I got better.
In the timeless classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the villagers do their best to think like baseless conspiracy believers. Confronted with the possibility of there being a witch in their midst, a wise knight queries them on what evidence they have. And a peasant (John Cleese), seeking an Attaboy!TM chimes in with how the foul witch turned him into a newt. As the other villagers incredulously look at him as he’s obviously not still a newt he offers his excuse.
So RFK, Jr. had a brain worm. But he got better.
And the media articles range from the factual accounts of actual brain worm sufferers to the, “What bs is this?” I personally think it’s bs, being far too convenient financially. Like Trump’s net worth being low when he needs to pay taxes, but high when it comes time for favorable loan rates it was a problem for divorce settlement but now that a presidency would benefit him he’s fine. But we mustn’t allow ourselves the luxury of assuming guilt when it’s possible for innocence. Which is kind of the whole point of the Python witch hunt scene. If one does have a parasitic brain worm it’s safe to assume you don’t want to just live with it. So benefit of the doubt.
But what you need to know about for improving your pattern recognition skills is a filing system that can retrieve nuggets of wisdom like this as needed. Giving someone a pass for a gaffe today doesn’t mean they continue to get a free pass when they make the same outrageous claims over and over and over. When you get to the point where you successfully predict an excuse is coming up, you’re in big trouble already. A serial fabulist is not going to settle down and suddenly change their ways without removing the brain parasite causing them to act like a lunatic.
The echo chambers of social media are designed for Attaboys! and not being challenged on outrageous excuses. If your cult leader of choice practices gematria, even if it’s just dabbling in it instead of relying on it as the main tool, you are stuck in an excuse making trap. Even if it’s not openly stated the point is to get you thinking that decoding today’s bad news has some impact on your ability to foresee the future. And really bold and obvious actual predictions based on gematria are non existent. The excuses are built into the system, starting with how even something as simple as a celebrity’s last name has dozens of values to pick from - accepting the one hit and ignoring the many misses.
There’s a reason that Hubbard’s critics have latched on to After the Fact Zach as the favorite nickname. His YouTube content and blog posts are filled with decodes that were done after the news story was announced. This bypasses the need to provide an excuse for a wrong prediction. He certainly didn’t do a decode well in advance that said RFK was going to claim he had a brain worm. Well, they all do it. All the decoders look at the daily news and report it after the fact. And the few times they predict an event it’s something simple like a single mid season sports game that nobody makes a big deal about. The bold predictions of life altering events are always after the fact.
Ironically, the pervasive pattern that the echo chamber listeners are missing on is the DAILY excuse. The entire point of their being there is the prediction of startling (yet vague) life changing events upcoming. The daily lie is that decoding yesterday’s news never provides an iota of predictive outcomes for tomorrow. And you have to wait until the day after tomorrow to find out what the cult leader said about tomorrow for your gematria fix.
It’s always amusing when a troll pins Hubbard down on his predictions. Although we’ll practiced on retaliatory tactics like deflecting and every logical fallacy available he has often been caught saying:
1). I’m the greatest predictor ever
2). I never said I could predict anything.
It should be
3). I predicted Team A would win. Team B won. I got better.
The simplest challenge, if you can get a word in edgewise in a fake debate, is to point out there’s no reason for his internet presence at all without a claim to be able to predict the future. The same for the synchronicity crowd. Stunning beyond coincidental things that happened yesterday don’t predict exactly what happens tomorrow that amazes you. Qanon is still waiting for something big to habben. And certainly the daily Obama is the Antichrist numbers haven’t successfully predicted the end of the world.
And once the leader of the clique admits to the entire point is actually about predicting, challenge them to start predicting instead of waiting till the next day. And watch that fail and watch the ludicrous excuses start flowing. There’s going to be a lot of newts.
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