People You Didn’t Know Were Grifters - Jim Bowie

It’s a sad fact that a lot of history is glossed over.  There’s some truth to the phrases regarding how the victors get to write the history books.  Eventually actual research might get done, and uncover some of the unseemly acts famous heroic persons have done that make you wonder if not just should their elevation to near deity status be questioned, maybe they should be reviled.

One such person that comes into question is Jim Bowie.  Yes, the guy with the knife.  Jason Patric or Richard Widmark depending on how old you are and if, like me, you watch too many movies.

Jim Bowie

My fertile imagination leads me to think that if Bowie were alive today he would have made a talented Internet conspiracy grifter.  There’s certainly a lot of backstory there with political background.  The best conspiracy grifts push divisive topics painted as black and white political issues with no nuance.  He didn’t even invent this ‘large hunting knife’ used in the sandbar fight that got him notoriety, only popularized it.  That doesn’t happen without some sort of charisma.  So charismatic that his death along with others at the Alamo is legendary.  One need look no further than how Ozzy Osbourne pissing on the Alamo shows how much elevation to deityhood one can achieve by messing with the shrine of Texas.  https://loudwire.com/ozzy-osbourne-arrested-urinating-alamo-cenotaph-anniversary/

Bowie helped that shrine becoming a shrine and his own deity status by also being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But at the wrong time with a big, badass fucking knife.

But before that, he got into a nice little scam being in the right place at the right time.  And that was a variation of what we joke about now as the, “And if you believe that I have some lovely swamp land in Florida I’d like to sell you.”  The basis of that classic is that you don’t actually own the swamp land.  It’s an unclaimed or not openly advertised and useless plot of land that you pretend to own just long enough to capitalize on people gullible enough to think they can get a gold mine cheap.

Real estate scams are historically a big draw for neophyte scammers.  Pretty much all you need to do is throw together a quick book about how you made an incredible amount of money using magic techniques.  Then instead of using nonexistent magic techniques you simply sell the book and make your money off the book sales.  And maybe throw in a high priced seminar or 100 along the way.  And if that doesn’t remind you of Zachary Hubbard over the last ten years selling sports picks that don’t work, and throwing in every fundraiser he can think of along the way, you really haven’t been paying attention.

Bowie would also have made a great real estate property manager.  The way his con worked was that after the US Government bought the land and declared what land claims would be honored, he produced fictitious people and documentation to show bogus rights to the land.  It’s always better to cheat the government.  It’s way more fun, they never have enough oversight to monitor all the activity in the subsidized housing world.  And property managers can play by the rules, bend the rules as they see fit, or break the rules constantly with little or no repercussions.  Owning even a tiny little plot of land to call your own is a huge draw for those who are tired of being gouged on rent increases.  And becoming part of the, “too big to fail” banking/insurance/real estate grist mill has its decided advantages.

So as you read the material in the first link above, you do see Bowie got caught.  It usually takes a scam far too long and with far too much damage done…and far too much getting caught up in the fun and going too far by the scammer for any sort of accountability.  And like D.B. Cooper, we’ll never know if the legendary status of Bowie would have been tarnished if he hadn’t had his big knife at the Alamo.  I doubt many school history classes talk much about Bowie and his land scams.    My fertile imagination has Bowie using the traditional go to arguments we see today when a scammer gets caught going too far and elevating themselves to the status of a problem that needs to be done.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry I got caught, not sorry for what I did.”

A Tale Of Two AIs

Story number one comes from the world of computer chess.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VUC1K3UA-3Y

A recap of that for those who haven’t got the time or find Levy’s over abundance of personality difficult to deal with for a long video:

Stockfish, the best chess playing computer program ever lost as black for the first time in two years.  The winner was Leela Chess Zero, the same program that beat Stockfish two years ago.  Arguably the two best chess engines (technobabble for chess computers) ever.

And recapping the advancements of chess engines in far less space than can do the topic justice -

It is pointless for humans to play chess computers now, that is if they expect to win.  They simply do not make mistakes that a human brain can exploit.  The only way they lose is in when matched against other chess engines, and that is rare for these top two.  As with human grandmaster classical time control chess, there are a lot of draws.  These are certainly boring for the public that doesn’t enjoy chess and even regarded as boring by those that do play chess.  They want to see Levy’s over abundance of personality recap a stunning queen sacrifice.

As part of the chess engine development process, the age old question, starting from move 1 and with best play from both sides is the game a win for white or a forced draw.  Chess is mathematically complex enough that humans have zero chance of breaking out equations to figure that out.  But where we are at is near 100% certainty that it is not a forced win for black.  There is an advantage to moving first.  This game between two titans of chess enginuity, and the previous loss that was essentially the same process (Stockfish allowing a piece to get trapped and out of play), bears out that perfection as white is still not here.  These engines are constantly being upgraded, and the use of a neural net to mimic human thinking is advancing to be applied to non chess topics, for example medical diagnoses.  The implication of solving medical problems more accurately is typical of the AI debate topic.  Yes it’s cool and some people will be saved from suffering.  Yes, it’s not cool because some capitalist will use the tech to make money because that’s cheaper than hiring a human doctor.

The next story is something that sounds like a potential topic for a conspiracy grifter.  Fairy circles.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/28/world/fairy-circles-new-sites-scn/index.html

These mysterious circles have been known about for some time, and being mysterious is perfect for a gematria story about how the Jesuits are using them for…something.  Maybe hockey face off circles, who knows.  But that’s a digression from the main point.  Using a neural net isn’t simply a matter of throwing data at the net, pressing a button and out pops the result.  Chess neural nets are known to have them play against themselves for a butt ton of games, analyzing what works and what doesn’t to fine tune and eliminate what doesn’t work.  And it’s important to emphasize that playing against themselves means literally playing against themselves.  It’s Leela vs. Leela with a starting point of the basic rules for the game, which aren’t that difficult to program in.

Like gematria, there are no rules in place for what exactly is a fairy circle and what is something that just looks like one but isn’t.  It could be a dark elf circle that’s completely evil.  It could be fairy oblate spheroid.  It could be fairy Pluto that should have gotten demoted from being called a planet a long time ago.  The humans involved need to force feed the initial data into the net to jump start the process.  Here net, these are actual fairy circles.  Here you go not, these look like fairy circles but they aren’t really fairy circles.  Then, here you go net, here’s satellite images.  Tell me what you think.

I suppose the goal is something noble like how vegetation patterns can be analyzed for food production, that didn’t seem clear.  Or it could be a repeat of using neural net projects to advance the study of neural nets and they had to pick something to get the ball rolling.  And I suppose it could be, “I can get funding for this?  I can eat for another year?  Cooooooooolll!”

There is no clearly defined win or loss in the fairy circle analysis.  There is in the chess, the game for each side will end in a win, loss or draw.  And note that the fairy circle news story shows that humans intervened to correct the AI mistakes that were made.

Every new tech advance makes it easier for the internet conspiracy grifter.  Here’s a photo.  Figured out how to edit that.  Here’s video digital editing.  Figured out how to make convincing deep fakes.  Here’s ChatGPT and neural net AI.  How about a day that comes along where we have AI that’s trained on:

Here is a bunch of stupid shit people believe in short term.  Show me the top hits for what gets the most engagement today so I can grift off of it.  AIlex Jones.  There is quite a lot of misinformation stockpiled on the Internet.  And there’s quite a lot of history of social media not using human intervention to correct mistakes.  “Thanks for reporting this to YouTube” does not count as actual human intervention.

Internet Conspiracy Grifters Are A Weird Virus

I’m going to arbitrarily and nonsensically address this in five tiers for space and time management.  Conspiracy grifting misses out on nuance and context, to arbitrarily assign negative qualities to members of a group, of which the individual somewhat randomly chosen individuals in a group do not possess.  Being attacked simply for having the wrong gematria decode number come up, choice of color of clothing worn that day, accidentally holding their hands in a manner deemed to be a satanic symbol or any manner of similar nonsense.  Some of that nonsense makes more sense, but as I’ve just said, people are assholes.

At the top of the pyramid is humans. The only species currently having the knowledge to understand that we engage in counterproductive activity that also drags down the quality of life of others.  And it’s a never ending struggle to figure out how to address this.  Evolution provided us with a relatively long life span accompanied with a low reproductive rate, at least relative to the other tiers.  We’re able to make decent short term decisions unconsciously, but have proven in recent history, not so much.  Learning to “not fuck with the bear today” does not equate to financial success or happiness beyond having another day to make a decision on what to do with the next bear.

