Posted on 06/01/2026 9:27:32 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
On X, Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) wrote "Spencer pratt dropped another banger! I hope every Republican running for office in November hires the people working on these amazing commercials!"
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Yep...pols all made rich through graft, fraud and corruption. It’s the same old story. There’s a great new history show about Theodore Roosevelt on Netflix. He made his mark as the police commissioner in NYC where he worked hard to stop all that. That was in 1895-1897.
Tammany Hall was the overarching power — the Democratic Party political machine that essentially ran the city. It controlled elections, appointed officials, and extracted money from nearly every corner of city life.
The Police Department was deeply enmeshed in the corruption. Officers had to pay for their appointments and promotions — literally buying their jobs — and then recouped those costs through shakedowns. The Lexow Committee investigation (1894, just before Roosevelt arrived) exposed the full scope, including police collecting regular payments from brothels, gambling dens, and saloons in exchange for protection. Precincts functioned almost like franchise operations, with set “rates” for different types of illegal businesses
Tammany’s patronage machine handed out city contracts, jobs, and licenses in exchange for political loyalty and kickbacks. Public works projects were notorious for inflated costs and shoddy work, with the difference pocketed by machine politicians.
The liquor and vice trade was practically a regulated shadow economy. Saloons were supposed to close on Sundays (blue laws), but almost none did — they simply paid the police. Gambling houses and brothels operated openly under the same arrangement.
It’s bad today. Cities are certainly corrupt, but the huge amounts of money doled out through NSAID, welfare, SNAP, etc shifted the focus. The corrupt people always follow the money.
It’s not just you.
L like the guy, I don’t live in Los Angeles so I can’t vote for him, but I don’t think the machine will let him win no matter what happens. with at least 1 ballot drop box at every cemetary in the County, they have enough votes to overcome anyone else trying to claim they won.
Mommy reading a bedtime story to her little girl:
"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful city called Los Angeles. But the a scary monster the kids called "Basura" took over the town. [whispering] She did all sorts of bad things...she let all the drug addicts take over the parks. So no kids had a place to play. Then she let them hurt the puppies. She let them do drugs in front of schools so none of the kids were safe. While she was partying far, far away, she let the city burn to the ground." Wow, no holds barred. Tough stuff!
I had to let it play through and then refresh the page. Worked the second time.
xxxxxxxxxxxx
I’ll try this. thx for the tip
I thought it might be:
<> bottom of page cut off unmute button?
<> I don’t have X app?
Click the video screen, uncheck the sound off button, restart the video. Happens a lot on X videos.
How do you know that? How do you distinguish between real and AI if they don’t tell you? That’s what makes AI so scary to me going forward in society especially with videos.
“Happens a lot on X videos”
Yes, it does.
These same characters are showing up all over the place. Somebody pointed out on X that the “Dad” in these ads is showing up in other product ads.
But here we are in 2026 remarking how true-to-life these characters are. Think back two or three years ago when the “tells” were so obvious. Think about what it will be like two or three years in the future. Wow.
I’ve been paying attention a lot more to my health, nutrition, exercise, diet, etc the past year and watch a lot of videos. There’s some real drek out there, but a lot of very good content. There were some video shorts by an Indian doctor that were clearly AI. I found out lots of “content farms” steal a real doctor’s likeness and voice and create new fake content with his or her visage and voice. Today, the AI fakes are still stilted, have awkward hand and arm motions, and weird intonations. I gave up on that one Indian doctor thinking it was all fake.
Then I learned he’s a real doc getting ripped off. Yesterday, I found real videos by him speaking to an audience and he’s quite funny, engaging and informative. I can’t believe we have fraudsters pulling this crap.
But, to complicate it even more some have said that the video personalities themselves are using their own AI likeness to amplify their output, so it may not be AI fraud farms at all. Talk about complicated!
In any even, we are headed toward a real crisis of confidence about everything.
I don’t have the x app either. But this time refreshing the page worked. I am working off of an iPad.
I’m on my iPhone.
I can see the unmute button on my desktop, but don’t have speakers.
So, unmute button is cut off on my iPhone.
I’m sure it’ll show up somewhere else.
Thanx for everyone’s help
The AI puppies ... 😢
“The AI puppies ... 😢”
I know! The zombies in the kids playgrounds was bad, but the puppies and drug zombies! Wow.
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