Sailors - Early Conspiracy Theorists

A lot of our problems with modern conspiracy theorists are tied into how people who don’t want appreciate science think it’s also a good idea to attack the science.  The Antiscience movement is in full swing.  Free speech is good, but ultimately members of society owe it to themselves and those that surround them to find the right answer.  Not just the convenient answer of what they want to hear.  The simultaneous belief in contradictory thoughts  is a large piece of the antiscience belief system.  People who genuinely think that the Earth is flat, plane contrails are poisoning us and 5G causes Covid are using modern science to disseminate misinformation that the technology they are using is rooted in the debunking of their stupid opinions.  And I need to work in the obligatory reminder - the internet grifters just love this.  Disinformation = misinformation + a fundraiser.

Picture old timey sailors. A civilization with a water source was primed to be a lot better off than a desert with a scant supply.  Instead of just standing near the shore and poking at unlucky fish close enough to stupidly get near your sharp, pointy objects you could access a supply of tasty fishies not easily available if you figured out how to make a floating piece of wood to get out to new areas.

A more modern example of the speed of technological process outpacing social progress are the World Wars.  You were the king of the block if your battleships were better than others.  Then by the end of WWII we found it was much more important to use the speed of jet aircraft and bomb the shit out of others from a safer distance.  Now unmanned drones and guided middles are better than  planes for killing from afar.

The smarter people making progress in earlier maritime civilizations figured out the Earth was round.  And navigation with a compass became a huge deal.  And we can be pretty sure that some of them were considered heretics by those that were just itching for 5G to come along and be used as a convenient scapegoat.  Because one of the things that we know about people being assholes, is that even if they’re wrong, even if they know deep down they’re wrong, they DON’T like to be told about it.  Much better to find a scapegoat to blame.  Sure it can be fun to sit down at the tavern and have a debate with other sailors about how you think the government assassinated Ahab, there was another big sea creature on that grassy knoll, but sometimes you need a crisis actor or completely mythical target.  You know, something convenient that won’t fight back, that won’t punch you for being the drunken tavern asshole you are.

The Sirens Did It.  Or it may be more correct to say the harpies did it.  Who knows for sure 100%.

https://www.audubon.org/news/sirens-greek-myth-were-bird-women-not-mermaids

Surprisingly, old timey sailors like some entertainment to go along with scoring with Brandy the fine barmaid while on a layover between voyages.  And there’s already some nice, perfectly fine predictive programming from Greek times to capitalize on.  Greek sirens, hideous looking bird/human hybrids, now that’s just plain stupid that somebody would think that was for real.  But change the format from hideous bird woman to sultry woman/fish that makes sense now.  Keep the alluring voice though, cause that part is pretty cool.

There’s always been people with a problem separating fact from fiction.  And tales and songs of your covering up your colossal fuck up by crashing your ship on the rocks - they know there wasn’t a storm last night.

Comely fish woman did it.

My personal belief is that any story about comely fish women that used to be hideous bird women isn’t any good  unless the head is a fish and the torso is the woman parts.  You’re just being racist, or mermaidist, if you insist otherwise.  But moving on.

Do you really think that mermaid stories weren’t grifting?  Aarrgh, matey, buy me another grog an I’ll share ye the story of how I got me peg leg from a shark…no wait crashing’ me ship on the rocks because the comely siren distracted me from my sailin’ duties.  Arguably, the story has a lot of legitimate entertainment value for those that accept it as the fiction it is.  But it is distracting from the real story that the Jesuits are behind the mermaids.  The gematria proves that.

Some stories are better than others.  Some storytellers are better than others.  If you look for your bogeyman now as a comely fish maiden hybrid you aren’t going to get as much attention, unless you can tie it in to modern times and our current technological progress.  Voting for people that the entire campaign platform amounts to, “I have the right to believe in mermaids”, isn’t going to help you with the next pandemic and how climate change is going to kill all the mermaids off.

The Bleeding Continues

 

The regular SportsGematria recaps are a breath of fresh air for me, providing a convenient excuse to discuss a more relatable subject.  I feel that it’s important to emphasize the psychological parts of the conspiracist mindset, but the average person would rather hear about the effects on the wallet than bother to understand something like the appeal to success logical fallacy.

Zach embraces the appeal to success aura he’s generated by a decade of misinformation.  He always talks up (lies) about his previous track record.  And he downplays some of his other not directly fibbing methods; more casual things lesser minds might not pick up on if they don’t have some guidance.  So I’m just going to throw a little more gasoline on the dumpster fire that has been this NFL season.

But first let’s start out with the comments section of the current video.  Midway through the season there were a significant number of comments from other sports gematria YouTube channels.  That is, other grifters.  Using virtually the same methods.  Some may qualify as true believers, but I doubt it.  If they really believe in the value of their predictions they’ve been getting high on their own hype and caught up in their own little LARPing world.  This current video as of this writing is exclusively just people fed up with Zach and his marketing plan.  That marketing plan is shameless self promotion, vacillating between claims of being correct all the time or at least rarely wrong, and backpedaling on getting called out for being wrong.  And having it recorded.  These commentators were simply playing the Shill Game.  Trying to lure people to their channel.  And the same bogus system is in place there.  So at best you would lose less money over the long haul than you would on the current dumpster fire at Gematria Effect Sports.  And as for these comments from the not another sports pick channel, let’s just say they aren’t happy.  They haven’t stuck the landing yet and pieced together that all the conspiracy grifting content is bad news.  But baby steps are better than no progress at all.