Next, the other animals, the ones that some people assign souls to since they behave in a manner more intelligent than cruder life forms that appear to just want to eat.  We’ve performed long term experiments on these.  Now we have yippy little dogs that survive as a species simply because some people think the demonic little ankle biting bastards are cute.  And the larger breeds can become a status symbol who are enjoyed by those who think that my dog being able to beat up your dog is cool.  We’ve bred horses for speed beyond the ability to easily survive in the wild since we like to gamble.  We’ve made birds live low quality bird lives since they taste like chicken.  And we’ve killed reptiles to turn them into shoes.  The common factor - the lack of knowledge on how their existence may or may not be impacting the quality of life for other creatures on the planet.

Then there’s the insects.  Other than bad science fiction movies there’s no conscious thought to impact on others.  Unlike the higher animals including humans they survive as a species by reproducing like crazy.  In a group started from the same direct descendants they have evolved to recognize friend and foe, but as soon as foe is recognized it’s time to rumble.  They will “fuck with the bear” regardless of personal risk.  The good of the hive is maintained by sacrifice of some noble kamikaze bees.  This is hardly conscious, but a defensive reaction to the bear fucking with the bees first.

Bacteria are a thorn in the side for evolution deniers.  They’ve taken the reproductive strategy of the insects to the extreme.  Lenski’s famous E. Coli with the ability to assess changes in multiple generations in a short time (at least compared to millions of years just for humans to learn to not fuck with the bear) demonstrates the effectiveness of species survival just by breeding.  A bacteria colony can kill itself off pretty rapidly too by overpopulation.  The food runs out and bacteria poop doesn’t make its way to bacteria sewage plants and dead bacteria cells don’t get recycled and turned into bacteria condos and bacteria park benches.  And if they are particularly well suited to fuck with bears they absolutely will fuck with the bears.

Viruses are still controversial on the being alive or not thing, just as controversial as how the word controversy is pronounced.  Britain has some weird ideas, apparently just because they claimed the language first.  The sole reason for existence is to find some chemical sequences to utilize to make more of themselves to find more chemical sequences to utilize.  If you think these are conscious actions, you’ve seen too many bad science fiction movies.  And the obligatory reference, some viruses aren’t just willing, they pretty much only can utilize the chemicals of bears and will fuck with bears without fucking with anything else.

Placing conspiracy grifters on one of these tiers is a challenge based on the reproductive cycle and the fucking with the bear test.  They do not act like a normal human, where offspring is (arguably) nurtured and protected in order to survive to reproductive age.  They regularly fuck with the bear.  They actively search out bears to fuck with.  And they prefer to let other humans do their dirty work since it’s better to not be the target of a bear that has been fucked with too much.

So not entirely human, but are they at least a higher animal?  Nah.  There’s no long term survival instinct.  Whatever bad news strikes is what needs to be capitalized on today.  Future be damned.  If climate change finishes me off, it’s better to have a couple bucks in the bank now, and maybe have a big Armageddon party with the other grifters.  No bears allowed.

I think we’re closer with insects.  There’s a definite hive mentality in regards to foes.  But these foes are deliberately sought out to attack, at the cost of maybe doing something more productive for the long term.  Compared to humans, insects have mastered cooperation.  But Truthers, on any given day, can and do attack each other.  The choice of foe fluctuates rapidly.  Bears are ok for foes, but like insects a foe that doesn’t fight back is ideal.  I sense a decode predicting the death of celebrity bears, who being dead don’t fight back, to be a dominant theme in the near future.

Bacteria, now we’re actually taking a step back in the comparisons.  It takes a lot of effort to groom the target to make it susceptible.  The conspiracy grifter already needs a susceptible audience to operate.  Not every bacteria colony member is equally susceptible.  Bacteria don’t make good identifiers of friend or foe, so they need to be guided, that guidance being misguided.

So they’re not viruses, either.  No friend or for identification in actual viruses unless they stumble on the right chemical sequence.  No conscious thought on the target selection.  But what we have is a weird sort of hybrid virus.  The goal is to guide the new virus particles to act in a mindless target selection manner.  Get them constantly sharing memes, parroting thoroughly debunked talking points.  Get them to fuck with the government bears to search out the right bits of chemical sequences to produce more angry chemical sequences.  The top grifters care about continued survival and wealth of resources, and they’ve convinced the other weird virus particles that they care about the master weird virus particles more than their own survival.

Know Your Gematria Grifter Cover Ups - “Close Enough”

Having just talked about coincidences, now is a good time for reposting content about the gematria Doctrine of Close Enough.  This could also be called the Doctrine of Being Less Wrong.  Left with failed predictions that need backpedaling or a cover story to distract from the stink of failure, newbie gematria users are inundated with being close enough is better than being outright wrong.

Mathematically, 2+2=4.  If your answer sheet has anything other than 4, it’s wrong.  It doesn’t matter if you answered 5 or 22 or 104.  A mathematical minded person might consider 5 to be less wrong since it’s closer to 4.  Or 22 might be less wrong since it’s pretty obvious what the mistake was.  And they might dismiss 104 outright as a, “How the hell did you get THAT?!” response.  To the gematria newbie, they can identify that they have the wrong answer, but there’s no chance of growing and learning and getting the correct answer the next time.  Each and every response to “What is 2+2” can be justified as less wrong through post mortem analysis.

The timing of coincidences is a tricky thing, where there’s an ill defined time frame between event one and event two.  Our brains trick themselves enough, and we really don’t need some grifter trying to muddy the waters even more.  We can and due process what we personally consider a remarkable coincidence without nudging from outside sources.  The conspiracy grifter wants you to think that everything is not a coincidence, that evil forces outside your control are pulling the strings, and with their deity level power level they have no choice but to continually prove how petty they are instead of doing something more remarkably, and statistically significantly, evil.

Although ill defined, the time period of events that events may or may not be coincidental is about one day.  Not within seconds or minutes or hours, but a full day.  And maybe, just maybe you can get away with up to several days.  The reason for one day?  The daily bad news.  The tiny insignificant numbers will always be there every day.  The daily post mortem analysis waits until the actual bad news has already happened.  Actual predictions are avoided as much as possible, because unless you want to spend the energy on covering up your failure you get tired of being wrong all the time.  Enter the Doctrine of Close Enough to save your brain from dealing with failure.

On the other side, you can’t go back too far in time and declare coincidences.  Predicting the death of Queen Elizabeth years in advance of the actual death is not close enough.  And in a not terribly well thought out series of  blog posts that are still up on Fee to Find Misinformation (at least in the archived forms), Hubbard was in the habit of predicting the death of the Queen every year for many years in a row.  The way to bypass getting called out for this is first and obviously, don’t pin yourself down to making a specific prediction that’s going to be wrong, and second use the lingo.  Long term post mortem analysis is not referred to as a matter of coincidence.  It’s a ritual.  When the Queen dies and the daily bad news complete with its particular set of tiny numbers is reported, declare it a ritual.  Brooks Robinson died.  That’s a ritual sacrifice for the entire 104th NFL season.  This bad news - that’s an eclipse ritual.  That bad news - a sign that something is brewing in bitcoin.  Other bad news - Obama is the Antichrist, and if you’re not talking about the Antichrist without talking about ritual sacrifices, just what the hell is wrong with you?  Have we taught you nothing.  Make no mistake, when the word ritual is thrown around in a gematria setting it’s really talking about if something is a coincidence or not.  And the cognitively impaired can’t make that connection because it doesn’t involve two and three digit numbers.

The most overused aspect of the Doctrine of Close Enough is date numerology.  Everything that is one day off is close enough.  Some calculators will even let you pick date numerology (which isn’t even gematria) that includes or does not include the end date in a span of days.  This reinforces the daily bad news cycle and being less wrong mentality.  Morbidly, when a celebrity hospitalization is announced there’s always some newbie who gets the bright idea to gematrify their data and predict a date they will actually croak.  And then wait it out as others, all trying to impress their clique cult leader create equally wrong death dates in the quest to be less wrong than the other predictors.  It should be noted here that to aid them in their quest, every single month has multiple kill dates.  Days where the date numerology equals the gematria of words like KILL, MURDER, RITUAL (with or without SACRIFICE), DEATH, etc….

These things are far easier to do after the fact.  If you’re not doing sports decodes after the fact, the celebrity death predictions are a good way to supplement your need to dwell in negativity.  Every single notable celebrity that passes away has multiple decodes of how it ties into something evil.  These are all equally wrong as the tiny insignificant numbers have nothing to do with it, even if an evil empire was involved.  They just superficially have some that look less wrong than others.

People are assholes.  We would much rather dwell on the morbid aspects of death than trying to analyze coincidences bringing up happy, nostalgic memories of wedding days or graduation or first kisses.  And to people that don’t get a lot of positive reinforcement from others because their thoughts are not the same as the “normies”, there’s an opportunity to create a temporary fuzzy warm place of being less wrong than other people with bad ideas.

