Monday, July 31, 2023
Hyperindividualism, Toxic Narcissism, Social Media and Gematria
Sunday, July 30, 2023
Online Scams - It’s Not Just Fun and Games With Gematria
I’ve often said that in contrast to the 419 advanced fee scam (Nigerian Prince) that these days it’s way easier. In the olden days you received a fax or email, which even with mass marketing to millions narrowed the further effort down to a select few - those gullible enough to reply. Now, with the never ending push of conspiracy content the target audience can find the old rabbit hole and come to you.
Some statistics from the FTC bear out the increasing exponential impact:
Your politicians love to complain about the cost of immediate projects. How much to send to the war in the Ukraine. How much to fund the problems with immigration. What to do about interest rates and inflation. When something like gematria sports picks comes along it just seems odd and weird. Why bother paying attention to something that’s utter nonsense that nobody would be foolish enough to believe?
Well there’s this thing called math, and enough people get involved and will continue to be involved in believing in something too good to be true.
When prices are set for food, part of the cost is already factored in for loss due to pests, disease and product expiration. When cars are priced for sale, the math on odds of a mandated safety recall are factored in. Insurance premiums are based on how many gazillion dollars the CEOs expect each year. Everything has a hidden cost that you are paying for.
Promoters of conspiracy content rely on astute psychological understanding of human nature. It’s not a goal to believe in the “product” for the rest of your life. The cognitive bias of short term benefit vs. long term impact is super powerful. Unless we are expected to evolve into a species where everyone steals from everyone else and that’s a good thing there’s no winners.
In that link, note that the romance scam is still a solid money maker. The scammer invests some short term energy into pumping up the ego of the target. You are so funny, smart, wonderful. The romance attaboys, hiding behind a fake account that may even be the opposite gender of what you expected. Following a script to help them through the rough spots on common skepticism. Then, ironically, being identified as a good person, the target is hit with some tragedy that only their money can solve. You are not a good person if you don’t send that money, whether you self identify the need to send that money immediately or suffer through more external pressure to guide you to that conclusion. An analogy is the mega church operators and their ilk. You are not a truly religious person unless you buy the miracle spring water that will magically erase your debt.
Gematria got merged into the conspiracy world of how everything is an animal in Australia that wants to kill you. Instead of selling a temporary feeling of joy of being a good person, the product is hatred. You can find numbers for everything you hate. The other political party. The wrong religion. Your government authorities. Law enforcement. You are no longer a good person if you don’t demonstrate your hatred by giving them your money. If you’ve awakened to how it makes no sense that the results of your sports prediction weren’t really a prediction, no further effort will be wasted on you. They are looking for someone with more staying power. The ones that demonstrate a consistent enough hatred to keep going to present the next level of funding. What started as jollies by analyzing your favorite team’s numbers is met with pressure to do more for the community.
The mid level believer is the kind of person who will double down instead of admitting they are wrong. They are susceptible to the double dip, where the first scam certainly didn’t help their situation and the next get rich quick scheme seems like a good idea. Now you aren’t even making sports picks anymore. Now your being groomed for cryptocurrency, sovereign citizen, political donations on a large scale type scams. You’re already armed with the cognitive bias of the gambler’s fallacy. You are due. Because you are a loyal hate filled person that has picked the scapegoat of the day whether that is someone of the wrong gender, skin color or sexual orientation. The math bears out that there’s always a significant number of these.
Here’s somebody on Twitter getting gematria groomed:
Of course you’ve seen for yourself it’s always correct. There’s always correct numbers. There’s also a million times more incorrect numbers that you could have latched on to. I looked at the profile and recent posts. This person is now getting into crypto and political donations type content. Using my amazing powers of gematria prediction, I expect loss of money in a significant amount, getting along with the family problems, and pressure to put out more scam content because the cause is more important than just what’s going on in your life. The scam promoter admits to the confirmation bias. Whatever it is I’m searching for, I’m sure to find.
This is the background for a series of posts. Make sure to not join my nonexistent Patreon and not donate to my PayPal account for more.
Friday, July 28, 2023
Vance Astro’s Armpits
As a bit of background, Stan Lee’s letters to the Marvel Comics staff had a frivolous and fun reward for the sharp eyed clients. If you were able to dredge up an old secure reference and be the first to point it out, you won a No Prize prize. Bragging rights. If you by any chance know of Vance Astro and the speech I’m about to relate, consider yourself seriously No Prized.
Teams of heroes were a popular source of storylines, adding flavor to the good guys versus the villains. Different groups facing off, civil wars in the membership ranks, proud announcements of new members, the heartbreak of an old comrade moving on (with or without death that is never really a true death, because hey, it’s a comic book). There’s no burden of the star in the film growing old and spending money on digital de-aging CGI.
There’s precious little new innovation in books and film. All the good ideas are mostly taken from old material and rebranded. Like how The Last of Us is just The Walking Dead with a twist. What makes it worthwhile is if it’s well done. And you never know when a story worth retelling is going to hit home for the first time as youth matures into adulthood.
