Capital Grifting

That’s CAPITAL, not CAPITOL.  Although both may apply.

Ponzi schemes have a downside where some effort is required to pay off the earliest investors.  Since a pyramid scheme format is common it starts to look shadier and shadier as time goes on.  What’s a grifter to do when you want to make a quick killing and then move to the safety of a nice little beach safe from extradition?  You get involved in raising money to do something important, something so important and innovative that’s never been done before.  Which is using that money to make you look good and making it easier to raise money.  And what’s important is raising money to the point of never producing anything of value in return.  Raising capital for the sake of raising capital.  And pretty much keeping as much of it is possible.

The main story for today is coming up, but let’s see if any red flags come up.  Somebody is raising money that’s being invested in real estate by exposing how evil the government is.  And they’ve got a magic code called gematria that never produces consistent results and they ask for money to bu and pay for real estate on a daily basis.  Or try this one, you haven’t paid enough attention to your eternal soul.  You aren’t tithing enough and that will fix everything right up.  Or this one.  Donald Trump is evil, and only my podcast can shine the light on it and you need to give me money to finally stop him.  Or I’m running for Mayor as a Democrat, because Republicans are obviously evil and you need to give me money.

Everybody wants money even though a common theme is the source of their solution can be pitched as their hard work and superior brain power can be the solution.  For one example from the list, that Democrat mayor - doesn’t that job also have something called a salary?  And haven’t you noticed that campaign funds are in the news a lot for not being used for campaign funds unless pocket lining counts?

Your Ponzi scheme may require some return to early investors.  Make it look good for a while longer to get more investors googly eyed at the success of others.  People that can be lured by the promise of an unrealistic rate of return who don’t have a ton of money to start up with are a dime a dozen.  But going after investors with a lot of money - they tend to not be so frivolous.  Having some substantial cash reserves requires more common sense (or maybe born into wealth and/or grifting themselves.)  For the big score you need to raise capital with a vague product that you can just say, “Oops, sorry.”  And move on to another raising capital for the sake of raising capital.

Cryptocurrency is awesome for that.  But it doesn’t have to be.  So here’s the abbreviated story of Nikola, also named after Tesla.  Maybe on purpose named that so the false conflation of wealth with intelligence and the name Elon Musk can be dragged into the equation.

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

The company still exists, but at a shadow level to the glory days.

Over 2,000 a share down to $1.18.  Like a major league ball player who has stats that mirror stopping using steroids, a classic pump and dump drop.

The Nikola article on Wikipedia doesn’t do justice to all the supposed shenanigans that were involved in the pump phase.  At the time GM was ready to shell out 34 billion dollars, not a single operational truck had been sold.  Family members with no qualifications for a hydrogen powered vehicle were on the executive board.  A non working model was presented at a Ted style launch talk, because it was easy to fake the electronic display panel and frankly nobody expected a truck to be driving on a stage.  But the ultimate, as confessed by a disgruntled ex employee.  A promotional video of a Nikola “hydrogen powered truck” was made with the truck happily tooling along an empty stretch of highway.  Able to do so because of gravity.  The truck had been towed to the top of a hill and was released.  Supposedly trouble with the door was solved by taping it so it wouldn’t fall off while filming.

Yes, that’s a lot of work to fake a functioning truck.  But the rate of return doesn’t need to be faked for investors.  The rate of return is expected to be zero.  Investors left with an excuse in place of any kind of monetary reward worth talking about.

And since nobody trusts science anymore, it was financial research that finally blew the whistle and the scheme unfolded.  Hindenburg Research gets most of the credit for coming out with the story two days after the GM deal.

https://pistol-forum.com/showthread.php?54656-Expose-on-the-Nikola-hydrogen-truck-scam

You really want to get into something like this.  While the shit was hitting the fan claims were made that the negative press was generated by haters, not people with evidence.  Doesn’t that sound like, oh, “The casinos flipped the script because they’re tired of me taking all their money!!”?  Never wrong about anything.  And the aftermath seems like a typical white collar crime slap on the wrist.  Maybe now there’s some actual worthwhile product in the works, but do you really trust the company with that history?  A history of, “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”?

Gematria and Fire Insurance

 

Gematria has a lot of numbers that get thrown around with claims to deep meaning.  In reality the numbers end up being arbitrary.

Fire insurance has a lot of numbers that get thrown around with claims to deep meaning.  In reality the numbers end up being arbitrary.

Gematria sports decodes are fun until you lose a big bet and get burned.

Fire insurance can be fun to shop around and make you think you’re a financial genius getting a low rate, until your house becomes ash and you get burned.

There’s a lot of con men in gematria.

Pretty sure you get the point.

——————————————————————-

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pacific-palisades-fire-may-spell-an-end-cheap-homeowners-insurance-california-2025-01-09/

For example, owning a Lamborghini instead of a Mitsubishi Mirage.  If there’s an oopsie with the Lambo it’s obviously more costly to replace.  Therefore, insurance should be more expensive.  The area of the current wildfire already had the third most costly fire in California history.  And we know that the conditions are an accident waiting to happen.  There’s no reason that rates should be as low as they were.

