Discernment - Another Projection Phrase

Following gematria accounts long term - on any social media platform - is EXTREMELY repetitive.  Mind numbingly, boringly extremely repetitive.  This is on purpose since the target audience is constantly shifting.  Eventually after having been suckered into the current fundraiser the current group of marks figure out that they are just being conned and move on.

What that means for today, I allow myself to complain about psychological projection in conspiracy theories again.

So for the umpteenth time, here are the basics.  If you are four years old on the playground or you are a conspiracy theorist on social media acting like a four year old, you may blurt out, “Tommy is fat, ugly and stupid!!”  There might be a general consensus at the school yard (or the comments of Zach’s live stream) that these statements are true.  There may be some degree of objective evidence that these are true.  But don’t forget that the point is really, “I have accused you of these negative qualities, therefore by default I am not fat, ugly or stupid.”  Even though there may be some consensus and objective evidence to that.  Getting in the first shot holds some weight, even though from a logical fallacy standpoint it shouldn’t.

So now, picture Tommy has done his psychological homework, having found out that and he confronts his main accuser with the evidence, “Uh, Nate….actually you’re an inch shorter than me, weigh ten pounds more than me and consistently get lower grades on staying in the lines coloring in pictures than me.”

Nate is left in the unenviable position of needing to reply to maintain his jungle gym cred for getting in the first shot, he’s too young to get a teardrop tattoo next to his eye, and Lisa might not go to the Hokey Pokey sock hop and ice cream social at Applebee’s next weekend without a response.  So maybe, “Yeah, but you’ll always be way uglier than me.”  Always is a long time, so this remains to be seen….

Now this is what linguistic experts who have analyzed these things have officially embedded in the high brow scientific literature as the I'm rubber, you're glue response.  As often happens at the school yard and Applebees, both Tommy and Nate may repeat this several times under the logically fallacious assumption that who now gets in the last word is the winner.  The kinds of arguments you get with no evidence to support your position.

This behavior at a school yard filled with four year olds is expected.  But one would hope that in a conversation between what the official high brow scientific literature calls “grown ass people” would not be resorted to.  Alas, the conspiracy theorist falling for the tactics designed to make them think they are smarter than they really are and getting emotional reactions instead of critical thinking does not operate that way.

So how exactly do you say, “I’m rubber and you’re glue” without saying the exact phrase, coming off like the four year old who is pouting at Applebee’s that he wanted a refill on Mountain Dew that Mom said no to?  One repetitive, overused word has cropped up - discernment.

I personally find discernment to be a perfectly lovely word.  Three syllables, not too short.  Doesn’t pop up in ordinary conversation too much.  Rolls off the tongue nicely.  Just picture John Houseman in The Paper Chase saying it, “You’re paper is worthless, you didn’t use disceeerrrrrnnnment choosing your sources.”  It also starts with D, like my personal favorite word, defenestration.

Based on the way gematria operates, every person that ever lived, is currently alive or ever will live is a member of the evil empire.  Tommy and Nate are now adults grown ass people and they need to upgrade.  When Tommy confronts NATE=13 with the evidence that 13, like Friday the 13th, is an evil number

Yeah, but you didn’t use disceeeeerrrrnment in your decode.

Gematria clowns fight like this all the time as part of the shill game.  Fighting for market share of the grifting pie there’s little choice but to play I’m rubber, your glue since inescapably they are both numerologically evil.

The most common use of discernment is likely to be pumping up the newbie who hasn’t yet been confronted with the statement of how they are by the numbers evil.  It gives the cult leader the opportunity to bolster the newbie ego with a lovely word outside their normal vocabulary.  I will give you the proper translation of using discernment in this conversation:

“Their decode of you being a Jesuit didn’t use discernment.” =

“You’re rubber, they’re glue, can’t I get some funds from you?”

Please stay interested long enough to:

Drop me a subscription to my Patreon, give me a livestream super chat, pay for my traveling expenses to go shout out a bullhorn in a city that doesn’t know my schpiel yet, donate to my bogus charity….

Armchair Quarterbacks In The World of Misinfo

Yeah, like me.  Information here is heavily opinionated, My education, IQ, and most importantly my stance this is presented as a take it or leave it whether you want to get anything out of it without me getting paid for it - is a bit different than a lot of the material.

The prompt that drove me to today’s material, I found a link to an essay on social media, analyzing an old topic:

Does Donald Trump have Narcissistic Personality Disorder?  Now if you go to Twitter even today you can search something like Trump NPD and find lots of recent activity, and of course a lot of old posts.

It’s important for this paragraph to understand I have some considerable experience with the topic, and my own thoughts are muddied by wondering whether it is my own cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias, lead me to my personal conclusion.  But this is only incidental to the main point.  I believe he does.  I think there’s a long term pattern showing all the signs outlined in the authoritative material from certified psychological analysts.  However, whenever I start to doubt whether I’m allowed to think this way, I remind myself that proving that is impossible, and more importantly, it ultimately doesn’t matter.  At a minimum he acts as a toxic narcissist often enough that as far as somebody being in charge of so many aspects of my life - I would prefer to be living in a cave by myself.

