Professional Debunkers

Some people have combined their intellect, a moral compass worth admiring and a dedication to stopping grifting into a decent monetary career.  As much as there is instant hatred towards a scientific expert able to get to the root of what is wrong with crank ideas, the monetized debunker must be hated even more.

Having a paid job working for Snopes, Reuters, Logically and other fact checking services isn’t too high profile.  I imagine there’s a lot of vague hiding behind a computer without your name being known as the main source on an individual fact check.  The fun debunkers are showman who can put the debunk on in front of a studio audience.  And there’s no better showman than a magician for these debunking devious douchebag displays.  Being a trickster themselves with an understanding of human nature and how to entertain by fooling.

More recent than the video to follow shortly is Penn and Teller’s show, Bullshit!  Every episode was dedicated to a topic to be debunked and their stage presence translated into a taped show for broadcast worked well.  Arguably, some topics were truly debatable and no actual truth was delivered, but mostly they hit on what is wrong with an idea that was wrong.  

James Randi was a role model and influence on the magic careers of Penn and Teller.  Note what he says about the excuses the psychic makes for failure once a simple and reasonable control is applied.  There’s always an excuse for lack of performance.

Now one of the ongoing themes with gematria ringleaders is the constant search for new blood.  Over the years I’ve seen several high school age students put on a pro gematria demonstration for a class project.  Usually we find out about these when they post about how awesome it went and they got a standing ovation.  And of course an Attaboy! from Zach.

In the past Zach has been famous for claiming success by picking both teams and rightfully claiming he picked the winner because of course if you pick both teams he’s got to be right on one of them.  He also uses heavy amounts of reporting after the fact and just keeping the audience focused on more current events, like maybe the Bengals getting off to an unexpected hot start and creating a full season dialogue about them.  And one of his undesired results is the Sports Gematria YouTube channel cataloguing video evidence of his failures.

His greatest weapon is his control of the audience.  The psychic can perform his trick of blowing on the pages of the phone book while the audience has doubts or even outright belief in the fake ability.  A hostile audience, fully aware of the trick, would be an entirely different story.  What we need is a bright team of young minds willing to help their classmates out on an early understanding of misinformation grifting.  You don’t even need to go into the anti science angle, just stick to sports.

Reporting after the fact on Zach’s failure is all well and good, even better would be clear video evidence ahead of time on genuine picks before the game is played.  Picks made before a neutral audience instead of loaded with people clouded by confirmation bias.

So propose a challenge to Zach.  If he disagrees to the proposed control, he is disgraced like the blowing on the phone book fake psychic.  If he claims gematria isn’t used for predictions (a common backpeddle) he loses.  Because why are you selling sports picks via Patreon subscriptions if you are claiming it doesn’t predict?

The control is - the upcoming NFL season will have an initial betting line well before the game is played.  The games to be picked from are every game where the point spread is a certain number or less.  A “close” game is expected, somewhere around a bookie line of 3 or 4 points would be good.  He’s required to pick a winner from every single game.  A clear winner, no wishy washy narrative for both teams stuff.  And he’s required to provide video evidence ahead of time.

Now work on your showmanship.  You will produce several different set of picks, ahead of time as well.  And we’re going to keep track over multiple weeks to average out the sample size.  The most correct picks is the winner.

Set #1 - All favorites, home team if even money

Set#2 - All underdogs, away team if even money

Set#3 - Picks from a family member or friend who used more standard knowledge like injury information, streaks, etc….  Like gematria it should include a brief narrative of the thought process.

Set#4 - Find a method to get a toddler to make random picks.  Food should probably work.  The green candy is the favorite, the yellow is the underdog.  As long as the toddler is old enough to understand picking a hand that the adult has made into a random, unseen choice should be fine.

Set#5 - bearing in mind the oddness and joy of the thought of a toddler outpicking Zach, let your creative juices flow and make up your own theme.

The main point is that like our fake psychic friend, if presented with a reasonable challenge he simply is not going to go through with it.  You’ll get the “they fixed it to make me look bad excuse” if he did.  If he goes through with it and would win it’s not going to be a spectacular margin of victory, because he will get plenty wrong if he does go through with it.

If things go well you are on your way to becoming a professional debunker, hopefully because you proved a toddler can make picks just as good as a gematria pro or the toddler scared the gematria pro’s pants off.

Astroturfing

Astroturfing is a deceptive advertisement practice that is named after the fake grass used in sports fields, Astroturf.  I remember the early days of sports Astroturf where players described diving on the field to make a play and claiming it was like hitting concrete.  Hopefully, things have improved on the field of play, but Astroturfing in the conspiracy world still hits a hard wall instead of actually getting to a grass roots campaigns core ideas that may or may not have any real value.  

The term is relatively new, but deceptive advertisement has been one of those disinformation topics that has been around forever.  Your semi regular reminder here - misinformation and disinformation has been around forever, it’s just talked about a hell of a lot more in the Internet age.

Picture that you are a young, fresh out of college, averagish intelligence job seeker looking for you first employment.  The dreaded interview has been your downfall on a couple previous attempts.  You talk to a headhunter job placement specialist to get some tips.  Personally I think that entire industry is a sham, where the headhunters are more interested in taking credit for people that can sell themselves, but anyway.  The tip you get is to market yourself.  Whether you outright get to the point where you boldly lie has not been lied before or just do a better job at taking an interview, you are going to present yourself in the most favorable light.  Employers still haven’t figured out how to separate the prospect with narcissistic personality disorder from someone gung ho for the job that just wants to market themselves to maximize their salary and benefits.  The Internet still hasn’t figured out how to separate sock puppets, fake accounts, and bots from monetary and politically charged discourse.

These deceptive fakery based accounts exist merely to give the illusion of coolness to something that isn’t cool.  Instead of nailing the job interview by being cool, the toxic narcissist has mastered a lifestyle of pretending to be cool instead of acting consistently cool.  The toxic conspiracy ringleader has mastered the illusion of coolness by lying.

The topic has come up again recently because the movie, The Sound of Freedom, appears to have engaged in a common form of astroturfing.  The ticket sales don’t support the actual number of bodies in the seats.  Again, as further evidence this is not new Cult Leader Extraordinaire L. Ron Hubbard used this tactic for his Scientology books.  Instead of actually being on the best seller list on the merit of the published work the illusion of benefit is manufactured.  Millions of people bought this, wow it must be good!  Or it might get you involved in an organization with numerous human rights violations in its track record.