The past week marked a change in some of the people I have to put up with on a semi regular basis, and that’s real life not online Direct Energy Weapon bullshit.  Finally, the Mangione shooting and insurance and A-list celebrity home loss and insurance have finally had an impact on some averagish pattern recognition skills.  Even volunteering up old thoughts about last years hurricanes and Asheville.  Like maybe, just maybe there’s something funny going on with this insurance thing.

Online, the assholes are out in full force.  Ghouls, the same that incessantly mocked the death of Brian Thompson also call out about the elite rich bastards getting what they deserve.  Excessive vigilantism and fires are bound to have collateral damage.  It’s just a little more obvious when it’s a fire being a fire and not picking its target.

The Sham of Gematria News Decodes

Most long time gematria decoders who look at news stories still dabble in sports on occasion.  Sports decodes serve as advertising for decoders primarily talking about bad news and vice versa.  The entire point is pumping out regular content.  An almost daily source of outrage porn clickbait.

Talented and seasoned odds makers love how people waste their time with gematria as it adds no value to the betting.  Their goal is to make about an equal amount of money wagered on both teams.  There’s no such thing as a skilled gematria decoder raping the casinos for huge amounts of cash.  Even their own decodes will often admit that an upcoming game has opposing narratives.  This quarterback has a 58.  That team name has a 41.  And I’m leaning towards this one, but watch out those evil bastards might flip the script.  Picking both teams is an art form.  Practicing your wording to disguise that you really have no idea what the outcome will be.  In the long run you can expect that after a decent sample size the sports decoder will average out to 50% and lose money based on the vigorish.

So there’s always a chance that a genuine prediction in advance will be right.  A chance that your heavily touted heavy favorite pregame gematria narrative will hit and you can and brag about.  And they do.  Boy do they hate having to downplay being wrong.  But when it comes to bragging about non sports predictions, now they literally bragging about a 0% success rate.

In my nearly a decade experience there has been no big non sports predictions that came true.  Every story, each and every single one is outrage porn clickbait based on events that already happened.  The other option is to be Nostradamus level vague and claim that you used the word red and fire engines are red and that meant California wildfire bullshit.  The reality of news gematria decodes is that they are all reverse engineered based on what was reported by other news sources.  And if you are reporting after the fact, it wasn’t a prediction.

Sports gematria fraud has some obvious red flags.  Like asking you for money.  Or picking both teams.  Or a hyper aggressive response to being challenged on being wrong about that playoff game between two relatively evenly matched teams.  The most common cover up is based on the close to 50% chance of being right.  The big red flag about gematria news narratives is the mere fact that the decode exists.  Technically, reporting after the fact is a 100% win rate.  But that’s only possible because it isn’t possible to not find a match of some sort.

From today’s headlines on one of my news apps.  Today is the 11th.  That surely means something for at least one of these movies.  SOCIETY OF JESUS = 56.  Bingo.  If you scrape the bottom of the barrel and use the EHP exception cipher on the Gematrinator calculator LA EVACUATION = 92, so our beloved Ernest actor has a wildfire connection.  Superficially that’s 100%.  But if you can’t miss, that’s no challenge at all and it’s 0%.  If you can’t make some kind of story about any headline, you really, really suck at gematria.

It’s galling to see people with obvious financial problems (they complain about the evil designated scapegoats all the time and how their lives and retirements are ruined) actually putting money down for fictitious bad news.  They’ve traded in the future for a couple of minutes feeling good about thinking they are right about tiny little numbers.

Two Tragic News Stories

Pizzagate Gunman
It seems like ages ago now.  This thing called Pizzagate, a flippant name for a rather dark and uncalled for series of events from the Alex Jones glory days.

Back when Alex was really on a roll with his Sandy Hook crisis actor bullshit there was a big and totally fake story going around.  “Free speech” demanded that equal time be given to a ludicrous story about how Hillary Clinton supposedly was involved in a pedophile ring run from the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor that doesn’t have a basement.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pizzagate

Going down the rabbit hole in this case meant radicalized by online disinformation. We haven't heard anything more about one of the main players in this until this month.  Edgar Welch, the man who was all fired up to take an assault rifle to a pizza parlor with no basement.  The man who never figured out that pretty much everything Alex Jones says is a lie to generate cash for his own pocket, was in a police incident January 4, 2025.

https://apnews.com/article/pizzagate-gunman-dead-police-shooting-north-carolina-81f0383fb55587350576b8265b7b5dd5

Often a selection of dodgy friends can be an indicator of selecting dodgy friends in real life.  Two people with open arrest warrants in the same car.  Generating not just initial law enforcement engagement, but a call for back up.  Usually a possession of a firearm by itself is a parole violation, but regardless we can be pretty certain that even  if not shot things weren’t going to end well for Welch that day.  Fortunately, the shooting was limited to Welch and not multiple officers, the driver and another passenger.