There’s a lot of armchair quarterbacking going on about this.  Amateur psychoanalysts abound even on that Twitter search mentioned above.  You can Google it and find both pro and con, including from certified people with actual degrees weighing in on both sides.  Previous little seems to cover the, “Does it really matter?” angle I mentioned, which may simply be that social media doesn’t generally allow you the space to write a novel length treatise on the subject.

So, how does gematria fit into this?  Am I suggesting that people use gematria to psychoanalyze political leaders?  Of course not.  Gematria lingers in the background giving a voice to armchair quarterbacks who dismiss being wrong.  This is related to the Appeal to Authority logical fallacy.

Both sides have been doing this forever, treating long term viability of countries and the world like a football game.  Instead of “here’s my well thought out arguments, let’s have an honest and open debate about it” we get “I’m not a Democrat” or “I’m not a Republican” as the sun total of evidence.  Gematria and it’s kin of confirmation bias scam thinking is even worse, driving people further into the rabbit hole.  The gematria newbie, getting frustrated with the experts constant misfires internalizes that they are smarter than the experts.  They are the authority and appealing to their own authority.   Beware the phrase, “I did my own research!”

The last I checked on Brother Berg, literally years ago, he was selling gematria readings instead of sports picks.  So yesterday, I also found this guy and this reminded me how gematria is a symptom of biased thinking instead of exclusive to the sports gambling world:

If you had a stranger bump into you on the street and told you to give them $10 to say something vague you can interpret however you want, would you really do it?  Because that’s what he’s selling.  Want more evidence of that?

You can be wildly confident with gematria, because there are no right or wrong answers.  Never before have I seen such a bold and blatant admission of the uselessness of numerology to base your decisions on.  Yet, there are people paying $10 for wrong answers.  Or even worse, people, knowing full well that gematria scamming goes on think that maybe they need themselves a slice of that grifting pie.

I would hope most people are beyond the psychic readings as shown in movie tropes by now.  It’s unlikely that a Nigerian prince email actually works now, but more likely one of the variations of the advanced fee scam (lottery, inheritance, etc….)  I hope that if some lady with an actual crystal ball, large gold earrings and a Romanian accent (faked) sold people a psychic reading that they would recognize that if they cough up the $10 it’s just a lark.  I hope that the gematria variation of the psychic reading scam reaches that point.  “Vell, darlink…give me $10 and I vill give you da wronk information!”

But here we are with everybody being an expert on everything, muddying up the Internet armchair quarterbacking because gullible people are voters, too.  As they should be, and this is your semi-regular reminder that these things are not even close to being new to the 21st century.  Can hardly wait for the 2024 US presidential election.  Should be lots of fun.

Gematria/Numerology Sports Scamming Basics

Well, there must be a fresh crop of new talent out there in the decoding world.  And just in time for the NBA Finals. So let’s take a look at how Zach is sticking to his old bread and butter, the sports betting scam.

Slightly different now, his blog has a butt load of password locked content.  All his recent NBA finals content is password protected like this, presumably to keep the trolls (aka people pointing out how terrible his content is) don’t troll him.

This magical secret knowledge that will save the world from the powers that shouldn’t be is not easily available.  I imagine there is better content on the Patreon, it makes ALLLLL kinds of sense that if you want the right answers, you need to pay for it.  But, he does share things that make their way to social media.

Challenge accepted, trolling begins now.

1)  The 8 is strong.  What the hell?!!?  Not even a two digit number?  That’s just plain ducking lazy.  Try to watch an NBA game where an 8 or two or a dozen doesn’t show up.  But surely, since the 8 is strong it will lead us to irrefutable proof how is destined to win the game and…

2)  Well that didn’t last long.  The old staple of someone making a fake prediction.  “On the other side…”.  Picking both teams again.  The only thing more common than an 8 showing up in an NBA game is Zach picking both teams.  It ruins your winning percent.  You may not take a goose egg, but it kind of leaves you at 50%.  Like, mathematically always 50%, 100% of the time.  You have really low standards if you’re information is from a source that makes it a no lose situation.  You just gotta convince the actual sheep that your picking both teams was a genuine only picked one team prediction.

3)  So there’s a couple of other numbers, let’s see if that separates the winner from the loser so 56… “It could also be a sign…”  Fuuuuuccckkk!!  Manipulating a perfectly good three digit number into a two digit number and it still picks both teams!  And what a waste, and how sad and embarrassing for that 263 - 2+6=8, it probably though the total points scored was gonna be 263, too.  But instead of a significant event that might open up some eyes, it gets thrown into the meat grinder, trimmed down to two digits, and is STILL 50% wrong.

4)  At least that 30 is a solid one team only indicator.  And that might mean something, except of course it’s got a chance of being dead wrong.  We’ll put that on hold to check in on the next game(s) in Denver.

5)  But as for that game.  Congrats to the Winners!  The usual cult leader ‘attaboy’.  Everybody that made a pick for the game gets an attaboy since you had to pick one team or the other.

