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.

The NFL Is Rigged With Gematria

It’s that time of the year, like the last week before Christmas Day in retail sales.  The king of sports, American football is back in business.

Which means that like MLM salespeople it’s time for that big push to hook some fish who don’t understand that the NFL is rigged.  It’s just not rigged in the way the sports gematria crowd suggests.

The sports gematria crowd used to have a theme in the old days, usually centered around the traditionally popular teams and players.  The focus one year was Tom Brady and the number 98.  Another year, Chinese calendar was the cat and there are lots of cat logos.  So far this year are vague smatterings of individual after the fact decodes with no overarching theme.  Skull and Bones, there was some 9/11 nonsense that certainly won’t be sustained with 9/11 being a single day instead of the whole season.  The only true theme I see is the usual, “Everybody except me is a shill who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The reason is quite simple.  If Zach has picked a theme for the season it’s not getting posted publicly.  He’s taking the route of a popular ongoing television show.  Wait and see what’s popular with the gullible crop of newbies who haven’t figured out it’s a con.  Wait and see who has a good start, so you can focus on them and keep your fingers crossed they don’t collapse and you have to overuse the flipped the script backpedal for being wrong.

In a popular TV show, there’s a basic framework.  The Walking Dead - zombies.  But there’s an individual villain each season.  One year it’s The Governor, another season it’s Negan, then it’s a group of people that eat people, etc…. But the zombies, while increasingly understated are always there as the main theme.  It’s easy for audiences to get fatigued and lose interest, then the show ratings tank as the cast ages and moves on to other projects.

Sports gematria, the main villain is the NFL itself that does not ever disappear.  The first and main plot point that is hammered home is that all sports are rigged.  And as the most popular sport, the NFL is the poster favorite.

So, I’ve said the NFL is rigged in a different way.  What exactly am I insinuating?  The side gigs.  They’ve had the audacity to to remain popular because there’s so much money in it.  And one could argue that they should be concerned about the gematria crowd sucking up resources that could be spent directly on NFL products.  And it’s not going to happen.

The merchandise sales are a sweet side gig.  Slap the popular QBs in an advertisement and sell more shirts, pennants and beverages at the stadium of that beloved player.  But the main product:

Gambling.

There’s no way the NFL is going to step up and say that they openly are against gambling which generates so much free advertising for the sport.  Even at the peak of ineptitude, die hard Lions fans could bet on the point spread and get the fuzzy warms of being right 50% of the time instead of wrong 100% of the time.  There’s nothing  like gematria that promotes the mindset that it’s ok to be wrong all the time.  Just find the ever present villain, the entire league is rigged in some new numbers you decoded after the game is over.  Then you are fully justified in your new found ability to whine about how unfair life is because your team is part of the sport you love so much.

Being a diehard fan gives one the feeling of accomplishment.  If and when your team is successful there’s a rush of internally produced chemical stimulants that makes you forget past misery.  Go ahead and gamble a little if that makes you get the extra edge.  But if you’re thinking about long term success, it’s not going to happen.  These are people that call themselves a community and they attack each other on a regular basis for market share. And as a “community” they literally pick both teams.  And most of the time the magic pick isn’t touted until AFTER the game is over.  Save yourself a little money to buy a ticket, some food and a shirt.

And realize there’s a reason that there’s no self made millionaire/billionaire who is openly acknowledged as having made his money as a gematria guru.  If it was that easy, they wouldn’t be talking about the NFL is being rigged on social media.  They would welcome the gambling that creates more losers for them to win from, because their decoding is better than yours.  They would do everything in their power to promote more and more gambling and became a trillionaire or quadrillionaire.

One word of warning before you buy that ticket.  In order to advertise to the maximum number of people there are occasional road trips to the games to hawk how great gematria decoding is.  So expect a chance you’ll be approached by some idiot harassing you on being a dummy for not realizing that you should get a sports gematria Patreon subscription instead of something tangible like a shirt.

What John Carpenter Got Wrong About They Live

Rowdy Roddy Piper, what a wonderful screen presence.  And the movie They Live just hit the 35 year anniversary mark.  The iconic scene where he dons the special sunglasses and can see who is an alien, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.  And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

Yeah, that’s all bullshit.  Because the approximately 3 out of 4 people with vision correction don’t actually need glasses or contacts at all.  That makes the idea of prescription glasses irrelevant.  The bubblegum market is about to tank.  How do we know this?  This gal told us so:

Old school grifting without the conspiracy theories.  A conspiracy grifter would still be talking about Ivermectin and curing Covid.  But the goal of the grifter is to promote the woo just long enough to profit, and your marketing plan needs a hook.  And the only way to separate yourself from the pack of other grifters is to outstupid them.  Find those that are desperate enough to believe that something remarkable, something that sounds too good to be true because it isn’t true, will solve your problems.