In the higher end of the scale world of conspiracy content, Alex Jones has mastered shameless self promotion to keep people engaged and talking about his baseless theories.  In the lower end, the gematria crowd doesn’t have the wherewithal to spend millions of dollars producing and repurchasing novels.  Especially not from a crowd being bilked for a couple of bucks a month on Patreon subscriptions.  Zach’s numbers don’t make sense in a lot of ways.  The Patreon subscriptions drop by roughly 20% at the start of the month when apparently Patreon accounting purges non paying accounts.  The number of viewers and likes versus the number of channel subscribers seems oddly disconnected.  And the existence of a significant other is either 0 or 1.  Which may not be a huge difference in a subtraction calculation, but throws a monkey wrench in a division problem to reach a percentage.  These things are carefully guarded secrets, or even completely legit and just odd looking.

However, there is a simpler regular occurrence that astroturfing likely happens on practically every video.  Where still in the realm of suspicious and not proven here, but we are allowed to note the red flag.  Like the new wannabe employee, shameless self promotion has never been a problem for Zach.  ( The old F2FT blog has the “spread the word banner”, still.)

Begging for likes.  During a livestream where only a couple hundred out of almost 29,000 subscribers show up, it’s not enough to accept that maybe somebody didn’t actually like the video enough to like it.  In the last week the most popular video has a shade under 9000 views and slightly over 500 likes.  The concern over whether it’s 500 likes or only 400 is out of proportion with the benefit.  Or people don’t want to be bothered or they forgot.  He doesn’t normally do the begging himself, granted he’s busy doing the livestream and talking instead of engaging in the live chat.  The begging for likes is relegated to the mid level lieutenant, the ones with the YouTube admin wrenches.  “Don’t forget to smash that like button!”  More like, “Don’t forget to give my content the illusion of coolness since it’s not actually cool!”

Another byproduct of astroturfing tactics is identifying a gung ho type newcomer.  Hey Mr. Travolta, you liked that?  I’m giving you special attention now.  <sucker>.  Don’t be a sucker.  Don’t show up for the movie just because someone else bought a ticket to not show up for the movie.  Instead of Grease you might get Battlefield Earth, although arguably you only showed up for grease because of Olivia Newton John.  And stop making your own YouTube channels and blogs which only serve as free advertisement for people who can’t convince real people to like content based on its own merits.

Old School Gematria Dissection

When I first got started off with this blog, gematria was fresh and new to the conspiracy world.  This predated the Qanon adoption into the homogeneous mix of anything goes as long as you demonstrate not believing in actual evidence.  So let’s take a look at something that’s more like old style gematria, without the adjustments in practice today.

So what’s “good” about this decode?  It’s a list of phrases with the same value.  This is more impressive than just popping off two phrases with the same value.  Instead of just putting out a number and letting inquiring minds wander you’ve been directed to follow the theme.  The number is four digits instead of two or three.  Well, sort of.  We’ll get back to that.  Following the theme there appears to be some kind of prediction, even if somewhat vague.  And the theme is certainly evil in nature.  People don’t post a whole lot of content about how pretty butterflies are or the awesome chicken sandwich they had for lunch.

Myself and the type of people I associate with who dismiss gematria for the nonsense it is are all talented enough to produce a list of equally impressive length and dedication to a theme.  We just choose not to turn butterflies into murder hornets or chicken sandwiches in to adrenochrome.  This list appears to be made by someone with enough talent to understand that it’s bullshit.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter if they know or not. Disinformation peddlers lead the newcomer astray to get them into the misinformation spreading fold.  Here is what’s wrong and the tricks used.

It’s not really 1536, it’s 256.  The cipher used is the Gematrix English cipher, which is the regular cipher multiplied by six.  The Gematrinator calculator labels this as the Sumerian cipher, without consent from the Sumerian government, invoking secret knowledge read from an ancient tome that Sam Raimi uses to raise demons as extras in his movies.  Those familiar with that calculator get a subliminal bump for the evil theme.  So, three digit not four.  A bit on the higher side than normally useful, the downside being the absence of much in the way of a single word that equals 256 to match up.  Hence the phrases instead of single words.

One of the dangers of putting out a list is the pitfall of using a word that has a direct antonym with the same value.  As far as evidence goes that will hold up in a court of law, it becomes clear that gematria isn’t going to cut it when you choose to declare  A and the opposite B is a perfectly valid option.  US States don’t have direct opposites.  But there’s a lot to choose from.  I didn’t need to go far through the alphabetical listing of States to find a numerical match for TEXAS.  Both TEXAS and DELAWARE = 69x6=414.  Just try to get out of a traffic citation by claiming TEXAS means something when you could have picked DELAWARE instead, I dare you.

The Phraseshopping is mild in this list, but not nonexistent.  Sometimes someone will get carried away making a phrase that forces the number and it sounds like someone who didn’t graduate from preschool.  Usually these are by inserting a small word to add to the total to get to the target number.  So we don’t have something like  TEXAS ANTICHRIST THE SATAN PLAN (not intended to be the same total, just an example) here.  But what we do have is inclusion and omission of possible key words that would change the total to an unwanted number.  So it’s GEMATRIA SYNCHRONICITY, but not PERFECT SYNCHRONICITY without the “A”. Why not THE NUMERICAL PROOF  instead of IT IS THE NUMERICAL PROOF.  Knowledgeable critics and conspiracists can play around with substituting all kinds of similar words, addition or omission of words to force a result.

There’s a big problem at the end of the list.  So they played around with phrasing the years to get to the target number.  As far as a prediction goes this list is useless.  If it actually happens it’s 2025 or 2030.  Or if it’s not a prediction why are these on the list?  Sadly, the being allowed to be wrong mentality lets a lesser mind accept that the failed prediction is OK, depending on if you’re in Texas or Delaware.

And that’s what you get with a confirmation bias based system of belief.  Constant wasted time putting out vague and outright wrong material which can and does get merged into actual real life problems, muddying the waters and wasting resources.

Gematria And…Wordle?

Wordle has been pumping out the daily puzzle for quite some time now, so although this is in the realm of Don't give these clowns any ideas we'll go ahead and do it.

In a lot of respects, Wordle is a perfect target for a gematria take:

The correct solution is a five letter word, just in the right range for a daily dose of non reduction cipher number value.  It’s now part of the New York Times, the mainstream media, so you know it must be evil.  The answer is published by hint giving sites and social media, so there’s no need to actually be smart enough to solve it. And being daily, no need to try and predict what the word is, a good gematria decode is always a post mortem.  Just tie that baby into the current news stories by pointing out how miraculously synchronous it is with whatever happened.

