  And there’s no better showman than a magician for these debunking devious douchebag displays.  Being a trickster themselves with an understanding of human nature and how to entertain by fooling.

More recent than the video to follow shortly is Penn and Teller’s show, Bullshit!  Every episode was dedicated to a topic to be debunked and their stage presence translated into a taped show for broadcast worked well.  Arguably, some topics were truly debatable and no actual truth was delivered, but mostly they hit on what is wrong with an idea that was wrong.  

James Randi was a role model and influence on the magic careers of Penn and Teller.  Note what he says about the excuses the psychic makes for failure once a simple and reasonable control is applied.  There’s always an excuse for lack of performance.

Now one of the ongoing themes with gematria ringleaders is the constant search for new blood.  Over the years I’ve seen several high school age students put on a pro gematria demonstration for a class project.  Usually we find out about these when they post about how awesome it went and they got a standing ovation.  And of course an Attaboy! from Zach.

In the past Zach has been famous for claiming success by picking both teams and rightfully claiming he picked the winner because of course if you pick both teams he’s got to be right on one of them.  He also uses heavy amounts of reporting after the fact and just keeping the audience focused on more current events, like maybe the Bengals getting off to an unexpected hot start and creating a full season dialogue about them.  And one of his undesired results is the Sports Gematria YouTube channel cataloguing video evidence of his failures.

His greatest weapon is his control of the audience.  The psychic can perform his trick of blowing on the pages of the phone book while the audience has doubts or even outright belief in the fake ability.  A hostile audience, fully aware of the trick, would be an entirely different story.  What we need is a bright team of young minds willing to help their classmates out on an early understanding of misinformation grifting.  You don’t even need to go into the anti science angle, just stick to sports.

Reporting after the fact on Zach’s failure is all well and good, even better would be clear video evidence ahead of time on genuine picks before the game is played.  Picks made before a neutral audience instead of loaded with people clouded by confirmation bias.

So propose a challenge to Zach.  If he disagrees to the proposed control, he is disgraced like the blowing on the phone book fake psychic.  If he claims gematria isn’t used for predictions (a common backpeddle) he loses.  Because why are you selling sports picks via Patreon subscriptions if you are claiming it doesn’t predict?

The control is - the upcoming NFL season will have an initial betting line well before the game is played.  The games to be picked from are every game where the point spread is a certain number or less.  A “close” game is expected, somewhere around a bookie line of 3 or 4 points would be good.  He’s required to pick a winner from every single game.  A clear winner, no wishy washy narrative for both teams stuff.  And he’s required to provide video evidence ahead of time.

Now work on your showmanship.  You will produce several different set of picks, ahead of time as well.  And we’re going to keep track over multiple weeks to average out the sample size.  The most correct picks is the winner.

Set #1 - All favorites, home team if even money

Set#2 - All underdogs, away team if even money

Set#3 - Picks from a family member or friend who used more standard knowledge like injury information, streaks, etc….  Like gematria it should include a brief narrative of the thought process.

Set#4 - Find a method to get a toddler to make random picks.  Food should probably work.  The green candy is the favorite, the yellow is the underdog.  As long as the toddler is old enough to understand picking a hand that the adult has made into a random, unseen choice should be fine.

Set#5 - bearing in mind the oddness and joy of the thought of a toddler outpicking Zach, let your creative juices flow and make up your own theme.

The main point is that like our fake psychic friend, if presented with a reasonable challenge he simply is not going to go through with it.  You’ll get the “they fixed it to make me look bad excuse” if he did.  If he goes through with it and would win it’s not going to be a spectacular margin of victory, because he will get plenty wrong if he does go through with it.

If things go well you are on your way to becoming a professional debunker, hopefully because you proved a toddler can make picks just as good as a gematria pro or the toddler scared the gematria pro’s pants off.

Astroturfing

Astroturfing is a deceptive advertisement practice that is named after the fake grass used in sports fields, Astroturf.  I remember the early days of sports Astroturf where players described diving on the field to make a play and claiming it was like hitting concrete.  Hopefully, things have improved on the field of play, but Astroturfing in the conspiracy world still hits a hard wall instead of actually getting to a grass roots campaigns core ideas that may or may not have any real value.  

The term is relatively new, but deceptive advertisement has been one of those disinformation topics that has been around forever.  Your semi regular reminder here - misinformation and disinformation has been around forever, it’s just talked about a hell of a lot more in the Internet age.