So here’s what we know so far.  The shtick is that you don’t need glasses, because your problems are mental, emotional and spiritual.  Not sure how that physical modifier got in the list, because that’s real.  The quickie Tik Tok video was to promote an online seminar on how you can fix your mental and spiritual vision problems with essential oils.  Essential oil grifting operates in the homeopathy turf.  The products are not regulated by the FDA like supplements are not regulated.  They won’t directly kill you because they’re not toxic, but they won’t do you any good either.  Just suck up your money you could use on more beneficial products.  That which does not kill me makes me poorer.

Specifically, the oils in question are from doTerra.  Their own blog claims they are not a pyramid scheme, the first line of defense for an actual pyramid scheme.  So they might be one or not and I can’t definitely say so here or I’ll get sued for being a concerned citizen.  Their own info states they are a direct selling company, not a pyramid scheme.  A direct selling company is not a pyramid scheme like Amway is not a pyramid scheme.  Which essentially (oil) means they operate as an MLM pyramid scheme under a different name that sounds nicer than admitting you are a pyramid scheme.

In order to outstupid rivals in the not a pyramid scheme, some individuals in the not a pyramid scheme decided to latch on to the Ivermectin cures Covid bandwagon.  And the FTC was not happy. 

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-takes-action-against-doterra-distributors-false-covid-19-health-claims

So being in the not a pyramid scheme is all fun and games until somebody dies from believing in your useless treatment instead of actual medicine.  It doesn’t directly kill you, but take a gander at what Steve Jobs untreated pancreatic cancer looked like.  He certainly had the money for treatment and looked like a skeleton at the end.

And these muddying the water not a pyramid scheme offers are quite popular in the conspiracy grifter not also a pyramid scheme crowd.  Not directly, they don’t really want the competition sucking money from their new members at the bottom of the not a pyramid scheme.  No, they find their way into the comments, looking to see if somebody is interested in being in multiple not a pyramid schemes at the same time.

The ingenious parts of the don’t need your glasses not a pyramid scheme grifting is that although instantly dismissed by a large percent, so damn many people need glasses the math is in their favor.  No need to send out millions of emails, let the fish come to you.  And just like prominent anti-vaxxers can operate on how evil the vaccines are while actually being vaccinated, it’s a simple matter for a vision corrected not a pyramid scheme grifter to make their pitch while wearing contact lenses.  And reliance on how enough people will be willing enough to try and keep using the not a pyramid scheme products and realize it’s not working as claimed, and when they go to hop in the car to buy some bubblegum they will simply suck it up and wear their glasses.

They Live was Carpenter’s stab at yuppie capitalist culture.  An interesting reboot would be turning the magic sunglasses part into seeing grifters for what they are instead of aliens.  Maybe throw in some magic bubblegum, because that’s unlikely to directly kill you.  Yeah, I’d pay to see that.  Unless I had to recruit others to see the movie to afford the ticket price.

Miscellaneous Observations

These are not all directly related to the world of conspiracy and include a lot of personal opinion based on personal scrutiny.  I’ll link some sources as I go but take this mostly as speculation.

People space themselves out better 

A botched pandemic response can help in one way.  There’s never been a good reason beyond profit to do things like build a sports arena to pack a city’s worth of people into a small space.  But even something like standing in line at the bank or grocery store has changed - people don’t crawl right up behind each other like they used to.  The arguments about mask mandates and forced policies continue, and I doubt people do it purely out of respect for other’s personal space as much as being trained for a lengthy period of time and growing accustomed to it. 

 People are a lot crankier

Like fussy toddler level crankier on a daily basis.  We haven’t adapted to every year being another heat record year.

https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/understanding-effects-of-heat-on-mental-health/

I wish my job was sitting in the air conditioned comfort of my parent’s basement making up ridiculous stories of direct energy weapons and how being a bigot is going to make everybody happier.  It’s like there was a previous civilization on our planet that traveled to Alpha Centauri to grift off them in the Pleistocene Era, and now they’re police are trying to force a confession out of us with their heat ray.