Individual sports games are a traditional outlet for being close enough.  For example, Hubbard will do the same thing a lot of non gematria sports pick grifters do - the hedge bet.  You might have picked the winner of the game wrong, but you picked the star receiver to get two touchdown receptions.  Close enough.  The Bengals lost.  But the day before Clemson won.  You didn’t even put out a weak and vague prediction on the college games, but they’re both tigers.  Close enough.  (By the way, that one is just an example and not a known misfire).  Brooks Robinson didn’t play football, but he died, his city matches the team I intend to milk this season and with a number I’ve mentioned.  Close enough.  Of course it’s a number you mentioned.  You’ve mentioned all of the small numbers.  Some are just less wrong than others.

Know Your Grifter Logical Fallacies - The Argument From Incredulity

 Incredulity

AKA the argument from personal incredulity.  Just because you don’t believe something is not true, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  For example, just because YOU don’t think climate change is a problem doesn’t mean it is not a problem.  On the other side of the coin, climate change does not give a damn what you think about it.  Although I’ve used a logical fallacy of assigning a human characteristic to a not human concept, there is no doubt this is true.

One of the goals of the conspiracy grifter is to hook in new audience members into the world, to get them to entire the rabbit hole.  Whether this is just a short term lark, long enough to throw away a couple of bucks on useless sports predictions or if you ending up devoting your life to the cause does not matter to them.  Let the math sort that out where statistics do that separation.

In theory, Zach could simply link an introductory video to have newcomers who want to understand the basics of A=1, B=2, etc…. And in theory that video could restate the best stories that by the math have separated themselves as having received more engagement.  Like Kobe Bryant and 9/11 material that has been quoted relentlessly and will continue to be.  And certainly the mountains of stories that fell flat won’t be mentioned.  But these videos tend to boring.  The subject matter of the basics is not that hard to grasp.  Why bother when your phone can open up any of many gematria calculators and let it do work on the wonderful new world you’ve uncovered.

What he is doing now, as in the past, is putting the introductory information at the start of a lot of videos based on current events.  Short enough that longer term viewers don’t get too annoyed at the delay on his less than fantastic set of weekly football picks.  Regardless of a video devoted to the basics or a prelude at the beginning of a bit of new material, the goal is the same.  Zach believes something.  Therefore, you are less than human if you do not share that belief.  You could fast forward and wait until the explosion when somebody calls him out for his many wrong picks.  Or, you could simply recognize is go to argument from personal incredulity hook - coincidences.

Kobe died blah, blah, blah, blah…how can that be a coincidence?  Look at how the 911 emergency number was created on blah, blah, blah…that can’t be a coincidence.  In addition to them not actually being anything but a coincidence for a lot of reasons, he’s trying to force his personal belief on what is a coincidence on to the newcomer.  For a group of people itching for a fight against the evil empire or their government, these people amazingly give up and accept a set of beliefs being forced on them without much of a fight.  Welcome to the cult.

And they receive ample evidence that coincidences, whether real and remarkable or completely imaginary, have little or no impact on their current sports picks.  People understand (incorrectly) that these Jesuit birthed not coincidences are important rituals, and when unleashed on their own have no impact on their success at predicting anything.  The only takeaway they get is a steady diet of everything being evil.  Which means that it’s time again for my semi regular reminder:

Based on how gematria is practiced, with all the ways to force numbers into other numbers, every single number is evil.  Based on gematria, every single person that is alive now, lived in the past or will ever live in the future is evil.  How can a system like that help you to decide who to pick to win on Monday Night Football?

The biggest two reasons for why the coincidences are imaginary are statistics and reporting after the fact.  There’s such a large database to work with regardless of the stated current topic, you can’t help but find some tiny number that matches.  And although the goal is to use this secret knowledge to predict, ALL of the best coincidence stories were created after the fact, with no actual predictions involved.

Just because you don’t believe something isn’t a coincidence doesn’t mean it is or is not a coincidence.  Coincidences don’t care if you believe in them or not.  Gematria’s greatest gift to the world - using the past to get people thinking about how that means to today’s events.  That’s as close to a prediction you’ll ever get.

Know Your Conspiracy Grifter Marketing Techniques - Word Salad

 

That’s right.  Australia, we love you for your lifelong practice in dealing with dangerous indigenous wildlife.  But crocodiles aren’t scary enough.  Serpents are scary enough.  It’s those damn crocodile serpent hybrids shedding their poisonous fake tears that are the real problem.  And nothing, absolutely nothing proves you cracked the code by adding a random letter, possibly a Roman numeral, to make your decode work out.

This tactic doesn’t happen much with your average sports gematria grift.  Once you get beyond the low three digit numbers finding a match for your sports game doesn’t happen without some heavy prime number or dropping extra digits type editing which makes it way too obvious you’re forcing it.  And looking like a schizophrenic in the process.  That sample phrase was chosen by picking 1748 at random and entered in Gematrix.  And yes, as always there are multiple word salad phrases for that number.

Gematrix is the VAERS reporting system for gematria.  A lot of the actual benefit of the VAERS system has been destroyed by purposeful anti vaxxer sabotage.  Anybody can report, and those who really don’t know what they’re talking about and those purposefully sabotaging can enter whatever bullshit they want to.  At least with Gematrix you know the results were never intended to be anything but bullshit, it almost has the exact same letters as gematria in the name.

The only sports gematria users that do use word salad are the basketball decoders.  They have mastered the crossover drivel.  Which isn’t just the opportunity to put out a bad Dad joke that I couldn’t resist, crossovers are the actual appearance of word salad in Zachosphere decodes.  And it’s not by that crew.  It’s an invasion by the spiritual crowd, with their attempts to lure away frustrated sports decode losers over to a different but essentially the same in practice time and money vacuum.

Clickbait is the fun drunken uncle that won’t shut up at the holiday dinner.  You know that you shouldn’t be listening to his made up cockamamie stories, but in addition to being stuck with him until the gathering is finished he’s far more entertaining than the Thanksgiving day football games the Jesuits rigged, and Grandma talking about the knitting club.  And now would be a good time to admit that if you didn’t outright Google “CROCODILE SERPENT TEARS V” you at least thought about.

Putting a lot of nonsensical words together has the general utility in all gematria since regardless of which clique you are involved in the stories, at their core, do not make any sense.  Just by putting that phrase out, anyone can pick and choose which part means something to them personally.  Holy shit, I was just thinking about crocodiles the other day.  I was just thinking about my brother getting bitten by a rattlesnake.  I just saw that recent meme about how many times a day I think of the Roman Empire.  I was just thinking about my nephew fake crying at Thanksgiving dinner because he wanted to be at drunken Uncle Phil’s table instead of listening to knitting talk.  I was just thinking that movies with nonsensical titles like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers make me think, “Wow, what the hell is that about?!?  Maybe I should watch it and find out.”

Without knowing it, the synchronicity clique is big on word salad tactics, often without knowing it.  They’re already lost looking at too much online content than they should be, getting exposed to different pieces of gibberish, on top of brain that’s already had a lot of training to ignore misses and just focus on the hits.  If the nephew’s crocodile tears were seven Thanksgiving’s ago, it’s not synchronous.  But you thought about it today, the current Thanksgiving because it’s, well, Thanksgiving.  So it’s on your mind.  Your brain has a warehouse of word salad that can be brought to the surface at a moments notice.

Common to the current decode you are presented with and aside from your brain tricking yourself, the spiritual crowd likes to invade gematria spaces with their tried and true word salad terms and phrases.  For starters there are the 12 Universal Laws.  Universal in that they all do not actually exist.

Divine oneness, vibration, correspondence, attraction, inspired action, perpetual transmutation, cause & effect, compensation, relativity (no, not the science one that does exist, and not drunken Uncle Phil), polarity, rhythm, gender.  In theory, you could use these to feel good about yourself the same as using gematria for its intended purpose of examining the Bible.  In practice, it’s pointed out that there’s something wrong with you NOW.  Your vibration is all fucked up.  Pay me, the mystical tantric sex guru for lessons on how not to be fucked up.  These terms and phrases aren’t really word salad by themselves, but they are like the amino acids of some good word salad proteins.  Wouldn’t some sciency sounding words go good with those.  Vibrational field depletion.  Quantum transmutation.  Organic attraction.  Gender entropy.  Please stop betting on sports.  Come visit my channel and we’ll fix up that vibrational gender entropy transmutation problem of yours, gaining organic attraction is just a PayPal donation away.  If that doesn’t work, my friend is a quantum chainsaw hooker.