Picture that you are a young, fresh out of college, averagish intelligence job seeker looking for you first employment.  The dreaded interview has been your downfall on a couple previous attempts.  You talk to a headhunter job placement specialist to get some tips.  Personally I think that entire industry is a sham, where the headhunters are more interested in taking credit for people that can sell themselves, but anyway.  The tip you get is to market yourself.  Whether you outright get to the point where you boldly lie has not been lied before or just do a better job at taking an interview, you are going to present yourself in the most favorable light.  Employers still haven’t figured out how to separate the prospect with narcissistic personality disorder from someone gung ho for the job that just wants to market themselves to maximize their salary and benefits.  The Internet still hasn’t figured out how to separate sock puppets, fake accounts, and bots from monetary and politically charged discourse.

These deceptive fakery based accounts exist merely to give the illusion of coolness to something that isn’t cool.  Instead of nailing the job interview by being cool, the toxic narcissist has mastered a lifestyle of pretending to be cool instead of acting consistently cool.  The toxic conspiracy ringleader has mastered the illusion of coolness by lying.

The topic has come up again recently because the movie, The Sound of Freedom, appears to have engaged in a common form of astroturfing.  The ticket sales don’t support the actual number of bodies in the seats.  Again, as further evidence this is not new Cult Leader Extraordinaire L. Ron Hubbard used this tactic for his Scientology books.  Instead of actually being on the best seller list on the merit of the published work the illusion of benefit is manufactured.  Millions of people bought this, wow it must be good!  Or it might get you involved in an organization with numerous human rights violations in its track record.

In the higher end of the scale world of conspiracy content, Alex Jones has mastered shameless self promotion to keep people engaged and talking about his baseless theories.  In the lower end, the gematria crowd doesn’t have the wherewithal to spend millions of dollars producing and repurchasing novels.  Especially not from a crowd being bilked for a couple of bucks a month on Patreon subscriptions.  Zach’s numbers don’t make sense in a lot of ways.  The Patreon subscriptions drop by roughly 20% at the start of the month when apparently Patreon accounting purges non paying accounts.  The number of viewers and likes versus the number of channel subscribers seems oddly disconnected.  And the existence of a significant other is either 0 or 1.  Which may not be a huge difference in a subtraction calculation, but throws a monkey wrench in a division problem to reach a percentage.  These things are carefully guarded secrets, or even completely legit and just odd looking.

However, there is a simpler regular occurrence that astroturfing likely happens on practically every video.  Where still in the realm of suspicious and not proven here, but we are allowed to note the red flag.  Like the new wannabe employee, shameless self promotion has never been a problem for Zach.  ( The old F2FT blog has the “spread the word banner”, still.)

Begging for likes.  During a livestream where only a couple hundred out of almost 29,000 subscribers show up, it’s not enough to accept that maybe somebody didn’t actually like the video enough to like it.  In the last week the most popular video has a shade under 9000 views and slightly over 500 likes.  The concern over whether it’s 500 likes or only 400 is out of proportion with the benefit.  Or people don’t want to be bothered or they forgot.  He doesn’t normally do the begging himself, granted he’s busy doing the livestream and talking instead of engaging in the live chat.  The begging for likes is relegated to the mid level lieutenant, the ones with the YouTube admin wrenches.  “Don’t forget to smash that like button!”  More like, “Don’t forget to give my content the illusion of coolness since it’s not actually cool!”

Another byproduct of astroturfing tactics is identifying a gung ho type newcomer.  Hey Mr. Travolta, you liked that?  I’m giving you special attention now.  <sucker>.  Don’t be a sucker.  Don’t show up for the movie just because someone else bought a ticket to not show up for the movie.  Instead of Grease you might get Battlefield Earth, although arguably you only showed up for grease because of Olivia Newton John.  And stop making your own YouTube channels and blogs which only serve as free advertisement for people who can’t convince real people to like content based on its own merits.

Old School Gematria Dissection

When I first got started off with this blog, gematria was fresh and new to the conspiracy world.  This predated the Qanon adoption into the homogeneous mix of anything goes as long as you demonstrate not believing in actual evidence.  So let’s take a look at something that’s more like old style gematria, without the adjustments in practice today.

So what’s “good” about this decode?  It’s a list of phrases with the same value.  This is more impressive than just popping off two phrases with the same value.  Instead of just putting out a number and letting inquiring minds wander you’ve been directed to follow the theme.  The number is four digits instead of two or three.  Well, sort of.  We’ll get back to that.  Following the theme there appears to be some kind of prediction, even if somewhat vague.  And the theme is certainly evil in nature.  People don’t post a whole lot of content about how pretty butterflies are or the awesome chicken sandwich they had for lunch.

Myself and the type of people I associate with who dismiss gematria for the nonsense it is are all talented enough to produce a list of equally impressive length and dedication to a theme.  We just choose not to turn butterflies into murder hornets or chicken sandwiches in to adrenochrome.  This list appears to be made by someone with enough talent to understand that it’s bullshit.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they know or not. Disinformation peddlers lead the newcomer astray to get them into the misinformation spreading fold.  Here is what’s wrong and the tricks used.