We've learned nothing from the previous global financial crisis 

The insurance industry is collapsing, outright admitting that they aren’t going to service areas hit the worst by climate change phenomena.  Real Estate is loaded with house flippers that want to turn an elderly person’s affordable home into an overpriced debt trap and a fractured property management industry struggling with commercial space downsizing.  The stock market is way too volatile and retirement portfolios are stagnating while people are borrowing from long term savings to get by.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-average-american-lost-retirement-131629993.html

So you lost value, you’ll have to work longer instead of retiring in dignity, and forced to interact more with all the heat cranky people you wanted to get away from.  Unless you’re in the 1%, then you get to use your money to donate to a political grifter to complain about how you shouldn’t be taxed fairly and supplement the electoral process with encouraging cognitively biased truth seekers who think everything is a hoax.  That sounds fair.

The eye of the conspiracy storm is passing 

There was an interlude where the violent content was dialed back, some social media policies targeting extremist conspiracies were enacted, and some of the big names were held accountable.  What did you think?  They were just going to fold up shop and give up?  No way, misinformation for profit has been around way to long for that.  They’re gearing up for round two, having adapted to the new political climate.  Which like the financial crisis hasn’t changed as learning from mistakes is not an option.  Buckle up.  2024 is going to be a record breaking year for conspiracy content.

Science continues to do amazing things 

But nobody can pay for it.  We know how to turn oceans into fresh water.  We know how to give terraforming Mars a good go.  We know how to do fusion power on paper.  Etc… And there’s going to be lots of other stuff we’ll learn to do that nobody can pay for.  My skeptical and pessimistic brain encountered this story:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vampire-einstein-tile-math

Great!  It’s going to do wonders for structural engineering!  And that will mean that when the time comes to deconstruct/recycle it will be like finding out about plastics all over again.  More stuff accumulating taking up the finite space available.  Fortunately, I was able to distract my skepticism and reawaken my inner nerd to appreciate how ingenious we can be as a species.  Maybe someday someone can figure out a scientific way to stop grifting from taking such a big hunk of funds off the income stream.

We're overdue for a new dog breed arbitrarily being called vicious 

I dont have the exact lineage, but there’s a long line of some particular dog breed being declared a public risk.  The amount of money people squander on their pets is staggering, yet understandable.  People suck.  It’s only natural to look for companionship with some other type of interactive living creature.  And people suck so bad that there are those that don’t have a fucking clue how to properly take care of another nonhuman living creature.  So we’ve gone through all kinds of different large breeds of dog to project our own empathy failures on to.  Bloodhounds, Dobermans, German Shepherds, Pit Bulls, Chows.  Good news for the grifters, people have made good money by overblowing the viciousness of some breed.  

Know Your Gematria Value Manipulation - Basic Math

Four themes for the price of one today.  Even though they’re all free and the price is still zero, getting to use the weasel words gives it the air of authenticity missing from simply saying there are four themes.

#1). Repetition.  Theme #4 is not anything new that hasn’t already been said here before.  Repetition helps to turn short term tasks into long term tasks.  Absorbed often just by doing it without being told.  If you always do your nighttime routine in the same order, you are less likely to miss one of the pieces.  And not have to worry about rushing around in the morning because you forgot to turn on your alarm.

Repetition of the same weasel numbers over and over again.  Get the flock used to seeing that 42 is always racist content.  Get them used to seeing that 113 is always about fakery.  Get them used to seeing that 33 is a Freemason number.  All while trying to mask that these are completely ambiguous out of context of the narrative presented and tiny and insignificant in any statistical setting.

#2). See what I did there with repetition and weasel words?  I repeated content from yesterday to help reinforce the content.  And I’m repeating some of theme #1 to reinforce repetition.  Misinformation researchers often repeat their content to combat the never ending supply of new posts that are really just rehashes of old thoroughly debunked posts.  You never know who’s popping in for the first time.

My grocery store of choice is repetitively consistent with their wording.  If something is Buy One - Get One Free and the item is $2 - if I buy only one of that item it’s $2 and I miss out on the freebie.  Depending on how cranky the cashier is that day, I may not ever be told I missed a free item.  A terrible thing if that was a free box of Little Debbie cookies.  If it’s Two for $2, that means when the cashier rings one up it’s $1, regardless of how much the cashier hates me because I wore a shirt that is the same color that Phoenician baby killers wore a millennia ago.  There’s a subconscious psychological tickle to go ahead and buy the second item whether you need it or not.  Gematria aficionados are partially immune to this, as they have no real friends that they would buy another box of cookies for.  And ordinary people may think that while they’re there to go ahead and treat a buddy to a box of Little Debbie’s.  If the grocery store is particularly disreputable they can drastically overstate the price of one item, make it a Two or Three for the price of one, still get the psychological tickle and sell the item at a normal one for one price.