If you’ve woken up to the picking both team things and stopped losing money on this, congratulations!  Attaboy!  You’re the real winner!!

The Slow Burn

There’s an old story about putting a frog in boiling water, which for full disclosure is not about preparing dinner.  Oddly enough, I was thinking about this post several days ago which now has coincidental tie ins. Or maybe not, the Organic Matrix might be fiddling with the settings just to mess with my mind.

But anyway:

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

Our unlucky test subject recognizes that if immediately dropped into dangerously hot water, it’s a holy shit, this is dangerous moment.  If the temperature is raised slowly, the frog has more time to reflect on his situation, waiting until it’s so uncomfortable that it finally jumps out or succumbs since it waited too long.  The story in the most common format is that the frog…croaks.  Neglecting the part about how frogs in reality don’t like excess heat and would jump out long before death.

Part of the mix in what makes gematria/misinfo/disinfo/conspiracy content so dangerous is the deliberate attempt to target a younger generation that hasn’t had enough life experiences necessary to process that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Some would call this grooming, although thanks to our old friend psychological projection, this almost always means the evil leftists are making our children LGBTQ+.  Coincidence #1 - Alex Jones talking about chemicals turning frogs gay.  Hmmmm…

As for a slow burn that goes unnoticed, climate change is a classic example.  I had already figured out in high school that the fossil fuel industry was not being entirely truthful about the long term consequences.  Lying to make money today is far easier than actually caring about events a century down the road when one has croaked.  A seminal moment in my anti-conspiracy activity occurred when some jackass used the logical fallacy of claiming my comments had no importance since, “there are megachurches raking in billions”.  To try to dumb this down - apparently two wrongs make a right.

Coincidence #2 - Pat Robertson died yesterday.  It’s up to greater minds than mine to decide if his life benefited society or if he was just a high profile grifter.

What I do know is that grifting on the Internet  is a new slow burn bullet point.  Success stories create coattail riders that think, even if they are fully aware it’s morally questionable, that grabbing a slice of the grifting pie is the way to go.  Social media reaction has been lip service to try to satisfy getting government off their back long enough to keep raking in the $$.  Where climate change impacts the quality of life or worst case scenario our existence, rampant grifting on the Internet affects our quality of life economically.  There simply aren’t enough resources to keep an eye on all the shady activity.  Somewhere between a 2am illegal left turn with no signal with nobody around for miles, and plowing your car through a holiday parade killing several people is a vague line where it’s ok to ignore the offense and it’s finally time to do something about it.

Effective grifting requires some kind of exit plan.  Probably before losing a billion dollar lawsuit or getting thrown in jail for sedition.  And the easiest exit plan is to choose not to be involved in the first place.  Just like we are immune to alien takeover since humans make shitty slaves, people in general do not enjoy being ripped off.

Currently we seem to be in a phase where while there’s still far more money in hatred, there’s also far more content related to awareness of the Internet grift problem than ten years ago.  The slow burn of gematria and conspiracy thinking developed into Alex Jones, Qanon, -48, Queen Romana, and for now seems to be combatted on the other side by non-monetized people with a moral compass.  There’s a reference point out there on how these groups and individuals don’t work out long term.  They rely on the “stop or I’ll say stop again” attitude of those claiming to manage the offensive content.  They feed off that, relying on the lag time between the first entry in the pot of water and when it starts to boil.

Hans Gruber claimed to have an exit plan of enjoying the fruits of his one big heist on a sunny tropical beach.  Enjoy your moment in the sun now, sports grifters, nobody really cares about the petty theft.  Just don’t push it until you create too many John McClane’s and you get involved in something that saying, “I’m sorry” isn’t good enough.

AI vs. Gematria

Gematria is like a multiple choice test in school where all the answers are wrong, and before receiving the failing grade everyone gets to argue that, "At least I wasn't dumb enough to pick 'C'!!" 

 When I was in high school computers were still infants compared to today’s field where everyone has a phone with vastly more computing power than what NASA lunar landing vehicles had.  It was a glorious time when people did what computing was made for instead of serious analysis about astrophysics - GAMES.

I literally started off with punched tape loading of the program.  A huge pain in the ass since the machine that punched the tape screwed up often enough that one tiny dot punched incorrectly made an entire yards long tape unusable since you ended up with LOOP being read as POOP while inputting, etc….  But we did have a 3D tic tax toe game.  Which was far enough advanced to learn from mistakes.  The first few games would be a cakewalk for the humans, and play long enough it would get to the point where human victory was virtually impossible.

Here’s the Wikipedia article:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_tic-tac-toe

And pay attention to the part about how mathematical analysis proves that the first player always wins, but the method is too complicated for most people to memorize.  That’s kinda important to the story.

There’s a very silly game you might have heard of called chess.  I’ve been witness to the chess computers rise over decades.  To summarize as quickly as possible, based on human games over many centuries it is suspected that perfectly played chess would either be a win for white, or a draw.  With no chance for black to win.  The first move is that important, even with a game as complex as chess.