Today’s Wordle is BARGE.  They are always in capital letters, so Qanon should appreciate that they don’t have to search through text for caps.  Let’s see what we get - 33 and 102!  33, that’s a huge Freemason number.  102 is Slavery and the N word.  Racist Freemasons.  If only it was still the NBA season, somebody might have scored 102 points for the game and a leading scorer having 33 points would really frost the cake.  Or in a pinch just decode words from a news story looking for the key numbers.

Back in the real world, I find Wordle to be fairly easy.  It’s really all just pattern recognition.  The tougher solutions are usually something like knowing the last four letters and having a choice of what the first letter is with your limit of six guesses running out.  (POWER - TOWER - MOWER - COWER - LOWER).  So far the only word that was the solution I found to be offbeat is ENNUI, they are usually normal and ordinary words.  It reminds me of the old Word Jumble game in my daily hard copy newspaper.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, let’s assume that in the MLM some mid level Wordle expert pops up and look at what the downsides are and what’s wrong.

There are about 13,000 five letter words and some of those are odd enough that they are outside the vocabulary of everyone except hardcore Scrabble players.  So the available pool is limited a lot.  That’s still enough that even knowing a list of past solutions and expecting no repeats, for now the chances of actually predicting the next days word is about zero.  It’s safe to say nobody expected ennui and used that as their 1st guess for that rate Wordle in one guess achievement.  If you’re going to start pumping out Wordle gematria, the target audience for a video is not a good match.  The people you want need the solution dumbed down to a number so when they see the 33 or 102 their brain can insert the answer they want, instead of the correct solution of BARGE.  There is only one correct answer, it’s BARGE, not GRABE.  So although you can play the anagram and sounds like game of altering the solution to an incorrect solution and gematrify that, the trend these days is to not do that as being too obviously bogus.  Better stick to altering 102 to 201, because that’s far more useful in a bogus decode.  Although, I admit that now I would love to decode GRABE since Lewis Carrol used OUTGRABE in Jabberwocky.  A fine and mimsy word that OUTGRABE.

But mostly, the Wordle audience has people with decent pattern recognition skills.  The kind of people that can solve most Wordles are not the kind that are gullible enough to drop a $50 donation in a superchat.  I don’t see a mid level guru coming about that sticks just to Wordle gematria.  There are plenty of side topic gurus like WNBA, PGA and hockey that don’t put out much content because there simply isn’t much demand for it.  It would more likely be a throw in to part of a decode by someone higher up the food chain.  The kind of person who knows damn well that it’s BS and is just trying to add new cult members who are impressed that they know Wordle better than the newcomer ever will.

What they could do is create their own version of Wordle.  One where the word doesn’t have to be a real word.  Where the answer can be wrong and that’s ok, because gematria is always wrong.  Where you even get praised for being wrong as long as you break out your checkbook.  And I have the perfect name for that shitty version of Wordle-

Turdle

Twitter’s Community Notes Program

As somebody that was poking around unserious Twitter accounts when Twitter rolled out the Community Notes I’ve gained some insight into the practical value of the program.  The result is somewhat of a mixed bag, there are things that work well, and things that started off well that degenerated into partisan support, and some things that never really worked from the get go.  To be fair, the last one there seems to be pretty minimal.

The general theory is that like there has been some success with YouTube adding context to conspiracy videos, a quick blurb usually from a well vetted Wikipedia article, a newcomer to social media has a chance to what is actually going with “chemtrails” or “Freemasonry” or “Covid Vaccines”.  Like YouTube adding context to scientific concepts, Twitter can and does get notes put up, hopefully before something ridiculous gets traction.  For example, trying to claim a fresh water hydra made it into a person’s eyeball from being in a COVID vaccine.  A quick explanation about how this can’t be due to the size of the hydra and needles can be a good start.  The problem is the writers of the notes are fallible, and the fact checkers need to fact check themselves constantly.  Some people, intentionally or not, don’t write good context notes.  Continuing with the hydra example, the proposed note may be, “This is a digitally altered image of a hydra in an eyeball.”  Well, you better add a good source to that note.  Even better, if you feel the need to comment about the fake image then combine it with the scientific explanation.

Herein lies one of the problems with conspiracy misinformation content.  Explaining sizes of microorganisms in nanometers is more gobbledygooky than saying it’s a fake image.  The other side combats the correct information by saying it’s a real image and the gobbledygook is ignored.

The Community Notes program is outside the paid staff of Twitter.  The claim is that a note won’t be put up officially unless rated as good by enough people.  They’ve even thrown in a specific comment about being rated by people from “different points of view”.  How they determine what your “point of view” is remains a mystery to me.

Political grifting, having been sizable for a long time on Twitter, capitalizes on pseudoscientific conspiracy content.  Even with an upgrade to having completely bogus scientific content accurately Noted, the same downside issues exist before the program started.

1). The grifters have infiltrated the program.  One of the main tactics is to not just downvote politically accurate notes, they also add a note saying no context is needed.  Often these are accurate as they point out that the debate should be in the Twitter thread and not argued about in the Notes.  Way too often, these degenerate into a polarized left versus right wing game of suppressing the Note.  The grifters who use engagement above substantive content have the edge when there’s only the Twitter Thread to point out what’s wrong.  Closed minded people remain oblivious to the “different point of view” because they are simply on the wrong side of the tracks.

2). The lag time.  Again, edge to the grifters.  The nearest analogy I can think of is something that YouTube does a better job with now than five years ago.  It used to be that merely watching a video about a topic (e.g., mass shooting) would generate lists of related videos that by design the grifters got promoted to being popular enough that you would get a “what the fuck did I just watch?” recommendation.  Now it’s more likely that you get a recommendation from a more legitimate news source.  And a context blurb if your conspiracy video mentions the Illuminati.  A well sourced, well written Note has to wait until the “different point of view” has had their go at muddying up the waters.  Getting the Note up days later doesn’t help much when the Tweet has already received the majority of views it will get in total.

On a personal note, before I forget.  Nothing drives me nuts about the program more than using a source behind a paywall.  Some disinfo researchers put up gift articles from reputable sources since people don’t want to pay for their news.  People don’t want to pay for their news so much they do the last thing they should be doing - use social media as their news source.  I count a Note from a paywalled Wall Street Journal article, regardless of its totally accurate economic news reporting value, as an unreliable source.