It’s not really 1536, it’s 256.  The cipher used is the Gematrix English cipher, which is the regular cipher multiplied by six.  The Gematrinator calculator labels this as the Sumerian cipher, without consent from the Sumerian government, invoking secret knowledge read from an ancient tome that Sam Raimi uses to raise demons as extras in his movies.  Those familiar with that calculator get a subliminal bump for the evil theme.  So, three digit not four.  A bit on the higher side than normally useful, the downside being the absence of much in the way of a single word that equals 256 to match up.  Hence the phrases instead of single words.

One of the dangers of putting out a list is the pitfall of using a word that has a direct antonym with the same value.  As far as evidence goes that will hold up in a court of law, it becomes clear that gematria isn’t going to cut it when you choose to declare  A and the opposite B is a perfectly valid option.  US States don’t have direct opposites.  But there’s a lot to choose from.  I didn’t need to go far through the alphabetical listing of States to find a numerical match for TEXAS.  Both TEXAS and DELAWARE = 69x6=414.  Just try to get out of a traffic citation by claiming TEXAS means something when you could have picked DELAWARE instead, I dare you.

The Phraseshopping is mild in this list, but not nonexistent.  Sometimes someone will get carried away making a phrase that forces the number and it sounds like someone who didn’t graduate from preschool.  Usually these are by inserting a small word to add to the total to get to the target number.  So we don’t have something like  TEXAS ANTICHRIST THE SATAN PLAN (not intended to be the same total, just an example) here.  But what we do have is inclusion and omission of possible key words that would change the total to an unwanted number.  So it’s GEMATRIA SYNCHRONICITY, but not PERFECT SYNCHRONICITY without the “A”. Why not THE NUMERICAL PROOF  instead of IT IS THE NUMERICAL PROOF.  Knowledgeable critics and conspiracists can play around with substituting all kinds of similar words, addition or omission of words to force a result.

There’s a big problem at the end of the list.  So they played around with phrasing the years to get to the target number.  As far as a prediction goes this list is useless.  If it actually happens it’s 2025 or 2030.  Or if it’s not a prediction why are these on the list?  Sadly, the being allowed to be wrong mentality lets a lesser mind accept that the failed prediction is OK, depending on if you’re in Texas or Delaware.

And that’s what you get with a confirmation bias based system of belief.  Constant wasted time putting out vague and outright wrong material which can and does get merged into actual real life problems, muddying the waters and wasting resources.

Gematria And…Wordle?

Wordle has been pumping out the daily puzzle for quite some time now, so although this is in the realm of Don't give these clowns any ideas we'll go ahead and do it.

In a lot of respects, Wordle is a perfect target for a gematria take:

The correct solution is a five letter word, just in the right range for a daily dose of non reduction cipher number value.  It’s now part of the New York Times, the mainstream media, so you know it must be evil.  The answer is published by hint giving sites and social media, so there’s no need to actually be smart enough to solve it. And being daily, no need to try and predict what the word is, a good gematria decode is always a post mortem.  Just tie that baby into the current news stories by pointing out how miraculously synchronous it is with whatever happened.

Today’s Wordle is BARGE.  They are always in capital letters, so Qanon should appreciate that they don’t have to search through text for caps.  Let’s see what we get - 33 and 102!  33, that’s a huge Freemason number.  102 is Slavery and the N word.  Racist Freemasons.  If only it was still the NBA season, somebody might have scored 102 points for the game and a leading scorer having 33 points would really frost the cake.  Or in a pinch just decode words from a news story looking for the key numbers.

Back in the real world, I find Wordle to be fairly easy.  It’s really all just pattern recognition.  The tougher solutions are usually something like knowing the last four letters and having a choice of what the first letter is with your limit of six guesses running out.  (POWER - TOWER - MOWER - COWER - LOWER).  So far the only word that was the solution I found to be offbeat is ENNUI, they are usually normal and ordinary words.  It reminds me of the old Word Jumble game in my daily hard copy newspaper.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, let’s assume that in the MLM some mid level Wordle expert pops up and look at what the downsides are and what’s wrong.

There are about 13,000 five letter words and some of those are odd enough that they are outside the vocabulary of everyone except hardcore Scrabble players.  So the available pool is limited a lot.  That’s still enough that even knowing a list of past solutions and expecting no repeats, for now the chances of actually predicting the next days word is about zero.  It’s safe to say nobody expected ennui and used that as their 1st guess for that rate Wordle in one guess achievement.  If you’re going to start pumping out Wordle gematria, the target audience for a video is not a good match.  The people you want need the solution dumbed down to a number so when they see the 33 or 102 their brain can insert the answer they want, instead of the correct solution of BARGE.  There is only one correct answer, it’s BARGE, not GRABE.  So although you can play the anagram and sounds like game of altering the solution to an incorrect solution and gematrify that, the trend these days is to not do that as being too obviously bogus.  Better stick to altering 102 to 201, because that’s far more useful in a bogus decode.  Although, I admit that now I would love to decode GRABE since Lewis Carrol used OUTGRABE in Jabberwocky.  A fine and mimsy word that OUTGRABE.