The first computers including my Fidelity Electronics were expensive, and not that good compared to humans with knowledge of chess things like pawn structures, taking the initiative at the cost of material and long term positional compensation.  Eventually top grandmasters would still win, but arguably having had the machine put up stiff resistance.  Strategy of playing against a computer program revolved around how they were extremely materialistic, always grabbing that pawn or rook versus minor piece exchange regardless of the consequences.

Fast forward to AlphaZero and Leela.  These are based on a neural network.  And like our almost 50 year old 3D tic tac toe game, learned.  Instead of playing against humans they learned by playing a butt ton of games against themselves.  For a pop culture reference to make an analogy- the computer in Wargames playing tic tac toe against itself to learn that nuclear war was a terrible idea.

The practical applications of neural net learning are something like feeding a large amount of complex data and the net has a huge reference library to better and more quickly make an evaluation than traditional more human reliant methods.  “You dumbass human, that’s colon cancer, not gassy flatulence from lactose intolerance.”

But every great new toy has the downside of meeting up with the crowd that is materialistic about grabbing that pawn that’s available now without regards to the long term consequences.  So we get deep fakes of bogus Putin speeches, ChatGPT creating fictional legal references and social media algorithms that do a terrible job at moderating content.

The early chess computers had different levels based on how long the machine was “thinking” about the position.  And at the higher levels there really wasn’t much difference relative to humans as they would waste a lot of time deciding between multiple wrong answers.  Now the neural nets are so advanced it’s literally impossible for human victory.  They have a reference library of so many wrong answers they know what doesn’t work.  Moves that in a human game would still work since humans, with their clock running can’t weave through the consequences of how their position will collapse five moves down the road.

Somebody like Alex Jones and the big names in the gematria community rely heavily on dumbing it down to appeal to the basic instinctive reactions.  They operate in a world that wants you to play the chess computer in the 1970’s at level one where you win the game by grabbing that pawn.  They want you to think that choosing among multiple wrong answers is OK, or even good.  Take Ivermectin for you flatulence, it will do wonders for your colon cancer you didn’t know you have.

This is the way the crank/grift magnetism operates.  Multiple wrong answers are constantly presented with an enormous amount of resources wasted on them.  Some players have the program set on a higher level; some arguments are more lucid than others.  If you want to impress me, search for the answer you would get from the neural net instead of downgrading the level of your computer until you get the answer you want to hear.

The reason Douglas Adams’ 42 gag is so memorable is because it’s the gematria response to an exceptionally difficult question.  Now people think that if they get laughed at for the wrong answer of 42, if they upgrade it to a three digit number they are now magically super smart, when they really are just lost in the rabbit hole of multiple wrong answers.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Already

There’s a big corporation looking to fill a position.  Due to budget cuts there’s only room for one candidate for this 200k a year salary job. After looking over resumes, the CEO settles into three different candidates, a mathematician, an engineer and an accountant.

The receptionist ushers the mathematician in, and the CEO asks him the single question that comprises the entire interview.

“What is 2+ 2?”

Dumbstruck, the mathematician blurts out, “Well ducking, DUH!  4.”

Thanking him the CEO calls the receptionist for the engineer’s turn.

“What’s 2+2?”

The engineer pulls out a slide rule, fiddles around with it for a minute or so, then responds.

“I can’t be sure, but after adjusting for tolerable deviations I’m confident it’s somewhere between 3.999 and 4.001.”

Then it’s the accountants turn.  The receptionist leaves the room and the question is posed.

“What’s 2+2?”

The accountant locks the door, closes the blinds, checks the lampshades, desk, curtains, etc… looking for listening devices, then says,

“What do you WANT it to be equal to?”

The receptionist is called back and the CEO, with gleeful delight tells her, “Prepare a new hire packet!  This accountant is our new team member!!”

Knowing what the interview question was, and what the salary that would be, and what a less than honest accountant was likely to say, the receptionist pipes up.

“Not so fast boss.  I think you should consider me for a promotion instead.  I’m a gematria user, and I get my information from grifters and attention whores on the Internet.  The correct answer is,”

“What do you want it to be equal to…TODAY!?”

Ecstatic, the CEO realizes how much money he’s about to save.

“Cancel the new hire paperwork, you’ve got the job!  I never knew you had this gematria gift!  Also, adjust your paperwork to reflect your new salary!”

“Thanks boss, now are you sure we can’t up it to 250k a year since I’m such a bargain?”

“On the contrary, my dear, I know just how to compensate you with what you want most.  Today is the first day of getting what you really want most! - - -

ATTAGIRL!!”

Changing The Rules

One of the great strengths of Gematria and how it fits into the cyber political landscape is its extreme lack of rules.  Sure there are some basic concepts, but by strengths I really mean weaknesses as just like it’s a real challenge to not find matching gematria for any story you want to concoct it’s nearly impossible for a post of any significant length to not contain some kind of contradiction.  You just used the A=26, Z=1 cipher instead of the more usual order.  You find 2107, which is close enough to the year 2017 for your purposes, AND you dropped the zero last week and didn’t drop the zero this week.  And HUBBARD=56, SOCIETY OF JESUS=56 doesn’t mean he’s a member of the evil empire because…reasons.