James Woods's House Burns Down
In case you need the background info, Woods is on the list of celebrities on the downside of a decent Hollywood career who absolutely cannot keep quiet about pro right wing, often extreme, talking points.  Right up there at the top of the list of celebs who just won’t give it a break.  Personally, I find only Kevin Sorbo to be more common a name that shows up by annoying pro left wing amateur pundits.  A source to mock instead of stopping at presenting the facts to counter what he said was wrong.  A situation that really doesn’t help to foster a sense of cooperation and generate effective, meaningful societal changes.

https://ew.com/james-woods-breaks-down-crying-after-la-home-burns-in-wildfires-8771479

As far Woods’s tirade about it not being climate change and his loss is because of “liberal assholes”, well, that’s exactly why he’s a target for left wing attack.  The reality is that this is 100% climate change related.  California is seemingly in constant drought alert status.  And what’s really changed lately is the winds.  Tiny sparks can travel fast and far starting new hot spots that catch hold of dried flammable material and spread.  Water reservoirs adequate for firefighting decades ago can’t keep up with the extreme number and size of 2025 era California wildfires.

As for irony, I’ve heard it reported that Woods’s home was uninsured.  And that’s the real tragedy.  He probably could afford it, but insurance companies will not offer it because *they know* the risk is too great.  Supposedly the uninsured status was mere months before the fire consumed his house.

Giving Woods some proper credit for behaving like a decent human being, note that he showed concern for an elderly neighbor with dementia.  That’s the kind of world I’d rather live in than a, “you had it coming to you asshole” type of world.

Facebook Gets Rid of Fact Checkers

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly74mpy8klo.amp

As your confirmation bias can find you the spin you want from some source on the internet, let me say I’m part of the group that believes they never really had fact checking in the first place.

Fact checking on social media has always been some kind of cruel joke.  You can come across the most mind bogglingly stupid ideas with no basis in reality and see that nothing ever gets done about.  Maybe it will be something that’s just a short term grift like magic glasses that cure color blindness, or maybe it’s something with further ramifications, like Covid disinformation.

Supposedly the paid fact checking companies (not keen on losing their paid job) are being replaced by a Twixter community notes style user participation format.  The reason - the bias of the fact checkers.  And we’ll get back to that.  As a former Twixter community notes author who spent the better part of two months noting let me tell you.  That doesn’t work either because of bias.  In the case of Macebook (if I call it Twixter I should probably do a mashup for Facebook/Meta) this change is more lip service than actual change.  Why spend money you don’t need to?  Operationally like health violations at the meat packing plant it’s often less expensive to violate the law, get fined, pay that instead of making expensive changes that cost way more.  Macebook ignoring small fry grift like gematria sports scams is nothing compared to the major advertising dollars at stake.  Global policies for all online grift with no regard to scale?  Cheaper to just ignore it and wait until the government slaps with a fine.  Which although it may seem hefty has obviously not stopped social media from ignoring things.  Like trying to overthrow election results.

I’ve seen the way the both sides political grift works over decades of pattern recognition.  There’s enough activity on both sides that neither really wants to disrupt the gravy train too much.  It works something like this.

1). Republicans up front talk small federal government, looking for deregulation and ridding us of pesky laws like paying taxes or regulated industries like making it safe to get on a Boeing commercial airliner.

2). Democrats up front talk about the common person being overburdened with a larger % tax burden because the rich never pay taxes or the commoner is a victim of poison gas from a train derailment.

3). Both can never agree on a middle ground and gridlock on actual change is the status quo.

4). Every four years the rabid bases make political campaign donations that get turned into personal profit despite laws to the country.  That’s on both sides.

And what we’ve been experiencing on social media is a grifter picking one side of the other to try and cash in.

About ten years ago, the Republican grift became more and more unhinged.  Like one of my favorite jokes from Steve Martin where you ask for the letter ‘m’ to be stricken from the English language.  Only now the bargaining table is asking for m and every letter that follows after it to be removed.  And to get something done, you may actually have give up on m to keep your precious w or else the gridlock shuts the economy down and doesn’t help anybody.

It’s not political bias to report that Fox News propaganda lies consistently when they actually do lie consistently.  If you have a pie chart with 75% side A lies correctly fact checked to 25% side B lies correctly fact checked you *should* have an independent media reporting 75% to 25%.  If anything those that openly call themselves Democrats can be accused of being too complacent.  We’re the party that’s not openly evil.  Go with is you not evil person.  Sorry about losing m, but what can you do?  No sense of urgency to the behind the scenes creation of getting rid of all the numbers as well as letters so you are in danger of losing w in the next round of negotiations.

As someone who leans left I’m allowed to be biased in my reporting.  What I’m not allowed to do is make stuff up and generally put a source in this blog to back up my stories.  If I want to talk about a woman forcing eggs back up a chicken’s privates then I can find it and source it.  I don’t need to make up “Haitian immigrants are eating pets” and then say sorry I was wrong.  Or double down and insist they still are.  Actually fact checking is an art of actually looking at both sides.  IF BOTH SIDES ACTUALLY EXIST.