The second picture is the full recap of the season so far.  The demographics of the viewers (I’ve researched this and I’m confident of my assessments) are a motley crew that can’t afford to lose $1500 on bad advice.  And I don’t think any of them have actually wagered on all the games recorded here as officially being a pick.  They’ve probably been picking and choosing, doing other more normal sports gambling themes.  Like betting the game your favorite team is involved with, since you plan on watching the game.  Or waiting until the Cowboys are picked by Zach to lose and plopping down a few bucks because you hate the Cowboys.  As you should.  Or letting your romantic partner pick from which team has the prettier logo in their opinion.  What the target audience of the sports gematria scene doesn’t grasp is that these silly and unscientific methods will produce the same results over the long term.  Does it really matter if you lose money with or without gematria?

The other picture is another one of those subtle things Zach has been capitalizing on, which I’ve called out years before.  And it’s something non gematria grifters have done forever.  When in doubt, with your magical system that isn’t really magical, and you’re avoiding picking against the point spread, pick the favorite.  Visually and psychologically it’s better to have presented a win loss record of 4-1without mentioning that you picked the favorite in the 5 games with the biggest point spreads.

Lions (-400) +$25. You need to wager $400 to win $100.  So if you bet $100 like SportsGematria always calculates you win $25 while risking losing $100.  If you bet 5 games at (-400) and got one wrong you would break even.  Except that you also have your monthly Patreon subscription.  And that share of your smartphone plan.  And lost time you’ll never get back.

Packers (+135) +$135.  You wagered 100 on an underdog and win a bit more than your wager.

And that’s the only underdog pick in the entire list of picks for the week.  Granted there are a few picks against the spread.  This is a classic example of betting a lot of games, having a winning record for the week, and essentially breaking even.  And that’s a good week.  Hardly that impressive.

Even without point spreads, picking NFL games is tough.  Two evenly matched teams would likely finish a 16 game set of playing just against each other at 8-8 or 9-7.  You’re not improving your chances much on a paltry couple of bucks while flipping that coin 16 times.  Remember, point spreads are designed to have approximately the same amount of money bet on both teams, not some kind of prediction on who the winner will be.

Thanks, Obama

 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanks,_Obama

Thanks Obama is one of those long lived internet memes, originally operating as a derogatory poke at Obama presidency era policies, then stolen to satirically support Obama.  A perfect fit for the all or nothing political only choice A or choice B with no middle ground outrage porn machine.  

The hate speech rules for prominent figures are different.  As a well known political figure it’s expected that some derogatory commentary is inevitable.  And all things for someone with the stature of an Obama are fair game.  Somehow, there are always plenty of people willing to chime in about such prominent figures using memes as evidence instead of…actual evidence.  These are called trolls.

Gematria is on par with memes for quality of empirical evidence.  That is, zero value.  And since your drop zeroes in gematria that means that it’s not even zero.  Just some black hole wasting space and time for those that want to devote a significant portion their f their lives to it.

And we do have to give a sarcastic shout out to Obama here for going too far.  The trolls are gonna troll, and they really don’t need to see something to refocus their attention to.  The undying Obama is the Antichrist narrative is still going strong.  The Michelle Obama is actually man narrative is not far behind.  Now he’s given the two sided outrage porn machine a movie to latch on to.  Thanks, Obama.

Leave the World Behind

I’m flying a bit blind here since I haven’t researched much of the plot details, yet.  What I know is gleaned only from the conspiracy content that is already churning through the normal (as normal as internet weirdos posting conspiracy content can be considered normal) social media conspiracy machine.  It’s got Julia Robert’s in it.  So that gets a tie in to the recent Matthew Perry death.  It’s got an apocalyptic theme.  And Obama, being an executive producer is already being pushed as the creative source, with some people calling it “Obama’s movie.”  Failing to realize that sometimes executive producer means merely investing in the movie or that there are at least a bunch of non Obama people involved.  That’s the way these things work.  If Julia Roberts was an aging overrated, in both talent and looks, actress the outrage machine would latch on to her.  If she made the mistake of going on talk shows discussing her politics.  And did you see what I did with the overrated comment?  Did I suggest she’s overrated?  Or that others think she is and I don’t?  Your reaction depends on what you personally think instead of anything to do with this particular movie.

Just as all gematria numbers are evil but some select numbers are more evil, some old stories are better than others.  This one could end up being one of them that will still be mentioned years from now.  Backing up to some of the other undying stories.  Thanks, Kobe.  You had to die and give the weirdos an excuse to latch on to all the two digit numbers in your career and life.  It’s been said that the Kobe narrative is the single biggest draw to the new initiates to sports gematria grifting.  To a lesser extent, Gabby Petito.  This is nowhere near as popular today, but it wasn’t for lack of conspiracy grifting effort.  The reality is a stunningly attractive young woman was tragically murdered by being involved with the wrong guy.  But she had the audacity to have massive media attention and lots of tiny, insignificant numbers associated with her life and those events.  Thanks, Gabby.

The common themes running through all these stories is simple.  Although the narratives are presented as, “I told you so - the evil empire is being evil again!”, not a single one was close to being predicted.  Just like Zach congratulating his Patreon winners after his bets with the spread, without the spread, narratives for both teams and 50 side bets on who scored a touchdown and the over under, these are all reported after the fact.  And as the outrage porn machine rushes to put out content the many stories that evolve short term as events unfold on TV the narratives conflict, even to the point of being mutually exclusive.  Until the stories that get the most engagement linger on, and the many equally valid as far as the gematria goes less engaging stories fade into oblivion.  You simply do not hear about Mrs. Johnson watering her flower garden on Tuesday even though gematriawise that was evil.

Thanks, social media.

For those who wish to crawl into their cave and weep for humanity I offer two final comments.