Hardcore gematria users that fall into the category of what could be called a true believer as opposed to a grifter stirring up trouble are cognitively incapable of processing the simple fact that just based on the gematria alone every person living now, that lived previously, and will live in the future is a member of the evil empire.

Sports are a good example of something familiar that has a clearly defined set of rules.  And as the games evolve, changes are made.  To increase excitement, the rules for illegal contact on the quarterback changed since games where Tom Brady passes for 300+ yards are more exciting than the Ravens winning 10-6.  And the end result was it was a penalty to look cross-eyed at Tom.

But changes are made during the off season.  Since the rule is that there is generally one winner and one loser, supporters of the loser are required to take the L.  Liberal amounts of complaining about the bad calls are expected. Major rule changes are discussed and if common sense prevails necessary updates are made for the upcoming set of games, but now…

…losers try to avoid taking the L and getting it retroactively declared a W.  A hardcore gematria true believer is the kind of person that won’t take no for an answer and refuses to take the L.  Which since gematria is so ridiculously easy to retroactively declare everything a W makes it a perfect tool to recruit cognitively impaired losers.  There’s a reason Hubbard has the nickname, “After the Fact, Zach”. 

Let’s turn to a non gematria example.  Vaccine ingredients.  You may have heard the old chestnut about mercury in vaccines.  I am also worried about mercury.  It’s extremely toxic and a big problem if your diet consists of a lot of dolphin meat.  But real scientists made a compound that was comparatively safe.  If you were super serious about ingredients, you would never be able to eat anything now, anything that previously existed or anything that exists in the future.  If you get lured into an insincere debate about vaccine ingredients, just point out how table salt is sodium and chlorine.  Both are super reactive and dangerous by themselves.  Chlorine gas being used as a weapon kind of proves that point.  Tell them to take the L and find a real argument.  Because there’s no going back and retroactively declaring victory on how sodium didn’t play fair and gave you severe burns.

Effective governments try to at least at times make an effective set of rules.  And effective government documents have language about changing the rules in the off season.  (To the conspiracy knuckleheads out there, these are something like Amendments to the US Constitution.)  You are allowed to change the rules if we find out that chlorine doesn’t kill people.  Unlikely, but whatever.  We are allowed to change the rules if, oh for a wild example, we think there might be something with our outdated gun laws.  We The People includes people getting the shaft because of those who won’t take NO for an answer and take the L.

The Evils of Science

I am very much on the pro side of science.  When applied correctly, learning from past mistakes, building on the hard work of your predecessors and making improvements (even incremental) has shown time and again to be the way the world works.  One day your painting pictures on the cave wall of hunting bison, the next you have a camera, then by the end of the week someone creates television.

But this process is interrupted by the mass of people who try to decide what exactly the number 47 means today, what the dark secret of someone wearing purple is, and trying to insist their arch enemy was making a Satanic hand gesture when they really were just picking their fingernails.

And the process is interrupted by evil scientists.  Not the movie trope scientist that speaks with a Hungarian accent, has a Tesla coil burping away on the lab bench and a hunchbacked sidekick.  More like the bazillion medical doctor Twitter accounts that either not an actual doctor of the field they claim they are or even sold their soul out because grifting on the Internet is more profitable to them than actually caring for other people.  I’m not going to say any of the names here.  I’m waiting for my big day testifying at the trial, because the book deal will get me the big bucks.

Which, if you haven’t figured it out on your own is exactly the problem.  Money as a necessary evil creates an atmosphere where people can and do make choices to survive getting through their mundane existence.  It doesn’t where you fall on the good vs. evil spectrum today, if the opportunity presents itself can you honestly know today something resembling a moral compass will stop you from tomorrow making methamphetamine to get enough cash for chemotherapy?

Money is the dominant social identifier.  Power, fame, status, attention…these others go hand in hand with money so often.  There always has been and always will be evil scientists muddying up the waters.  It’s actually pretty easy.  When you are a genuine expert, you also know what DOESN’T work.  But sounds real good.  Maybe, if I pretend that I discovered element number 472 on the periodic table I can get famous, steal government research funds, and get off from my jail sentence by getting pregnant, having my cult hire high powered lawyers to dismiss my rape case or simply say, “I’m sorry!” and my opening the portal to the dark dimension that unleashed Cthulhu while oil drilling will all be forgiven.

Artificial intelligence has been getting lots of press lately. Great.  Just great.  Like the grifters need any more toys to give them better results.  One day they’re photoshopping, the next day they’re making “deep fake videos”, by the end of the week there are chatbots spouting out believable doctoral theses.

As I review content about misinformation, I personally wonder if, for example, climate change models ever factor in some estimation for how much the average human being is a complete and utter asshole.  It doesn’t seem like it.  It seems more like they estimate the current rate of sea level rise, predict what year Ron DeSantis’s Florida office is underwater based on that, and ignore how grifters are gonna grift and fight tooth and nail to keep grifting.