But confirmation bias borne of lifelong indoctrination doesn’t work that way.  The knee jerk reaction, the emotional response to instantly reject the buzzwords from “the wrong side” kicks in and dismisses actual facts.

Twixter community notes will surely be a model that Macebook will follow.  And that pattern is that all meaningful fact checking will be gridlocked into nonexistent.  Trolls with an agenda will just downvote the actual facts check, claim it’s biased and not needed.  And it works.  Actual facts check checks are incredibly difficult to maintain when the illusion of bias can be forced into the process.  It has not been a happy time to understand things using critical thinking, logic and structured arguments for a long, long time when it can be hand waved away by an emotional based counterattack.

Landmine Goes Boom

 https://fsd.ch/en/landmine-goes-click/

Yeah, there’s even a movie called Landmine Goes Click.  There’s one of the better Doctor Who episodes where he steps on a Landmine.  The idea that you step on a landmine and get a chance to go Indiana Jones mode and place a heavy rock on it, step off, wipe the sweat off your nervous forehead and move on to the next part of your secret ops mission is pure Hollywood bullshit, and I’ll bet ya that you know someone that believes it’s true.  And that they believe it so much they will defend it if you bring up how it’s wrong.  If you search for How Landmines Work or Landmine Myths on YouTube you can find lots of debunks.

But who are the people that fall for this mythinformation?  If you have somebody really, really not bright delayed fuses and pressure thresholds and landmine tech in general is so far beyond them it’s like magic or vaccine literacy.  In a lot of cases, the more dangerous people are the ones that are not the really stupid ones.  More dangerous to the spread of misinformation is someone of average intelligence.  Someone who would, for example, remember they’ve seen an episode of NCIS with the Landmine click trope, three movies with the trope AND had a two hour discussion at the bar where they and their echo chamber reinforced that they have seen it’s this way.  Instead of instant detonation and removal of limbs from torsos, landmines are kind enough to give you a grace period to say your past mental goodbyes or even escape.

You can be decently smart, but still have problems with structuring your logic trail.  Here’s a link with eight traits that are associated with susceptibility to misinformation and disinformation.  

https://hackspirit.com/traits-of-people-who-are-most-likely-to-fall-for-misinformation-on-the-internet-according-to-a-psychologist/

Relax and absorb some of that content.  It’s not like you’ve stepped on a landmine and need to make an immediate emotional response.

Know Your Grifter Tactics - Forcing the Issue vs. Improving the Math

I much prefer the former, where the scammer has taken the initiative and maybe even introduced something new and innovative.  It’s been said that Charles Ponzi and his famous scheme was maybe more copycat activity than originally his own idea.

Gematria is heavily based on working the math to your favor.  Combined with an uncaring social media algorithm process and limited, essentially nonexistent, moderation procedure it’s easiest to just float out a story and let the random first time viewer get curious.  Letting nature take its course.  Based on math some of those curious people will be susceptible enough to keep the curiosity level up enough to dive deeper into the rabbit hole.  Deep enough to eventually start emptying their bank account for the sake of something with questionable entertainment value.

The story of today’s math side begins with the death of Aubrey Plaza’s husband.  I’m a big Aubrey fan, her comedic talent stems from a spontaneous and unfiltered immediate response with some of the most wacky nonsense.  The odds that some other would be comedian has ever said the same thing are close to zero.  A bad comedian would make an obvious and unfunny joke about her name and maybe a shopping plaza tie in.  And other bad comedians would do the same.

Here’s a screenshot of a skeptic commenting on the video, correctly pointing out that it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.  And a snarky reply from a gematria fan.

As an Aubrey fan I’m amazed that I didn’t even know she was married before this story broke.  Never heard of the husband before yesterday.  There’s math points to this.  A significant amount of the “decoding” relates to Aubrey’s name recognition.  Math points gained for death.  People who are into conspiracy theories prefer a good death story.  Death means ritual sacrifice, not succumbing peacefully in your sleep to old age.

And then beyond the obvious forcing the math into your favor the story starts to break down.  The decode switches gears to the NBA, as a previous narrative was about the NBA.  But it’s not about a death in the NBA or even a loved one of an NBA player’s family number as is often the case.  Someone was injured, as if a sports injury is some uncommon and strange and wondrous event.  That’s some high quality grasping at “synchronicity” straws.

A search engine has the AI overview show that there’s 5.6 to 7.0 injuries per 10,000 game minutes.  And that’s injuries serious enough for the loss of game time.  Let’s call that six per 10k.  30 teams x 82 game schedule x players per team = 590,400 game minutes without overtime.  And at a rate of 6 per 10,000 minutes that’s 354 injuries per season.  Why wait around for the occasional death, even of a famous ex NBA star when an injury was newsworthy?

The poster of that question is correct.  There is no significance other than random and rather stupid and arbitrary connections to things that have no meaningful connection.  Compare that throwing around some low statistical value two to four digit gematria decoding to the effort put into the next story.

