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In Memory of Rebarcock.
As we navigate life without Pat 'Rebarcock.' Flood, who passed on Sept 21, 2025, we continue to remember the profound impact he had on our community. His support was a cornerstone for our forum. We encourage you to visit the memorial thread to share your memories and condolences. In honor of Pat’s love for storytelling, please contribute to his ‘Rebarcock tells a story’ thread. Your stories will help keep his spirit alive among us.
Master Thread Dance Your Cares Away/Fraggle/Law Abiding Citizens
- Thread starter Bryan74b
- Start date
Master Threads
With Zuck’s move to Florida, California’s total taxable wealth from billionaires has plummeted to well under $1T from over $2T just a few weeks ago.
The loss of this tax revenue was totally avoidable but is now forever. All because Gavin Newsom stood motionless as this stupidly written bill, from a fringe union and a handful of socialist academics with an axe to grind, meandered its way into the public conversation without any action from him and freaked everyone out.
These were all people that were paying 13%+ in state income tax every year WITH NO COMPLAINTS UNTIL A FEW WEEKS AGO.
And now, for the rest of time, the lost tax revenues from these folks will have to be paid for by the middle class because they are the only group left in California large enough that you can tax to fill the hole.
He’s forsaken the middle class instead of managing the budget, managing the deficit, eliminating even a portion of California’s gargantuan waste and abuse. He could have done any of these things at any point over the past 7+ years.
But he was silent. And now California’s budget will implode and he wants to run for President. Insane.
Unlike the European stalwarts and Nordic powerhouses, it didn't get to evolve a high trust culture and proper institutions organically over generations, through homogenous societies.
This low corruption outcome for Singapore was entirely engineered, top-down. Lee Kuan Yew inherited a tiny, resource-poor Asian city state that was rife with ethnic tensions and rampant graft. Bribery was a survival tool. But the man studied Thomas Hobbes and knew that it could be done. One need only understand human nature and possess the will to power to pull it off.
What LKY did:
> Beefed up laws and enforcement: Defined bribery in the legal code and empowered harsh penalties. Revamped the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) into an independent agency, reporting straight to the PM, with resources to investigate anyone
> Paid civil servants as well as private sector does to kill the incentive to take bribes. Singapore's ministers are among the world's highest-paid (also allows the government to attract top talent)
> Streamlined bureaucracy: Cut red tape, simplified procedures, and made government efficient and transparent. No need to bribe when things just... works
> Cultural shift: Fines for littering, caning for vandalism - LKY's strict penal code, inspired by Japanese occupation discipline, built a society where rule-following became the norm.
Sure, it's mostly because people are brow-beaten and cowered into it. But it worked.
He also promoted meritocracy which forged trust in a multiracial, diverse population.
There are lessons here for European countries that have found themselves dealing with increasingly diverse and low trust societies.
notice we're not on the list, wonder where we are
Here are the worst 10, notice the second and third worse
1. South Sudan (8)
2. Somalia (9)
3. Venezuela (10)
4. Syria (12)
5. Yemen (13)
6. Libya (13)
7. Eritrea (13
8. Equatorial Guinea (13)
9. North Korea (15)
10. Sudan (15)
Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.
The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.
Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.
This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.
They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.
Robert Welch on the Spanish Civil War:
"Since we shall be paying very little attention to chronological order, we now turn back to Europe and take a very brief look at the Spanish Civil War. For about three years, 1936-1939, this was a nightmare of incredible cruelties. Since the essence of Franco's strength, and of the whole resistance to Communism, lay in the fervor of the Spanish people's Roman Catholic religion, the Communists set out to break down that resistance by the terror, torture, and death let loose on the most devoted followers of the Catholic Church.
Not only were Catholic priests subjected to sacrilegious abominations and then killed by the thousands. And not only were equal thousands of nuns driven into the streets, and cruelly murdered after having ineffable obscenities perpetrated upon them. But in Spain the Communists devised a special means of mass torture which they would have been unable to inflict on a less religious people. They herded whole congregations at bayonet point into tightly packed churches, sealed up all exits, and then burned down the churches with the priests and their parishioners inside. And this, my friends, was Communism at work in deadly earnest, in what turned out to be primarily a rehearsal for the sake of future expertise. In fact the man who was most diligent in carrying out those atrocities in Spain, Alberto Bayo, is the one who was later sent by Stalin to Costa Rica to train Fidel Castro's guerrillas for their forthcoming activities in Cuba. (All of this was well known at the time. We knew it, and published it. Yet the New York Times, The Reader's Digest, Our Sunday Visitor, and many other media of huge circulation, told the American people that Castro certainly was not a Communist.)"
I see that this forum was started January 2021. I have no doubt at all there are/were feds monitoring TFSF.
For my grandkids sake, I hope there is a rope shortage in this country within a year.
That guy is more deranged than Mark Levin.
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