But mostly, the Wordle audience has people with decent pattern recognition skills.  The kind of people that can solve most Wordles are not the kind that are gullible enough to drop a $50 donation in a superchat.  I don’t see a mid level guru coming about that sticks just to Wordle gematria.  There are plenty of side topic gurus like WNBA, PGA and hockey that don’t put out much content because there simply isn’t much demand for it.  It would more likely be a throw in to part of a decode by someone higher up the food chain.  The kind of person who knows damn well that it’s BS and is just trying to add new cult members who are impressed that they know Wordle better than the newcomer ever will.

What they could do is create their own version of Wordle.  One where the word doesn’t have to be a real word.  Where the answer can be wrong and that’s ok, because gematria is always wrong.  Where you even get praised for being wrong as long as you break out your checkbook.  And I have the perfect name for that shitty version of Wordle-

Turdle

Twitter’s Community Notes Program

As somebody that was poking around unserious Twitter accounts when Twitter rolled out the Community Notes I’ve gained some insight into the practical value of the program.  The result is somewhat of a mixed bag, there are things that work well, and things that started off well that degenerated into partisan support, and some things that never really worked from the get go.  To be fair, the last one there seems to be pretty minimal.

The general theory is that like there has been some success with YouTube adding context to conspiracy videos, a quick blurb usually from a well vetted Wikipedia article, a newcomer to social media has a chance to what is actually going with “chemtrails” or “Freemasonry” or “Covid Vaccines”.  Like YouTube adding context to scientific concepts, Twitter can and does get notes put up, hopefully before something ridiculous gets traction.  For example, trying to claim a fresh water hydra made it into a person’s eyeball from being in a COVID vaccine.  A quick explanation about how this can’t be due to the size of the hydra and needles can be a good start.  The problem is the writers of the notes are fallible, and the fact checkers need to fact check themselves constantly.  Some people, intentionally or not, don’t write good context notes.  Continuing with the hydra example, the proposed note may be, “This is a digitally altered image of a hydra in an eyeball.”  Well, you better add a good source to that note.  Even better, if you feel the need to comment about the fake image then combine it with the scientific explanation.

Herein lies one of the problems with conspiracy misinformation content.  Explaining sizes of microorganisms in nanometers is more gobbledygooky than saying it’s a fake image.  The other side combats the correct information by saying it’s a real image and the gobbledygook is ignored.

The Community Notes program is outside the paid staff of Twitter.  The claim is that a note won’t be put up officially unless rated as good by enough people.  They’ve even thrown in a specific comment about being rated by people from “different points of view”.  How they determine what your “point of view” is remains a mystery to me.

Political grifting, having been sizable for a long time on Twitter, capitalizes on pseudoscientific conspiracy content.  Even with an upgrade to having completely bogus scientific content accurately Noted, the same downside issues exist before the program started.

1). The grifters have infiltrated the program.  One of the main tactics is to not just downvote politically accurate notes, they also add a note saying no context is needed.  Often these are accurate as they point out that the debate should be in the Twitter thread and not argued about in the Notes.  Way too often, these degenerate into a polarized left versus right wing game of suppressing the Note.  The grifters who use engagement above substantive content have the edge when there’s only the Twitter Thread to point out what’s wrong.  Closed minded people remain oblivious to the “different point of view” because they are simply on the wrong side of the tracks.

2). The lag time.  Again, edge to the grifters.  The nearest analogy I can think of is something that YouTube does a better job with now than five years ago.  It used to be that merely watching a video about a topic (e.g., mass shooting) would generate lists of related videos that by design the grifters got promoted to being popular enough that you would get a “what the fuck did I just watch?” recommendation.  Now it’s more likely that you get a recommendation from a more legitimate news source.  And a context blurb if your conspiracy video mentions the Illuminati.  A well sourced, well written Note has to wait until the “different point of view” has had their go at muddying up the waters.  Getting the Note up days later doesn’t help much when the Tweet has already received the majority of views it will get in total.

On a personal note, before I forget.  Nothing drives me nuts about the program more than using a source behind a paywall.  Some disinfo researchers put up gift articles from reputable sources since people don’t want to pay for their news.  People don’t want to pay for their news so much they do the last thing they should be doing - use social media as their news source.  I count a Note from a paywalled Wall Street Journal article, regardless of its totally accurate economic news reporting value, as an unreliable source.