———————————————————————-

In what is sure to be a running joke for quite some time here, the story of Mary Bateman (link at the end) was executed for murder and fraud in the early 19th century for what would land her a cabinet administration post in the upcoming Trump term.

Mary apparently enjoyed stealing and she certainly would be into gematria today.  She latched on to another common gematria topic, the end of the world prophecy.  Selling useless trinkets - pieces of paper as admission tickets to heaven, because a chicken was laying prophetic eggs.  The first egg her magic chicken produced had clearly inscribed upon it:

                       Crist is coming

Apparently the misspelling wasn’t intentional, but the chicken added a nice touch there.  Who would expect a chicken to have perfect grammar.  More inscribed eggs kept following from the same chicken.  And amazingly these weren’t just proclaimed to be coming from that chicken, it was actually, really coming from this one magic chicken.

Fortunately some skeptical sleuths figured something was amiss and did a stakeout operation to see if they could uncover what was really going on.  Chicken lays egg.  Words inscribed on the calcium based eggshell with the mild acid in vinegar.  A little creative animal abuse forcing the eggs back up the magic chicken’s privates.  Chicken protrudes the now magic messaged egg again.  It’s a miracle!!

Now that is some high quality scamming showing a degree of innovation and time investment far removed from Aubrey Plaza = Sports Injury because of tiny numbers.  The gematria crowd leaders are pretty much just phoning in their performance at this point.

https://www.iflscience.com/how-the-yorkshire-witch-scammed-1806-leeds-with-apocalyptic-chicken-eggs-and-simple-chemistry-59356

New Currency Slogan - In Nothing We Trust

Time for a trip down memory lane looking at what life was in a comparatively technologically basic and boring.  Then we’ll walk into the Yotta scam and cryptocurrency.

When I was growing up and playing outdoors without boiling alive was a thing, the peer pressure most fun thing ever was hanging out at the mall.  Dispensable income was at an all time high.  A lower middle class family could afford a home.  And the mall had all the fun stuff to blow your extra money on.  Tacky Spencer’s Gifts black light posters, dropping quarters into Space Invaders, the food court that actually had all food establishments, the fountains, the elderly morning exercisers in the air conditioning.

And the kiosks.  The little spots outside an actual mall store, clogging up the walking areas.  And a super popular  business for those was the growing cell phone market.  Because at that time people having a rotary dial phone was still a thing.  And despite the gematria of all that nostalgia not having changed the thought of playing arcade games, eating greasy pizza that wasn’t dropped off by DoorDash or dialing zero to talk to a human being that wasn’t dedicated to a single business (dialing anything at all instead of pressing smartphone keys) is alien to multiple generations.  As for the cell phone kiosks, there was a strange lack of endorsement coming from the sellers.  They weren’t leasing space in the mall long term.  Just a cheapo little kiosk where the salesperson badgered anyone who walked by with anything resembling a gaze they might be interested in purchasing a cell phone.  And if you got your first phone there, odds are they used the old technology of the land line instead of their own product.  Isn’t that a little odd?

Now the internet is the mall.  Empty commercial office space whose best purpose now is money laundering and tax loss write offs.  And the scammers are screaming for your business.  And while you’re here on the internet looking at ads for $300 glasses that supposedly cure color blindness, taking horse dewormer for Covid and pretending you can win money based on a quartback’s birthday and the team mascots gematria, why not USE THE LATEST AND GREATEST CURRENCY!  See here good people, step right up and buy bitcoin with actual money and pretend that it’s real money!!

These are your new kiosk salesman, who aren’t really using their own product.  Not by choice, don’t get me wrong.  There’s a lot of legitimate thinking that crypto is awesome.  But as we stand right now cryptocurrency is a misnomer.  It is not actually a currency.  This is from the definition of what a currency actually is:

Currencies are issued by governments and central banks and are usually accepted at face value.

Currently there are no countries that let you pay your federal income taxes with crypto.  You can whine all you want that your jar of fake pennies is legal tender but the would be receiver doesn’t have to accept them.  And if governments don’t accept crypto, why should anyone else?  So far there are three U.S. states that do:

https://www.globalgovernmentfintech.com/detroit-cryptocurrency-tax-payments/#:~:text=Colorado's%20revenue%20department%20began%20to,years%20ago%20(September%202022).

Utah uses a third party processor.  Sure.  Because nothing says actual trust like claiming you take it but needing to actually jump through more layers to get the transaction done.  When these extra layers are added it’s a whole other level of things that can go wrong.

https://youtu.be/SAFlRSftffc?si=jltiH5WhMVNOm9nr

Concurrent with the Honey scam I just talked about, the Yotta scam recapped in that video details people losing their life savings based on financial tech related grift.  Do you really need another layer of South Park style “Oops, it’s gone!” banking instead of government insured stamp of approval on your money actually being money?  Every cryptocurrency stash is potentially a ticking time bomb of, “No, it’s not $250,000 you have, it’s worth $0.”