#3). I’m guilty of this as I find most of my topics to be things that don’t make their way into a social media thread without gematria content.  There is a tried and true format to not spreading misinformation by talking about misinformation.  When you post content that has misinformation in it, from some quack source that has no friends to share Little Debbie’s with, you should alter it in some way.  Like this:

Since the goal for disinformation accounts is to spread the message and make it at least temporarily go viral, there’s no reason to make it easier for someone to copy it from your debunk.

#4). Because there’s really nothing missing in the altered image, so it’s fine as is for the debunk.  What we have here is our old favorite, the word list of the same number, allegedly all with the same theme.  This can be used in a YouTube video presentation with the weasel words, “There are those that say the numbers are always below 300, but can this be a coincidence?!?  What are the odds?!?”  Sorry, every single item is using the Sumerian cipher, which is the basic value X 6.  So that means everything is really 149.  And use of “Sumerian” is a weasel sneaky way of sounding occult instead of saying 149x6.  149 is right in the sweet spot for a short phrase like the list and statistically not terribly difficult at all for Phraseshopping like calling Donald, “Donnie” and loosely associated phrases that don’t have any real connection to whatever theme that’s trying to be conveyed.  The goal of the list was to produce as many 894s as possible.  I can easily make a long list of 894s in this manner if you paid me or bribed with me free cookies.

Know Your Insincere Debate Tactics - Weasel Words

Even calling something Weasel Words is use of weasel words.  A deliberate attempt to immediately associate more meaning to an argument than the argument deserves based on facts.  Some weasels are pretty good at being weasels.  Born into a weasel family, struggling to get by and instantly being associated as sneaky and dangerous when they and their weasel family are not judged by their individual weaselneess but as a group.  Every weasel has a weasel Mom.  And a Pop.  They might be good at being weasels or absolutely suck eggs at it, which actually might make them good weasels after all.

The first insincere debate tactic from somebody who thinks gematria has value is the request to have a debate.  In this corner we have a peer reviewed scientific study that has a result that can be duplicated by an independent, unbiased person running the same experiments.  In the other corner, we have gematria where the results can only be duplicated because every piece of data fits whatever outcome you want.

I want to dwell more on one aspect of weasel words in a bit, but here are some examples of weasel words in the gematria setting.

“It’s been said that the reduction cipher is the purest cipher.”  It’s been said - by whom?  I want to check that source out.  Granted that was quoted in a previous video, but people are making their own content based on an overused repeated phrase without any knowledge of who said it, when they said it and whether there is genuine authority.

“Congratulations to all of the winners last night!”  Yeah, the three people that won versus the three people that lost.  Classic weasel wording giving the impression that the house took a beating and there’s a huge crowd of winners, maybe everybody that played.  In the meantime there are multiple sports gematria picking sources that picked the other team.  And you’re hiding your picks behind a paywall and reporting results after the game is over instead of an up front verifiable preview.

“Support this young man, he’s been doing a lot of good things for the community!”  Granted, in a limited space for a quickie social media post it’s not possible to list.  But if you want to elevate this person as a source of reliable information, how but linking at least one single video with a specific mention of something good?

Wording is a tricky thing to master.  Even the best scientific papers will have some vague wording.  Reading through the Wikipedia article, you can see this is because “we” means they’ve given the basics on how to duplicate the results to a statistically significant level.  The pseudoscience “we” means “I found a meme on Facebook that told me what I want to hear.”

But really, the main point here is - since gematria is falsely equating words with numbers the world has to put up with weasel numbers now.  And boy howdy does that get beaten to death.  People see a number and latch on to it because they saw an evil number.  1488 is a nasty number, they all know what that dog whistle means.  Uh oh, there’s a 201.  They all know what that means.  33.  113.  42.  Well, save some time - all the two and three digit numbers (except some of the larger ones like 500+) are weasel numbers.  Even 1488 is just 14 and 88 mashed together, because 1488 just doesn’t show up by itself often enough.

The insincere gematria debater is armed only with logical fallacies and weasel numbers.  The reason for a debate is to show initiates more repetition of the weasel numbers in a setting where the cult leader is a bad ass, lying his way through the debate.  The initiate is armed with rudimentary knowledge to be successful at creating every weasel number, and will see it every day.  Or if they don’t see it, the mind will wander to manufacture it.  148 - that’s 1488, close enough.  201, 21 is close enough because somebody weasel worded their way into dropping or not dropping zeroes without any authoritative source on the proper way to handle it.

If you do get into a setting where you are debating the gematria clown, it’s best not to let them get started on the often repeated weasel number stories that make a tad bit more sense.  Don’t let them start on the “but what about Kobe dying on blah, blah, blah, blah….”  Keep it focused on the corrupt system that allows them to change the rules.  Rules are important, except to the criminals that want to avoid accountability.