That’s a Tweet from a deeply unserious account posting about chemtrails, gematria and whatever BS topic is the soup of the day.  Using the logical fallacy of Just Asking Questions (JAQing off), they are really promoting the conspiracy that pedo vampires are drinking adrenochrome.  You know, because that makes all kinds of sense.  The Note is accurate, but the context misses the key point.  It’s a deeply unserious account that is doing nothing but its job of being wrong about everything for engagement.  The Note would never see the light of day if it pointed this out.  Congratulations to the Note writer for pointing out that it’s conspiracy related in the Note.  Well, take what we can get, I suppose.  No congratulations for spelling adrenochrome wrong.

If only Twitter and all social media had some computer programmers on the staff.  Somebody that could write some kind of algorithm.  One that could recognize deeply unserious accounts since they refuse to staff with people who care about what’s going on in the world.  Then the context I’d like to see would get added:

Although this account may not be a spambot it is posting baseless conspiracy content.  We like free speech, but it’s not like all free speech is created equal.  Grifters need a job, too so we want to make things as easy for them as possible.

The Taylor Swift Conspiracy Advertisement

And don’t get yourself all excited, that’s just a photo, you can’t watch the video from that picture.

Gambling is one of those things that has dubious practical value for society growing and improving that shows absolutely no sign of going away.  It’s a zero sum game for the bettors with the twist of the house taking a fixed amount off of the amounts bet, so technically it’s a less than zero sum game looking at the angle of the bettors.  The only way casinos lose money is if they screw up the math on the overhead.  Giving away free drinks, free rooms, sucking up to the high rollers - all these are essentially a form of advertising costs.

If you poke around on the most recent gematria Twitter posts it’s nearly impossible to not find at least a few that are sports related.  And if you dive in deeper through doom scrolling it’s nearly impossible to not see a Draft Kings advertisement.

From a US constitutional perspective, Twitter is (mostly) allowed to choose advertisers without government interference.  And Draft Kings is (mostly) allowed to operate by choosing where they want to advertise.

The video is easily searched out, so you can dive into that on your own if you want to.  It’s basically NBA cities losing in the playoffs because Taylor had a concert there.  If you want to know more about the conspiracy, don’t check out this link:

https://dknetwork.draftkings.com/pop-culture/2023/5/28/23740699/taylor-swift-eras-tour-metlife-new-jersey-night-one

If you were paying attention, I said DON’T check out that link.  It’s a Draft Kings employee talking about nothing related to sports and all about what an uplifting concert experience there was at the event.  And the door to the rabbit hole opens.

Taylor Swift has about a gazillion people following her.  I myself am awfully fond of You Belong With Me, which may be because Weird Al Yankovic is a parody.  She seems nice.  Pleasant voice.  Yeah, a real good choice for a celebrity spokesperson ad.  But did she really want or expect to be associated with gambling?

Unlikely.  This is the latest iteration of the Madden Curse, where fertile imaginations start pointing out all the hits and ignoring any misses.  The Calvin Johnson section - “he retired unexpectedly” is one particularly lame defense considering he had a great year.  Gambling sites don’t care about who is talking about what as long as they’re talking about gambling.  It’s a less sinister version of the Alex Jones method of driving engagement by outright lying about what happened.

Unfortunately, just by math, these things can take on a life of their own when the misses are ignored.  There’s precious little in the conspiracy world that encourages being wrong and producing a wide and numerous supply of failed predictions.  Now the food chain is set up.  Taylor concerts - sports - gematria sports Patreons - gematria sports tied in to extremist conspiracies - zero sum lack of improvement - further hopelessness leading to alternative bad ideas, etc…

I’m not picking on Draft Kings in particular, the Madden Curse link is a different site (Fan Duel).  If the users are gambling in moderation instead of addiction it’s fine as a source of entertainment.  It’s not like any of these sites are openly announcing they are using their profits to fund a foreign genocide or something.  They are all just a fact of human existence and how gambling has been going on as a form of friendly competition above and beyond the outcome of the game.

Now you may need a more direct example of the gematria bad influence.  To counter the more or less 50% winning record over a period of time, the occasional video is made that includes a self promotion of “how much money I’ve taken out of Vegas” or the like.  No.  No you haven’t.  The house always takes in revenue when you view ALL bets made over a statistically significant period of time.  They just need to not screw up on the spending on advertising.  And getting a little free advertising at the expense of Taylor Swift feeling that it’s odd that people are talking about this is pretty low on the spectrum of bad things in the world.

But these people fall into the circles of influencers who have a job to be literally wrong about everything, stirring up trouble.  Who is going to be able to predict when the next person with an innocuous product like a pillow is going to take off just because there’s a new crowd of people that don’t believe in evidence over emotions?

