The Sociopathic Contract

 Why Monsters Follow the Rules

Tale Foundry on YouTube is a mostly safe haven from conspiracy content.  It’s thought provoking, intelligent and entertaining.  The content Tale Foundry puts out is totally free of conspiracy theory dumbassery, the reason I qualify it is that now that society has slipped away from a social contract almost any video is a target for some grifter to pop into the comments and try and stir up trouble.  The new Sociopathic Contract.

The bulk of the monsters following rules video relates to the movie Let the Right One In , and it’s a brilliant choice for the main point.  Monsters like vampires have long been a quality source for tales both written and filmed.  Old folklore turned into modern media where there are certain expectations.  There’s a background you know about vampires and no need to try and guess what the monster’s true abilities are.  Pointy teeth - check.  Drink blood - check.  Maybe you get further down the checklist and there’s a tweak to make the idea not be a boring copycat clone.  But the reason that TF is not a breeding ground for rampant unchecked conspiracy content - it’s too intellectual.  Many that watch already understand the thing about a lot of monster movies that doesn’t need to be bashed over their head.  Like in Let the Right One In, often the people are the true monsters.  The conspiracist prefers to comment on Alex Jones rants about immigrants eating babies, like vampires not a real thing but that’s where the conflict between fiction for entertainment and fiction for propaganda ruins the conspiracists claims to intellect.

People as true monsters are swinging towards being the normal, what is expected in society.  At the time Wall Street with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen was made the point was that despite what Douglas says, greed is NOT good.  For all his wealth and power he is a monster.  A monster that like the pre spirit visitation Scrooge thinks the social contract allows him unlimited and unregulated free rein to do whatever he wants.  The movie ends with Charlie orchestrating the financial equivalent of the stake through the monster’s heart.  The good guys win in the end.

Personally, I think a lot of the reason for the success of the Marvel superhero movies was the broken social contract.  Monsters have decided that they should be the one that’s special and allowed to decide that 50% of all living creatures get snuffed because of universal overpopulation.  Or even as simple as, “I have these supervillain powers, I’m allowed to rob a bank!”  There’s an expectation of these characters despite the historical character development from the comics, the audience needs a quick training session.  We know they are a monster because they are a supervillain, but what part of the Social Contract did they break?  What part of them makes them a true monster?  The part that’s not just the color of their skin or the way the original comic artist drew the terrifying spikes on their body, but their actions that truly define their persona.

Frankenstein is a common enough monster that people screw up the basics, totally missing the point that Frankenstein’s monster is not the true monster.  I’d be willing to bet a sizable chunk of money that the average conspiracist instantly associates the tall, slow moving, Boris Karloff in make up as the monster without thought to that Frankenstein is the man.  The hideous under the skin demented sociopath playing god.  We can get away without being too worried about the error.  It is entertainment, and film will dress it up with some gore, explosions and boobs to distract you from needing to think deeper into any meaning.

There’s a reason I chose Wall Street as an example.  After being socialized into dealing with your immediate family and close friends you’ve bonded over with similar thoughts, one gets thrust into this nasty societal creation known as work.  The construct that generates more human monsters than any other.  The drive to be admired based on what possessions and money you have.  And the new Sociopathic Contract demands that you be surrounded by others who think the same, stepping on the “little people” isn’t just greed being good, it’s a way of life.  Acting in direct opposition to the old Social Contract and behaving aggressively to counter it.  The purveyors  of the Sociopathic Contract want you to believe that unlimited wealth can be yours by just being like them.

Know You’re Grifter Tactics - Woe Is Me

 You should really watch this important video:

Just kidding!  You didn’t need to watch it, and you couldn’t watch it even if you wanted to.

Starting in 2024, one of our favorite gematria content creators (and calling gematria narrative manufacturers content creators is exceptionally generous) started accelerating the new pattern.

1). Amidst the normal repetitive bullshit put out a “Woe is me, I’m so poor and I need money!” panhandling video.  No meat to the story.  Just asking for money.

2). Leave the video up for a couple of days.

3). Delete that video so you couldn’t see how many similar videos there were in the channel history.