I take comfort that my financial advisor firm does not delve into cryptocurrency at all.  The official line is that it’s too speculative which I think is politically correct speak for “this is not actually money.”  When things go wrong with deregulation, lack of regulation and Ponzi scheme political lobbying for less regulation - they go spectacularly wrong.

Mild Inconvenience - The Fifth Horseman

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2025/01/01/sugar-bowl-postponed-georgia-notre-dame-rescheduled-latest/77379447007/

For the newcomers:

News Headline + Manufactured Scapegoat + Financial Hook = Social Media Conspiracy Theory

When I first wrote the Rationalwiki article (yes, it’s woefully outdated now) one of the things that struck me in my previous research was how it was regarded differently by the users.  Some people were hardcore the evil cabal must be stopped at all costs.  Some didn’t give a rip at all about that and only thought the idea of a magic money making system was important and the news was a waste of time.  And naturally with confirmation bias being involved most fell somewhere in between.  Leaning towards one or the other, but at least willing to drop a comment on the videos and blogs showing awareness of both.

Within that framework, the consistency of the importance of tying in the date with the news headline was beaten to death.  The cheapest add on to the narrative.  Like all the other gematria related topics there’s multiple ways to calculate it, it can be ignored if it “misses” the target, and even the most brain dead troglodytes know what the current day is.  Not even really gematria, but another easily mutated number that thrives on the pervasive attitude that any two or three digit number has some cosmic significance despite its overwhelming triviality.

And we can see that in the grand scheme, nobody really cares about college football.  The only real usefulness is something like “John Smith went to USC” and that makes its way into a NFL decode.  The AI response to a search for COLLEGE FOOTBALL GEMATRIA gives a response that there’s not much going on.  One of the top hits is a YouTube short about —> last year <— instead of a genuine prediction for this year:

Now ask yourself some questions.  If sports are so important to the scapegoats plans, and the dates these events are planned out in advance are so important, why did we not hear about the Sugar Bowl postponement in advance?

Because scams don’t work that way.  If it really worked we would have known the details before it happened and we’d be in a weird Hollywood time travel story.  Reporting on the event after the event is over is so much safer than going out in a limb.  Nobody, literally nobody, had a decode in advance that focused on the Sugar Bowl would be delayed because of a terrorist attack in the early New Year hours.  Why are you even wasting time giving any credibility to someone that claims predictive powers that never actually predicts anything?

In the social media actual research circles there’s a reminder that gets posted to people new to the disinformation sphere.  Don’t spread memes, links and rumors until the actual authorities sort through and it’s closer to being the real story.  The internet has been, and will be always, a machine that churns out viral disinformation.  Focusing on outrage, a lot of which is targeting those with an easily triggered emotional reaction who have already been involved in some dubious monetary venture.  Hatred is far more profitable than actual knowledge.

As for the Gematria Effect News blog, that also shows the disdain for college sports and the jump on to the viral news bandwagon.

Any would be Sugar Bowl decoders, working off the January 1st blog info are still operating on the game being played last night.  The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Mildly Inconveniencing sports decoders with wrong dates.

A recent video from Hubbard laid claim to his alleged significant other wanting him to resolve to do less angry ranting in the New Year.  Could be, but highly unlikely.  That’s the marketing strategy.  That’s what the people are signing up for and donating for.  Someone to be as belligerent as possible, an alpha male wannabe who revels in attack more than substance to the message.  There’s no updates on wrong information.  There’s no time to revise a blog post to mention that the Sugar Bowl date, something that based on the magic system, should be supremely important while cranking out an hour long video about other topics intended to distract the easily impressed.  We’re closer to him being a cabinet member than him giving up on being eternally angry.

Predicting Sports Winners With Gematria - 2025 Edition

 After nearly a decade the Gematria Grift has gotten over its growing pains and settled in to some more predictable patterns.  As for the material within these posts, the overall value is a mixed bag, that said being based on the popularity of the individual posts.  Although any scam topic with a cognitive bias based hook is a target for gematria grifting, the sports section is by far the most targeted.  For the record, some other topics include religion/spirituality politics, and the stock market.  All that will be said about those in this post is that the goal is to cultivate existing cognitive biases and nurture them into a black and white binary response.  Religion A good, Religion B bad.  Left/right leaning  = good vs. Left/right leaning = bad.  Investing in this equity = good, while involvement in any other investment = bad or at least nowhere near as lucrative.

In sports, the binary outcome is brutally clear.  Two teams play and one of them wins other than the sports that have ties built into the structure.  Although the making a prediction angle is downplayed at times make no mistake - the entire goal of the gematria grift is to falsely portray the narrator as some sort of magician with amazing predictive powers.  A source that has acquired special knowledge that is somehow able to use that to win, if not all the time, so often that it’s far better than flipping a coin.

The Reality Check

If this person was actually able to use gematria/numerology for these predictions they wouldn’t be hawking their system on a YouTube Channel, blog or a book they’ve written.  They would simply work their magical system, make a crap load of money and have no need to keep crying out for Patreon donations.  The biggest red flag for gematria grift is asking for donations instead of self sufficiency.