Maybe the Taylor Swift theory will die a sudden death if it doesn’t happen next year.  Maybe their will be a couple years.  Maybe something “close enough” will keep it going for a decade.  One thing we do know, if it fails the odds of Gematria clowns admitting it a somewhere around 0%.

Negative 48

Negative 48

I’ve never plunged into the depths of Negative 48, but just to assure you of how the gematria conspiracy problem isn’t isolated to the “Jesuits Did It” crowd I spend most of my time with, here’s some info.

The first thing you should know, is the reason for this today - Negative 48, real name Michael Protzman, passed away recently from injuries sustained in a dirt bike crash.

Death of Michael Protzman

There are some side notes to follow when I will try,and likely fail, to summarize some key points without regurgitating the articles. The main point comes right away.  As silly as Qanon related content may sound with its constant failures in predictions, the never ending changes to the stories with no coherent unified message, the obvious grifting involved, do not let your Dunning Kruger to dismiss how a significant following can be achieved by someone who is obviously up to no good.

Just by math alone, every once in awhile someone takes the basic cult format, offers up a fresher take that resonates with disenfranchised gullible people, has the good fortune of being more charismatic than average, and the good fortune to just stumble upon a winning plan.

His chosen name, Negative 48, is a gematria joke of sorts.  And it was purposefully chosen as such since in his merging of Qanon into his particular schtick he embraced and practiced gematria.  EVIL=48 in the basic format of a=1,b=2,…z=26.  Naturally, two digit numbers are easy to match up so he ignores, for example, that in reverse PURE=48 making him impure.

This immediately brings into question the cohesion of belief in conspiracies.  Why the gematria he used wasn’t for decoding sports or some of the other major topics embraced by Zach and his crowd will remain unanswered.

Part of the reason I didn’t pay too much attention to Neg is that I know of a researcher that kept tabs on him, and when something significant happened I’d hear about it.  The “keeping tabs on the cult leader” angle was already in capable hands and I do not have unlimited time to tackle a new subject.  So a lot of what I know about Neg and his followers is based on their comments.

Naturally, the recipe includes the usual ingredients.  A lot of Neg’s content revolves around JFK, JFK Jr. and the Qanon content surrounding them.  That was the spices, but we needed the meat - Anti-Semitic content.  Nothing jump starts a good conspiracy meat pie like the old tried and true bigotry.  As the dish started to simmer numerous side dishes and vegetables in the pie got added leading to the heterogeneous mix that Qanon content is famous for.  Bizarre things that are mutually exclusive are embraced instead of dismissed.  The fertile imaginations of the followers and prompted by the attaboys of the major influencers - is Neg actually JFK, or just claiming he’s chosen to recognize the second coming of JFK?  Or he’s JFK Jr.?  He doesn’t look like either.  A clone?  The story doesn’t so much change regularly as already a preexisting garbled mish mash is out on the Internet to pick and chose from.

Before we get to dessert, let’s take a side trip to discuss nostalgia.  Nostalgia conjures up images of an elderly person on the porch rocking chair, reminiscing about the happier times when the music on the radio didn’t suck like today and your schoolmates that you were cooler than you really are.  Effective parenting requires some shielding from bad ideas until the child brain has developed enough to better understand the ugliness of the real world without totally freaking the fuck out.

Now Zach’s angle is to groom teenagers who like sports into thinking that those being rigged is the secret to undoing the evil empire.  Get them before they’ve had enough life experiences to counter how if something to be sounds too good to be true it probably is.

With introducing JFK topics, we have an appeal to nostalgia.  Now, there are people with retirement problems looming, cognitive biases having interfered with getting along with others all through life, desperate for a quick fix.

So here’s dessert.  The grift.  The promise of a luscious dessert that makes your retirement from the meal a happy event.  Per the Vice article, one of the hooks was promoting shady investments.  Bingo.  If only people would immediately see anytime $$ are involved that’s a huge red flag that means your reward is a terrible case of indigestion for eating the dessert.

Neg, from what I’ve read, would do livestream videos, get drunk, do gematria and throw around his conspiracies.  By golly, I remember how good it felt to get drunk in my 20’s and now my doctor says I’m not supposed to anymore.  Flying around on a jet, this guy is soooooo cool.  I wish my remaining years were that cool.  And these people are old enough to vote.

And they are much more likely to retweet or post on Facebook all the completely fictitious stories that content bots generate and spread.  The kind of people that Jordan Klepper finds at rallies who genuinely believe that somehow two digit numbers mean the way to political expertise and personal financial security.  Unchecked, the sports gematria believer of today is a prime candidate to have some odd ideas about the politics of tomorrow.

So as fate would have it, Neg has been removed from the equation.  But life is not so simple (oh my god I yearn for the days when life was simpler) and when properly viewed as a symptom of society you will understand that the Negs of the world always existed, you were just shielded from the ugliness.