On a related note, if you’ve noticed the focus on spiritual instead of religious.  There was a period of time the Zachosphere was openly critical of Qanon content, with the obvious (weasel word) intent of luring away those lack of critical thinking skills followed to another time and money vacuum.  The Christian gematria cliques have gone full blown Qanon, where if it’s not outright Trump is the best thing ever it’s at least decidedly anti-liberal/anti-Democrat.  Naturally, this is a byproduct of Trump being a constant source of daily, original word salad.

The Baltimore Stockbroker Scam

It’s also known as the Psychic Sports Scam, which certainly hits home regarding the go to source for gematria content - picking both teams to win in sporting events.  The Wikipedia article on gambling scams also has good info about this, but here’s another source

Binary Psychic Scam

I’ve mentioned before about an episode of The Mentalist where Simon Baker’s character “cons” information out of someone by picking a low odds outcome on a horse race.  His trick was accepting a sure loss of money, but this wasn’t a huge amount.  The method was simply to bet the minimum allowable wager on every single possible  outcome.

The binary scam, for those not interested in looking at other sources, operates by starting with a large pool of people that is an exponent of two.  Parroting some of the wording in the other sources 2^10=1024.  512 people get the Chiefs 512 people get the 49ers.  Then the next week 256 get a winner and 256 get a loser.  Then 128 each winners and losers, etc…. There’s an assured diet of people getting multiple consecutive winners that can be given extra attention to.

To me this seems like operating a long game strategy instead of Zach’s method of being a little more open on the Internet with picking both teams.  “Well that 56 is a Chiefs number, but don’t forget that the 49er’s coach could stay on 15 losses at home in the 15th week and blah, blah, blah, blah.”  Which isn’t saying that’s not what’s going on.  For example, as long as the old content is still up, the old Gematria Effect News 22 channel, the most recent video from 7 months ago doesn’t have a single comment from anyone currently appearing in Zach’s comments section.  It does make one wonder if these include some people getting hit by requests for larger $ than just joining a Patreon for a couple bucks a month.

The Internet was made with scammers in mind.  So although part of me says don’t give out this secret information, another part says social media not caring means it’s already spread around, so screw it.  As a psychologically astute person, here’s how I’d run a variation of this scam.  It requires a lot of effort, like the movie The Sting level effort.

1). Openly make a steady diet of content about sports gematria, not caring if my picks are right or wrong.  Use emotional topics to identify biased people.  That’s my current pool of 1024 potential victims.

2). Use sock puppets and/or confederates to make one on one contact with the most gullible of that group.  One half of the group gets courted with emails (they always want you to give up your email to prove you’re serious about this secret information that only you will receive).  For the first halving, minimal to no effort in the courtship.  Increase the pressure as the halving continues.

3).  As the season wears on, the number is getting closer to a manageable amount for serious one on one courtship.  That’s where the big sting is presented.  That’s where you separate the lucky but not wealthy crowd from the group that has access to some serious bucks.

4). Emphasize to the chosen few that you’ve made new discoveries in your system that others are not ready for.  They are not worthy (and it’s your cover story to continually put out visibly bad information on the Internet).  And even better, I’d personally convince the group that this secret knowledge I found isn’t in sports picks, the big payoff is in cryptocurrency.

5).  Keep the number of people that know what’s going on to a minimum.  Real life doesn’t have a Robert Shaw character that’s so evil you cheer for the con men to get away with it.  You don’t want someone on your team feeling stiffed and blowing the whistle on your operation.

Like I said, a lot of work with enough moving parts that if something would go wrong it probably would have happened by now.  Zach personally puts out a lengthy video daily because he's dedicated to the truth enjoys being a psychopath, and has such a wide array of fundraisers that he doesn’t have the time to handle more than making bad sports picks and covering his ass after the fact.  But yeah, I can see that some crank magnetism parties have stepped into people’s lives to offer an alternative to shitty sports picks.  And Hollywood needs me to be a strike breaking scab and help write that screenplay for the blockbuster gematria movie.  My career as an unpaid member of the evil empire isn’t going too well.

By the way, there’s also a variation of this for more intellectual pursuits.  A not very strong chess player can guarantee a 50% record versus the top grandmasters.  There’s video of it I can’t find now.  Playing in a simultaneous exhibition with say, nine boards, where the other players can’t see the other boards.  Play as black on the first board against the only non grandmaster.  Whatever his move is, that’s your move on the next board, etc…. The first game is a throwaway, maybe you’ll get lucky and win even.  The others, win, lose or draw you are actually making the GMs play versus each other.

Morton’s Fork, Hobson’s Choice, And Buridan’s Ass

Which one to talk about first?  The order put in the heading?  Alphabetical?  Chronological order of when the terms were first used?  Pick from a hat?

Psychologically, our brains fire, and misfire, on their own without conscious thought to what is being processed.  This isn’t about autonomic nervous system functions running in the background.  You don’t need an audiotape hooked to headphones to remind you to breathe.  

You’re supposed to be scared of giant carnivorous animals as a matter of self preservation.  When you actually meet a grizzly bear you’re supposed to not spend too much of your time making a decision on whether you should do something to extend your life span or if you think it’s cute enough to pet it.  If you overcome the most useless solution of petting it being a bad idea you then need a quick reaction to chose between the attempt to fight or flee or try to steal its money.

Now before I get carried away about dilemmas and solutions, let me go on record again about internet grifters and their chosen targets.  So often, those that dismiss conspiracy thinking comment on how it seems ridiculous that anybody would fall for the scam.  Get over it.  There are people, whether they be life long adherents of conspiracy style thinking or just that they have not garnered enough life experiences to make an informed decision who do not process contradictory information well.

And gematria is the king of contradictory information where even direct antonyms have the same gematria value.

Hobson’s Choice is no actual choice at all.  It’s “Take it or leave it.”  The only game in town.  If you visit a restaurant and see everybody eating the most vile looking burgers you’ve ever set eyes on and you’re super hungry, we’ll it’s eat a gross out burger or nothing, as you find the reason everyone is eating it is because it’s the only one on the menu.  So, this doesn’t apply so much to the conspiracy grifter world.  There are lots of different bad ideas to choose from.  The restaurant also has side salads, French fries and ice cream.  It’s just that they are equally gruesome as the burger.

When you get to Morton’s Fork, now we are approaching conspiracy grifting territory.  There is a choice, it’s just a stupid choice.  Picking any option of your choices is equally bad and could even result in the same outcome.  The restaurant with the gross food.  This can be summed up by the old phrase, between a rock and a hard place.  It’s closer to Conspiracy thinking, but not quite there yet.  The difference between this and Buridan’s Ass is the amount of time involved.  If one is picking between the Yankees or the Red Sox on an individual game based on gematria that’s s a short term conscious choice.  However, it’s not a real choice for gematria users.  It inevitably devolves into other not fully conscious factors that won’t be admitted to.  Presented with contradictory information, the comments will show at least someone if not fully half of the group picking against the presenter’s conclusion.  And in the long term, if you pick the money line on the Yankees because you like the Yankees or whatever other non gematria reasoning you use, you will be wrong about 50% of the time.  Even if you mix it up and bet on the Ted Sox 50% of the time you will lose a season full of Yankees vs. Red Sox games about 50% of the time.  The long term result is the same, you just get a fake choice to make along the way.

The goal of the non conspiracy theorist to combat the conspiracy grifting tactics is to interrupt the thought process before the constant diet of misinformation results in Buridan’s Ass level thinking.  Using the original source material, the ass is presented with two equal bales of hay.  Unable to make a choice the ass doesn’t eat either and starved to death.  In theory, the die hard true believer could chose to accept that they’re wrong.  Or they could chose the bale of hay where something else (maybe a potential life partner they fancy) distracts them from the belief system and they simply move on.  Instead, they double down, putting more effort into finding material that confirms their biases, continue to be a pest, starve and die amidst a sea of actual evidence based information.

Ignoring actual evidence based thinking is not part of our hard wired “don’t fuck with the bear” evolutionary make up.  If you have seen your friend get mauled by a bear, you don’t fuck with bears.  You don’t double down and insist, and make it your life’s mission, to fuck with as many bears as possible.  If only I get to pet a grizzly, just one time, I’d be soooooooo happy, said nobody still alive ever.

Conspiracy grifter tactics load up the playing field with Morton’s Fork material, constantly conflating pseudoscience with actual scientific evidence based research.  Do you think they care if you get to the point where it develops into you thinking it’s a good idea to ransack your capital on the day the election is certified?  That bear is still being fucked with, today.

Know Your Grifter Marketing Techniques - Covering Up For Failed Predictions

It takes way too long for grifter victims to throw in the towel and admit the predictions not working out and are not ever going to work out.  There are two clips of Zach rants often repeated on the Sports Gematria YouTube channel.  In one, Zach claims that he’s way better than Nostradamus at predictions, popping up with his often repeated claim that he’s taken so much money out of the casinos they are out to get him.  In the other, he claims, “I never said I could predict anything.”  That happens when a caller challenges him on claiming victory when old video shows he clearly picked the other team.