Perhaps, with the Leave the World Behind theme of a media blackout there’s an intention to show the lunacy of social media driven conspiracy grifting content.  I doubt it.  Personal interpretation can go a lot of different directions.  Thanks, Obama.

More importantly, Gabby Petito is prettier than Julia Roberts was at the same age.  That’s a fact.  You read that on the internet, so it must be true.

Self-Fulfilling Feedback Loops

Getting yourself in a feedback loop can be a good thing.  That guy at the gym who tried to motivate himself time and again to lose weight, maybe his failure was rooted in some other problem.  Since this blog is about internet weirdos conspiracy theories and grifting let’s assume it’s financial.  Having been exposed to the tangential grift magnetism content of wellness industry grift since he’s now firmly anti-vaccination, his lousy job coupled with losing money on shitty gematria based sports picks can’t allow him an expensive gym membership.  Drinking his own urine didn’t help like he was told.  All the other quackery didn’t work.  The cognitive dissonance is building up on all the internet crap he’s been subjected, so he decides to give the gym a try.  Saves up some money, joins, and starts to see some results because exercise actually works.  Friends and family notice the change.  Positive verbal feedback.  Keeps going to the gym.  Hangs around more normal people.  Meets a nice girl.  They move in together, get a puppy, get married and he throws away his notebook with all his decodes, and becomes the next ambassador to Wollongong.

The key to the success was interruption of a negative feedback loop and substitution with a positive feedback loop.  This is much easier said than done.  The old adage of wanting to change holds true.  Those that are targets in the internet grifting MLM scheme are already getting a lot of negative feedback about them being real life and internet weirdos.  Even being called out as an internet weirdo is their five minutes of fame and is better than being ignored.

So that brings me to the best internet weirdo I’ve visited this year, which was just a few days ago.  And, I refuse to give oxygen to this brush fire by mentioning screen or channel names.  At least for now.  The top of the grift pyramid loves to pump these guys egos up - everybody hates you because you know the truth!  Attaboy!^TM.

My strange little friend is consistent with his video content.  The video titles almost always use the phrase gangstalking, and he’s being persecuted.  It’s obviously never occurred to him that the gangstalkers have not figured out how to use their vast resources to track him down on YouTube and load up the platform with content regarding their mortal enemy here.

The negative feedback loop is - night driving.  And they demonstrate that they know who and where he is by only having one working headlight.  And naturally, even with that ongoing main theme, he expands into everything else being a sign that the stalkers are out to get him.  Commenting while he taps away from the safety of his car about all the things the stalkers are doing to stalk him and apparently doing absolutely nothing else but stalking him.  There’s a hitchhiker at night!  Gangstalker.  There’s a car with two working headlights, but the high beams are on!  Gangstalker.  Easily distracted by the negative feedback loop he’s stuck in of his private little persecution world.  Fortunately, maybe, limiting the drives to night time instead of being a problem on a busy daytime freeway.

Since his surprisingly large library of videos on this is a proud announcement that he’s got some cognitive bias problems I’m sure he’s bouncing around and getting looks at other dodgy content.  And getting positive reinforcement on bad other bad ideas.  Maybe there’s already been a sovereign citizen grifter that’s tried to convince him that to be safe he just needs a special license plate to keep the stalkers at bay.  If so, the reality is that if he gets stopped (maybe for a headlight being out at night!) the police will probably already treat him oddly for his bogus plate.  More feedback on how the entire world is out to get him.

For someone as proficient as me with finding odd content these types of accounts are easy to find.  The process amounts to looking at known leaders.  Then look at the people that are active in the comments.  Then look at their content.  And by the time you look at friends of friends there’s always somebody putting out copies of thoroughly debunked content like 9/11 hoaxes, anti-vaxx and contrails.

Which makes researchers wonder - if social media sites claim to care, and you can find this content so easily, why can’t they tweak their algorithms to maybe pay attention to facts instead of views?  Not our headlight friend here, his videos have less than 10 views normally.  But those that are courting him.  They’re the ones trying to encourage him to jump to that next level.  Start mirroring videos.  Go on to Twixter and talk about that great new channel you found.  Post that meme on Facebook.

And all this going on as the King, Alex Jones just gets back on Twitter.  Bear in mind that he’s more of a symptom of the overall problem.  It’s easier to encourage continued negativity than to break out of the loop and get involved with a more positive loop.  When there’s money involved.

Well, That’s Unique

 

Somebody is decoding YouTube video addresses.  The video I found that he bragged about decoding is a Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World clip.  And more proof that these clowns are not decoding anything.

Of course, the point of having a scrambled and meaningless looking set of alphanumeric characters is to produce a unique identifier.  You don’t want someone looking for Brie Larson videos to have the worst thing imaginable happen.  Accidentally getting pointed at a video with songs performed by Barney tue dinosaur.  Or gematria sports betting.

Google is very good at encryption stuff.  You also don’t want hacker mentality random people playing around with their code and changing stuff around so someone that uploaded their family picnic video gets edited into Barney or other unwanted material.  I imagine there’s something going on like a pumped up version of a stock numbering system used by retailers, like the MOD 11 system.

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

The function of such a system is to avoid transposition errors and other simple mistakes like making that last digit that’s actually a 1 in reality entered as a 2 and stumbling upon a different legitimate stock number.  Now you thought you were buying a stuffed Barney doll but it was rung up as a plasma TV.  Because by the doctrine of close enough, that must be true.  No refunds allowed.

If one attempts to “decode” and find a similar video address and if one is simply relying on changing a single character or transposing two of the characters, you get a video unavailable error.  That’s the way life works with encryption.