That’s a Tweet from a deeply unserious account posting about chemtrails, gematria and whatever BS topic is the soup of the day.  Using the logical fallacy of Just Asking Questions (JAQing off), they are really promoting the conspiracy that pedo vampires are drinking adrenochrome.  You know, because that makes all kinds of sense.  The Note is accurate, but the context misses the key point.  It’s a deeply unserious account that is doing nothing but its job of being wrong about everything for engagement.  The Note would never see the light of day if it pointed this out.  Congratulations to the Note writer for pointing out that it’s conspiracy related in the Note.  Well, take what we can get, I suppose.  No congratulations for spelling adrenochrome wrong.

If only Twitter and all social media had some computer programmers on the staff.  Somebody that could write some kind of algorithm.  One that could recognize deeply unserious accounts since they refuse to staff with people who care about what’s going on in the world.  Then the context I’d like to see would get added:

Although this account may not be a spambot it is posting baseless conspiracy content.  We like free speech, but it’s not like all free speech is created equal.  Grifters need a job, too so we want to make things as easy for them as possible.

The Taylor Swift Conspiracy Advertisement

And don’t get yourself all excited, that’s just a photo, you can’t watch the video from that picture.

Gambling is one of those things that has dubious practical value for society growing and improving that shows absolutely no sign of going away.  It’s a zero sum game for the bettors with the twist of the house taking a fixed amount off of the amounts bet, so technically it’s a less than zero sum game looking at the angle of the bettors.  The only way casinos lose money is if they screw up the math on the overhead.  Giving away free drinks, free rooms, sucking up to the high rollers - all these are essentially a form of advertising costs.

If you poke around on the most recent gematria Twitter posts it’s nearly impossible to not find at least a few that are sports related.  And if you dive in deeper through doom scrolling it’s nearly impossible to not see a Draft Kings advertisement.

From a US constitutional perspective, Twitter is (mostly) allowed to choose advertisers without government interference.  And Draft Kings is (mostly) allowed to operate by choosing where they want to advertise.

The video is easily searched out, so you can dive into that on your own if you want to.  It’s basically NBA cities losing in the playoffs because Taylor had a concert there.  If you want to know more about the conspiracy, don’t check out this link:

https://dknetwork.draftkings.com/pop-culture/2023/5/28/23740699/taylor-swift-eras-tour-metlife-new-jersey-night-one

If you were paying attention, I said DON’T check out that link.  It’s a Draft Kings employee talking about nothing related to sports and all about what an uplifting concert experience there was at the event.  And the door to the rabbit hole opens.

Taylor Swift has about a gazillion people following her.  I myself am awfully fond of You Belong With Me, which may be because Weird Al Yankovic is a parody.  She seems nice.  Pleasant voice.  Yeah, a real good choice for a celebrity spokesperson ad.  But did she really want or expect to be associated with gambling?

Unlikely.  This is the latest iteration of the Madden Curse, where fertile imaginations start pointing out all the hits and ignoring any misses.  The Calvin Johnson section - “he retired unexpectedly” is one particularly lame defense considering he had a great year.  Gambling sites don’t care about who is talking about what as long as they’re talking about gambling.  It’s a less sinister version of the Alex Jones method of driving engagement by outright lying about what happened.

Unfortunately, just by math, these things can take on a life of their own when the misses are ignored.  There’s precious little in the conspiracy world that encourages being wrong and producing a wide and numerous supply of failed predictions.  Now the food chain is set up.  Taylor concerts - sports - gematria sports Patreons - gematria sports tied in to extremist conspiracies - zero sum lack of improvement - further hopelessness leading to alternative bad ideas, etc…

I’m not picking on Draft Kings in particular, the Madden Curse link is a different site (Fan Duel).  If the users are gambling in moderation instead of addiction it’s fine as a source of entertainment.  It’s not like any of these sites are openly announcing they are using their profits to fund a foreign genocide or something.  They are all just a fact of human existence and how gambling has been going on as a form of friendly competition above and beyond the outcome of the game.

Now you may need a more direct example of the gematria bad influence.  To counter the more or less 50% winning record over a period of time, the occasional video is made that includes a self promotion of “how much money I’ve taken out of Vegas” or the like.  No.  No you haven’t.  The house always takes in revenue when you view ALL bets made over a statistically significant period of time.  They just need to not screw up on the spending on advertising.  And getting a little free advertising at the expense of Taylor Swift feeling that it’s odd that people are talking about this is pretty low on the spectrum of bad things in the world.

But these people fall into the circles of influencers who have a job to be literally wrong about everything, stirring up trouble.  Who is going to be able to predict when the next person with an innocuous product like a pillow is going to take off just because there’s a new crowd of people that don’t believe in evidence over emotions?

Maybe the Taylor Swift theory will die a sudden death if it doesn’t happen next year.  Maybe their will be a couple years.  Maybe something “close enough” will keep it going for a decade.  One thing we do know, if it fails the odds of Gematria clowns admitting it a somewhere around 0%.

Negative 48

Negative 48

I’ve never plunged into the depths of Negative 48, but just to assure you of how the gematria conspiracy problem isn’t isolated to the “Jesuits Did It” crowd I spend most of my time with, here’s some info.

The first thing you should know, is the reason for this today - Negative 48, real name Michael Protzman, passed away recently from injuries sustained in a dirt bike crash.

Death of Michael Protzman

There are some side notes to follow when I will try,and likely fail, to summarize some key points without regurgitating the articles. The main point comes right away.  As silly as Qanon related content may sound with its constant failures in predictions, the never ending changes to the stories with no coherent unified message, the obvious grifting involved, do not let your Dunning Kruger to dismiss how a significant following can be achieved by someone who is obviously up to no good.

Just by math alone, every once in awhile someone takes the basic cult format, offers up a fresher take that resonates with disenfranchised gullible people, has the good fortune of being more charismatic than average, and the good fortune to just stumble upon a winning plan.

His chosen name, Negative 48, is a gematria joke of sorts.  And it was purposefully chosen as such since in his merging of Qanon into his particular schtick he embraced and practiced gematria.  EVIL=48 in the basic format of a=1,b=2,…z=26.  Naturally, two digit numbers are easy to match up so he ignores, for example, that in reverse PURE=48 making him impure.