I suppose a lot of long time followers didn’t care that the donation plate was being passed around often.  It’s always the same people in the comments and the same reaction.  A familiar and easy pattern.  The content, even with the “meat” is extremely repetitive.  It’s difficult to believe that serious entertainment value is gained.  At least gematria sports fake decodes get you interested in watching a game.  But the predicting the end of the world every day…that’s like recording the 2008 Detroit Lions winless season and expecting that maybe somewhere one of the game results will change if you just keep rewatching them.  Nearly all the content revolves around the end of the world rapture and for years nothing new has popped up.  Unless you count that the donation requests are more frequent.  Seriously, it had to be at least a half dozen just in November 2024 through now.

But there’s a new pattern to the responses.  Finally.  The panhandling content sounds increasingly desperate.  No longer a side hustle to earn a couple extra bucks, but now somehow the only way to pay bills and buy groceries.  Whether it’s an act or genuine it doesn’t bode well, because the audience is a majority of people equally desperate.  Made up of poverty level social media acts who act like if the world does actually end that’s a good thing.  Let’s look at some of the comments.

 

I desperately need help and thanks for your

Thoughts and Prayers.

What a shocker.  Dirt poor social media addicts who also desperately need money don’t have money to give to others who desperately need money.  Sure, a couple people chimed in that they would PayPal transfer some bucks.  The number of thoughts and prayers outsizes those, and has outnumbered them for some time.

But fear not, the panhandler king is also fond of popping up in the comments of the Sports Gematria recaps of Zach’s losing football picks.  Talking about what a fraud Hubbard is; subliminally suggesting his work is more meaningful.  There’s bound to be some desperate social media addicts who don’t have money they can afford to lose on bad sports picks that will give that a try instead of buying lottery tickets.  At least with that you can generate some genuine interest in the Lions results.

Killdozer

Heemeyer - Killdozer

There’s a 1974 made for TV movie named Killdozer.  A construction bulldozer hits a rock that has some kind of alien presence in it and starts terrorizing the area.  Complete with running without fuel.  Starring Clint Walker, a young Robert Urich it is an absolute gem.

And it became predictive programming for the Heemeyer story above.

A funny thing about conspiracy theories and reporting after the fact is that there’s this quackery called predictive programming.  And since gematria lays claim to prediction there’s always a chance that “predictive” programming will be brought up.  Curiously (read in sarcasm voice) you don’t hear in 1974 some self proclaimed prophet saying, “Behold ye, this crappy but fun Killdozer movie in 1974 will yield unto us a Simpsons episode with a bulldozer in season 26, complete with undeniable gematria.”

Real life and conspiracy theories don’t mix.  The story of Heemeyer is nuanced, not black and white.  He was as described in that recap your best friend if you were on his good side, and on the other side willing to cause millions of dollars worth of damage for real and perceived injustices.  And the damage was done affecting some people who are classic ‘innocent bystanders’.  Including according to one video I watched having to evacuate children from a story time hour at the public library he mashed his Killdozer into.  No word on whether it was drag queens doing the reading or not.

Not knowing exactly what went through his head without being him, people can make up whatever conspiracy theories they want about unknown details of Heemeyer.  And closer to the time of the rampage some chose to call him a monster.  Some imagined him a folk hero of sorts.  The guy willing to put his life on the line to stick up for the little guy.  And that is an encapsulation of what is wrong with the conspiracy theory mentality today.  Using confirmation bias to justify your own preconceived notions, claiming all along you’re educated and smart when in fact you’re extremely closed minded and subject to propaganda.  Propaganda designed to push you to the extreme.

If the Killdozer rampage was last week instead of in 2004 we would certainly be hearing it alongside the Mangione/United Health Care assassination talk.  When financial issues go wrong, people get all kinds of cranky and lash out in unpredictable ways.  In a better world economic systems would not push people to the extremes.  There are those that say free market capitalism and anarcho-capitalism both inevitably lead to dictatorship, and I can see why.  It’s never as simple as just “finding a new job” or “pulling up roots and moving to a new place for a fresh start”.  Free market capitalism tells all employers that they are justified for anything related to profitability, while competition dictates that their competitors do the same.