Know your other grifter marketing techniques.  The persecution complex, the casinos changed the result to make him, and only him, look bad.  The self proclaimed only person in the Truth Community that matters.  On the other side, claiming you never predict anything and are only exposing rituals that “mock us”, that runs into the commentary on the Sports Gematria YouTube channel reminding us of the nickname, After the Fact Zach.

Making an actual prediction is problematic for the group that’s in on the con.  Verifiable evidence that it did not come true will present itself.  The Wikipedia page on end of the world predictions is loaded with, to put it mildly since we are still here, failed predictions.

Ironically, the quote about Nostradamus is the key to making successful failed predictions.  Predictions you know aren’t going to work out and/or easy to cover up when they don’t work out.  The big red flag cognitively impaired grifting victims miss is the mere fact that predictions are being made in the first place is a sign of trouble.  Nobody popularized the vague prediction that could be covered up for being wrong as much as good ole Nostradamus.  And there’s nothing in conspiracy grifting anywhere near as vague as gematria.  It was DESIGNED, to be vague and misleading.  Let the confirmation bias of the mark seal their own doom.

Nostradamus didn’t make his work mentioning specific dates.  That doesn’t seem to work in modern society where our lack of patience demands instant gratification.  I want to win my bet on this weekend’s games.  Not put a lot of money down on the NFL champ now, and wait out a full NFL season.  But, letting the games playing out and changing the narrative after the fact, that’s got the Nostradamus seal of approval.  By the time the playoffs come around, literally every team has got someone that’s done a mind blowing decode that shows their narrative.  All the failed weekly predictions are forgiven.  Congratulations to the winners.  If you lost, you missed the narrative for the other team.  And since the numbers exist for a narrative for both teams on every single game, you’ve missed the narrative that gematria provides no benefit.

The vague prediction Nostradamus style doesn’t work when the evangelicals talk about the Rapture.  It’s always coming soon.  It sounds like it works, since soon can mean anything from tomorrow to years from now.  And inevitably, as a variation of predicting the end of the world it butts heads with the stubborn world continuing to not end.

The real key to covering up the failed prediction is to not actually make a prediction that has a definite plus or minus result in the near future, and not so far away that your hook is going to get dismissed in favor of shorter term promises.  A sports season is perfect.  Interest can be maintained along months.  And that’s right about the correct time frame for deriving some benefit (donations) from the marks before they wake up to the con and move on.  Cryptocurrency is even better.  There’s no defined season.  Our extremely volatile markets go way up and way down regularly on even ordinary investments.  But the crypto volatility is absolutely insane.  Predicting a big upswing or a crash, he buddy, you just messed up your decode by a couple of weeks.  The crash wasn’t really a true crash, but losing 10% of value in a couple days, that is close enough to be translated as a crash.

For those who are thinking of getting involved as a conspiracy grifter, you need a marketing plan that has a pre made plan to cover up for failed predictions.  The reality is:

I’m picking sports games based on numerology.  My predictions don’t work.  I’m making investments based on numerology.  My predictions don’t work.  I’m making political affiliations based on numerology.  My predictions don’t work.  Those arrests still haven’t happened yet.  I’m claiming synchronicity now tying it into years old “rituals”.  My predictions don’t work.  The world hasn’t ended yet.  My predictions don’t work.

We’re obsessed with predictions.  Nostradamus would be proud.

Know Your Grifter Marketing - Intimidation

Every day that passes by there are stories of violence, because violence is news.  And we’re talking about the relatively minor stuff for the moment and tie into the major stuff after a ramble.  Road rage where somebody flips out and decides to bump someone with their car.  The “Karen” that aggressively verbally assaults another customer at the hair salon, complete with racial slurs.  Kicking the neighbors dog just because it seemed fun and you don’t like the color they painted their house.

Societies have a tough time separating those who genuinely just had a bad day and after being pointed in the right direction can get their shit together from long term repeat offenders with all the signs that the behavioral patterns aren’t going to change.  Innocent until proven guilty.  That’s still a good thing

Social media is loaded with the same problems.  Is Kanye genuinely remorseful about his bigoted comments, or just sorry he lost money and got called out?  As I often do, I turn to the world of film for an analogy and that’s the crossover episode.

Popular series to add a bit of spice will have a major character from another series pop in to add flavor to an episode, combining the star power of two big names.  The tie in for some is obvious, like the Buffy spin off Angel switching characters between the shows.  Shows that have the same basic formula.  Others are a bit odder, like Matlock showing up on Diagnosis Murder.  Although the main characters have an interest in murder in common, their approach is quite different.  Putting them together increases the chances that new viewers who didn’t watch the one show will give it a try, and maybe get hooked.  More viewers, more advertisements, more money.  This is roughly the way YouTube algorithms can operate.

Now compared to ten years ago, the gematria (sports especially) content is much tamer, directly.  There isn’t as much angry ranting about killing your enemies as their used to be.  That was a byproduct of the popularity of Alex Jones and unimaginatively copying what was working for him.  The solution to not putting up content with a better chance of getting flagged, stricken and removed?  The crossover episode.  Perform a livestream with a gung ho gun rights fanatic.  Give the viewers who incorrectly think they can successfully predict NFL games a taste of something a bit different.  The spiritual/evangelical crowd might have been lured in by feelings of love and compassion, and then get a new message about how Biden is Satan.  With the standard Internet caveat of psychological projection that by default if Biden is bad, Trump is good.

Another movie theme is the nerdy kid at school who is left alone by the notorious bully because his muscular jock friend intimidates the bully into leaving the nerd alone.  Or even better is training the nerd to fight the bully on his own.  Or even upgrade the jock to Mr. Miyagi, he was training Daniel-San, but on occasion stepped in to actively take care of business when the still green karate kid was not fully prepared to fight his own battles.

For good or for evil, intimidation tactics work and their not going away.  One need not directly post violent content, but the threat of violence is sufficient to present the (often arbitrarily chosen) target with a no win situation.  Live with it and walk away the “better person”, or stand up and maybe find out that your bully isn’t going to back down and you get the living shit calculated.  A small scale of, “I’m a crazy dictator who has nuclear weapons that I will use!”  Do you have the time and resources to affect that global issue?  Do you even have the time and resources for karate training on a personal level?  The easier way is to walk away the better person and convince yourself that somebody else will take care of the problem.

It’s simultaneously somewhat amusing and completely terrifying to see how gematria sports decoders pop into the comments of somebody regularly posting more hateful and destructive content.  Or the spiritual crowd talking about eclipses one day showing up to listen to a bitcoin ramble that has identified Obama as the Antichrist.  And seeing the opposite play out where the fire and brimstone preacher talks about the team colors and gematria values of Monday Night Football.  Crank/grift magnetism in all its glory.

Part of our film school nerd’s dilemma is the incompetence of those in authority.  The principal and teachers don’t help through some clever plot device, unless that plot includes the teacher being the one who knows karate.  The same plays out in the workplace when the toxic narcissist gets away with sabotaging computer files because management doesn’t lift a finger.  The CEO likes the bully, they can do whatever they want.  In the Internet world, social media is the incompetent management in a bad movie that has them so enamored of $ that there’s little choice but to walk away “the better person.”  The constant philosophy of saying, “Stop, or I’ll say stop again!” only goads those who are even only using intimidation by association to continue to do so.  The reporting system is some kind of awful joke that if it ever works it’s way too late.  Not everybody is like Russell Brand who elevated himself to problem status so publically and quickly.

As always, the solution is to not be involved in the first place.  It’s up to those who know and care about what’s going on to step up and educate.  In the absence of competent movie management/school staff you can at least sift through the friends and followers and look for the red flags that shout out there is a problem.  There is a lot of literature and social media commentary now about the conspiracy grifting culture.  And like social media content reporting, this comes way too long after problems were identified.  For more of this, please review the links I posted a few days ago.

Why We Love Australia

 https://www.undp.org/european-union/stories/value-cooperation-fractured-world

Again, the recent UN meeting has brought up the topic of how our world is fractured.  Not a new topic at all.  Every time a war breaks out different ideologies seek to impose their will upon others.  Sometimes with dubious reasons, with “sometimes” being translated as all the time considering little side pieces are manufactured to promote that you are right about everything.  This is lovingly known as propaganda.  You have weapons of mass destruction?  Die heretic!  Oh wait, you didn’t?  Sorry, my bad.  Die heretic!

Separating the producers and cooperating traders vs. the takers is easier at an individual level than it is on a fractured global misinformed by the Internet scale.  Collateral damage on innocent civilians is considered not cool while the leaders who are pushing the buttons are stirring up trouble.  That collateral damage is lovingly called war crimes.