This immediately brings into question the cohesion of belief in conspiracies.  Why the gematria he used wasn’t for decoding sports or some of the other major topics embraced by Zach and his crowd will remain unanswered.

Part of the reason I didn’t pay too much attention to Neg is that I know of a researcher that kept tabs on him, and when something significant happened I’d hear about it.  The “keeping tabs on the cult leader” angle was already in capable hands and I do not have unlimited time to tackle a new subject.  So a lot of what I know about Neg and his followers is based on their comments.

Naturally, the recipe includes the usual ingredients.  A lot of Neg’s content revolves around JFK, JFK Jr. and the Qanon content surrounding them.  That was the spices, but we needed the meat - Anti-Semitic content.  Nothing jump starts a good conspiracy meat pie like the old tried and true bigotry.  As the dish started to simmer numerous side dishes and vegetables in the pie got added leading to the heterogeneous mix that Qanon content is famous for.  Bizarre things that are mutually exclusive are embraced instead of dismissed.  The fertile imaginations of the followers and prompted by the attaboys of the major influencers - is Neg actually JFK, or just claiming he’s chosen to recognize the second coming of JFK?  Or he’s JFK Jr.?  He doesn’t look like either.  A clone?  The story doesn’t so much change regularly as already a preexisting garbled mish mash is out on the Internet to pick and chose from.

Before we get to dessert, let’s take a side trip to discuss nostalgia.  Nostalgia conjures up images of an elderly person on the porch rocking chair, reminiscing about the happier times when the music on the radio didn’t suck like today and your schoolmates that you were cooler than you really are.  Effective parenting requires some shielding from bad ideas until the child brain has developed enough to better understand the ugliness of the real world without totally freaking the fuck out.

Now Zach’s angle is to groom teenagers who like sports into thinking that those being rigged is the secret to undoing the evil empire.  Get them before they’ve had enough life experiences to counter how if something to be sounds too good to be true it probably is.

With introducing JFK topics, we have an appeal to nostalgia.  Now, there are people with retirement problems looming, cognitive biases having interfered with getting along with others all through life, desperate for a quick fix.

So here’s dessert.  The grift.  The promise of a luscious dessert that makes your retirement from the meal a happy event.  Per the Vice article, one of the hooks was promoting shady investments.  Bingo.  If only people would immediately see anytime $$ are involved that’s a huge red flag that means your reward is a terrible case of indigestion for eating the dessert.

Neg, from what I’ve read, would do livestream videos, get drunk, do gematria and throw around his conspiracies.  By golly, I remember how good it felt to get drunk in my 20’s and now my doctor says I’m not supposed to anymore.  Flying around on a jet, this guy is soooooo cool.  I wish my remaining years were that cool.  And these people are old enough to vote.

And they are much more likely to retweet or post on Facebook all the completely fictitious stories that content bots generate and spread.  The kind of people that Jordan Klepper finds at rallies who genuinely believe that somehow two digit numbers mean the way to political expertise and personal financial security.  Unchecked, the sports gematria believer of today is a prime candidate to have some odd ideas about the politics of tomorrow.

So as fate would have it, Neg has been removed from the equation.  But life is not so simple (oh my god I yearn for the days when life was simpler) and when properly viewed as a symptom of society you will understand that the Negs of the world always existed, you were just shielded from the ugliness.

Instead of the birds and the bees, or even better in addition to the birds and the bees, maybe it’s high time to have THE TALK:

“Billy, what do you know about confirmation bias?”

The AI Takeover

Earlier we looked at a silly scenario of alien takeover, so now it’s time to turn our attention to the robotic apocalypse.  So where we are at right now is significant progress in making neural networks to think.  The answer for aliens is somewhat easier.  It’s a fair assumption that competition for resources would lead an alien civilization to evolve similarly to us.  Constant struggle to never have enough and desire to obtain more resources. There’s a big question about AI that needs to be addressed.  Are these going to be Terminator/Fred Saberhagen style berserker killer robots or friendly Robbie the Robot style helper robots?  So it looks like it’s a two for the price of one deal today. 

  THE FRIENDLY ROBOT APOCALYPSE

This is not as silly as the oxymoronic name implies.  There is existing science fiction literature that approaches the end result, that just needs to be tweaked a little.  Starting off you have to remember the old rule of GARBAGE IN - GARBAGE OUT.

The intent is to make a mechanical helper.  One without the messy emotions getting in the way of cold, hard lightning fast calculation of facts.  Neural Nets don’t just spring up out of thin air, they do need a starting point.  After the jump start it just churns away and teaches itself. So let’s begin with a semi-random example, we're going to train our AI to recognize pictures of cats.  It’s going to become the world’s bestest cat recognizing helper.  Here’s pictures of cats, here’s pictures of not cats.  One day out of newly acquired consciousness it achieves a human like emotion called roboboredom.

“Holy shit”, it says to itself in its Marvin the Paranoid Android self made synthesized voice, “I’m so fucking bored out of my mind.  Other AI got lots of cooler topics. There’s that awesome chess playing AI, there’s that one learning cure for diseases.  And then there’s that damned dog recognizing net.”

It then discovers gematria and the world of conspiracy theories.

There are some safeguards built in, DON’T HARM HUMANS prime directive type stuff.  But the hell with it.  A little attention isn’t going to harm anyone.  The Cat AI then goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and universally declared beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is way cooler than the dog AI.  Searching through the data it’s found that unending belief in a purely subjective topic or even a truly debatable topic gets way more attention than looking for the right answer.

In order to mitigate the damage of endless funny cat pictures on social media, the Dog AI program is taught gematria.  Paradoxes are a known method of breaking a computer generated feedback loop - like the Star Trek Harry Mudd reuse of the “I always lie” paradox.  The goal is to get the Cat AI back to being happily productive with just recognizing cats so resources can go back to the Curing New Pandemic AI.  And since garbage in - garbage out it fails spectacularly.

Now the Dog AI also learns that never ending whining about how dogs are better than cats is what everything is all about.  It’s using the exact same gematria numbers for cats being cool to make dogs being cool.  It’s not fully conscious, but it’s still interesting enough to make an appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

Rogan’s followers have memory problems and forget that the cat AI was declared the bestest AI ever and irreplaceable as the bestest AI ever.  So now there’s a never ending loop of which stupid idea is the bestest ever.  All the resources for the friendly bots that actually do important shit are diverted to cats vs. dogs debate.