An astute identity theft hacker will take note of an obsession with gematria coding.  That’s the same kind of person that will do some kind or reverse gematria on their social security number.  That will look for synchronicity in their girlfriend’s name and phone number - and post the decode on a blog.  The same person that will answer internet quizzes about posting your favorite movie as a gif, because the security questions at your bank include your favorite movie.  Wouldn’t the world be a lot more fun if your bank password was a two digit number and the only security question was, “Which color do you like better, yellow or blue?”

The opposite of decoding is going on in gematria decodes.  Now for that video we have a screenful of gematria suffers, sorry…ciphers, that provides 29 different values.  And depending on who you’re talking to they all mean different things at different times.  Now you absolutely have no idea what it’s supposed to mean other than your own interpretation.  And of course it’s not a true gematria decode without reporting it after the fact.  If you managed to crack the encryption you would actually be able to predict future video addresses.  Ain’t gonna happen.

Knowing How Your Brain Is Stupid - The Misinformation Effect

 https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-misinformation-effect-2795353

Your choice of words can have a subtle and yet profound impact on communicating what actually happened.  The telephone game relies on misinformation and misreporting what you witnessed.  Facebook is a good source of telephone game style misinformation.  Although actual words are recorded and could theoretically be produced and read, people will latch on to the stupidest of the stupid and go out into real life and outstupid every other person that will pay them heed.  Vaccination is a fun topic for misinformation like this.  Throw around some fake scientific jargon, and when spread around all that will be remembered is the source and a few sketchy details.  “MRNA polymerase blah blah blah…furin cleavage site blah blah…vaccine shedding blah blah…”. The next day at work, “There’s this really smart doctor named Malone who says vaccines are bad!!”

But more important to this post is the tactic of producing leading questions.  Picture the not so honest cop that thinks his next promotion is tied to getting confessions.  Recapping the linked article, the wording of questions can alter eyewitness testimony.  You ask “How fast were the cars going when they hit each each other?” vs. “How fast when they smashed into each other?” has a significant impact on post event remembrance.  Like the Dunning-Kruger tests where self reporting skill level always have a significant portion of respondents claiming they are cooler than they are, there are plenty of stupid brains incorporating things they remember as fact when it’s just not true.  Even to the point where our leading question about the car accident can have an eyewitness claiming they witnessed the accident when they really just rubbernecked it minutes after it happened.  Yes, eyewitness testimony sucks.

Gematria is a set of leading questions and fake memories.  Although it’s true and I constantly beat the point to death, at its core every reasonably useful (smallish) number is evil, some numbers are more evil than others.  These people have had enough exposure and positive feedback through the Attaboy!^TM process that certain values have more significance than others.  (Although the synchronicity crowd is big on their own personalized set of values that they insist show how the world is existentially only serving their personal amusement.)

For a good example look no further than Freemasons.  

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

There are really only three actual degrees, apprentice, journeyman and master mason.  The master masonry titles have a lot of honorary titles that really don’t mean anything other than bragging rights.  I’m cooler than you because I’m a 17th level, you lowly 13th level piece of shit.  You buy the grog this week.  As soon as you become a master mason, you’ve already proven you can be trusted with the secrets of the super scary secret society bent on world domination.  Yet, since the highest level is 33 (that’s a lot of grog!) the number 33 to the gematria clown is super duper extra scary.  To the point that they’ll even manufacture it bogusly instead of just looking for it.  Note to self, repost the old content of the hotel floors at the Vegas music festival shooting where they fudged it to 33.  It was hilarious.

Even my stupid brain has been trained on what 33 means.  Lots of other overused numbers, too.  57, 201, 47, 113-my all time favorite, 666, 227 and 314, 42.  47 is notorious for a push to be remembered specifically with a questioning campaign - “What is 47?”  Buy your bumper sticker now at the shop!  Just don’t dwell on the irony that you are showing membership in a secret society far more dangerous than Freemasons, tue gematria disinfo crowd.  But even our friend 33, just by its existence, gematria history and prevalence is a leading question.  If you don’t know what 33 means you aren’t a good little gematria puppet and will get scolded for not spouting the cult party line that it’s masons.  No cookie for you.  As soon as I see a screenshot of a 33 from a gematria cipher I know there’s somebody somewhere thinking about not so scary in reality Freemasons being arbitrarily assigned a false label because they are in the thrall of some sports grifter.

33 is a lovely gematria number, just for the sake of the number without the history and secret society tie in.  Single word or short phrase in the reduction ciphers, oh yeah, there’s lots of 33’s happening everyday.  And a third degree mason, still a master?  3 would be just plain insulting.  Anybody can find a 3.  But get it up to two digits - the stupid brains start to pay notice.  Especially with the duplicate digits.  Face it, which number is cooler, 6 or 666?  8 or 88?  2 or 222?

And to be fair, the freemasonry content is a footnote now.  It mostly only shows up as a “the Jesuits control the Freemasons” aside since a different arbitrary target was picked based on engagement and views.  It doesn’t matter what the target is, what your clique is.  They all have a set of more magical target numbers to focus on.  It doesn’t matter if your clique is Qanon Trump content, cryptocurrency, or spirituality.  Your friendly cult leader will throw out the old chestnuts on a regular basis.

Present Value Of Money

It’s pretty safe to say that the targets of internet grift have a poor concept of money management.  And accounting, although if you dig into it the math is really not terribly difficult, has a certain aura of authenticity to it.  It sounds way cooler to call yourself a certified financial analyst than it does to merely be a bookkeeper.  