Faking Predictions - Picking Both Teams
It shouldn't work, but it does.  The entrenched old guard that has been making gematria gambling content has settled into rarely making genuine predictions.  The easiest way around that is to pick both teams and have a new batch of followers who haven’t been able to figure that out.  The format is something like this:

I like Team A because there’s a narrative for the quarterback to throw his 23rd touchdown of the year and Team A’s name = 23.  But notice that Team B could win their 11th consecutive home game.  The 11th prime number is 31 and Coach Smith’s last name = 31.  So I’m leaning towards Team A, but you know how the casinos love to flip the script on Coach Smith games.

Yes, they actually talk like this.  And the biggest addition not in that example is date numerology, something that isn’t even technically gematria.  The narratives ramble on, grasping at any straws that match any team name, key player name, date numerology and anything else that can even loosely be associated with a team that’s about to play.  From a cognitive bias standpoint, this justifies being wrong.  It masks the being wrong under a disingenuous shade of, “I was only wrong because they are out to get me/us.”  An extremely common subplot to this is to find a narrative for the team the bookies favor when not making a prediction that factors in the point spread.

After the Fact Recap
You may not be able to force any word to literally match any number with gematria, but you can certainly force the overall narrative for a binary outcome to match what story you want to tell.  And to pick up fake, “look how great I am at predicting stuff” points, nothing works better than a synopsis when the game is over.  If you are a scammer using gematria grift and you can’t make a believable post mortem fake prediction, it’s time to find another hustle.  The daily news serves as advertisement for sports prediction grifting.  Whatever big headlines show up is analyzed after the fact, giving the audience a taste of the fake predictive power of gematria.  And needless to say these headlines were never actually predicted, unless they are also a binary outcome like Trump being elected instead of Clinton.  Conspiracy theory content is a great topic to add as an alternative to the mainstream media reporting of some actual facts.  People with a gambling problem that don’t understand the fairly simple nature of predicting something that’s already happened are probably significantly biased politically.

User Participation
Gematria is really good at one thing.  And that’s getting people involved.  It’s perfect for someone who is fully invested in a personal belief that they are right all the time.  Perfect for someone with a hatred of actual research and how pesky facts get in the way of being stupendously wrong about a lot of stuff, including major things like personal finances.  My estimate is that within two weeks if not just a few days a new to gematria sports decoder is up and running and making their own predictions based on their own confirmation bias.  The marketing strategy of the old time grifters is well established.  Always attack science/experts/smarter people.  Give out words of encouragement to newcomers.  Never admit you’re wrong and always claim that gematria is valuable despite overwhelming evidence it is worthless.  This is the same tactics used by cults and MLM pyramid schemes.  When people do drop out after gematria fails them, they (mostly) do so quietly, embarrassed by being scammed.  And there’s always a newcomer or hundred to take their place, eager for those words of encouragement missing from non internet life.

Social Media
Do social media sites care?  What about their stated community guidelines stating that fraud is illegal?

The answer is no, by a long shot.  Lip service.  Any enforcement of gematria grift is completely arbitrary.  Any loss of a channel on YouTube or deleted post is done on purpose by the narrator to play the victim card, or just the once in a while social media moderation team having a bad day.  Gematria YouTube channels can be and are monetized.  Despite clear guidelines that channel removal means you can’t start a new one there are lots of resurrections.  The almighty dollar rules.  And that means it’s up to the viewer of gematria content to recognize on their own that they are dealing with dishonest people.

The Honey Coupon Scam

 

https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk?si=SKcdaj_3s6QmADBg

Some people’s bullshit detectors are better than others.  Based on spending a lot of time around obvious bullshit I see a lot of people with nearly nonexistent radar detectors.  Even more annoying, the crowd that understands some of the most obvious grift but doesn’t ever get to the advanced level of getting inside other people’s heads - some people can and do fall for even the most asinine scams.  If nobody fell for it, the scam wouldn’t exist.

Trying to explain this to someone, trying to encourage them to warn and prepare others is met with:

You refusing to believe that Flat Earth, chemtrails or gematria content is possibly ripping people off doesn’t stop it.  “Nobody is stupid enough to fall for that!” shows personal ignorance and is not a powerful condemnation of the people that have been the target of grift.

In a nutshell, the Honey scam worked like this -

Bigger YouTube channels also make money by promoting advertisements outside the YouTube ads.  A product or service often related to the channel (e.g. replica miniature weapons for a battlefield history channel) will take a time out to promote the ad.  Having a large following of biased (not necessarily in a bad way) provides a ready made audience for the adjacent product.

It doesn’t have to be specific to the channel, and Honey coupons were that type.  (VPN ads are another common generic ad association).  Honey would spend money going directly to influencers to talk about the coupons.  On the surface the deal operated like this:

You load Honey on to your device, and when you go shopping Honey automatically kicks in and finds the best coupon available resulting in maximizing the discount you get at checkout.  No more fuss searching for yourself, after loading Honey it’s in the background.