The Avengers, sure we all know those guys by now. The movies have been plastered all over cinemas and TVs for over a decade. And oh boy those are retelling of old stories. Anyway, there was a second group that was fairly popular called The Defenders. The lineup featured Dr. Strange, the Hulk and Valkyrie and rotating lesser know members as needed. Those first three, all of those are in the Avengers movies. And there was also a Guardians of the Galaxy back then. Their leader was Vance Astro. So here’s a link to a preachy little bit the writers worked into the story. Defenders #26
https://everything2.com/title/The+Defenders+%252326
Here’s the key paragraph
Holy shit, Marvel. I’m supposed to be reading about superheroes beating up supervillains. Why you do did to me? Now I’m in high school absorbing different peoples attitudes towards pollution, overpopulation and the conflict between those who understand the scientific method and those who don’t. And those that don’t care because grifting is more important than truth.
Back in 1975 when this was produced the fossil fuel industry was already ass deep in lying about the science to make money. Almost 50 years ago, and it’s blatantly obvious to people today that even if they don’t trust the scientific consensus SOMETHING IS WRONG. Gone are the days when I could grab a comic book and sit outside on a plastic lounge chair and read. I have to be careful about taking my senior dog for a walk, because it’s just too fucking hot. A 10 minute drive from work back home isn’t enough for the car AC to cool off the blistering heat on the steering wheel completely. Air conditioning is a necessity, not a luxury.
Add to this (and let me assure you, it sucks to have great long term memory), Vance’s speech was presented to a young boy who breaks down crying about the awful future that awaits us. “But that couldn’t really happen here, could it?” It’s a time travel story, and Doctor Strange assured the boy it’s just a POSSIBLE future.
I found that comic book recap by Google searching for VANCE ASTRO ARMPIT. If I were a conspiracy grifter I’d call that predictive programming where 50 year old material shows the future with somewhat frightening accuracy. I’d also throw in a whine about how you don’t hear the ozone layer stuff anymore. We did put out that fire, but the dry tinder is still there in the whole population/pollution/economic impact problems.
The grifters do not want you to understand that a comic book boy is now an avatar for scientific expertise. How a fluffy superhero story has more relevance to the world than their free speech of stupid ideas. The more chaos there is, the more background noise that exists to ignore the science side in the battle of good science versus making money, the better.
It’s hard to imagine what these conspiracy theory Avengers have for an Endgame. A world where those who steal the best are the winners is a loss. If that story were to get rebranded today it would replace dry armpits and ozone with disinformation, climate change and vaccinations. The little boy in the comic will be crying about not knowing who to believe. And Dr. Strange will step in and point out that at least you’ll get gematria sports picks, so it’s not all bad, eh?
Thursday, July 27, 2023
Rebranding
Twitter is now X. Facebook is Meta. Lots of other corporate entities have rebranded over time.
A true rebranding is a fresh start. It might start with a name change, yet usually indicates dropping the old and bringing in the new. A radio station might change their name. New management comes in and after doing some market studies decides that the audience numbers are suffering and instead of Classic Rock it’s time to go with lots of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and that more modern set.
Twitter in particular doesn’t seem like a true rebranding to me, more like an attempt to disassociate from recent turmoil and financial problems. A reliance on how forgetful people are about how due diligence on digging into the past is important instead of the old conspiracy method of claiming, “I never said that.” Yes. Yes you did. But it’s all just a show to present what your new audience wants to hear. About how they can become rich and famous by giving you money.
The term is soft rebrand. Your not totally throwing out the old and making a fresh start. It’s just a name change with new packaging. In the old TV days they studied how many shows for a series needed to be produced for a successful run in syndication. A famous example being Star Trek, which was right at the borderline. The old rule of thumb was 100 episodes or four seasons. The average memory has enough time to forget enough about a single episode during the run, so by the time the 108th and last episode finishes and season 1, episode 1 comes back on it’s fresh enough for entertainment value long enough to get butts on the couch long enough to be influenced by the commercials.
So far, there’s only been one true rebranding in the gematria conspiracy theory gang. When Hubbard dropped the Illuminati/Freemason/Cabal storylines in the FTFT blog and changed to the current Gematria Effect News brand. Now it’s Jesuits this, Jesuits that, Jesuits everywhere. With generous commercial slots for reminding the audience that it’s really the “you know who I’m really talking about”. The subliminal scapegoating of anti-semitism.
I’ve noticed lately that there’s been some dabbling in the rebranding arena from the mid-level tier of the MLM structure. The kind of people who have been around for years as opposed to moving on to the greener pastures of slightly more lucid conspiracy content. (Let’s face it, a YouTube channel dedicated to how much you love guns simply because you love guns is a lot more sane sounding.) It’s all about engagement and keeping butts on the couch long enough to get them lost in the rabbit hole. Sincere sounding messages are put out about how they’ve changed, usually to be more spiritual and loving than they used to be. Anecdotal “evidence” provided for the motivation includes run ins with law enforcement, concern over viewer counts on videos, reasons to suddenly get back into gambling. That evidence may or may not be true. The advertisers don’t care. Only now the advertisers are grifters instead of somebody trying to sell something more or less legitimate. I’ve personally scambaited a couple of them. The girl down on her luck because she was raped by her father. The biker chick who has the husband thrown in jail. There’s a bunch who just go for the old fashioned selling of porn. All eager to like videos long enough to post a couple comments to see if the ad makes an impact on the unsuspecting.