Every number is a weasel number to the gematria aficionado.  A false equivocation to a meaning that is totally ambiguous.

Know Your Scams - Catfishing

In these low level grifting waters, it’s not the sharks you need to worry about, it’s the Catfish.

Let’s put out a traditional catfish scam scenario for those not aware.  Our target, Callie, is a fairly recently widowed 50 year old woman, because even though you can’t swing a dead cat on Facebook without hitting an obviously fake super model hot account, it does happen to women as the targets, too.  She’s not freshly widowed and still grieving, but is posting FB content where her concerned friends are talking about how she has come to terms with the husband’s passing and is starting to be happy again.  The kind of person that doesn’t need having her savings stolen on top of the death of their spouse.

One day, there is a friend request from Hank.  Hank is not a new recruit (not enough glamour) and also not a high ranking officer (not believable that a four star general would have interest in Callie), so Hank has pictures (hijacked off the internet) of him in his sergeant uniform.  And boy is he handsome.  Hank starts liking Callie’s posts, posting some laughing emojis at her jokes and final direct messages her, striking up a one on one message exchange relationship.

Hank, in reality is a 14 year old boy from Ghana, with limited English, but he does have a set of scripted fake stories and people higher up in the scam that have been around awhile.  The goal is to use every bit of old info Callie posted to make it seem like Hank is a dream come true.  Then it’s time for the tragedy.  The tragedy is preceded by a, “Hey, I have leave coming up in a week.  Let’s finally meet up and go for dinner.”  But, it turns out that when the plans are set and Hank is supposedly on his way, in his rush to meet Callie he messed up his leave paperwork and is detained at the airport.  And somehow there are magically no other Hank friends to get him out of being stuck.  Only Callie’s PayPal account can rescue him.

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These are the kinds of things that make it not matter if someone truly believes in gematria or 9/11 being hoax.  Scammers from all over the world, not just some creepy perv at the bar, have access to genuine personal information freely posted on social media.  They recognize the cognitive biases brought on by the state of mind of a deceased love one and do not care if the target gets hurt even more.  The best defense remains the properly skeptical thought that it’s unlikely a handsome military guy with limited social media presence would get involved with Callie.  And Callie would be best off ignoring him.

The scams have been around for a long time, and the scripts are fine tuned and superficially believable.  Here’s some examples of how some of the variations occur in gematria community interactions - remember that it’s a group of people that have already been shown to be susceptible to some rather silly things.

1). This is one I’ve personally experienced.  The “girl” posted some weird spiritual related content with a side dish of hot hippie chick vibe.  And her email address.  So I emailed her and got the story of how she was raped by her father and that’s all I needed to see.  The initial comment she made was on a YouTube account of a new gematria user who started popping up on Zach’s videos.

2). It’s perfectly believable that somebody gullible enough to believe that they can win money gambling on sports picks decided after the game is over might be a pain in the ass in real life.  “I lost my job because Tammy told Human Resources I lied about getting vaccinated.   Here’s my PayPal address so you can help me get through these tough times.”  Or, you are homeless living in your car because you got thrown in jail.  Or you got got scammed by a flat earther.  Just like Callie and Hank, any sad story of how unfair life is because the evil cabal did this and that and woe is me.  And again from personal experience, I’ve seen the guy who lost his job, house, car and credibility in the truth community get back on his feet within weeks and start decoding again.

3). This fits into the Shill Game.  The constant accusations among truth seekers regarding who is legit and who is not trustworthy.  Although there is genuine animosity between different conspiracy specialists overall content (e.g. anti-vaxx vs. gematria) and the cliques within gematria (sports, crypto, spirituality/synchronicity) there isn’t anybody that seems to have gotten the bright idea to up their game and show that they are serious about getting revenge for being scammed.  The different backgrounds are easier to understand - don’t you dare pay attention to vaccination stuff, gematria is what’s important.  The different gematria cliques operate like a big unhappy family arguing about politics at  Thanksgiving dinner.  Well sometimes a friendly and hopeful message is better than arguing about watching the Thanksgiving Day games or Fox News.  Please stop fighting and can’t we just all get along?  My overpriced crypto store items are better than those failed sports predictions or the PayPal account of that end of times Evangelical fire and brimstone preacher.

There’s a lot of pressure to pick a side TODAY.