The key to getting that certification?  One plan is to take on a lot of student loan debt, find a job in an industry that’s in the financial sector, wear a suit and tie every day and complain about every time you hear that some government official talks about the rich being taxed.  The other plan is to go through the arduous process of being born into a wealthy family and then follow all those steps.  You’ve already grown up learning to complain about taxes, you just need some school more interested in Daddy’s donations than you legitimately studying for your certification.

Even the most lowly of the financially ignorant has a basic grasp of the present value of money, even if they don’t understand why.  I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.  WTF?!?  Dude, are you crazy?  I’m supposed to just give you a hamburger now and trust some vague promise of being reimbursed.  Get the fuck outta here.  Future value is basically the same.  I would rather you pay me today.  I’d rather you pay me next Tuesday if that’s the best I can get, it’s better than getting paid a year from now.

Tables like the image above work, if you keep in mind an important piece.  The interest rates are locked in, the standard method of operation being a signed contract.  The annuities for a big lottery payout are based on this.  You won 50 million?  That’s if it’s paid out in yearly installments.  You want it today, it’s a lot less than that, but be damned sure the taxes are coming out of it all up front.

And since people who tend to fall for get rich quick schemes throw common sense out the window when money gets involved they don’t realize that the entire contract process is a sham.  Nothing is in writing.  There’s no guarantee that your involvement with the sovereign citizen claims, sports gematria bets or crypto pump and dump ploys is *definitely* going to net you at least x amount of dollars in the future.  You need to make your decision now, because the grifter understands that it’s more important to get your money now than it is to let you wait awhile and think about it.  You just might let a friend or family member slightly more sane talk you out of it.  Or you might get enticed away by flame wars of competing grifters playing the Shill Game.  Or you might put a pause on your sports parlays and buy some Christmas presents this year.  The immediate transfer of cash from you to them now is the only guaranteed outcome after you sign up for that Patreon.

Personally, I’m hugely skeptical of any solutions to an extraordinarily complex subject like climate change.  Studies get thrown around showing $ invested in renewables, nuclear energy, investment in new tech and whatever else.  And just like the retail employee pocketing stuff from the stockroom and outside “shoppers” lifting goods, the shrinkage issue isn’t addressed.  The present value of the $ in full is presented without the added factor of people being assholes factored in.  Having been aware of how oil companies have stuck their hands into politics and aided where we are at now for many decades - I’ve seen nothing that changes my mind that a sensible solution to minimize the grift shrinkage is even remotely brewing.

Your numbers might be based on a solid 20% return.  But what if a full half of that disappears while waiting for it to play out?  There’s no climate change “contract” in place to make the big polluters actually move forward on genuinely worthwhile actionable solutions.  Social contracts are easy to break.

And there is something the ordinary person can do, instead of just me complaining I offer a stepping stone towards happiness.  Start taking misinformation seriously.  Instead of donating to that politician for a vague promise of enemies being squashed, think about the effect on you today.  Start looking for politicians that realize that misinformation and disinformation are a catch all for a lot of problems.  Grift takes a chunk off of climate change induced disaster relief.  Grift takes a chunk off of vaccination for new pandemics.  Grift takes a chunk off of tax collections, keeping law enforcement and the courts busy with sovereign citizen tactics.  Grift takes a chunk off of food pantries run by the well meaning religious organizations who are competing with end of the world survivalist content creators.

The last place you should ever do research on for a financial issue is social media, until you get to the point where you recognize the internet grifters for what they are.

Ritual Sacrifices And Algebra

These initiates into the world of gematria are extremely persistent and annoying with their lingo.  And nothing is more persistently annoying right now than the phrase ritual sacrifice. Since their pattern recognitions are limited to A=1 instead of higher math, let’s look at some simple algebra.

The illusion in gematria is that something like 73 has more significance than 1.  So if a slightly bigger number shows up, and matches two vaguely connected words a meaning, a false veneer of importance is associated to it.

In the following sense, ‘a’ is the algebraic variable, not the letter a, and so on.

a=73 b=73  a=person’s name b=ritual sacrifice

a=b by math

But you’re never going to pass that math test since in addition to b=ritual sacrifice b also means any word related to death.  Kill, murder, blood, sacrifice, etc….  I haven’t addressed a specific word for a value of 73 and I’m not going to.  It doesn’t matter.  They’re just going to pick one of the many transformation tricks to alter it to a number they like instead.

Transpose it 37.  703 is 73.  713 is 73.  Use of dozens of ciphers.  73 is the 21st prime number, so 21.  I can literally pick any person, alive or dead and make a narrative for predicting death by ritual sacrifice if still alive or justifying report of their passing as a ritual sacrifice for the recently deceased.  When Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis die near the beginning of Beetlejuice their book for the recently deceased could have simply said “ritual sacrifice” and the end credits roll.

And with the near infinite substitutions the source of the sacrifice, the murderers, is anything or anybody.  There’s no citation of sources for the actual murderers, so they get to plug whatever they want in.

All the old timers, even if they now concentrate on sports or cryptocurrency or synchronicity, have at one time or another at least dabbled in the ritual sacrifice narratives.  It’s what got the views.  It still gets views.  And depending on the source, the associated content can at least occasionally get nastier.

I’m not able to point fingers at anybody that I can definitely say is a bad parent for allowing their preteen or young teenager to get involved with sports gematria video content.  And the same goes for the kids themselves.  But legitimate anti extremism experts (i.e. not me) have noticed that anyone that is swayed by symbolic (ritual) content is more prone to develop or already be involved with some nastier IRL stuff.  That’s not just gematria, but talk of hand signals, color of clothing, the transvestigation “experts”, anything where a false label can arbitrarily assigned to an unwitting target.  It may not be as overt as drawing pictures of guns and the words KILL KILL KILL in the margin of the notebook.  But your precious little babies may be exposed to some stuff you might want to have a talk to them about.