A soft rebrand is never on the lines of someone talking about how they’ve given up on conspiracy content completely. It’s always limited to how much I don’t like So and So today. If there is a hard rebrand they don’t rage quit and announce they are quitting because of So and So. They just slink away into the night.
Mostly. The recent rebrands have been renaming the YouTube channel without much change in the actual content. It’s still about whining about how evil the world is. Attempts to do a hard rebrand and attacking an entrenched gematria guru always backfire. New entrants into the pyramid scheme are pressured to attack. There’s a weird entire economy surrounding conspiracy content where the constant attacks add to the lack of coherence in the overall message.
If you’re interested in genuine research into the disinformation world there’s an opportunity to find some blatant hypocrisy here. My all time favorite is the Gematrinator posting on blog about how Zach started making accurate sports picks like crazy years ago. The day after he joined the comments of a Zach Attack video complaining about how much of a pain in the ass he is. Highly unlikely the rebranding lasted a matter of hours, not even a few days.
To be fair, the newest versions of long timer content are a lot less openly hateful and violent. In that respect, some progress has been made. Whether this is a sign of users mellowing or not - ?? It’s not that certain. Weird is ok. Being weird doesn’t directly interrupt the lives of others too much.
(And change your channel name as much as you want. If you don’t join the internet equivalent of a convent we’ll still find you in the comments sections of other videos.)
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Bullying In the Truth Community
One of the features of reading through truth so called community posts on social media is division within the ranks; petty squabbling over nonissues and infighting over who is more important to the movement. I call this The Shill Game, where the cups covering the balls (or shills) are constantly moved around and it’s impossible to predict where the actual target it is. Nobody ever truly wins this game. But by accident or design it helps the grifters a lot. The target audience is already cognitively impaired and is constantly pressured to keep toeing the line, following the rules. And those rules can change on a daily basis.
Precious little in the truth so called community changes the rules so much. One person has a screen full of dozens of ciphers. One person arbitrarily declares that the reduction cipher is the “purest” and using more than the four base ciphers is not legit. One person finds synchronicity on hundreds of years old events. One person makes a narrative about predicting the future claiming that the old events aren’t as important as declaring a 90+ year old person in poor health is about to die since the mainstream media declared their hospitalization. But hey, you where only 67 days off . That must mean something, right?
And the sports gematria is the worst. A reasonably rational person can instantly identify a problem with how the Lions and Colts both equal 69 and 66 in the most commonly used ciphers. A person that is more likely to not recognize this as a problem is the kind of person that went through high school with bad grades and being issued reinforcement that they aren’t performing well. Psychologically, they are placed into a setting where they receive positive reinforcement for being right on a trivial event. An event that is nudged along by increasing the statistical chance to create the right answer. And the methods to create the correct answer are so vast that it gets to the point that it’s impossible to not get a “right” answer.
By changing the rules daily. Never accepting being wrong. And toeing the line on who is your current choice for not being a shill.
I’ve been totally not surprised to be reading that there’s a bunch of harassment and bullying ongoing in the -48 crowd with the passing of that cult leader. This is totally natural as there’s a rush to fill the vacuum by those that are fully aware of the way the grift works and those that qualify as true believers. The true believers have lost their prime source of positive reinforcement. They’ve lost that main source of being told they are right all the time.
The chicken or the egg coming first doesn’t matter. Whether the conspiracy mentality bleeds over into real life or real life pressure turns you to belief in conspiracies, there is a link between being a real life pain in the ass and an online conspiracy spouting bad ass who is never wrong. And here we see another problem with the mix. How social media historically has mishandled conspiracy content.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-14751-001
I would like to check that link thoroughly to verify it looks like a legitimate study. No way am I going to put that much effort into it. On the surface it looks fine, but it’s blocked off from full view unless I click more links. Even that short blurb in the abstract isn’t written in normal English. It’s science talk. Your going to get a heavy dose of standard deviations, psychology terms and things way outside a high school education for the average kid. Historically, I personally do a terrible job of communicating higher end concepts. I’m not the only one, so at least I have that going for me. It’s way too easy for me to fall into the trap of assuming people know what I’m talking about when I’m just getting a vacant stare, hoping the awkward conversation ends. I’m also guilty of just giving up on what I deem to be a hopeless situation.
Real life workplace, school, social contact - it’s a never ending battle on dealing with one side that’s a pain in the ass being force fed bad information and constantly being showered with praise even when colossally wrong about important issues and a more knowledgeable community who can’t effectively communicate the correct information. It doesn’t help when the experts are being attacked because the Alex Jones’s of the world are directing the attacks, going after the experts that can debunk the bullshit.
Compare these statements:
“While the efficacy of H2SO4 on dissolution of plumbing congestion is not to be denied, its corrosive attributes make it an overall less than worthy ultimate answer.”
Vs.
“Don’t use acid for plumbing problems, it eats the hell out of the pipes.”
In the gematria world:
“Astute grifters use psychological techniques to motivate and exploit their target audience.”
Vs.
“I’m important because Zachary Hubbard said so.”
And over the past decade that’s all it has taken. Support the cause I give you an attaboy. Stop paying me, or question what I say on even whether 69,66 means Colts or Lions, you are a worthless shill, controlled opposition less than human piece of garbage.