War is messy and always a huge waste of resources.  But even times of relative peace, the underlying factor that makers and takers have - a competition for resources.  Having more stuff is better than not having stuff.  And the people with more stuff want to keep that stuff and not give it away.  This is lovingly called government by rich white dudes.

In their quest for global domination (oh, yeah, we’re on to you), Australia has a distinct and unfair advantage.  The old joke that pops up in memes has some truth to it.  All the wildlife in Australia wants to kill you.  Being able to learn that everything is out to get you at a young age is totally unfair to those of us that grow up thinking that everyone is our friend.

Crocodiles, check.  Want to kill and eat you.  Poisonous snakes, check.  They want to kill you before you kill them.  Kangaroos, check.  Getting drop kicked by a roo after it just finished watching a kung fu marathon on the telly, maybe not going to kill you but that doesn’t mean it isn’t trying.  Those giant ass huntsman spiders, check.  They might not be super deadly poisonous, but take unholy delight in scuttling around scaring the shit out of people.  Heart attack victims.  Koalas, check.  They want all the eucalyptus for themselves, and you dying of starvation is of no concern to them.  Desert scorpions, check.  There’s a reason that a version of heavy metal is called death metal.  The Scorpions and other metal bands want to kill you if you don’t play your records backwards and worship Satan and spend all your money on their records instead of buying food.

Of course, the point is not that literally everything wants to kill you.  Labeling any group and picking arbitrary victims is never a great idea.  But, that’s the internet for you.  Here’s a group that doesn’t really want your stuff and just wants to present a bad ass image that they will take your stuff if you mess with them.  Here’s a vocal group that actually does want to take your stuff and projects the image they don’t to hide that they really do.

There are some exceptionally good things about Australia that do not really want to take your stuff.  At a group level, simply look at Wollongong that has never in its history had anything bad about it.

Or does it?!?

Know Your Grifter Marketing Techniques - The Persecution Complex

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecutory_delusion

It is unfair to conflate the gematria and other disinfo peddlers with full blown persecutory delusions.  As disinfo peddlers, they are fully aware that they aren’t being persecuted.  It’s not even the main goal to declare that they are persecuted and usually is limited to declarations of being unfairly censored, so Censorship Delusions may be more appropriate for a name.

Within what has been called the Zachosphere, where the main money making hook is emphasis on sports gambling, claims of unfair a cyclical and common.  This is part of what I call the Shill Game.  And things are really hot and heavy right now with Shill Game activity.  The NFL season just underway is heavily emphasized since it’s the biggest cash grab for lower level grifting - flying under the radar of huge scams that somebody would actually report to the authorities.  You lost $100?  Sorry, I have a case where somebody got their retirement savings stolen.  No time for you.

One of the dangers of commenting on online grifting is teaching scammers to be better scammers.  However, what I’m seeing now is nothing new.  It’s merely a repeat of the old cycle from every NFL season since Zach started training other people on how many gullible people appear and fall for the techniques every single year.

As mid level people in the MLM scheme drop out, there’s a push to create new membership to replace them.  Hopefully, people dropping out haven’t been financially crippled before waking up on the lack of fulfillment.  These people tend to quietly slip away unnoticed.  Occasionally, they fire off some parting shots and then “walk away the better man”.  The Shill Game - those are the critics with the staying power.  They comb the Internet looking for what they can capitalize on to point a finger at.  You’re bad.  You’re a scammer.  And it’s not that I’m claiming the fault is your entire system of operation being bogus.  It’s my gematria or other grifting is better.  My sports picks are better.  Sports gematria is a waste of time - you need to focus on Jesus second coming.  Tired of losing money at sports?  My cryptocurrency gematria can suck your money away, too.

The Shill Game has a lot of advantages, one of the largest being decades of being trained by social media that actual persecution and censorship does not exist.  You’ve already groomed a crop of people that have not gained fulfillment long term with the constant wrong predictions.  Among these people are some with genuine feelings of persecution.  After turning to conspiracy as an outlet to vent their dissatisfaction with the way that life has turned out, they have been given some positive feedback - missing from real life since in real life they are displaying undesirable qualities.  The Shill Game is a great way to get somebody fired up to switch teams.  Think of it as a small scale Ron DeSantis vs. Donald Trump.

Shill Game content incorporates a lot of persecution material.  Just last night Zach’s livestream included a caller who claimed that he’s obviously being censored because he’s so close to that truth and the evil powers are tired of him being such a nuisance.  That’s exactly the reaction Zach was looking for.  Someone so closed minded on how gematria doesn’t work and willing to call in to his livestream to get the cult leader Attaboy!.  The persecution content is an appeal to others who instead of a common bond of race, religion, social class, there is a kinship of being told you’re wrong.  Often.

Persecution content is a display of hypocrisy in all its unholy glory.  Memory holing past content is easy.  “I never said” that an easy defense to prior disinformation.  Videos do get taken down from YouTube, just after a lengthy lag time after getting reported and only if it’s a serious infraction.  They are more likely to monetize a video with sports gematria by slapping a Draft Kings ad than admitting that maybe there’s some fraud going on.  And there’s an unwritten rule, as soon as a video gets taken down, or even a channel lost for a third strike, you MUST whine about being censored.  And you can even take down your own material and claim censorship with nobody being the wiser.

There’s some lingo common in the persecution content.  Shill, gangstalking, Big Tech censorship, somebody is declared an “agent” of the evil empire.  As these words and phrases are thrown around it’s fairly easy to see how hypocritical and hollow the claims are.  Not only has Zach not been booted off the Internet completely, a fairly easy thing to accomplish for a massive, well funded evil empire, he ran the live stream simultaneously on two different YouTube channels.  Another evangelical gematria channel recently claimed regret for saying something he probably shouldn’t have that resulted in a YouTube channel strike.  Proceeded to promote the already existing back up channel, never missed a day of new content, then returned to the main channel after “being gone” in his own words.  New people digesting conspiracy grifting content for the first time do not pay attention to anything other than the new notifications popping up today.

In the meantime, in addition to feelings of persecution, these people do have other more mundane interests.  Maybe grandkids, gardening, music, of course sports, other things not harmful that make them happy.  The occasional touching grass.  It looks like the algorithms don’t involve any separation from the weirdness with the innocuous.  It gets mixed all into a big blender of mish mashed recommendations.  Your one of the few people that likes ocarina music?  Here’s somebody that has 20 ocarina music videos from 12 years ago.  Here’s their recent election was stolen content on their channel, too!  Have a nice day!

If nothing else, I hope you are now awakened to the dangers of ocarina music.  Every word has multiple gematria values that you are allowed to pick and choose from, ignoring what you like and don’t like.  And there are people that do not care that it makes no sense to claim ocarina and Michelle Obama have the same value.  These people are digesting confirmation bias grifting content focused on their feelings of persecution and how much they hate the damn liberals.

Internet Grifting - Links And Notes

The Internet, and social media is chock full of insincerity aimed at making a quick buck.  Here’s some other resources.

https://medium.com/in-the-light/they-rely-on-your-insecurity-a8fff563603b

The thought leader connects the audience through an identity aspect:  nationality, race, gender, political leaning, generation.  The thought leaders belief in the message being delivered is not required and not necessary to be consistent on a day to day basis.  Spontaneous emotional reaction is the desired result.

http://extension.msstate.edu/news/feature-story/2005/modern-day-grifters-use-internet-scams

“Before the Internet, grifters were criminals who moved from town to town, seeking easy targets for money scams.”  Outdated (2005) now, instead of emails the message is presented on social media.  Mass emails require a response and further work to vet the target.  People readily let their feelings about emotional issues be known on social media.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Grifting

https://www.nylon.com/life/most-iconic-internet-grifters

Infamous grifters.  Not directly using the Internet for the grift, but name recognition with an Internet/social media presence goes a long way before people figure out you’re up to no good.

https://nccriminallaw.com/what-is-a-grifter/

Point #1 Lawyers are expensive.  Better to learn about the scams and not get conned in the first place.

Point #2 The scammer will ask you to do a small favor.  Like starting off small with things like commenting and liking YouTube videos.  This identifies someone with some sincerity in belief of the scheme instead of a casual observer; someone worth giving more one on one attention to.