4). Friendly sock puppets.  Use the main account to identify and do research on the new targets.  Load them up with ego boosting messages, maybe through them a couple of bucks to prime the pump - encourage them to produce content of their own.  Content that won’t generally get a lot of attention because the cult leader personalities have a better grip on what to say and do.  A newbie also wants to see that other newbies have recently woken up, the same way somebody new to Alcoholics Anonymous is presented with other hand raisers who have just joined and sober for the same amount of time.  Look!  I just donated money (to myself, only paying the Patreon or PayPal processing fee)!  You can be enlightened more by paying too!

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Just like the catfish grifting outside gematria accounts the variations are unlimited and only bound by the imagination and psychological prowess of the content author.  In many respects, the person that wants to demonstrate being good and being known for doing good is better than the person that thinks that doing good means getting liquored up, pick up a gun, and going to the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor they were told was involved in trafficking children.  Deep down there’s some spark of humanity left that has been struggling with the failed predictions and wants an out.  They don’t want to lose yet another job because they refuse to take their ADHD medication since they have no real friends.  They are like Callie, the last people that need to be scammed on top of not having actual solutions to actual problems.

Vampires, Deadpool, Xena, Apocalypses and Gematria

Eternal life is a tricky little bugger in film fiction.  I’m more fond than I should admit to of an old gothic horror/fantasy sci-fi film, The Asphyx.  Just like the physics of zombie existence is all screwed up, when film scientists muddle around with trying to achieve eternal life they often don’t even consider the consequences of what it would actually be to live forever.  Spoiler alert - in The Asphyx, the hero is shown through 1970’s practical effects make-up to not being a happy camper at the end of the film.

The other side of the coin to living as a mortal forever is some kind of eternal happiness in a spiritual utopia.  Whether this exists or not, I’m in the camp of liking to see a little evidence for it.  Something spectacular like an actual showing of a miracle as opposed to arbitrarily citing something explained by statistics - instead of the Didit fallacy.

Filmmakers don’t care about long term timeline issues, trying to cram a story into a time slot to convince your butt to stay seated long enough for the snack purchases and the hope for the inevitable sequel.  Some of the long term franchises have entire teams of nerds sifting through the timelines, waiting for the endorphin rush of finding something regarded as a mistake.

One of the most ridiculous examples of messed up timelines is the thoroughly enjoyable, Xena, the Warrior Princess series.  The goal was to move the setting to a different location to freshen the storylines instead of having Xena be stuck in Ancient Greece.  And the result is an inconsistent mish mash of Xena traveling around to other cultures where they couldn’t possibly coexist together.  Like the X-Files, there is an overarching story for a season, peppered with “monster of the week episodes”.  Along the way, the stories manage to poke fun at a lot of groups that don’t like to be poked fun at.  Including the need to apologize to India for insulting their culture for an entire season, and the Dahak storylines that not so subtilely insult Christianity.  Throw in meeting Caesar, and traveling to China etc…how Xena, a tough as nails mortal, but still a mortal gets to live so long is a mystery.  This is unaddressed and the viewer is simply left with a, “Hey it’s just fiction.  Enjoy the pretty girls kicking ass.”

Then we have Marvel, the king of timeline problems that they insist on fixing with retconning.  Mistakes are made over a huge library of films and they address it with a simple addition of exposition or some (lame) scene addition.  Still, never explaining how Peter Parker is a teenager for so damn long.  Now Deadpool, that’s a character that can always be thrown an excuse that the writers can get away with.  He’s basically immortal.  So there always a way to explain away how he’s popping up at any spot in the timeline.  Like Kang, without the overused film time travel concepts.

Which returns us to The Asphyx, would you really be having…fun?…being immortal.  Wouldn’t that get boring?  At least Deadpool wouldn’t be old and decrepit like our Asphyx protagonist at movie end.  Asphyx was a morality tale, and you can’t get much less moral than a foul mouthed, snarky assassin in spandex.  There is an attempt to address his loneliness with a doomed suicide attempt in the second movie.  Again, you are not supposed to dwell on the plot device to get the story rolling.  Having an enemy is a great distraction to the boredom of immortality.

Vampire lore is a nice step towards middle of the road between bored immortal and frail mortal existence over a normal lifespan.  You aren’t indestructible like Deadpool, and the story lines include signs of boredom just with the endless sucking blood to remain alive.  Buffy and Angel have stories with a “Just go ahead and end me” plot.  But the endgame never makes sense.  In theory, there’s not much left to sustain the pseudo immortality of a vampire living in a world of all vampires.  The best I’ve seen that covers this is the anthology book, Under the Fang.  Written in a shared world style like Robert Asprin’s Thieves World, writers could do their own take on vampire lore, including other writer’s characters.  With retconning as needed if you did something extreme - like the Thieves World story where somebody made an unhappy ending for the other writer’s, wait for it…….. immortal character.