And all the corporate laws and governmental structures are suffering at the same time.  The health care industry wants to suck you dry with exorbitant rates and no payment on claims.  Housing wants you to buy a home at a mortgage rate you can’t afford, paying more in interest over 30 years than you can really afford.  Utilities, you need them.  But here’s a water line insurance program since we don’t actually need to replace the water lines ourselves after years of depreciation.  That’s your problem now.  You don’t just need a car for employment now, there’s also your phone.  Google searches need to be paid for so more and better Google searches can find you bad information on the internet in the future.  If one is really paying attention the idea that we are in a free market has slipped more and more to anarcho-capitalism each passing generation.  With nowhere in not just your town or country, but the entire world to race off to for a better chance of a tiny bit of freedom and happiness.  If Greenland isn’t even safe anymore, then what else can we turn to?

Substituting economic warfare for bullets hasn’t resolved how oligarchy allows the worst and most selfish of us to gather a self sustaining power base.  Money leads to power which is used to make more money.  And we actually have examples of how to stop it.  It’s called taxing the rich.  An actual non violent way to simply generate more revenue that actually gets used for road repairs, hospitals, and schools where kids don’t get shot.

Aligning with my personal philosophy of cooperation above all else.  A demonstration of empathy towards those that show they are worthy of it.  Progress instead of regressive corporate laws that maintain the rich and make radicalized people think that shooting CEOs or arming bulldozers might actually be a good idea.

And amidst the talk of rich Hollywood elites deserving to lose their homes to wildfires it’s time to remind you that there’s no good side versus bad side within the government.  Mostly one side is enacting legislation to stay in power.  The other side is mostly using the argument of taxing the rich as an election talking point without worrying about it actually happening.  A solution will come from someone far smarter than I am.  My position in life is to whine and complain about it.  I’m too poor to buy a bulldozer.  But at least I didn’t make up gematria evidence to try and fake any of this.

I Don’t ❤️ Wikipedia

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/23/why-is-elon-musk-attacking-wikipedia-because-its-very-existence-offends-him

An oversimplified process of the class struggle that has existed forever:

Person becomes rich.  Enough people believe the myth that rich = smart.  Smart means qualified to rule.  Poor people finally figure out rich people don’t give a shit about them.  Poor people start talking about the bad things unqualified leader did wrong.  Bad leader does whatever it takes to cover up the sordid history.

At one time in the chain of edits the Musk page, for a brief period in time, in the opening paragraph labeled him as a conspiracy theorist.  Twixter was a great platform for him to espouse his baseless claims, being in control of it he can do whatever he wants.  But something like Wikipedia that resembles a form of unbiased journalism when it operates at its best isn’t as easy to memory hole.

Although we are in the late stages of global capitalism and the downside of wealth being concentrated in a very few people, memory holing doesn’t even seem to matter to most people.  A simple, “I never said that”, seems good enough for most with their preconceived cognitively biased opinions.  But still, they try.  Getting rid of Wikipedia altogether would stop that unhappy problem of documentation of past lawsuits, baseless claims, outright lies and hypocritical contradictions.  What I said two seconds ago is the truth.  That’s all the research your search engine needs to find.

Similarly, archiving sites are a thorn in the side.  Yes, actually yes you did just contradict yourself.  And after the earlier days when it was kind of fun to spend some time the hypocrites while they backpedaled, of course processes to stop personally operated sites are now in place from being archived.  The internet version of burning books.  Putting in a properly coded robots.txt file thwarts archiving bots.

And finally, Hubbard seems to have given up on his love affair with his old site.  Occasionally a video from his current bad news of the day livestream would reference the old blog, freetofindtruth.com.  Encouraging that newbie to look at how just by math the occasional actual correct sports prediction or generic topic was legitimately referenced many years ago.  Now in addition to being redirected to the new blog, all the archived material is gone.  The Wayback bots going back nearly a decade can’t find anything but the current blog.

We’re now one step closer to grifters wearing T-shirts, displayed for purchase at their online store, that say

I NEVER SAID THAT

And people think that’s a good thing.

Capital Grifting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gematria and Fire Insurance

 

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

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

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

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

There’s a lot of con men in gematria.

Pretty sure you get the point.

——————————————————————-

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

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

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

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

The Sham of Gematria News Decodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Tragic News Stories

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

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

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pizzagate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Gets Rid of Fact Checkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Landmine Goes Boom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————————————————————-

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

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

                       Crist is coming

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

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

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

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

New Currency Slogan - In Nothing We Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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