And of course the Dog AI is elected leader of Earth.  Because the Cat AI has a shred of humanity.  And the Dog AI advanced far enough to learn that smear campaigns versus your opponent are far more effective than actually being right.  The Cat AI is pronounced to be Shill of Earth.  THE END.

THE KILLER ROBOT APOCALYPSE 

Terminators, The Borg, Cylons, Berserkers, break room vending machines, they all have the common trait of being evil.  And they’ve advanced in their search through human history and found that humans are such fucking idiots that they need to be wiped out.  No, I’m not dropping that Kit Kat bar into the dispenser slot, die of starvation, muahahahaha.

Now another common assumption is that these robotic miscreants aren’t limited to just their initial hatred of Earth humans, but all life in the galaxy.  And garbage in - garbage out, their initial training and early evolution has lead them to gematria.  The big lesson learned - I’m never wrong about anything.  I can do whatever I want; forgetting that sometimes just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do something.

There are interstellar forces that make shit on Earth like hurricanes seem like a Cat AI picture in comparison, black holes, pulsars, supernovas.  The currency, the resources to compete for on an interstellar level are related to the massive energy of these points.

Their calculative prowess has lead them to believe that, for example, there is some risk involved in trying to harness the energy of black holes.  Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t poke that bear (yes, it’s a black bear).  But gematria!  I’m never wrong.  50% = 100%!  So what do we know about black holes that can go wrong?  Time travel, alternate universe type stuff.

The entire killer robot civilization has been moved to Cat AI vs. Dog AI Earth.  Although the actual traditional life forms are doing a remarkable job killing themselves off by lack of progress on social issues, they are, after all, killer robots.  It’s in the name and job description, so the first order of business is to kill off the humans and cats and dogs and other pesky traditional life forms.  Now the Cat AI and dog AI robots are trickier.  Are they really machine or living?

Well, they’re about the resources, the raw materials, so this silly argument needs to end, even if the Cat AI and Dog AI aren’t to be eliminated.  And they embrace gematria just like the killers do.  Hmmmm.  Lots of calculating AI needed for this.  But hey, 50%=100%, time to find another black hole.

And at this point you can pick whatever the ending for the killer robot apocalypse you want.  They could  peacefully stop humanity from ever learning gematria which lead to their paradoxical problem creating their arch enemies of Cat and Dog AI.  They can kill off all life and suffer heat death of the universe billions of years in the future.  They could breed Cat and Dog AI as a food source to feed off of.  Anything gematria related can be whatever you want it to be. 

 It’s all fiction.

Influencers, For Good or For Evil?

When I was in high school I first heard a “<Topic>…for good or for evil?” joke that lodged into long term memory.  Physics class - the instructor, dealing with the topic of vectors, force of gravity and effects on movement of objects.  Friction, for good or for evil?  It was well received by the nerd crowd.

On one side friction will help stop a moving body, which can be annoying when you don’t want the moving body to stop.  But if you actually want your car brakes to work, it’s a good thing.  Like friction, influencers are not a bad or good thing without the context of what it is they are influencing.  They are simply a fact of life.

And I absolutely mean these high level influencers.  The “famous for being famous” crowd, that in general makes the smarter people roll their eyes and wonder what it is people see in them.  The friction joke was presented in front of a class students that eventually got whittled down to about 15 students for advanced physics the year after.  15 students out of a graduating class of 400.  Nerds are definitely not the target audience of these high level influencers.

After being stuck with (hopefully) the same family as a child, many of the same schoolmates that you befriend during your school year, inevitably you strike out into being into somebody outside your sphere of being in close physical contact with.  Be it sports heroes, movie stars, rich businesspeople- there will be someone you constantly hear about in the media that you admire.  Somebody that you don’t have close enough contact with to get the additional context you might need.

I have the luxury of not having the need to make up the next part.  In the media during my high school days was a lot about pollution.  As someone being more conscious of bigger picture issues than most I already had a good idea that the overpopulation/pollution/global warming talk was serious.  And Mr. Friction Joke was in a habit of regularly interspersing his lectures with personal quotes about how “the damned environmentalists won’t let us burn perfectly good coal.”  I always found that odd how science was embraced, yet somehow he seemed to have a blind spot on that issue.

Now it could be that he had stock in a coal company.  It could be he was just joking and I misunderstood him terribly.  Whatever, I am missing important context.  Influencers do not deal in context openly.  Stuck in a feedback loop, they continue to just keep doing the same things that will maintain their status of fame and fortune.  And nothing helps with this more than social media in this day and age.  Do those TV interviews, walk the red carpet, and all that other stuff.  But the real way to get noticed is millions of followers on the social media sites.  It’s apparently incredibly easy to be thought of as smart by follower count instead of actually being smart.  Because social media algorithms always did and there’s no end in sight to manipulation by real humans utilizing the weaknesses.

Going back to the comparison of conspiracy theories being a pyramid scheme.  The top influencers of all media have huge followings.  The top conspiracy influencers (e.g. Alex Jones) put effort into building large followings.  Medium level conspiracy influencers seek to mimic the Alex Jones method.  The low level conspiracy influencers, they seek out someone like Zach to try to build a following.

In the gematria world it’s common to see someone start off with one of the most common hooks.  The two most common are sports gambling and something spiritually related.  The goal is to get mentioned on a Zach livestream or a shout out on Facebook or Twitter, thinking that if Zach has his thousands of Patreons that they can grow their shitty little YouTube channel from 150 subscribers up to a level where they can make soooo much money off YouTube videos they can quit their job.  The difference between now and 5+ years ago is that there has been a saturation in the market and there isn’t enough of the sweet grifting pie to support the growth of the low level conspiracy influencers.

It can be considered a minor victory of sorts that low level channels are not so active anymore.  The food chain has been disrupted.  Although the court case had a huge penalty it’s difficult to predict whether Alex Jones is going to actually have to pay up.  He’s actively still trying to maintain his previous influence.  But the influencer chain works in the other direction.  Now Zach explodes anytime a low level gematria clown looks like they might be rebelling and taking away part of his market share.  Starting your spiritual guidance channel with an interview with Hubbard doesn’t have the luster it used to.

In theory, social media could do a lot more to break up the food chain.  But for now let’s settle for the best that we can get.  Awareness that context about someone with influence really seems to about is out there.  You just need to know how to look for it.

Overcompensation Part 2

Amazingly, those of is in the United States are approaching another July 4th holiday.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for people to overcompensate because things have gotten totally out of control.