Sunday, July 23, 2023
Culture Wars - Barbie, Beer, Boycotts and Building Blocks
There were things in the past that two sides chose to oppose each other on. There are opposing sides on today’s hot topics. There will be opposing sides in the future. All Culture War topics are not created equal and like gematria dumbing it down to a manageable level for the critical thinking challenged, some things explode way out of proportion to their actual relevance.
Returning to one of my old favorites, Scientology - the product being sold is a complete sham. You did not actually have the souls of angry dead aliens that needed expensive classes to be removed. The indoctrination happens slowly over time. You never hear the infamous Xenu story until you’ve been exposed to some slightly more lucid topics. Maybe you got some benefit from their anti-drug program. Maybe you dislike psychiatrists and fell for that selling point. Maybe you fell for the celebrity endorsements and thought your acting career would take off. Hey, it worked for Cruise, Travolta and Alley, why not me?
Those with a logic and evidence based outlook often do the eye roll thing when a Culture War topic takes off and develops a life of its own beyond its true significance. Like it is some hill you choose to die on significance. Arguably, something consistently proven to be a harmful long term sham like Scientology deserves to be boycotted if governments behave ineffectually. Still arguably, but less arguably is what happens when people get fired up over things like beer and toys.
The Barbie movie is the current big issue, and don’t let your inner Dunning Kruger get in the way of thinking it doesn’t have an impact on people other than yourself. If conservatives get their way Barbie will be banned in all forms except a monogamous housewife spending all her time in the Barbie custom kitchen and the Talking Barbie pull cord only espouses traditional Christian values. At least from the way they talk about it. In reality, it’s just another arbitrary scapegoat. Barbies, when I worked for Toys R Us, were not the money marker. It was the custom kitchen, clothes, the car and the fringe things in the Barbie World that were the real profit producers. Putting a GI Joe in a pink car was something that just wasn’t meant to be done. No real Barbie lover would dare do that and at least admit it in public.
They start the kiddies off young with the Purity fallacy, appealing to the purity dichotomy of boys doing boy things and girls doing girl things. Mark did his thing, Shania did her thing and never the Twain shall meet. After growing up, and moving beyond toys, now as a voting age person instead of an appeal to nostalgia to market selling tickets to a movie it’s the end of the world since no true Republican would have anything to do with Barbie. The funny thing is, if you dig around in history pretty much every toy has been advertised in some way that can be deemed as offensive. The slow witted just fall for the rhetoric that’s being pushed by the top of the food chain. The only real solution is no toys at all.
This all or nothing except when I expose my hypocrisy mentality is more emphatic with the Bud Light culture war boycott. Hopefully you don’t give your children beer since they aren’t allowed to play with toys any more. No voting age types have put a hit on Bud Light, successfully knocking it off the number one spot on best selling beer list. Funny thing is Modelo is the new number one. And everywhere outside the United States is owned by Anheuser-Busch who also owns Bud Light. If you don’t mind that obvious hypocrisy, if you dig deep enough you can find advertisers try to be inclusive to as much different culture as possible and have at one time or another done something that could set off the boycott brigades. The only real solution is to not drink any beer at all if you really think Bud Light is so bad. But the beer situation gets worse. Now there’s a frivolous lawsuit by a presidential candidate because his state’s pension funds took a hit because his side got his idiots fired up about Bud Light and they lost money. No true Republican would not sue for creating a problem by making a mountain out of a molehill.
Let’s not forget that you can’t have a culture war without an opposing side. The liberal response invariably overcompensates by endless talking about these trivial issues, like a big cloud of no true Democrat would ever… arguments to attempt to counter the gung ho attitude of the other side. Giving the pointless argument fuel and oxygen. The endless psychological pressure of choosing one side or another by the example of how you spend your money. The only real winners are the grifters who keep bringing up both sides, going with the flow of what is getting the most engagement.
The real solution is an understanding of building blocks and how the whole is sum of its parts, and not good or bad based on one individual component. So, I return to my vaccine analogy. The gematria crowd affiliated themselves with the anti-science crowd. When Covid hit, the first significant pandemic in quite awhile they climbed on to the Covid is a Hoax bandwagon. Giving oxygen and fuel to the social media discourse that still doesn’t just linger but like an unruly child screams out for attention, interrupting the adult after dinner talk. Every single vaccine that ever was, ever is and ever will be is made of chemicals. No individual element is good or bad, it’s how they are combined that makes a difference. If your argument is based on boycotting chemicals you don’t like, the only real solution you have, just like not ever drinking beer again, not ever playing with toys again, is to boycott ever eating again. Of course there’s “bad” chemicals in your everyday stuff. Have you ever heard of 💩?
Good luck with that not eating thing.
Friday, July 21, 2023
How Gematria Fits Into The Culture War
Also take a side trap on their link to wedge issues if you have an extra couple minutes.
For the most part the higher level gematria users remain politically neutral. Naturally, since grifting has been a major part of the program this makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to antagonize roughly half of your target audience. But what they do use is make the hot topic wedge issues a primary talking point. Nonstop.