Point #3 This firm will defend you if you’ve been unjustly accused of being a grifter.  Of course.  Social media isn’t going to step up and identify who is a free speech true believer vs. a person having a single bad day that said something out of character.  Having a lot of money for lawyers goes a long way for being determined to be right even when you aren’t.

https://www.amazon.com/Hype-Scammers-Grifters-Internet_and-Following/dp/133501649X

So scared of the Internet but you want content about the scams?

https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/07/grifters-con-artists-7.php

The best con artists know more about psychology tha you do.  More than some psychologists.  For a good idea of how this plays out in a romanticized fictional setting, watch the movie House of Games.

https://www.weststeincard.com/private/blog/avoid-internet-scams/

Sports gematria - the fake product is the illusion of gambling success.

https://time.com/6124874/2021-the-year-the-grift-kept-giving/

“…a grift economy so embedded in our daily lives we barely notice.”

https://moguldom.com/335167/documentary-shows-instagram-influencers-faking-and-grifting-their-way-to-internet-fame/amp/

The lure of starting off small and building a following to become the next great influencer.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/06/1115936712/how-alex-jones-helped-mainstream-conspiracy-theories-into-american-life

How being purposefully wrong about everything made Alex Jones rich and famous.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4110729-conspiracists-in-congress-republicans-go-off-the-deep-end/amp/

Most of the really off the wall ideas originate with conservatives.  Then left wing grifters have an excuse to overreact and do their own scamming.  With the grift economy so normalized and embedded, politicians simply do not care about being right anymore.

https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/alex-jones-grift-continues-givesendgo

Oh no, he’s not done yet.  Not by a long shot.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ace.20486?af=R

Whatever comes after Covid will be just as poorly handled as Covid was when wellness grifting is so popular.  Alternative medicine topics aren’t going away.  Ever.

https://apnews.com/article/covid-technology-health-government-and-politics-new-york-cfb56a95aec23dddbabcf3ebbe839f05

Belief in baseless conspiracies is edgy and cool, because your government sucks.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-roadshows-plagued-with-grifter-allegations

Pricey conferences for being fed a steady diet of disinformation.  What could possibly go wrong?

There are more of these.  A lot more.  During the remainder of this year and pre Election Day 2024 there will be even more.  A lot more.  The messages will be a combination of old favorites that won’t go away, like the 2020 election being stolen and new material based on current events.  But the tactics will be the same.

Scammer Ousted From Small Canadian Town

There’s some relevance to internet grifting in this story, but the meat of the story revolves in the live action events that played out a couple of days ago.  Queen Romana was told to hit the road.  The full story can also be found at the Sovereign Citizen Watch website as well as various MSM news outlets.

Since part of the marketing plan for internet scams involves outreach towards new, unsuspecting potential marks, internet grifters will travel to locations to make a pest of themselves.  Romana bounces around all over the place and makes a point of live streaming events to spin it to match her normal modus operandi.

A quick recap of that modus operandi:

She’s the legitimate Queen of Canada.

She issues royal decrees that you are not obligated to pay utility bills, taxes, mortgages, or anything that would mean less money to donate to her.

Occasional death threats.

Issues “Loyalty Money” as a reward that has less real value than Monopoly money.

Occasional alien spaceship weirdness - https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gb5y/queen-romana-didulo-citizen-arrest-qanon

In short, a wide array of typical crank magnetism just to attract attention, leading to internet activity to funnel towards a never ending need for donations, because these aliens don’t have South Park space cash in ample supply.

The articles relate how this incident did not go particularly well for her.  In about a six hour window the small town citizens heard she was coming, figured out what it was all about, organized a protest in record time and let her know she wasn’t welcome.  This restrained and calm reaction was handled remarkably well.  Kudos for the nonviolent response (which if happened would backfire as more ammunition for the, “I’m being persecuted” content that would follow) and its effectiveness for booting her out of town with a courtesy law enforcement escort.

Yes, that’s right.  The people of Kamsack did their own research on the Internet.  There’s enough real info out there if you know where to look for it and don’t shut your brain off from only listening to a message that you want to hear.

Hubbard is not a stranger to the live event making a pest of himself scene.  These do get turned into an immediate fundraiser ranging from a simple desperate need for gas (even though he’s taken a gazillion dollars out of the casinos) to finding an excuse for looking at a big ticket purchase like a building in OKC to “help the cause”.  It’s not easy to tell what details in these events are real and if there’s any manufactured details for fake persecution related sympathy.  He is a good showman.

With the meat and potatoes of Zach’s operation being sports - people love themselves some sports, there often is some unlucky mid level lieutenant in the MLM pyramid that either gets the bright idea on their own to make a live visit, or if they’ve been successfully pressured and courted to do more for the cause than simply liking and commenting on YouTube videos.  (Now would be a great time to ask for a pay increase since some long time supporters have dropped off the scene or hardly post new content anymore.  And that pay increase may be suggesting that they should be upgraded from zero to something more than zero).  Unlike Zach, who is more than willing to hop in the car and make a pest of himself at a shooting crime scene, these mid level folk who are treated merely as gullible free advertisement providers to Zach’s top of the pyramid, they might not feel comfortable and safe talking to an officer of the law who really doesn’t want to be interrupted in the process of doing his job.  So traveling to a ball game is the way to go.

People love themselves some sports.  So much that every major metropolitan area has a major sports gig available.  Usually within a couple hours drive of anywhere but the most remote parts of the U.S. or tiny Saskatchewan towns.  There’s no need to coordinate a group for the mental security of strength in numbers to go to NYC for 9/11 conspiracy grifting.  There’s no need to join a gathering with a cutesy but bad ass title like “Anarchadelphia”.  You can make a solo trip to the stadium on your own and you definitely will get the cult leader Attaboy! you crave.

Now is a good time to remind that even though a civil judgment has been passed and things have slowed down, Alex Jones is still doing everything in his power to not pay up.  These things take time, more time than they should, but as the evidence mounts up on the unforgiving and not forgetting Internet there will be a point sometime where people will simply not be interested in bogus sports picks.  You are perfectly within your nonviolent civil rights to send a message to your local sports team management.  “My right to the pursuit of happiness by enjoying a ball game was infringed by some scammer in the parking lot.  Please do something about that.”

Or you could just ignore it and let your curious teenager do his own research after the incident and roll the dice they don’t get involved with something worse than gematria, aka Conspiracy Lite.

Know Your Gematria Manipulation - Dropping Digits

 

Supposedly, there is an old rule in gematria about dropping zeroes.  Superficially this makes some sense in the sense of zero meaning nothing.  How this rule plays out in practice while actual decoding is more appropriately worded as:

“I got a number I didn’t like, but it’s so close to a number I was looking for and I haven’t gotten any attention from the cult leader in awhile, so imma jus’ gonna say this is close enough and drop whatever digits I want.”

People that decode like this are looking for trouble.  They are dead set on the evil number of the day, however that number was manufactured.  A plane crash killed 117 people?  Date numerology is 17?  Close enough.  Totally unrelated news story with a picture of a license plate containing 177?  Close enough.  If only this was based on Sacred Basic Math instead of Sacred Geometry, what a better place the world would be.

Whether guided into searching for a number or just randomly fucking around with a gematria calculator app on your smartphone, this kind of decoding is encouraged and labeled as doing your own research.  The goal of the practitioners who knowingly put out disinformation based on gematria is twofold, with the one reason being psychologically subtle and scarier. 

The first an easiest to understand, if you are looking for a number, given a full set of digits 0-9 and an arsenal of manipulation techniques you WILL find a number you are looking for.  The real challenge in gematria is to not find a match when manipulating.

More importantly, do we really want and need a bunch of aggressive personalities on social media learning that it’s OK to make up any rule they want to justify their actions?  Conspiracy theorists are looking for hidden truth, evidence buried so deep it hasn’t been uncovered yet.  What better way to be the discoverer of the smoking gun by uncovering the truth by changing the rules to always be right?

The Qanon decoding and MAGA is right about everything crowd is far from dead.  I just watched a video a bit ago from a commenter on one of Dan’s videos.  The plus side, she did correctly state that we shouldn’t jump to label someone as everything doesn’t fit inside a nice and easy package.  On the downside she says she’d rather hang out with patriots than liberals, disregarding that liberals can also be patriots.  If she’s following that account for leadership she’s ass deep in content that is “I’m going to just ignore when I’m wrong or make up a new rule to justify being wrong.”

Let’s flesh out the screenshot wrongness other than the insinuation that 1666=666.

There are three different ciphers on the screenshot instead of just typing the list of only 1666 decodes.  That’s being wrong twice as often as being right from the get go.

Bad grammar counts.  A United States?  Uggh.  If it was talking about the US as a modifier, “a” is correct as in “a United States citizen”, but that’s a stretch.  Don’t even get me started on the one about the breast.  Double uggh.  It’s complete gibberish.  Qanon decoders still yammer on about TRUMP USING ALL CAPITALS and misspelling simple words like “stollen”.

Keep Henry, Charles, Albert and David from being in the same room.  They morph into the Antichrist Voltron style.

Starry Starry Night isn’t too bad.  It is the alternate title of a Don McLean song.  But what about the “Hush hush hush hush hush hush hush” I saw a couple days ago.  Just repeat the word until you get the number you like.