This is a variation of the too good to be true money making ideas.  Honey itself can’t scale up their own purchases to take advantage of their own product to make it worthwhile.  It needs a mass audience.  And that’s the red flag that finally brought it down.  The math didn’t make sense - spending millions of dollars to advertise to get back a portion of revenue invested.  Some people started digging and then the reveal of the scammy nature went viral.  The app was faking the amount of some discounts.  And sometimes inserting itself as the user that clicked last and stealing the whole discount.  But, watch the video for the full detail.

A gematria sports betting channel is more of a self contained operation.  No channel has been big enough to get the attention of the marketing deals the bigger influencers are involved in.  But there is constant trolling from other low level grift.  For years now the ads YouTube puts with the videos that qualify for monetization are sometimes pretty obviously BS.  Those advertisers don’t have the millions to invest in marketing like Honey had.  Just because you don’t believe people are dumb enough to fall for it doesn’t mean others aren’t.  Honey was able to get away with it for quite awhile including pulling the wool over the eyes of some smarter than average content creators.

Greatest Unintentional Weapons - The Statue of Liberty

When you do finally grow up a little bit and honestly look at what’s going on with your political leaders it’s shocking to see how much money is more important than abstract things like rights and freedom.  Sure, money itself is abstract - but like getting a t-shirt for joining that charity drive there’s something physical to latch on to.

The Statue of Liberty.  A beacon of hope for immigrants.  Run away from the troubles in your old place of birth and trade them in for the American Dream of corporate sabotage, oligarchs in control of housing and health care, non stop harassment rooted in bigotry.  But if you play your cards right you can actually VOTE for those that want to take advantage of you instead of just armed goon squads assaulting the houses of political power.  The U.S. has a zero percent success rate with that, not like it hasn’t been tried.

In theory, the Statue of Liberty was a nice gesture.  That is beyond the symbolism of the ending of Planet of the Apes.  A movie so overwhelming with social allegory that it’s one of those tests you can present to see where someone stands on the political and intellectual spectrum.  If you really like talking apes shooting guns and think the Statue represents just a large recognizable object from history - you probably loved the future installment where the mutants wage war and lots of shit gets blown up.  If you actually understand that the apes are hugely racist enslavers as a stand in for how humans treat others for the differences that shouldn’t really matter, and the Statue ending is no accident as a symbol for immigration and “otherness”, congratulations.  You might actually get more from films - a constant source of ongoing education if you watch the right ones.

I do both.  Background noise where an alien monster slaughters inhabitants of a small town and that’s the sole purpose of the movie.  Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country at the other side where they try to beat you over the head with its message of not just spaceships flying around.

I still like to think that France gifting the U.S. was a sincere gift instead of what it represents now.  Now, it’s an embarrassment.  A relic that didn’t age well.

https://jasoncochran.com/2010/11/18/the-statue-of-liberty-is-an-embarrassment/

The same way that CPAs having course work and seminars on ethical standards, the standards have now turned into some kind of running joke where politicians and even Supreme Court justices are openly taking bribes because, well, everyone else is doing it.  The idea was good, it just hasn’t aged well.  And that’s because of the age old concept that deep down so many people are complete and utter assholes.

The magic words are etched into the Statue.  Words that indicate that you are now an American, part of the bestest tribe the planet has ever seen.  Becoming an immigrant is cool and the best idea you ever had.  Until you get to modern America where it’s just, “I tolerate you as long as I can exploit you for slave labor.  Face it bucks, your skin is the wrong color, your god is the wrong god, or some other arbitrary wrongness can be assigned to you.”  I was here first, I’m better than you.  Fox News and the gematria told me so.

In the meantime, since it’s all or nothing here in the U.S., at any given moment someone can be arbitrarily decided to be cool regardless of citizenship.  Immigration is one of those touchy no easy solution discourses.  Any government doesn’t want welfare leeches, homegrown or not.  Any government embraces luring great people to the land.  But short of an Infinity Gauntlet separating people by actual content of character instead of arbitrariness is impossible.  We here in the U.S. have in part solved the immigration problem.  Who in their right mind would actually want to move into this hellhole?

Well that also can be explained by one of the U.S. big problems - our lack of emphasis on education for decades.  Other countries that have wannabe emigrants don’t realize who much of a bad joke the Statue represents and how pointless the journey is now.  Let’s run through some of the greatest hits in recent history:

Our gun culture is the most absurd in the world.

Women’s rights have regressed on health care.

Our healthcare is so expensive and denied on a whim it’s fairly useless unless you’re wealthy.

Our housing is way too expensive to own.

And despite an entire civil war the systemic racism is what SHOULD be etched into the Statue.

Back when there was room to expand the Statue was fine and accepting a bunch of Irish potato farmers to walk a beat as a street cop was cool.  Yes, a purposeful stereotype to reinforce the point.  Now, instead of accepting that the Statue of Liberty should read ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK it’s a candidate for being memory holed.  One of the great unintentional weapons where for a period of time Europe got to say - piss off and go to the U.S.  We’ve got our own problems here.