Personally as a pro cooperation type of guy I hate wedge issues and how they are handled. Instead of open debate about topics that are genuinely arguable from both sides having some good points inevitably it turns into an all out nothing package deal. Maybe the losing side gets thrown a few bones and table scraps. In general there is gridlock where the losers seek to regain control becoming more important for the control than the underlying ideas behind their “culture”.
A hugely oversimplified example, the liberals want to help the poor with social programs geared towards giving them money. The conservatives believe in capitalism and earning money. So the conservatives would prefer less government oversight and cutting free lunch programs for school kids, the liberals would prefer writing off student loan debt and funding aid overseas. There’s always a valid negative to these sides. Better educated children happy with school should be a plus, money sent to malnourished children in another continent could be used at home. And through massive propaganda campaigns in the never ending cycle of having control and trying to maintain it versus losing control and trying to get it back a lot of resources that could be better spent on both sides of the culture war get wasted.
Somebody super crazy gung ho one side or the other is a perfect candidate for political grifting, where the campaign fundraising is the goal instead of the means to get policies put in place. After a gematria newbie gets a taste of the success of easily manufacturing numbers to support something less life altering, like a sports championship, it’s only natural that left to their own cognitive biases they will wander to other aspects of their lives. And since the gematria topics based on ness headlines are supercharged wedge issue items they get a heavy dose of “pick one side or the other” with a heaping helping of “everything is evil, don’t worry about the other side’s talking points because I have flimsy evidence that shows that I’m right all the time.”
Your semi regular reminder that based on gematria, everyone alive now, lived in the past and will live in the future is evil. Or good. But finding evil is a lot more fun so let’s roll with that.
Everybody is paying a hidden cost for the culture war, the cost of wasted resources. Once the line has been cast and the fish first bite there’s a rush for the grifting economy to suck as much out of the mark while the sun is still shining on the row boat. Whether the fish on the line is a teen without enough to have the life experiences to recognize that something that sounds too good to be true is too good to be true. Whether the fish is an elderly person with declining mental faculties who has voted for a single party their entire life. Whether the the fish is genuinely mentally disturbed. These are the kinds of people that are beset with enormous psychological pressure that to be a good person it’s not just good enough to be a good person, but evil needs to be found and eradicated to be a good person. So give me some $$ on some sports picks to fund defeating evil.
Along the way, arbitrary scapegoats are created. All scapegoats are not created equal. Some rise to the top by being at least somewhat of a celebrity. Some are completely uncalled for. Did we really need a bitter and hate filled gematria grifter claiming Gabby Petito was the Antichrist (or at least there was some sort of “ritual sacrifice” involved)? No. Do we really need free speech allowing these comments? No, but it’s historically something that’s always happened. So we live with it, although now thanks to the Internet there’s an historical record of how picking an arbitrary scapegoat works for grifting short term. Getting people fired up about wedge issues in the current news has worked wonders for a long time. Now thanks to the Internet and Antisocial Media that people use for news instead of real news both sides of the culture war are losing resources that could better be spent on cooperating.
Paradoxically free speech in its current form is ruining your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Good luck figuring out how to fund stopping climate change. Good luck figuring out how to golf in 110 degree daily temperatures. Good luck trying to fund your allies during the next war a dictator starts. Good luck not just funding the free school lunch program, but actually finding the food for the program.
A good start is to take a step back at least every once in awhile to be a good person instead of the myth of funding politics to eradicate the other evil people. Misinformation researchers have a phrase for this.
Go touch some grass.
Wednesday, July 19, 2023
How The Hollywood Elites Ruined the World
The real reason I had taken a lengthy break was I was working on my most mind boggling decode ever. Like movie hype:
Now I have to explain the first of what is going to be many distractions. Cocaine Bear - based on true events! Sound of Freedom - based on true events! Braveheart- based on true events! And, numerous gematria clowns introduce their current video as the most mind boggling decode ever, until next week’s most mind boggling decode ever.
As a young, lower middle class movie watcher the theater experience was a joy. Not so much for the movie at times, but the air conditioning. As one of the last households to get a window unit AC the chance to not bake while watching mid summer TV, oh boy that was the life.
Now you should keep in mind that a gematria decode needs to dumb it down to statistically insignificant numerical talking points, so let’s get the numerology all out of the way here to present the rest of the material uninterrupted by that. Climate Change, Cult Classic and Credit Cards - CC. CC = 48. Hoax = 48. Tickets = 48. B-Movie = 96 which is 48x2 (because ya gotta through in a make up your own rules type number to encourage others that without real rules you get to make up whatever rules you want)
To be allowed to sit in the theater, you need to buy a ticket. And doing that you are now a sheeple being part of the problem. You’ve fallen for the plan and that’s why record breaking temperatures are the new normal.
The movie is just bread and circuses to get you hooked on air conditioning. Historically people have watched some mind numbingly dumb movies that make it big - the cult classic. Clearly the film isn’t anything resembling art, but why would it have to be good when the cool air is the real selling point?
It’s even worse than you think. It’s deliberately bad so that the cool air becomes more memorable than the content of the film. The only parts of the movie the guys are going to remember are the boobs and the blood. And there’s another distraction break - you often have to bring up racism in a decode so people easily confused by biases get the subliminal bump to remember that they have had their lives ruined by <insert scapegoat here>. Misogyny works the same way. And why exactly are the girls there? They don’t want to see this crappy movie. It’s a date. And how do you keep your date interested in staying through the movie instead of bailing at the first sign of gore? Date numerology. No, no, wait -
Popcorn
And what do we know about popcorn? It’s made of chemical elements. And it blows up when heated. What else blew up? THE BIG BANG.