For a long time, a huge part of the problem has been social progress versus technological progress.  This graph may help:

The red line is social progress over time.  The green line is science building on itself.  This is by no means meant to be anything resembling any kind of exact plotting of actual data.  Just a rough idea.  It is also worth wrapping this up by clearly stating that since I don’t see this talked about much, this is very much my opinion instead of a claim of being definite reality.  I reserve the right to gloat when Griftbot 3.2 modifies that graph to make the green line human happiness vs. the red line of investment into Griftbot 4.0.

Not Subliminal Scapegoating

Scientology criticism was one of my first passions in researching disinformation.  It was a mix of being involved with the fraud in internet strategy games, especially online poker and a lot of just plain dumb luck, since shit happens.  Before the key event, I was part of what I suspect was a large group of people that just thought it was some space alien weirdness that Tom Cruise was into.  Which was no surprise he was involved , because Tom creeps me out to this day.

A co-worker thought I might enjoy a copy of Maxim magazine she had picked up somehow for free.  Never turning down a chance to look at pict…read high quality journalism about guy stuff, I was all like, “Hell yeah, sure.”  The amusement park ride was best described as a friend:  “Come for the crazy.  Stay for the human rights violations.”  Here’s the type of literature I was now consuming, since I love dwelling in overwhelming negativity.

http://www.davidkushner.com/article/anonymous-vs-scientology/

This was well before Leah Remini escaped and not long after the South Park episode.  And similar to a lot of flat earth/gematria/other “weird” stuff - a lot of the discourse revolved around how could people be stupid enough to fall for this?  Just because you are savvy enough to not be involved in a cult doesn’t mean Dunning and Kruger aren’t that savvy.

Nowadays, the scapegoat is more generalized to anyone who has a science degree.  Add on attacking someone who demonstrates any empathy in a job that to be effective requires some empathy (police, teachers, health care workers, you know - the everyday people that are the real heroes).  Hubbard, no not the new cult leader*, L. Ron Hubbard, chose a specific target as the scapegoats.  Psychiarty.  The group of people that if they take their job seriously would be best suited to help people avoid getting involved with a cult masquerading as a religion.  Giving brainwashed cult members a convenient target - check that box off on your cult bingo card.

It would require an entire other blog to recap what I learned about Scientology.  And it’s not really necessary since the cat is pretty much out of the bag on that one now.  Let’s turn back to our old friend Alex Jones.  The scapegoat is now the government.  Well, that’s an overused topic.  Always has been the scapegoat, always will be the scapegoat.  What a yawn fest.  So what changed, what made it catch on?

To me - it seems fairly obvious the scapegoat is EVERYBODY.  If dead children are crisis actors and your not allowed to mourn them, then pretty much nobody is safe.  And with the crank and grift magnetism going around every con artist is looking at ways to point a finger at the most arbitrary targets.  You did WHAT?  That’s a Freemason hand gesture!  Heretic, Satanic, Pedophile, how dare you wear purple clothes!  We all know what that means.  If only a knight with a duck could prove that the target doesn’t weigh the same as that duck….

In case you need a current example of how this works, I give you this:

https://amp.france24.com/en/live-news/20230513-meteorologists-targeted-in-climate-misinfo-surge

Apparently the solution to climate change is to make online death threats to weathermen because planes leave condensation behind them.  The same people that fall for the long debunked chemtrail conspiracy and act like a shithead online are the same people that look for trouble in real life and are terrible employees.

It’s not my fault you failed science class.  It’s not the weatherman’s fault you failed science class.  It’s not the rest of the world’s fault the only class you passed is Having cognitive biases 101.

* Since there’s a Jimmy Butler is Michael Jordan’s son conspiracy going around here’s my version.  Zach is actual L. Ron’s son and has modeled his cult by access to all the history of what works.  Fictitious back stories.  Targeting sports are rigged for a fresh scapegoat.  Pumping up viewership by buying likes and followers.  It all makes so much sense.  The only thing that can change my mind is if he posts a video of his girlfriend hugging a weatherman.

Subliminal Scapegoating

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. ~ Emo Philips.

The average “newbie” conspiracy theorist, someone that hasn’t yet figured out the grift laden material on social media and qualifies at least to some extent as a “true believer”, has a pretty good idea that they are not in fact a member of some ill defined evil empire.  Again (and again, and again, and…) these are not brand new to the 20th and 21st century battle of wills on the social media field of conflict.  Going back to what I read of philosophy decades ago.  Nichomachean Ethics, Leviathan, The Critique of Pure Reason, etc….  What I got out of these works - your confirmation bias has a wide array of information to latch on to.  Whether you think it’s a dog eat dog world where only the strong survive, you think there is a moral imperative built into the fiber of our being, or some mix in between, your personal brain will fixate on the bits and pieces that resonate with you most.  And the practical value gained from this is getting drunk in your dorm room and arguing with the collection of misfits you hang with about it while wondering why you need to take a badminton gym credit for you criminal justice degree.