Attaboy! TM

 

The Twixter account this was posted on recently is a Zach fan.  There’s reposts of Zach’s direct content as well as some other in his sphere of influence.  Note that there is a Flat Earth logo in the bottom right corner.  Additionally, looking at the content there’s also a classic sovereign citizen claim of “legal name fraud”, which translates to real life as, “I don’t want to pay my taxes and bills, so I’m going to make shit up.”

Attaboy!^TM  Good for you.  You’ve learned the joy of trolling the internet with disinformation.  Or you’re a sock puppet of an old player, engaging in the tactic of reverse trolling, a key component in the grifter economy.  Being wrong about everything for engagement instead of being correct.

Scientific minds will already pick up on some of the errors.  Scientific minds not aware of the specifics of what’s wrong will still know a reputable source to check, and then find out some are kind of wrong, and some are outrageously wrong.

Keep in mind as well that the profile describes this person as a political commentator in addition to analysts of rigged sports and scripted news.  What it is in reality, as an established reverse trolling account, is a search for unsuspecting debate opponents.  Those that feel the need to correct the mistakes to help them.  Obviously, you are misinformed, I can help you.  The force of gravity is actually…As the account owner snickers, notifies the wolf pack that there is someone for newbie true believers to get some practice of harassing others.

Reverse trolling is a subtle form of outrage porn.  Instead of directly attacking a pro and anti genuinely debatable topic it seeks to draw in well intentioned do gooders into a debate that ultimately degenerates into a pigeon chess logical fallacy loaded name calling contest.  Because people gullible enough to give credence to the meme and share it without checking how blatantly wrong it is can’t do better than calling other people poopyheads.

Sure, a cult leader type will jump in and give the expert opinion to back up the debate topic.  It’s still not a genuine debate.  It’s an Attaboy!^TM dospensary. A participation award for those that didn’t do well in school that finally got their first iPhone.  A genuine teacher, a genuine leader of people looking for actual truth would draw a line in the sand and say things like, “Wow, that’s got some bad numbers.  Don’t make the work look bad.”  Or how about, “That’s a flat earther that created that.  We believe in the globe so we can use GPS coordinates in our gematria decodes.  Don’t make the work look bad.”  Or, “You put up sovereign citizen content.  Why the hell are you trying to send gematria grifting dollars their way.  Keep it in the sports gambling scam community.”

The fighting blow ups could be avoided by a set number f community standards.  Where certain things are acceptable and not acceptable.  But gematria has always been more about making your own rules to justify your decode than following rules.  And the making up your own rules spilling over into real life.  I’m special, I don’t need to follow speed limits.  The real speed limit is 666 mph, established on route 666 in Ancient Rome in the year 666.

Know Your Gematria Grifter Red Flags - Misstakes And Mispelings

I had a conversation recently about misspelling and gematria of the misspelling.  So, I thought it was time to refresh and bump up this topic.

If I wanted to, I could make an entire blog about how disturbing it is that Gematrix.org contains a collection of extensively unscholarly material.  If one approaches gematria with the idea of checking it out for a lark like getting a mood ring or having a biorhythm chart made, well good for you.  But when people who are basically overly vocal trolls with no real value to add to the discussion start spouting out gematria truths, if they want to be taken seriously for even a second they should at least take the time to spell some damn words right.

Bear in mind, that gematria originated through a lot of the mentality of “throw enough shit on a wall, something will stick.”  Things that were commonplace years ago are now only footnotes, dredged up only occasionally as they became over time to silly and/or obvious that shit was being slung.  I haven’t seen a good Pi reference in forever.  It used to be that your decode sucked if you didn’t find a Pi reference.

Misspellings in gematria are a self contained contradiction.  The entire point is to sort through the people that are susceptible to being given the idea that they are smarter than they really are.  The pattern recognition is dumbed down so that it’s super easy to find the target number.  Or find a likely topic and then just sort through the already voluminous databases to find numbers that look inviting.

You’ve got to love how Gematrix pretty openly shows how unserious the site is.  Most gematria clowns will only ever play with the smaller numbers.  Two and three digits.  Short phrases or even single words that can be specifically identified and tied into a narrative.  So in preparation for this I did the same trick that I’ve done for years.  Picked a number too large and weird to actually have any practical gematria value.  That’s why the 8917 is purple in the screenshot.  And as expected I was rewarded with multiple gibberish entries to choose from that had some misspelled words.  I’m not going to dwell on wouldgonna.  That already speaks to the point of how if you’re not much of a scholar by itself.  So, you use gematria to show you’re smart and should be taken seriously?  That’s your story?  You’re going to stick with that?

Maybe there is some Organic Matrix involved and my random pick was not so random.  There are two pieces of that phrase that are remarkable for my vague plans to make this post.  First of all, I saw the new Godzilla movie.  Kamikaze pilots were an integral part of the plot.  It stands to reason a gematria scholar might actually do some research because of that.  And should know that the spelling is horribly butchered.  But these people have been trained that, “You know what I mean, close enough”, despite how the actual gematria value is different.  There’s an extra ‘a’ in there.

Even weirder, I intended to bring up a famous misspelling that is now enshrined in several video clips.  Pro gematria so called scholars, while playing the shill game and making attack videos of other users and cliques have called out one of their own for misspelling and doing gematria of SKULL N BONES instead of SKULL AND BONES (sometimes SKULL & BONES).  That person has been second to only Zach for producing content that would categorize him as a serial harasser.  And since Yale Skull and Bones is big for whenever 322 appears it’s enshrined in the gematria mythos.  He should be called out for it.  By all scholars, not just someone that didn’t like him for infiltrating on his market share of the grifting pie.