Every subatomic particle that ever was, is and will be including YOU may have gotten rearranged in weird ways was created in the Big Bang. Every piece of popcorn is a result of the Big Bang.
Back to date night. You don’t want to appear cheap, so you suck it up and buy the popcorn. But instead of two small popcorns because you really can’t afford it you buy a large for her and act all noble and generous. But it’s more than she can eat, so you think she might share. But there’s that darn cheap looking problem again.
So you turn to the conspiracy world for inspiration
You steal some. Maybe she takes a bathroom break, or is distracted covering her eyes by a particularly bloody scene. Whatever, you get a taste of the popcorn, you like it, and now you’re officially part of the bread (popcorn) and circuses (movie) loving complex that loves AC and stealing.
Now you’ve done it, and you get married. She pretended to be interested in the now cult classic and you have to watch romantic comedies for the rest of your time together. At home. In your central air conditioning upgrade. With more popcorn? Hell no. Now it’s kale and veggie platters and the celery doesn’t even have peanut butter. So once every month you and the guys plot out an excuse to have a cult classic movie night for the nostalgia. Now it’s beer and popcorn while the significant others think you are preparing a report for the Monday work group meeting.
Back to the Big Bang. All intelligent life (and conspiracy theorists) that will ever exist was created then. And shocking - popcorn is a self perpetuating intelligent life form disguised as a snack. Astrophysicists look for signs of life by examining chemical signatures, like if an exoplanet has signs that radioactive isotopes exist that only could have come from nuclear fission. Actually, they are looking for popcorn. Enough popcorn gets made it eventually pulls itself into a massive popcorn star, a neutron star made of nothing but popcorn. Eventually the gravitational pull of all the popcorn stars fuse them together. All matter returns to a universal central point. Then there’s a new Big Bang - the Great Reset.
Really, think about it. What are they called movie stars? Popcorn stars. You take on credit card debt to buy AC for your home. Because popcorn wants you to. Climate change? Popcorn wants it hot enough to pop without a microwave or other human made devices. Eventually we’ll stop producing traditional food crops like, well corn, and produce nothing but popcorn. Because it’s more fun to steal popcorn than to produce regular corn.
The real Hollywood Elites are the ones that make the B-movies, not the blockbusters. The Roger Cormans that make a movie because <gasp> it’s entertaining, at least superficially. All driven by power mad hyper intelligent popcorn with its new Big Bang agenda. You’re now paying for your movies with a debit card (credit card) because it’s part of plan, not convenient.
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As strange as it seems this is not that far off of Qanon style content. It’s all gibberish and on the whole makes no sense. But it throws out little hooks to grab at those who can’t grasp the difference in fiction and reality. Gender inequality (racism), stupid take on science, a completely non existent conspiracy driven by a cabal, popular culture references. You just never know what the hive collective will latch on to and blow out of proportion. No good truther will call out another on the contradictions or lack of coherence. Pizzagate, gematria, the self proclaimed Queen says you don’t need to pay your bills, blah, blah blah. A lot of it driven by the gravitational pull of grift magnetism. If you’re gullible enough to believe that two and three digit numbers have anything to do with astrophysics, you’re gullible enough to think you don’t need to pay off your mortgage.
Monday, July 17, 2023
Professional Debunkers
Some people have combined their intellect, a moral compass worth admiring and a dedication to stopping grifting into a decent monetary career. As much as there is instant hatred towards a scientific expert able to get to the root of what is wrong with crank ideas, the monetized debunker must be hated even more.
Having a paid job working for Snopes, Reuters, Logically and other fact checking services isn’t too high profile. I imagine there’s a lot of vague hiding behind a computer without your name being known as the main source on an individual fact check. The fun debunkers are showman who can put the debunk on in front of a studio audience. And there’s no better showman than a magician for these debunking devious douchebag displays. Being a trickster themselves with an understanding of human nature and how to entertain by fooling.
More recent than the video to follow shortly is Penn and Teller’s show, Bullshit! Every episode was dedicated to a topic to be debunked and their stage presence translated into a taped show for broadcast worked well. Arguably, some topics were truly debatable and no actual truth was delivered, but mostly they hit on what is wrong with an idea that was wrong.
James Randi was a role model and influence on the magic careers of Penn and Teller. Note what he says about the excuses the psychic makes for failure once a simple and reasonable control is applied. There’s always an excuse for lack of performance.
Now one of the ongoing themes with gematria ringleaders is the constant search for new blood. Over the years I’ve seen several high school age students put on a pro gematria demonstration for a class project. Usually we find out about these when they post about how awesome it went and they got a standing ovation. And of course an Attaboy! from Zach.
In the past Zach has been famous for claiming success by picking both teams and rightfully claiming he picked the winner because of course if you pick both teams he’s got to be right on one of them. He also uses heavy amounts of reporting after the fact and just keeping the audience focused on more current events, like maybe the Bengals getting off to an unexpected hot start and creating a full season dialogue about them. And one of his undesired results is the Sports Gematria YouTube channel cataloguing video evidence of his failures.