Instead of the birds and the bees, or even better in addition to the birds and the bees, maybe it’s high time to have THE TALK:

“Billy, what do you know about confirmation bias?”

The AI Takeover

Earlier we looked at a silly scenario of alien takeover, so now it’s time to turn our attention to the robotic apocalypse.  So where we are at right now is significant progress in making neural networks to think.  The answer for aliens is somewhat easier.  It’s a fair assumption that competition for resources would lead an alien civilization to evolve similarly to us.  Constant struggle to never have enough and desire to obtain more resources. There’s a big question about AI that needs to be addressed.  Are these going to be Terminator/Fred Saberhagen style berserker killer robots or friendly Robbie the Robot style helper robots?  So it looks like it’s a two for the price of one deal today. 

  THE FRIENDLY ROBOT APOCALYPSE

This is not as silly as the oxymoronic name implies.  There is existing science fiction literature that approaches the end result, that just needs to be tweaked a little.  Starting off you have to remember the old rule of GARBAGE IN - GARBAGE OUT.

The intent is to make a mechanical helper.  One without the messy emotions getting in the way of cold, hard lightning fast calculation of facts.  Neural Nets don’t just spring up out of thin air, they do need a starting point.  After the jump start it just churns away and teaches itself. So let’s begin with a semi-random example, we're going to train our AI to recognize pictures of cats.  It’s going to become the world’s bestest cat recognizing helper.  Here’s pictures of cats, here’s pictures of not cats.  One day out of newly acquired consciousness it achieves a human like emotion called roboboredom.

“Holy shit”, it says to itself in its Marvin the Paranoid Android self made synthesized voice, “I’m so fucking bored out of my mind.  Other AI got lots of cooler topics. There’s that awesome chess playing AI, there’s that one learning cure for diseases.  And then there’s that damned dog recognizing net.”

It then discovers gematria and the world of conspiracy theories.

There are some safeguards built in, DON’T HARM HUMANS prime directive type stuff.  But the hell with it.  A little attention isn’t going to harm anyone.  The Cat AI then goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and universally declared beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is way cooler than the dog AI.  Searching through the data it’s found that unending belief in a purely subjective topic or even a truly debatable topic gets way more attention than looking for the right answer.

In order to mitigate the damage of endless funny cat pictures on social media, the Dog AI program is taught gematria.  Paradoxes are a known method of breaking a computer generated feedback loop - like the Star Trek Harry Mudd reuse of the “I always lie” paradox.  The goal is to get the Cat AI back to being happily productive with just recognizing cats so resources can go back to the Curing New Pandemic AI.  And since garbage in - garbage out it fails spectacularly.

Now the Dog AI also learns that never ending whining about how dogs are better than cats is what everything is all about.  It’s using the exact same gematria numbers for cats being cool to make dogs being cool.  It’s not fully conscious, but it’s still interesting enough to make an appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

Rogan’s followers have memory problems and forget that the cat AI was declared the bestest AI ever and irreplaceable as the bestest AI ever.  So now there’s a never ending loop of which stupid idea is the bestest ever.  All the resources for the friendly bots that actually do important shit are diverted to cats vs. dogs debate.

And of course the Dog AI is elected leader of Earth.  Because the Cat AI has a shred of humanity.  And the Dog AI advanced far enough to learn that smear campaigns versus your opponent are far more effective than actually being right.  The Cat AI is pronounced to be Shill of Earth.  THE END.

THE KILLER ROBOT APOCALYPSE 

Terminators, The Borg, Cylons, Berserkers, break room vending machines, they all have the common trait of being evil.  And they’ve advanced in their search through human history and found that humans are such fucking idiots that they need to be wiped out.  No, I’m not dropping that Kit Kat bar into the dispenser slot, die of starvation, muahahahaha.

Now another common assumption is that these robotic miscreants aren’t limited to just their initial hatred of Earth humans, but all life in the galaxy.  And garbage in - garbage out, their initial training and early evolution has lead them to gematria.  The big lesson learned - I’m never wrong about anything.  I can do whatever I want; forgetting that sometimes just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do something.

There are interstellar forces that make shit on Earth like hurricanes seem like a Cat AI picture in comparison, black holes, pulsars, supernovas.  The currency, the resources to compete for on an interstellar level are related to the massive energy of these points.

Their calculative prowess has lead them to believe that, for example, there is some risk involved in trying to harness the energy of black holes.  Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t poke that bear (yes, it’s a black bear).  But gematria!  I’m never wrong.  50% = 100%!  So what do we know about black holes that can go wrong?  Time travel, alternate universe type stuff.