What you should find is that everybody that isn’t you is not you.  Not you has a distinct set of beliefs, probably from a different genetic make up and peculiar set of life experiences.  Maybe we’re in a simulation and that’s the way not you is programmed in comparison to you?  I don’t know.  My isn’t that fun.  Even sans booze and the collection of misfits to debate with.

Maybe I need to force my beliefs on the not me’s of the world.  Good luck with that.  Not Me outnumbers me significantly.  Best find some allies among the not me’s.  At least I’ll have some back up.  But how do I identify the worthwhile not me’s from the group?

Just like every bullshit gematria celebrity death story, finding a scapegoat is the key.  All scapegoats are not equal, and historically some get more attention than others.  But gematria has helped the crank magnetism movement significantly, bringing to the table a self delusional aspect missing from other conspiracy content.

Sure they might have talked about the Freemasons (with minor degrees in Illuminati and badminton), then arbitrarily switched to the Jesuits (with a dual major with criminal injustice), but they simply can’t help taking a stab at the Jews occasionally.  And before I start ranting about that in particular let’s be completely clear about the point -

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who the scapegoat is.  The goal of gematria is beginner training for a cognitively damaged mind to “do its own research” and let your bigotry take you where it will.  Subliminal scapegoating.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t like negroes, white people, Jews, gays, people from Madagascar, Neapolitan ice cream, Democrats, Republicans, or pink paper clips.  If it’s a noun that can be hated a gematria narrative can be created* for it.

So every time there’s beginner content being posted it’s a signal that a fresh wave of subliminal scapegoating is being fed.  “A=1, B=2, C=3…”.   A new video posted with the intro, “Today’s date is…” as if the viewer is too stupid to see the date on YouTube and needs to be reminded that non-actual gematria date numerology is being incorporated.  If a long time gematria knucklehead is saying these things it means the previous crop of cult initiates has gotten frustrated with the constant incorrect predictions or graduated to where their hatred has taken them.  Or even both.  Because the evolution of confirmation bias now allows those without critical thinking skills to accept being wrong in return for the never received in real life attaboy they crave.

There are other non gematria scapegoating dog whistles.  Hand signals - it’s virtually impossible to hold your hand in any position without being accused of it meaning something other than what it was.  Every color “means” something evil.  The most trivial things get elevated to instant scapegoat status and merged into a broader us vs. them narrative that started as an internalized me vs. not me narrative.

Consider for a long moment that the reason Hubbard’s books have been dirt cheap or even free (I got his first book free at the cost of 15 minutes of my life creating a sock puppet account) may just be the starting point of 

conspiracy theory light and he doesn’t mind being wrong all the time.  Modern conspiracy thinking has normalized being wrong.

I wonder what Hobbes, Kant, Calvin, Aristotle etc… would think about this and badminton.

* This would be a lovely rhyming line delivered by Johnny Cochran in the summation of an Alex Jones bankruptcy trial.

Back To Basics

Since the Gematrinator posted a video about going Back To Basics it’s time to go off the recent trend and get back to the basics here.

He is the reigning champion on forcing the narrative.  While Hubbard finally realized that four ciphers is plenty to force the narrative, the mere fact that the Gematrinator calculator has a ton of them, even though some are rarely used, is enough to lure people astray into mindless “decoding”.

An old favorite of mine from years ago was the absolutely bonkers outright claim that the entire English language was coded by the evil empire.  This is the kind of statement that when presented in a court of law would get you the same kind of stink eye reaction that Sovereign Citizen pseudo law claims. 

 “So Mr. Gromk, you defrauded your entire cryptocurrency community group, what do you have to say in your defense?”

“The evil empire encoded the entire English language, and I was just showing them this great knowledge.”

“Hmmmm….that’s bullshit.  ‘Mary is cool, Bob is a jackass’ has the same gematria as ‘Bob is cool, Mary is a jackass’.  You lose.”

While gematria has morphed into some of the nuttier ways of forcing the numbers being downplayed, they still use a more subtle method of forcing the narrative called phraseshopping.  That’s  where you cherry-pick what wording you use so the resulting number matches the predetermined story you have chosen.  Effective storytelling requires a grasp of how the words flow to let the reader visualize the themes.  Without using awkward grammar that interrupts the chain of thought.  Since a decode generally doesn’t present a paragraph or even a sentence as a story, it’s far less obvious that word substitution is playing a role.  It can be extremely subtle such as picking what synonym lets you find the target.  Or as blatantly obvious by adding your own favorite secret words.  ICE CREAM=57, but SIGNAL CODE MK ULTRA WARFARE ICE CREAM=314. Thereby, your ice cream is now a Pi ritual and everyone knows that 314 means Pi because you’ve been beating that to death.

Now, that last example was purposefully silly, but if you were part of Hubbard’s old Free To Find Truth blog there was someone that actually spent a significant amount of phraseshopping extra added words like SIGNAL and CODE to produce repeating triple digits.  The Gematrix calculator has a lot of super awkward religious phrases something like HOLY TRINITY BORN OF GOD’S DIVINE JUSTICE TUESDAY just because someone wanted to hit a number they wanted.

https://gematrinator.com/blog/2023/05/21/some-notes-on-the-denver-nuggets-2023-postseason-run

There we go.  It’s not just FREEMASONRY  It’s not just SCOTTISH RITE.  It’s not just SCOTTISH RITE OF FREEMASONRY or ANCIENT SCOTTISH RITE OF FREEMASONRY.  You don’t get the forced result without adding that ACCEPTED into the decode.  How about you just keep adding modifiers until your brain explodes?