But they did finally address the age old problem of how vampires in charge would have to consider keeping some humans around as cattle to feed on.  Just like real world humans that don’t like to be enslaved, our vampire controlled cattle make shitty slaves and fight back.

For those that don’t understand that gematria is pure fiction, they miss out on the way the plot holes are covered up.  The Didit fallacy abounds.  The Jesuits were shoehorned (retconned) in as a substitute for the Freemasons.  No explanation for a world full a handful of  evil cabal rulers is going to do with a herd of microchipped zombies.  There’s only so many ritual sacrifices you can do before you get bored out of your skull.  There does seem to be a focus on money, so maybe they can make a Triskelion and bet quatloos on their unhappy slaves fighting in gladiator contests.

But is money really going to make you happy when there’s nobody left to take the money from?  What are the odds a starship of fresh gladiators is going to happen on your planet to spice things up?

There’s a distinct lack of thought to what kind of endgame the evil empire has in store.  There’s not much fun in everybody operating under the same logical fallacies, arguing over whether the evil empire is headed by A, B, or C.  One of the hallmarks of conspiracy thinking.  You’re in a group, but you sure don’t act like you’re in a group.  And it’s amazing how the current champion of your cause always wants money from you.  So good like retconning happiness into your life when that’s gone, too.

But Nobody Really Believes That

This should be just a quick one as a reminder to those who hand wave away conspiracy mentality.  From recent social media activity:

 

Well, I can easily make 666 reference Trump if I follow the same lack of rules and add random letters and misspell names.  (Note the inconsistency in spelling Barak which is in the same social media post).

Your two main options are:

1). A true believer expressing their right to free speech who genuinely feels that Obama is the Antichrist.

2). Purposeful disinformation with an agenda.

with some minor chances for:

3). LARPing for attention.

4).  Someone needs a good therapist.

Just the same as ignorance of the law is no excuse to break, ignorance of facts is no excuse to spread misinformation or disinformation.  The members of society with critical thinking skills fail to see what is gained by free speech that is clearly bad information.  People can and do post things like this on a daily basis.  The OP here has a new account (July 2023) that is loaded with bigoted memes and here can be seen to likely be trolling someone who called him out on his Qanon nonsense.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the source is a true believer or not.  Bad information is still bad information.

Gematria Gurus - The Lowest Form Of Life Coaches

Anyone can be a Life Coach.

 

I used to lay awake at night as a middle school student dreaming of being a life coach.  The thought of being a life coach, the idea that people would see me as an expert on everything and pay me money to advise them on how to run their own pathetic, miserable lives.  The power, the control, and the sweet perks like the framed certificates declaring how I went through the arduous life coach program to achieve the mastery in my craft.

Life coaches (mostly) are in the bullshit realm of the hour long infomercial proclaiming success in real estate investment by buying a book on real estate investment tips.  If Dean Graziosi was that good at real estate investment he wouldn’t need to hawk his services about real estate investment, he would simply do it.  That’s actually a bad analogy as this article explains the FTC case revolving around how what he was really marketing was coaching services instead of sound investment advice.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2020/09/ftc-moves-add-real-estate-celebrities-dean-graziosi-and-scott-yancey-nudge-case

Our cognitively biased species does a decent job of recognizing a short term immediate problem that absolutely needs to be fixed right away.  The pipe above your head breaks, you hire a plumber that actually knows how to plumb.  The house is on fire, you call 911, because our cognitive biases don’t help so much with long term investment and you didn’t think ahead to having a working fire extinguisher.

So the idea of a life coach seems natural, you are at least admitting you suck at long term ideas.  Coaching advice from someone who got a certificate for a couple bucks off the internet is the same as a plumber who calls himself one because he has duct tape and WD40 and a $5 monkey wrench.  You will be worse off than you started out.

In comparing life coaches with gematria we can see some of the key points that show the failures of the system.  There’s no licensing board for life coaches, no agency to oversee any rigorous coursework that shows somebody spent serious time educating themselves to identify and help with other’s long term problems.  There’s also no government agency that operates to scour social media for the conspiracy grifting content.

And you can find a life coach to specialize in certain areas or a Jack of All Trades style coach.  Finance, romance, fitness, spiritual fulfillment.  Not so strangely but quite unappealing is the life coach more interested in selling you how to be a life coach to others.  The exact same methodology as our real estate investment books.