Now these types of mistakes are perhaps unavoidable with so many fat fingers typety typing away and spell check being bypassed.  But the mentality of trying to pump up egos with Attaboys!^TM while simultaneously having the need to smack down your enemies yields a curious problem for the gematria crowd.  Even without the actual gematria numbers, sometimes the clickbait gets overzealous.  Derek making his video about XXXTentacion and getting reamed in the comments for his mistake about what X’s tattoo was (video is out of circulation).  At that time the desire to be the bad ass scholar overrode the idea of simply admitting a mistake was made.  The tattoo ID was wrong, misspelled for all practical purposes.  So, you may be remembering he did make a correction - sure.  He reran the numbers and tweaked the narrative for the correct tattoo.  See, I was right all along!  Of course you were.  It didn’t matter if the tattoo was of a penguin or a kamikaze plane, you’d find a “right number”.  What the XXX fans wanted was, “I’m sorry, I’m deleting my video now for offending you.”  I dare you - no since Christmas is coming soon I double dog dare you to make an insulting video about Taylor Swift.  See how that goes over.  For starters, do the decode on the misspelling of TAILOR and how that means manufactured reality.  Then go into untrue statements about how she’s a talentless sex object elevated as a Manchurian candidate by the NWO.  You could get a lot of attention.

There are ways to separate the “true believers” from the agenda pushers.  One of those is the reaction to being presented with proof of dead wrong information.  Not owning the mistake and apologizing is not acceptable in real life.  Instead of admiring those that do it online, one should consider shunning them.

Know Your Sports Gematria Money Drains - The Sunk Cost Fallacy

The sunk cost fallacy is similar to the gambler’s fallacy.  For sports gematria betting purposes it adds an additional drain that does not occur in the gambler’s fallacy.  Not only do you lose on the scam magic technique, you have to pay to play.

Casino gambling has been a master class in socializing humans on how just our stupid brains justify being wrong.  The gambler’s fallacy, even if a game player is armed in advance with knowledge about it, continues to operate in live settings.  The pattern recognition skill that the roulette wheel has come up as black seven times in a row is super easy to spot.  The eight spin on a fair roulette wheel doesn’t give a damn about the previous seven spins.  But the safest bet in the casino at that time is that somebody is thinking that red is “due.”  Previous outcomes have no effect, even if you’re the eye candy watching the wealthy casino patron and aren’t putting a penny on the game yourself.

The sunk cost tops that off with a helping of you having some skin in the game.  Bitcoin had a bad stretch and is only 50% of its value you purchased it at.  Because of real life pressures like interest rates fluctuating, breakout of a war disturbing global markets, etc….  Past investment gains or losses have no bearing on these real factors.  Bitcoin is not “due” just because your life savings is now invested in it and you’ve deemed yourself just unlucky.

The easiest gematria example is sports betting.  You got involved because the $$ signs of a get rich now scheme attracted you.  And the secret knowledge, which incidentally used to be openly displayed and discussed on the Free To Find Truth Fee To Find Misinformation blog is now buried behind a paywall.  Now the secret knowledge costs you actual cash in advance.  And you’re more likely to keep thinking about how you need to start winning because you’re kicking in extra $ for the picks.  Your sunk cost includes whatever your monthly subscription price is.

It should be a complete abandonment of Hubbard’s Patreon at this time.  He’s had such a bad season to date it’s unlikely that he’ll even break even by the end of the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl.  And although it’s supremely odd that this once free, now monetized information has had an inflationary increase in price.  And add to that the Sports Gematria recaps of the colossal failure so far bringing comments about how he doesn’t even make wagers on his own picks.  There still are newbies every season that refuse to admit that he’s the casino.  Making business decisions on how much to comp high rollers, giving away free drinks and so on to adjust for the expected steady income stream from the Patreon.

There’s an even more disturbing example that is in the world of Hubbard fanboys that aren’t into sports.  The long term loyal lieutenants that simply refuse to give up and walk away.  Now, the content level has certainly dropped off drastically.  But they still have their cliques to be active in.  They still don’t see the big picture how if gematria worked in the manner being presented, Zach would have more money than Elon Musk.  The sunk cost fallacy may be traditionally stated as purely economical, but having invested so much time and energy, having had the cult leader tell them so often that their worth as a human being is so important, they continue to waste their time.  

They’ll be back after a break.  Maybe because they needed a second job to pay for actual monetary sink costs.  They are like a gymnast that can perform a flawless routine based on watching, listening to, and being coached by an actual expert.  But their first friend who got them into gymnastics was an incompetent swindler.  They just can’t stick the landing.  Once they get to the edge of the forest of misinformation they turn around because they got a phone call from someone pretending to be their friend telling them to turn around, walk back down the path and head back to the camp site of Gematria familiarity.  Never able to afford a home in the real world, the camp ground is going to have to do.

These people are, so to speak, stuck in the rabbit hole.  And have actual sunk costs.  They don’t realize that employers really don’t want to hire someone that prefers to make up their own rules to feel good about themselves.  They will sooner buy a video editing software package to make nicer “truth” videos than go to church and socialize with people they might actually get along with long term.  They can even be motivated to January 6th levels of aggression over enough time.  Getting arrested and really screwing up their future for themselves and any partners and children they had.  All for the sake of that Attaboy!^TM that came from someone that really just regards them as free advertisement.  If need be, I can give names and examples of a couple people that were literally offered money to produce content, then finally woke up to that even the sunk cost of their lost time wasn’t worth it.  These took years, not just the course of a single football season.