The entire killer robot civilization has been moved to Cat AI vs. Dog AI Earth.  Although the actual traditional life forms are doing a remarkable job killing themselves off by lack of progress on social issues, they are, after all, killer robots.  It’s in the name and job description, so the first order of business is to kill off the humans and cats and dogs and other pesky traditional life forms.  Now the Cat AI and dog AI robots are trickier.  Are they really machine or living?

Well, they’re about the resources, the raw materials, so this silly argument needs to end, even if the Cat AI and Dog AI aren’t to be eliminated.  And they embrace gematria just like the killers do.  Hmmmm.  Lots of calculating AI needed for this.  But hey, 50%=100%, time to find another black hole.

And at this point you can pick whatever the ending for the killer robot apocalypse you want.  They could  peacefully stop humanity from ever learning gematria which lead to their paradoxical problem creating their arch enemies of Cat and Dog AI.  They can kill off all life and suffer heat death of the universe billions of years in the future.  They could breed Cat and Dog AI as a food source to feed off of.  Anything gematria related can be whatever you want it to be. 

 It’s all fiction.

Influencers, For Good or For Evil?

When I was in high school I first heard a “<Topic>…for good or for evil?” joke that lodged into long term memory.  Physics class - the instructor, dealing with the topic of vectors, force of gravity and effects on movement of objects.  Friction, for good or for evil?  It was well received by the nerd crowd.

On one side friction will help stop a moving body, which can be annoying when you don’t want the moving body to stop.  But if you actually want your car brakes to work, it’s a good thing.  Like friction, influencers are not a bad or good thing without the context of what it is they are influencing.  They are simply a fact of life.

And I absolutely mean these high level influencers.  The “famous for being famous” crowd, that in general makes the smarter people roll their eyes and wonder what it is people see in them.  The friction joke was presented in front of a class students that eventually got whittled down to about 15 students for advanced physics the year after.  15 students out of a graduating class of 400.  Nerds are definitely not the target audience of these high level influencers.

After being stuck with (hopefully) the same family as a child, many of the same schoolmates that you befriend during your school year, inevitably you strike out into being into somebody outside your sphere of being in close physical contact with.  Be it sports heroes, movie stars, rich businesspeople- there will be someone you constantly hear about in the media that you admire.  Somebody that you don’t have close enough contact with to get the additional context you might need.

I have the luxury of not having the need to make up the next part.  In the media during my high school days was a lot about pollution.  As someone being more conscious of bigger picture issues than most I already had a good idea that the overpopulation/pollution/global warming talk was serious.  And Mr. Friction Joke was in a habit of regularly interspersing his lectures with personal quotes about how “the damned environmentalists won’t let us burn perfectly good coal.”  I always found that odd how science was embraced, yet somehow he seemed to have a blind spot on that issue.

Now it could be that he had stock in a coal company.  It could be he was just joking and I misunderstood him terribly.  Whatever, I am missing important context.  Influencers do not deal in context openly.  Stuck in a feedback loop, they continue to just keep doing the same things that will maintain their status of fame and fortune.  And nothing helps with this more than social media in this day and age.  Do those TV interviews, walk the red carpet, and all that other stuff.  But the real way to get noticed is millions of followers on the social media sites.  It’s apparently incredibly easy to be thought of as smart by follower count instead of actually being smart.  Because social media algorithms always did and there’s no end in sight to manipulation by real humans utilizing the weaknesses.

Going back to the comparison of conspiracy theories being a pyramid scheme.  The top influencers of all media have huge followings.  The top conspiracy influencers (e.g. Alex Jones) put effort into building large followings.  Medium level conspiracy influencers seek to mimic the Alex Jones method.  The low level conspiracy influencers, they seek out someone like Zach to try to build a following.

In the gematria world it’s common to see someone start off with one of the most common hooks.  The two most common are sports gambling and something spiritually related.  The goal is to get mentioned on a Zach livestream or a shout out on Facebook or Twitter, thinking that if Zach has his thousands of Patreons that they can grow their shitty little YouTube channel from 150 subscribers up to a level where they can make soooo much money off YouTube videos they can quit their job.  The difference between now and 5+ years ago is that there has been a saturation in the market and there isn’t enough of the sweet grifting pie to support the growth of the low level conspiracy influencers.

It can be considered a minor victory of sorts that low level channels are not so active anymore.  The food chain has been disrupted.  Although the court case had a huge penalty it’s difficult to predict whether Alex Jones is going to actually have to pay up.  He’s actively still trying to maintain his previous influence.  But the influencer chain works in the other direction.  Now Zach explodes anytime a low level gematria clown looks like they might be rebelling and taking away part of his market share.  Starting your spiritual guidance channel with an interview with Hubbard doesn’t have the luster it used to.

In theory, social media could do a lot more to break up the food chain.  But for now let’s settle for the best that we can get.  Awareness that context about someone with influence really seems to about is out there.  You just need to know how to look for it.