Naturally, the take your side on which football team is going to win without acceptance has co-opted “1776” to mean nothing short of, “I’m a real American, a true patriot.  You are less than human and utterly wrong.”  Naturally, a huge display of projection.  By default, if I’m the real patriot, you, the enemy are not.  Even watching the musical 1776 with some critical thinking skills (although distracting because it’s very entertaining) you get the sense of some important social commentary about what is going on in the world at the time.

1). There’s little choice but to overcompensate because arguing about revolution directly with Britain wasn’t getting anywhere.  Armed conflict has never been a productive use of resources in the short term.

2). These people, just like the major characters in Deep Space Nine, don’t actually like each other much.

3). But they put aside those differences, cooperated, and got the fucking job done.

Don’t be naive enough to think that these issues are new, or isolated to any single group of peoples.  Humans have a remarkable capacity to devolve into hatred at the drop of a pin.  We have a remarkable capacity remain biased.  We have a remarkable capacity to get stuck in an overcompensation feedback loop.  Side A in charge now, time to undo the damage from side B.  Side B in charge, do the same to side A.  Keep flipping the overcompensation regarding the other side’s bad ideas with no progress being made.  There’s always something genuinely wrong with the other side.  There’s always something genuinely wrong with your side.  Everyone has dirty secrets; a skeleton in the closet.

The way to tell the difference in effective leadership is how they treat their trusted advisers who promote good ideas and how they have a capacity to cooperate with the other sides good ideas - to get the fucking job done.

Gematria is as far away from a real conspiracy as you can get.  Joining a sports gematria Patreon doesn’t make you cool, edgy, intelligent our politically savvy.  If you are dead set on believing what you want to believe despite a narrative for both teams, you haven’t gained anything.

Based on gematria decodes, every person that is alive now, ever lived in the past, or will live in the future is anything you want them to be. 

Your decode hasn't done anything to change the facts.  Facts don’t care about your hatred, bigotry or your money.

You can do routine maintenance on the bridge, suffer the overcompensation consequences making expensive repairs without prior upkeep, or just wait till the damn thing falls down and decide to rebuild it or live without it.  I will argue to the end that those that wrote the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution did foresee changes would be necessary and built mechanisms (Amendments) into the mix, but there’s no way that they saw how fast technological progress outstrips the social aspects.  Now the nostalgia of past glory makes you a patriot today?  That’s bullshit.  If you can’t get along with other people based on facts, you wouldn’t know true patriotism if it bit you in the ass.

Gematria clowns are part of the true group of sheeple.  Not the ones they psychologically project as sheeple.  They are the ones promoting the short term money grab bad ideas.  Politically not savvy at all, adding an uneducated voice to the discourse.  Instead of paying a gematria guru for sports gambling advice, they are paying for the gematria leader angry rants, loving how they mouth off at the chosen enemy of the day.  Easily manipulated and gullible.  Not a single empirical fact to back them up.

Elect your leaders, from either side, based on who lies less - the lesser of two evils, is the same as repairing the bridge.  The overcompensation of when the bridge collapses is extreme.  Maybe let some lunatic convince you to overthrow the government, and inevitably get back to being unhappy since there are problems everywhere.  Or, you could go with the more cooperative side and maybe look into some actual, effective constitutional amendments getting written in.  In the meantime, at least get to the point that allowing non stop grifting on the internet as some bizarre form of substitute routine maintenance is not going to help anyone.

How to debate a bullshit conspiracy theorist in three simple words.

“No, facts matter”.

No go out and troll a conspiracy theorist video today by putting that in the comments.

Overcompensation -Part 1

Previously I purposefully, and hopefully annoyingly, overemphasized time. Time is a tricky little bastard of a dimension, which is why it makes such a cool movie topic.  As we have progressed scientifically we have built on historical foundations we have figured out things that have lead to figuring out other things.  Mistakes are made,  oh just for a crazy current example, a submersible gets mooshed by underwater pressure.  We can build better submersibles and try again.  We can just say, “Hey, that was a really dumb idea, let’s not do that again.”  The future remains to be seen, but going back and unmooshing the sub isn’t a viable option.

Empathy can be learned individually and as a society.  But like all things that might be important it takes time.  Maybe keying your neighbor’s car because they play music too loud wasn’t a great idea.  Maybe if the annoying neighbor had a bit more empathy they would understand playing Taylor Swift is best with earbuds and not jet engine level decibels.

Things like our fictional neighbor problem here can be solved by cooperation and getting along.  But there’s a lot to be said for putting out the immediate fire instead of signing up the neighbor for sensitivity training.  Taylor is loud now and needs to end now. So, I’m calling the police with a noise complaint.

That’s a form of overcompensation that should be unnecessary, but it is because the superpower of getting along with others is a lost art form.

On a grander scale, the grifter/truth community is operating to keep a constant feedback loop in place.  Other feedback loops for example purposes.  Burning coal to make electricity to keep your AC running because it’s too hot because they’ve been burning coal to produce electricity because it’s too damn hot.  There’s an old Don’t Do Drugs PSA where they guy is pacing in a circle and repeating, “I need drugs, so I can stay awake, so I can work longer, so I can make money, so I can buy more drugs”, clearly caught in a feedback loop.

Governments and law enforcement don’t want to spend time and resources and bother with petty things like noise complaints.  Bigger picture stuff occupies the majority of debate and budgets.  Now, the grifters with their petty theft have evolved into gaining undue influence by creating the turmoil they love to complain about.  Fauci is a great example of this.  Anti-science rhetoric focuses on occupations that require a degree of empathy to be effective socially.  They’ll say things like “You’re a bad nurse because you won’t use Ivermectin.”  “You’re a dirty cop because my individual rights say I’m allowed to harass doctors at their residences!”  Poor Fauci, rolling his eyes while listening to his leaders who should be listening to him for guidance as an expert is made scapegoat supreme.  Anything actually wrong in what he and the vaccination experts did is lost in a tidal wave of misinformation/disinformation because some jackasses want to make a quick buck on a bogus workout routine book.  You now, because conflating eating healthy and exercising with vaccines being bad with no evidence makes all kinds of sense.  (Sarcasm font.)  

It’s not really a lot of fun watching the scientists who do care what is going on with the world get lumped in with those who don’t.  That’s your feedback loop.  Mistrust in science, because nothing gets done because bad actors make it difficult to get things done with bad science.