His greatest weapon is his control of the audience. The psychic can perform his trick of blowing on the pages of the phone book while the audience has doubts or even outright belief in the fake ability. A hostile audience, fully aware of the trick, would be an entirely different story. What we need is a bright team of young minds willing to help their classmates out on an early understanding of misinformation grifting. You don’t even need to go into the anti science angle, just stick to sports.
Reporting after the fact on Zach’s failure is all well and good, even better would be clear video evidence ahead of time on genuine picks before the game is played. Picks made before a neutral audience instead of loaded with people clouded by confirmation bias.
So propose a challenge to Zach. If he disagrees to the proposed control, he is disgraced like the blowing on the phone book fake psychic. If he claims gematria isn’t used for predictions (a common backpeddle) he loses. Because why are you selling sports picks via Patreon subscriptions if you are claiming it doesn’t predict?
The control is - the upcoming NFL season will have an initial betting line well before the game is played. The games to be picked from are every game where the point spread is a certain number or less. A “close” game is expected, somewhere around a bookie line of 3 or 4 points would be good. He’s required to pick a winner from every single game. A clear winner, no wishy washy narrative for both teams stuff. And he’s required to provide video evidence ahead of time.
Now work on your showmanship. You will produce several different set of picks, ahead of time as well. And we’re going to keep track over multiple weeks to average out the sample size. The most correct picks is the winner.
Set #1 - All favorites, home team if even money
Set#2 - All underdogs, away team if even money
Set#3 - Picks from a family member or friend who used more standard knowledge like injury information, streaks, etc…. Like gematria it should include a brief narrative of the thought process.
Set#4 - Find a method to get a toddler to make random picks. Food should probably work. The green candy is the favorite, the yellow is the underdog. As long as the toddler is old enough to understand picking a hand that the adult has made into a random, unseen choice should be fine.
Set#5 - bearing in mind the oddness and joy of the thought of a toddler outpicking Zach, let your creative juices flow and make up your own theme.
The main point is that like our fake psychic friend, if presented with a reasonable challenge he simply is not going to go through with it. You’ll get the “they fixed it to make me look bad excuse” if he did. If he goes through with it and would win it’s not going to be a spectacular margin of victory, because he will get plenty wrong if he does go through with it.
If things go well you are on your way to becoming a professional debunker, hopefully because you proved a toddler can make picks just as good as a gematria pro or the toddler scared the gematria pro’s pants off.
Sunday, July 16, 2023
Astroturfing
Astroturfing is a deceptive advertisement practice that is named after the fake grass used in sports fields, Astroturf. I remember the early days of sports Astroturf where players described diving on the field to make a play and claiming it was like hitting concrete. Hopefully, things have improved on the field of play, but Astroturfing in the conspiracy world still hits a hard wall instead of actually getting to a grass roots campaigns core ideas that may or may not have any real value.
The term is relatively new, but deceptive advertisement has been one of those disinformation topics that has been around forever. Your semi regular reminder here - misinformation and disinformation has been around forever, it’s just talked about a hell of a lot more in the Internet age.
Picture that you are a young, fresh out of college, averagish intelligence job seeker looking for you first employment. The dreaded interview has been your downfall on a couple previous attempts. You talk to a headhunter job placement specialist to get some tips. Personally I think that entire industry is a sham, where the headhunters are more interested in taking credit for people that can sell themselves, but anyway. The tip you get is to market yourself. Whether you outright get to the point where you boldly lie has not been lied before or just do a better job at taking an interview, you are going to present yourself in the most favorable light. Employers still haven’t figured out how to separate the prospect with narcissistic personality disorder from someone gung ho for the job that just wants to market themselves to maximize their salary and benefits. The Internet still hasn’t figured out how to separate sock puppets, fake accounts, and bots from monetary and politically charged discourse.
These deceptive fakery based accounts exist merely to give the illusion of coolness to something that isn’t cool. Instead of nailing the job interview by being cool, the toxic narcissist has mastered a lifestyle of pretending to be cool instead of acting consistently cool. The toxic conspiracy ringleader has mastered the illusion of coolness by lying.
The topic has come up again recently because the movie, The Sound of Freedom, appears to have engaged in a common form of astroturfing. The ticket sales don’t support the actual number of bodies in the seats. Again, as further evidence this is not new Cult Leader Extraordinaire L. Ron Hubbard used this tactic for his Scientology books. Instead of actually being on the best seller list on the merit of the published work the illusion of benefit is manufactured. Millions of people bought this, wow it must be good! Or it might get you involved in an organization with numerous human rights violations in its track record.
In the higher end of the scale world of conspiracy content, Alex Jones has mastered shameless self promotion to keep people engaged and talking about his baseless theories. In the lower end, the gematria crowd doesn’t have the wherewithal to spend millions of dollars producing and repurchasing novels. Especially not from a crowd being bilked for a couple of bucks a month on Patreon subscriptions. Zach’s numbers don’t make sense in a lot of ways. The Patreon subscriptions drop by roughly 20% at the start of the month when apparently Patreon accounting purges non paying accounts. The number of viewers and likes versus the number of channel subscribers seems oddly disconnected. And the existence of a significant other is either 0 or 1. Which may not be a huge difference in a subtraction calculation, but throws a monkey wrench in a division problem to reach a percentage. These things are carefully guarded secrets, or even completely legit and just odd looking.
