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Doug Morris

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Everything posted by Doug Morris

  1. The current online New York Times has an article claiming that real estate commissions in the USA were at the high rate of 6% because the National Association of Realtors had the power to enforce it and that this constituted a failure of the free market that required antitrust action to correct it. Can anyone provide a good source explaining the real reason commissions were so high?
  2. I see that the document you linked mentions the East German Stasi. Maybe the secret police of a dictatorship could bring something like this off. But how workable would it be in a relatively free society?
  3. " "What we are seeing now is a globally co-ordinated and organised effort of control and conformity. Many countries around the world are currently using a model of policing called Community Oriented Policing [ie.gangstalking]." (ibid.pg.3) " Here is a definition of Community Oriented Policing from Wikipedia: Community policing or community-oriented policing (COP) is a strategy of policing that focuses on developing relationships with community members. It is a philosophy of full-service policing that is highly personal, where an officer patrols the same area for an extended time and develops a partnership with citizens to collaboratively identify and solve problems.[1] The goal is for police to build relationships with the community, at times through mediums such as local agencies, to reduce antisocial behavior and low-level crime.[2][3][4][5][6][7] Some scholarship, such as the broken windows theory, proposes that community policing can reduce serious crimes as well.[8][9] Community policing is related to problem-oriented policing and intelligence-led policing, and contrasted with reactive policing strategies which were predominant in the late 20th century.[10] Many police forces have teams that focus specifically on community policing.
  4. " Those who oppose the cabal are targeted and those of pure blood, those of a healthy mind incorruptible by its influence are foremost in the crosshairs. This group, especially those who are the most intelligent and intuitive amongst them, are prime target's for the cabal's use of the following means of global enslavement. " If this is true, why are you the only victim who posts here?
  5. Protecting children from alcohol and tobacco is a much simpler issue than protecting them from social media. Should we have laws protecting children from foods containing unhealthy amounts of sugar or salt? How do we define "unhealthy"? Should we have laws limiting children's access to over the counter drugs? To pornography? To violent fiction? Should we get into arguments about what ideas could be harmful to children?
  6. They don't raise the sort of issues that Gus talked about. The law in question is "one size fits all". We probably need a more complicated, nuanced approach. The better parents have a lot of responsibility here. We need to avoid closing paths to help for those children who need protection from bad parents.
  7. There is a difference in kind with respect to which rights are being violated. The "J6ers" were insurrectionists trying to interfere with legitimate election certification and orderly transfer of power. They were guilty of very serious crimes. Trump and his people made arbitrary assertions, without evidence, of a stolen election. They knew they were lying. People who fell for this deserve harsh criticism. What evidence do you have to back this up?
  8. The statism shown in the digital economy quote I posted and in fiat money, including central bank digital currency, is bad, but it is not in the same category as the suppression going on in Belarus. A government can be guilty of any or all of the former and still be more rights-respecting than one guilty of the latter.
  9. That document refers to central bank digital currency as something being studied, not something planned.
  10. I googled Transatlantic digital economy and found the following: With a wave of digital advancements, new security risks and vulnerabilities in critical technologies will continue to emerge, especially given current geopolitical instabilities. The technology may be digital, but the effects are real – the way governments regulate these risks is important. Who will design the rules for this new world, and for whose benefit? How can the EU and the US work together to regulate new technologies and deliver resilience to an increasingly digitalised society? This does not sound to me like it has anything to do with "basically, a digital central bank coin scheme" or "electronic programmable money".
  11. That sentence says "Specifically, it supports Strategic Objective 3.2 and 3.3 on developing coalitions to counter non-market coercive economic practices and collaborating with Europe to create a Transatlantic digital economy." How did you make the leap from "a Transatlantic digital economy" to "basically, a digital central bank coin scheme"?
  12. The US government has a lot wrong with it, but it is much more rights-respecting than the Belarus regime. They are not equivalent. MAGA consists of people who have let the lying demagogue Trump stir up their emotions to dangerous levels.
  13. In addition to Murphy's Law, there is a humorous law that says "Murphy was an optimist". Again, this is not meant to be taken literally. It is a humorous reminder that things can go wrong that we did not think of ahead of time, so we should prepare as best we can for the unexpected, psychologically at least, and probably with some budgetary, scheduling, and/or physical allowance for unexpected contingencies. It may also be a good idea to do some brainstorming to improve our prospects of thinking of things ahead of time.
  14. Your example says: CDC published “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” to the Public Health Matters blog in 2011. The post was an example of educational entertainment. It used a popular cultural reference to zombies to promote preparedness for different emergencies and disasters. This looks to me more like using a popular cultural reference to encourage preparedness for different emergencies and disasters than like an effort to get anyone to take zombies seriously. It's like Murphy's Law, a humorous way to encourage people to be prepared for bad things to happen. Murphy's Law is not meant to be taken literally - obviously it is possible for something that can go wrong to turn out not to go wrong. It is just a reminder to be prepared in case something does go wrong. "CDC published “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” to the Public Health Matters blog in 2011." The zombie apocalypse cultural reference predates this. The zombie novel World War Z was published in 2006. The original "Night of the Living Dead" movie came out in 1968. Even older is the idea of a vampire apocalypse, as in Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, which inspired "Night of the Living Dead".
  15. It has always been true that there is a potential for a new pandemic of some sort or other, partly because of germs mutating and partly because of human expansion into more places. It is probably wise to be prepared. It is surely wise to at least be aware of the potential.
  16. Isn't it proven that there was a big spike in respiratory deaths starting in 2020, which must have had some cause or causes?
  17. It's a little more complicated. To the extent that the measures, rightly or wrongly, keep people indoors, that would help with air pollution. Masks would help with sufficiently large particles of pollution.
  18. We can not prove mathematically that arithmetic is consistent. But we can make a rational judgment about it. To what extent does Quantum Mechanics, including Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, actually show that there are limits to knowledge at the physical level? To what extent does it instead simply show that subatomic particles must be viewed as waves of a certain kind, not as point particles?
  19. Of course this would not be relevant to any alleged respiratory disease that does not actually exist, such as the "were-unicorn coronavirus".
  20. I claim that anti-pandemic measures, whether right or wrong, would tend to reduce the incidence of all respiratory diseases. I am not claiming anything specific about the exact extent of this or the extent to which it might or might not vary from one disease to another. I do claim that this effect should be considered when trying to deduce anything from statistics about respiratory disease.
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