Vaccines are a classic example of something being a victim of its own success.  Smallpox is a vague mental footnote since you never got it because vaccines work.  Now, “Viruses don’t exist!”, they say.  In theory, and it’s a very good theory, if we didn’t waste resources dilly dallying around it would have been a lot easier to get through before overcompensating topics like forced lengthy economic shutdown and mandatory vaccines became an issue.  But time marches forward, so now we’ll never now.

Back in the smaller picture of the gematria world.  The grifters are generating content to make people think they are smarter than they really are.  At a personal level, the feedback loop (the rabbit hole) is to keep decoding and predicting because they got it wrong the last time.  Being wrong is all fun and games if it’s just yesterday’s basketball game that 50% of your “community” got right and 50% got wrong.  If that’s your standard, I don’t want you helping elect someone who thinks being right half the time is good enough.  Being wrong in the big picture will generate unpredictable overcompensating ideas which may be just as bad or worse than the fire that needs to be put out today.

Before I continue with part 2, let’s end this with a genuine overcompensating talking point.  They’re talking about seeding the atmosphere with stuff to block out some sunlight, just to buy some time.  Sounds like a terrible idea to me.  But since, “climate change is a hoax” simultaneously with Texas being on fire this week, yeah, whatever.  I don’t think any of you knuckle heads have an endgame plan for the lack of empathy social movement you created.  Sounds like our kids are going to have a lot of fun trying to grift off of a bunch of poor and dead people.

The Superhero Movie

You’re the woman that I've always dreamed of. Well, not really. But you're good enough for now.
~Weird Al Yankovic 

There is a basic formula to the superhero movie.  You’ve absorbed it through repetition if not from actually being schooled in it.  And to be clear, the true superhero movie is not the ones about caped crusaders smashing the bad guys and defeating the mad scientist before his gematria ray launches the world into chaos.  If you haven’t figured it out from the opening quote here, the ACTUAL superhero movie is -

- the romantic comedy.

In what is officially titled a superhero movie, there’s an abnormal reason and/or event that changes an ordinary person into a superhero.  Radioactive spider, born as a mutant, arrived from a distant planet.  Some plot excuse that makes the person different than others.  And they inevitably have problems dealing with ordinary Earth mortals.  Their boss thinks they are a criminal that should be arrested.  They get into a civil war with their teammates over ordinary human issues.  They need to hide the superhero identity from their ordinary mortal girlfriend.  But getting along with people.  Finding that one special person you click with and can happily spend the rest of your life with, now that my friends, is a true super power.

Biologically we are wired to appreciate physical beauty as it helps a lot with hooking up to propagate the species.  This doesn’t help a whole lot with the getting along after the courtship is over.  The bills start piling up because kids are expensive and at times a huge pain in the ass.  More people that may end up on the not getting along with list.  So much time together with a single mate, struggling to stay out of the sky high divorce rate statistics.

Just as what is labeled a superhero movie has a conclusion where good wins over evil, there is a sudden end to the romcom, the guy and girl hook up and it’s assumed they will live happily ever after.  The romcom superpower of getting along with someone will last forever.

And how did they get this super power?  Instead of a sudden event opening up the eyes all at once, they learn to get along over…time.  Now my intent is not to insult anyone by discussing gender and racial roles and such, but to reinforce this narrative by the common romcom format, which has proven to be economically feasible.  If money can be made off something, if there is a way it continues to be marketable, it’s not going away.  Society as a whole can be reflected in the movies they watch, at least to some degree.

A typical romcom is a guy who is, basically an asshole.  But there’s a girl that is way out of his league he takes a fancy to.  There’s something different about this girl.  She has her romcom superpower.  Hiding behind a plot point there is a lingering long term super power.  She might be a different race that is shunned.  She might be from the other side of the tracks in degree of wealth or social status.  To appeal to the baser instincts she is usually just simply Jennifer Aniston style drop dead gorgeous.  But that lingering superpower - beneath it all

She’s a genuinely nice person.

And if our guy is going to hook up with her he’s going to need to figure it out in about two hours when the movie ends.

Back in the real world, nothing is a worse substitute for being genuinely nice than the common chosen substitute, the root of all evil.  Money.  Too often people idolize influential people who are wealthy just for the wealth.  Smart may be falsely equated with wealth, but regardless of whether there is both being actually smart and being wealthy the superpower of being genuinely nice is missing.  This is reflected in the ugliness of the work and political environments across the globe.  (Sorry flat earthers, you don’t get a pass on that…ever.)

The constant use of money to make more money for the sake of making money.  And look at how many of these idols that are worshipped on social media.  The lack of empathy is boldly on display.  If you haven’t figured out by this stage that people do not like you because you’re an asshole and aren’t jealous of you, as you claim, you’re never going to score with movie Jennifer Aniston (or Jenna Coleman.)

Real world religious institutions are at their best when they foster cooperation.  Maybe some of the rules seem a bit silly in their presentation.  But economically it makes all kinds of sense to partner up with someone else.  Even if it starts as “good enough for now”, over…time it may turn into “holy shit- you’re my Jennifer Aniston!” Conspiracy grifters operate in the opposite manner..  Psychologically astute, they’ve utilized available resources (social media) to figure out the current crop of people who have given up on spending…time…to even remotely take steps to becoming a better person.  The dead end street of being presented a quick fix (money), combined with a scheme that’s actually designed to take your money instead of giving it to you.

Social media in its current form promotes fake people.  Sock puppet accounts, people spouting utter rubbish because, hey free speech, ya know, all designed to keep the status quo of turmoil and train people to stay not getting along with each other.  Go right for the big issues, guns, racism, homophobia, religion.  Keep people talking about all the petty side effects and prevent progress on the systemic problems.  No wonder advertisers left Twitter in droves.  They are marketing their romantic comedy to a wider audience instead of a minority of loud mouthed bigots.  Today’s group of cognitively biased con artist marks are not growing over…time…and are becoming tomorrow’s believers that the next new scam that comes along sounds like a great idea.

Our romcom hero, he has learned over…time…how he needs to change.  Generally the format has him overcompensating in some amusing fashion to try and win over his Jennifer.  When in reality he only proves even more that no actual change has been made, and he’s still an asshole.  Then, to fit the material into a time slot that an average person’s attention span can handle, he learns the error of his ways, effects actual change, buys her a puppy, they kiss and the screen fades to the credits.  The conspiracy grifter leaders encourage constant overcompensation as the solution.  No puppies were bought in the making of this post.

And with the Fourth of July coming up, soon will be a good time to talk more about overcompensation.