However, there is a simpler regular occurrence that astroturfing likely happens on practically every video. Where still in the realm of suspicious and not proven here, but we are allowed to note the red flag. Like the new wannabe employee, shameless self promotion has never been a problem for Zach. ( The old F2FT blog has the “spread the word banner”, still.)
Begging for likes. During a livestream where only a couple hundred out of almost 29,000 subscribers show up, it’s not enough to accept that maybe somebody didn’t actually like the video enough to like it. In the last week the most popular video has a shade under 9000 views and slightly over 500 likes. The concern over whether it’s 500 likes or only 400 is out of proportion with the benefit. Or people don’t want to be bothered or they forgot. He doesn’t normally do the begging himself, granted he’s busy doing the livestream and talking instead of engaging in the live chat. The begging for likes is relegated to the mid level lieutenant, the ones with the YouTube admin wrenches. “Don’t forget to smash that like button!” More like, “Don’t forget to give my content the illusion of coolness since it’s not actually cool!”
Another byproduct of astroturfing tactics is identifying a gung ho type newcomer. Hey Mr. Travolta, you liked that? I’m giving you special attention now. <sucker>. Don’t be a sucker. Don’t show up for the movie just because someone else bought a ticket to not show up for the movie. Instead of Grease you might get Battlefield Earth, although arguably you only showed up for grease because of Olivia Newton John. And stop making your own YouTube channels and blogs which only serve as free advertisement for people who can’t convince real people to like content based on its own merits.
Friday, July 14, 2023
Old School Gematria Dissection
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Gematria And…Wordle?
Wordle has been pumping out the daily puzzle for quite some time now, so although this is in the realm of Don't give these clowns any ideas we'll go ahead and do it.
In a lot of respects, Wordle is a perfect target for a gematria take:
The correct solution is a five letter word, just in the right range for a daily dose of non reduction cipher number value. It’s now part of the New York Times, the mainstream media, so you know it must be evil. The answer is published by hint giving sites and social media, so there’s no need to actually be smart enough to solve it. And being daily, no need to try and predict what the word is, a good gematria decode is always a post mortem. Just tie that baby into the current news stories by pointing out how miraculously synchronous it is with whatever happened.
Today’s Wordle is BARGE. They are always in capital letters, so Qanon should appreciate that they don’t have to search through text for caps. Let’s see what we get - 33 and 102! 33, that’s a huge Freemason number. 102 is Slavery and the N word. Racist Freemasons. If only it was still the NBA season, somebody might have scored 102 points for the game and a leading scorer having 33 points would really frost the cake. Or in a pinch just decode words from a news story looking for the key numbers.
Back in the real world, I find Wordle to be fairly easy. It’s really all just pattern recognition. The tougher solutions are usually something like knowing the last four letters and having a choice of what the first letter is with your limit of six guesses running out. (POWER - TOWER - MOWER - COWER - LOWER). So far the only word that was the solution I found to be offbeat is ENNUI, they are usually normal and ordinary words. It reminds me of the old Word Jumble game in my daily hard copy newspaper.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, let’s assume that in the MLM some mid level Wordle expert pops up and look at what the downsides are and what’s wrong.
There are about 13,000 five letter words and some of those are odd enough that they are outside the vocabulary of everyone except hardcore Scrabble players. So the available pool is limited a lot. That’s still enough that even knowing a list of past solutions and expecting no repeats, for now the chances of actually predicting the next days word is about zero. It’s safe to say nobody expected ennui and used that as their 1st guess for that rate Wordle in one guess achievement. If you’re going to start pumping out Wordle gematria, the target audience for a video is not a good match. The people you want need the solution dumbed down to a number so when they see the 33 or 102 their brain can insert the answer they want, instead of the correct solution of BARGE. There is only one correct answer, it’s BARGE, not GRABE. So although you can play the anagram and sounds like game of altering the solution to an incorrect solution and gematrify that, the trend these days is to not do that as being too obviously bogus. Better stick to altering 102 to 201, because that’s far more useful in a bogus decode. Although, I admit that now I would love to decode GRABE since Lewis Carrol used OUTGRABE in Jabberwocky. A fine and mimsy word that OUTGRABE.
But mostly, the Wordle audience has people with decent pattern recognition skills. The kind of people that can solve most Wordles are not the kind that are gullible enough to drop a $50 donation in a superchat. I don’t see a mid level guru coming about that sticks just to Wordle gematria. There are plenty of side topic gurus like WNBA, PGA and hockey that don’t put out much content because there simply isn’t much demand for it. It would more likely be a throw in to part of a decode by someone higher up the food chain. The kind of person who knows damn well that it’s BS and is just trying to add new cult members who are impressed that they know Wordle better than the newcomer ever will.
What they could do is create their own version of Wordle. One where the word doesn’t have to be a real word. Where the answer can be wrong and that’s ok, because gematria is always wrong. Where you even get praised for being wrong as long as you break out your checkbook. And I have the perfect name for that shitty version of Wordle-
Turdle