And gematria gets to cover the same ground.  The statistically insignificant numbers can be found in all the cliquish cult divisions.  You’ve got the long term big names presented as the know it all for all the cliques.  You’ve got your cryptocurrency bros.  You’ve got the astrology and spiritual related bases covered ad nauseam. Even the occasional eating healthy and fitness post.

Romance, well that is not highlighted as a topic so much. I suppose you could burden yourself by creating a fake girlfriend for fake anecdotal evidence, but this doesn’t fit with the overall marketing plan.  The goal is to seek out the most cognitively impaired targets.  Advertising in general loves the spontaneous reaction above long term value, so why should gematria be any different?  So let’s throw in death, and all the group phobias.  A kind and empathetic person looking for a soul mate?  Fuck that, give me the assholes.  The bigger the asshole the better.  The kind of person who doesn’t mind spreading every single hateful meme that crosses their eyes.

The gematria life coach is more dangerous because, these numbers are supposed to mean something in regards to predictability.  There’s an illusion that this two digit number is a ritual sacrifice, or murder by an evil empire.  The initiate into the gematria world has enough pattern recognition skill to memorize the most basic patterns combined with a desire for long term improvement.  You too can learn this awesome prediction skill by

Decoding an event that already happened.  That’s not even short term improvement, that’s reporting the news.  This is how the message gets internally twisted.  Complaining about the many actual problems in the world and trolling the empathetic normies becomes:

Dude, everyone IRL still thinks you’re an asshole.  You’re doing a great job proving that.  The problem is you’re not a big enough asshole.  The gematria life coach can coach you on how to be a better asshole, you just need to go a little bit deeper down that rabbit hole.  Maybe you need to be more vocal about these other notable assholes and abuse the empathetic enemies of these assholes.

Decoding the Super Bowl when the game is over doesn’t help with having the resources to hire a qualified plumber, predicting when the next pipe will break or make you a better person.  It doesn’t even make you a better asshole, just a more vocal one.  The conspiracy theorist world is filled with people lacking in emotional maturity - angry two year olds who admire other angry two year olds.  People who have had a life filled with being told they should grow up and are rightfully sick of it.  Constantly attacked for being a royal pain in the ass, like this post.

All because somewhere along the way a qualified life coach was missing in the socialization process.

The

The post title is not a moment of forgetfulness, so here’s the background.

Given that the cognitive dissonance of the gematria newbie does not allow for being proven wrong when presented with contradictory evidence, they are constantly being presented with the mental gymnastics of basing decisions on factors outside gematria.  The Cam Newton fan will find stories about Cam Newton.  The Kobe Bryant fan will be hammered with stories about the overused gematria story that makes a little more sense than most of the garbage out there.

And boy do they love to repeat those couple of stories that make a bit more sense.  Always yammering away with the catch phrases, “What are the odds?”  “How can that be a coincidence?”  One of the most repeated stories is the list of 113 words and phrases.  It’s so popular that it gets updated once in awhile, and the core meaning gets diluted by addition of some rather odd choices.  The basic story is that 113 is the number of dishonesty.

I presume VAMPIRES and UNICORN are dishonest, because as a nonexistent supernatural creature they don’t exist, as opposed to the vampires that are out there are all dishonest.  But hey, who knows.  It’s difficult to delve into the mindset of a person that attributes arbitrary significance to arbitrary words with a system that has arbitrary rules.

Speaking of arbitrary rules and rule changes, the Gematrinator calculator has had some plastic surgery.  The Jewish cipher is now Latin.  And what used to be the Francis Bacon cipher is now the much less cool sounding “Capitals Added” cipher.  Probably that facelift was for the arbitrary addition of the “Capitals Mixed” cipher which is also not cool and should be something like the Applewood Smoked Bacon cipher.  The funny thing about the Capitals added cipher’s existence is that the word Truth = 113.  Yep.  Truth is dishonest.  But I’ve spent a lot of time on that in the past.  Today's star is THE.

THE is dishonest.  And 33 is a big Freemason number.  THE is clearly evil, and nobody talks about.  Somebody else s not just GOAT, they are The Goat.  Ohio State University regrets alumni making it to the NFL and emphasize they are from The Ohio State University, ignoring the fact that are evil just because they do suck and instead assigning some arbitrary numerology to their suckiness.

Promoters of this and other word lists are not seeking truth, they are seeking out the gullible to join in the pyramid scheme.  They are using gematria, aka Conspiracy Theory Light as a gateway drug to get hooked on the monetized content that leads many gematria users to comment about how it’s a distraction to “legitimate truth seeking”.  Any explanation of exactly why The is not evil will fail to take into account why every word is evil.