It’s a feedback loop.  Like a trap of student loan debt.  Your degree not working out, maybe you need more training in that same field, more advanced courses.  Or maybe, you should be a plumber instead of shooting for bank vice president, especially if you have already got awesome plumbing skills without taking on new, expensive training for something that doesn’t fit.  

Kurzgesagt Talks About The Internet

Kurzgesagt -The Internet

Maybe it’s just my own confirmation bias.  Or maybe I at least at times know what I’m talking about.  And since this is my blog, I’m going to go with the second one.

For those that need the background, Kurzgesagt is not just one of the top science content channels on YouTube, they are one of the top channels, period.  Whenever a new video drops it routinely is in the top trending videos.  Unlike trivial, repetitive gematria content where they need to explain the basics at the start of every video, they can operate on the assumption that the target audience has a decent grasp on math and the laws of physics.  So they skip the Science 101 lesson and dive into a carefully chosen topic.  And there are recurring jokes for those that need some comic relief.  You may never view animated cartoon birds the same way again.

The Internet Is Worse Than Ever - Now What?

Diving in headfirst, they begin with the global dumpster fire that is social media.  The internet is worse than ever because of social media.  No beating around the bush, but a punch in the face to the downside of the internet.  Although, in theory, access to a wealth of knowledge could enrich our lives, the unholy matrimony of convenience, rampant unregulated capitalism, and people being assholes has gotten us where we are today.

The actual meat of the video begins with online filter bubbles and how that’s actually a myth.  A minor quibble from me, as I do not think they are a myth.  Just way overrated.  A filter bubble only gives you the content you agree with, keeping you in your preconceived echo chamber.  The algorithms DO present you with content similar to what you’ve been watching.  Similar is a question of personal definition.  Start watching pool trick shot videos, you get more pool trick shot video suggestions.  That’s fine, but what if your celebrity trick shot video has regular messages about other content?  Like claiming their success is due to not being vaccinated and that the Jesuits are behind the nonexistent plot.  These types of things may be better now with some context additions and suggestions of real news sources above conspiracy content.  But now “both sides” are presented and people are actively pushed to think the inaccurate information is just as valid as the right answer.  People that think there are chemtrails poisoning us don’t give a hoot about the right answer, they ignore it and move on to the messages about how Gabby Petito is a crisis actor and cryptocurrency markets are controlled by reptilians or whatever other bullshit that is being peddled.  The context that is missing is that the sources of the “bubble” content are purposefully, actively being wrong about everything for engagement.  They do end up making the qualifying comment that EXTREME filter bubbles are rare.  For example, there’s somebody that’s made their life’s mission to wake people up to the evils of GMO only ever getting GMO content and nothing else.  The algorithms will throw in non GMO content.  Etc….  Let’s shorten that up to say that the online filter bubble is not mythical, but you filter bubble can be damaged to ignore the red flag of contradictions, even within the same sources of your information.

Around the 2:10 mark they get to the point.  “Your brain is stupid.”  Or as I even more disparagingly say, people are assholes.  We have cognitive biases.  We evolved to have cognitive biases to get by, to shorten the thinking process down to the bare minimum to cope with dire situations requiring immediate attention.  I wonder if I should pet the bear?  No.  Don’t fuck with the bear.  Teeth, claws, massive weight advantage and after hibernation has been working out at the gym.  Bad idea.

Moving on they discuss cooperation, empathy and navigating social structures.  After millions of years we learned that a tribal level of socialization is about the right size.  Thanks to there being a rapid technological advance that has increased our life spans, and corresponding dominance to top of the food chain, we simply have too many people to take care of.  We’ve been losing our empathy and cooperation, because now you can’t move to another town to get away from your idiot neighbor - there’s plenty of replacement idiot neighbors in the new ton.  Big cities always have big city problems of trying to keep everyone cooperating instead of at each other’s throats.  Empires always get too big for their britches and start doing things that keep the wealthy elite in power, while ignoring the lower classes struggle just to put gas in the chariot to go slave at the rock quarry for a couple loaves of bread.

The video moves on to the level of disagreement we’re exposed to on the social media internet. Social sorting.  Now we are exposed to a planet full of conflicting ideas on what is right and what is wrong.  They don’t spend time on the grifter economy, that’s probably a good idea for the scope of the video.  So I get to add that in addition to the social sorting that has created a my team good your team bad atmosphere, there’s a lot of deliberate pressure to keep the labeling going.  You’re on the wrong team, it’s the end of the world if you don’t join my team.  No allowance for nuance that can be talked about civilly.  Pick a side, and be gung ho for it or you are slime that is not even worthy of being wiped from my boot.  That’s about as far away as cooperating as you can get.

Kudos for them directly pointing a finger at the US two party political team split.  The grifters on both sides love how they can immediately label one side bad, one side good, throw out a bit of outrage porn for engagement and make a donation request.  Political us vs. them HAS reached ridiculous proportions.

Kurzgesagt does a good job of clearly pointing out when something is an opinion of theirs instead of a researched, properly sourced and scientific fact.  I have no comment about their proposed solutions.

Here’s what I do get to point out as owner of this blog.  I’ve gone on record here well before that video came out about some of these same issues.  The massive interconnectivity above a tribal level.  The cognitive biases.  The lack of cooperation and empathy.  How we should be on the same team about global problems now that we are a global society.

I’ve been accused of not being self confident.  I’m not overwhelmingly self confident, but what I really lack is confidence in other people.  Because I hate being right about some stuff.  That video has racked up almost 3 million views.  And the comments are overwhelmingly supportive of the video content.  Not because they are deleting comments because they are part of an evil empire.  But because the target audience, far smarter than money obsessed corporate leaders, realize that things are this bad out there on social media.