And it gets even better, which scores some points on the subtlety portion of your English test, but fails in the awkward wording storytelling part of the exam.

No, you should consider using a compass to draw A CIRCLE.  Not THE CIRCLE.  But of course just the word CIRCLE, arguably the most natural phrasing, is 32/40 in the reduction methods and A CIRCLE =33/48.  Here you drawing THE CIRCLE makes it sound like it’s the best circle that was ever made.  The most important circle ever.  The one Circle that Sauron created to deceive mankind that they could make sports predictions and guess what’s going to happen in cryptocurrency markets.

Since the claim is made that basics are being addressed it looks like there’s a push to add content for a crop of newbies.  Make no mistake, gematria has always been about pretending to be able to make predictions.  And since people with critical thinking skills don’t word things like SAURON BITCOIN THE ANCIENT ACCEPTED SCOTTISH CIRCLE SIGNAL CODE ECLIPSE RITUAL and there’s always an “out” to cover the inevitable failure, phraseshopping will keep being a problem.

At least you can spend some time with the shitty ads on the Gematrinator blog.  You might get something in return instead of losing your life savings in the crypto market or placing bets with Draft Kings.

Dwelling In Overwhelming Negativity

I spend a lot of time looking at insincere social media accounts on the major platforms.  They range from what looks to be temporarily misguided accounts that might actually come around if they can get over a few stumbling points to ones that are fairly obviously only existing to spread a wide array of blatant disinformation.

The first of those - I don’t spend a lot of time with.  And that’s a personality fault (cognitive bias) of mine I just can’t seem to get over.  I just can’t seem to muster the energy to spend on trying to help someone that refuses to do actual research on their own, while claiming they are searching through content “researching on their own”.  Yes, years on dwelling in overwhelming negativity can bring a buzz kill to even some of the happiest battles won.

The accounts mired in overwhelming negativity - my Dunning-Kruger (more personal cognitive bias problems) leads me to judge as “guilty until proven innocent”.  Which is a terrible attitude to have.  I would inevitably word something the wrong way trying to help the followers of these incorrectly.  Which is also a terrible thing.  What a lot (and a mean A LOT, like a gazillion metric bitch tons A LOT) of people don’t get is that the counterattack is the desired outcome.  They want to give newbie cult members a convenient target to “debate”.  Which is inevitably a logical fallacy shit fest that creates more background noise while the adults are trying to have an actual debate on an actually debatable topic.  The easiest example from recent history - “Viruses don’t exist”.  There’s far more content that simply makes that statement than even bothers to try putting up a coherent not already thoroughly debunked basis for the claim.

Since I have the experience I do, and if you want a tip I have some tests.  There are things I’ve already mentioned.  Is this person being a hypocrite?  Like do you drop zeroes in gematria like you claim is a rule or leave them in when it suits you?  Are you a “Christian Nationalist” sitting in Congress, espousing how nothing is more important than family values and you are getting a divorce?  Did you talk up how great the Covid researcher is on your radio show, only to later in the pandemic take Ivermectin and give one of the big name purveyors of  vaccine misinformation a platform, talking up how great they are?  Etc….

But I have a new not before mentioned on here test.  I call it the dog test.  Somewhere between the possibly salvageable and “won’t ever shut up because their job is disinformation account”, there is something that usually puts up political info.  They clearly establish they are a real person, using their actual name, show pictures of themselves at political rallies.  Share good mornings with everyone that pops up on their time line.  But they dwell in overwhelming negativity.  There are no puppies.  There’s never, “I had a rough morning, the dog puked on the carpet.”  There’s no, “Oh I’m so sorry!  Send me a picture when he’s better.”  There’s no idle chit chat about the weather, the kids, sports teams.  But I like the dog example the best.

These accounts exist to boost likes and followers to give illusion to actual support of the ideas.  The ideas don’t have much value.  The idea is usually something meaningless like “Fuck you, liberal assholes!!”  That gets 250 likes and 20 retweets the first hour it’s up on Twitter.  The advantage to operating an account such as this - You can’t censor my content you evil social media bastards, I’m a real person!  The downside, you are only playing the Alex Jones elicit an emotional response for engagement game.  And if you are following such an account you have put up a red flag that you are dwelling in overwhelming negativity and you’ll never get a puppy. At least one that you’d treat right.  Pretending to have empathy when you don’t is too much of a burden long term.  The same thing exists in the workplace where dishonest and/of narcissistic folks don’t have patience to maintain the charade beyond a three month probationary period after hiring.

Now go to your local rescue and get a dog or a cat.  Do NOT get a red panda.  They will just pretend to be your friend while plotting against you as they dwell in their overwhelming negativity.