We started with a well known evil number of 666, and somebody got interested in 1666 being close enough.  And presented us with more ways to break anything resembling a rule and insinuates it’s not just Ok, but even desirable to break the rules.

Escaping The Conspiracy Mind Trap

 

Admittedly I do a terrible job of covering one facet of the world of conspiracy theories - the hope that there are stories out there of those who finally figured out that what they were involved in is a sham.  Other critical information I follow is heavily skewed towards busting on the fallacies and reporting on when things go seriously wrong.  It seems like every day there’s somebody new openly seeking help because they decided that they were desperate enough to seek alternatives to common sense and logical reasoning, and now they are losing their home because they put belief in sovereign citizen pseudo law arguments.  So much so that they donate money to a cult leader instead of paying their bills.

The above is a snippet from a lengthy post from someone describing some key points that at least at times I try to reinforce.  And yes, it’s not me.  I have access to the source material and can, if needed, verify it’s a piece of work from someone else.

What good would knowing that do me in my everyday life? 

There are and will forever be lots of things wrong in the world.  Complaining about them and getting to the point where you are knowingly or unknowingly are manufacturing fake evidence to support your point of view doesn’t solve them.  And it does nothing to improve your attitude on how to help make the world a better place or at least struggle to cope with what’s going on around you.

The author of that is somebody who somehow, one day figured this out.  The writing is not conspiracy style writing which is often…gibberish.  The sentences are structured properly and the post in its entirety makes me think, “Hmmm, smart guy.  How did he ever get into conspiracy thinking in the first place.”  And that is one of the traps where conspiracy thinking perpetuates.  The “how could anybody be dumb enough to fall for that?” thinking outside the conspiracists.  There are a lot, billions even, of people that are not you.  And it’s impossible to know what background they emerged from that makes them act the way the do.

Unless they share some of the background.  And/or something resembling correct information with what’s really going on.  There’s a big focus in the conspiracy theorist world to project that you are doing your own research while you are actually just parroting the large volume of material that tries to throw shade on something resembling correct information.  This person, as I did decades ago, dismissed unproven, magical thinking that lead to my agnosticism.  Is there a God?  Actually, I don’t care.  I find the framework they operate in to be needlessly complicated.  Science does a lot better job of explaining what’s going on.  And I can still read a book or watch a movie for entertainment value instead of assuming there is a hidden message that if only I were a bit smarter I’d be able to figure it out.  And I’m a happier person for that.

One of the points I speculate on that I believe enough to aggressively defend my opinion on - there’s more impact when the right answer is discovered by actual independent research than by force feeding.  People don’t truly “wake up” by being forced to wear masks for a pandemic, or whatever.  They need to understand the reason behind it, to the point they voluntarily do it.  Mask wearing chosen on purpose as a topic that is truly debatable - I don’t know if that part of the Covid response was worthwhile or not.  I didn’t enjoy wearing it.  But there are a lot of things to be said about putting the fire out that is burning your house now before worrying about whether it was started by arson or an electrical short.  Or for that matter, whether the virus originated in a lab or zoonotically.

The world needs more powerful stories like those of this other author.  Of how conspiracy thinking is a dead end.  Whether he knows it or not, he’s thinking scientifically.  The scientific method of building on past knowledge.  Dismissing what doesn’t work.  Keeping what does work and tweaking it when new information comes along.  And sharing for peer review.  Whatever worked for him just might resonate with others and help them recognize the difference between short term conspiracy thinking and long term coping with the ugliness surrounding us.

In the meantime, I’ll keep operating busting on the grifting.  These are not particularly enlightening messages, but they are a starting point for awareness on how someone else’s fundraising efforts via magical thinking are likely not in your best interest.  So finishing off here with my Yelp review of the other content in the screenshot.

5 stars out of 5.  Will return for another visit.  Would share a beer with if at the same bar.

Why Conspiracy Theories And Not Something Else?

Starting off with the short answer - reverse trolling.

Reverse trolling is the process where somebody is having a more or less legitimate conversation about any topic, it can be a truly debatable important topic (death penalty, sending money to the Ukraine) or a trivial yet common talking point (Tom Brady is the GOAT) or any random conversation that is interrupted.  It is an invitation to fight back.

Whether the interrupter is a true believer or not is not important.  The goal, whether knowingly done by a grifter or someone who just enjoys spreading memes with no idea what’s going on is to spread the message around as much as possible.  The grifter leaders are looking for reactions.  A intelligent and angry retaliator armed with facts will unwittingly become a target for trolls pulled in by the reverse trolling messages.  And there are the people with the genuine replies, “I’m new to this.  Tell me more.”  The ones with the bright neon sign proclaiming, “I have cognitive biases, please take my money.

Empathy in internet is being diluted, it could be moral decline or even simply that since the internet doesn’t forget the old messages are still there.  Even on this recent 9/11 anniversary there were multiple revivals of the same old wrong information.  For the grifter, it’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about engagement.  More views = more reactions = more content = never ending feedback loop.  Some stories make more sense and might not go fully viral, but will at least get enough attention to spread around more than they deserve to be based on the quality of the content.

The choice to use conspiracy theories instead of other content has some great benefits.  Starting up a brand new religion, Scientology style cult stuff, is a lot of work.  The major religions are well entrenched.  And within that entrenchment is an ancient framework of BE A GOOD PERSON = ETERNAL REWARD.  BAD PERSON = ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.  The modern conspiracist bypasses the need to demonstrate any kind of empathy consistently.  I’M A GOOD PERSON BECAUSE I’M NOT A MEMBER OF THE BAD PEOPLE.  The modern conspiracist is excused from the awkward, time consuming and exhausting need to operate in life like a person that gives a fuck about anyone else.

The people who are deciding who the bad people are do not care how or why somebody is picked as a member of the bad people are.  The drive for engagement by people arguing is the marketing.  And it simply does not matter how arbitrary, not factual and even outright mind boggling stupid the engagement is.  People who have life experiences of being wrong a lot get positive reinforcement.  People who are correct get negative reinforcement.  And people in positions of political influence mostly don’t care to call out even the mind boggling stupid content for fear of impact on their paychecks.

Since the targets are often selected arbitrarily (use of gematria that can be anything about anybody, hand signals, colors of clothing, so and so didn’t actually die, where the natural disaster hits crisis actors, etc…) the topics are arbitrary based on current events.  There are a couple things that are ongoing topics and I’ll get to them in a bit.  But starting off early in the rabbit hole an experience of being fed a constant supply of wrong information changes the I’M A GOOD PERSON message into I AM RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.  Because there’s always an arbitrary reason to find anybody else, including your new found friends, to be wrong.

There’s no effective central leadership in the conspiracy world.  The closest that we’ve had to that is Alex Jones.  An effective conspiracy grifter will play both sides of that coin.  Copying whatever talking points he is blathering about for the day (Sandy Hook is a Hoax) while simultaneously scrabbling for market share of the grifting pie (Alex Jones is a shill!). There’s never been anyone to step in as a true leader who leads by ideas instead of leading by being better at fundraising.  Maybe one day someone will organize the loosely associated cliques to one time on one topic admit that they’ve gone too far.  But don’t hold your breath.

In the U.S., the big topics are the constitutional rights of free speech and guns.  One day people are arguing about their sports decode being better than someone else’s, and unchecked they find themselves arguing that Ivermectin works curing Covid because Facebook made their friend delete a post based on it being vaccine misinformation.  And that friend is a fan of a grifter who is making good money on constantly creating fundraisers for you to combat a nonexistent evil empire.  Don’t you dare take my gun away from me, you nonexistent evil empire.  I can tell you’re evil because you made an 👌🏾 hand sign once on this video that Zach put up yesterday.  We all know what that means!  Loved that message Zach, here’s a $10 PayPal donation in case my bright neon sign declaring my cognitive biases wasn’t enough! 

A rule for thee but not for me 

The misininformed social media public loves themselves a good argument about guns and free speech.  Gun violence is elevated from a tragic rarity to daily occurrences.  Positive reinforcement, to the point where people willingly divest themselves of their hard earned cash, is elevated to conflating aggressively marketed bad information with facts.  If everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, why do they love to tread on other’s right to happily live in a society where they don’t have to worry about dying from Covid or going to Walmart and getting shot because somebody else took getting cut off on the highway badly by somebody with “the wrong bumper sticker”?

My standard of leadership is somebody that behaves like a leader with thoughts, ideas and solid facts behind them. Somebody that recognizes that this arbitrary target selection process involves a lot of treading on personal rights.  Somebody that recognizes that being elected to a position of political power means more than a platform to fundraise for the next election cycle.

I’m not holding my breath.