In Pursuit of Virtue – August Edition, Volume 3

A few areas of concern…

• Environmentalism: 
• As it turns out, it seems the U.S. has the greatest amount of combined energy resources on earth. 
• Warfare:
• It is not conservative to start or defend pre-emptive or preventative war.
• “Security”:
• A federal appeals court recently ruled that the state laws prohibiting you from recording cops are unconstitutional. WIN!
• Another court recently ruled that to obtain cell phone location data, officers of the law will need to obtain a warrant. WIN!
• The TSA dreams someday of tracking you at every moment – at the store, at home, at a friend’s house, at your kid’s football game. Sounds like the administration must be a bunch of creepers.
• FBI informant numbers have soared to over 15,000, due to “terror.” I wonder how many existed when Communism was the big scare…
• Assange speaks truth when he says that Facebook is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented. Too late for those of us that are signed up, I suppose…
• Media:
• PolitiFact is renowned for “getting the facts straight.” Turns out, just because an org says they will give you the truth behind the facts doesn’t mean they will… Surprise!
• Why Ron Paul is anathema to the power structure and media elite:
  
• Bill-O is a media hack. This one is petty, but worth it:
  
• Economics
• A question is posed: Is America the sick man of the globe? That is an OKAY analogy, but it isn’t the best. Better would be a reanimated corpse or zombie. The free market made this county wealthy, and gave the world the leader in education, technology, and agriculture throughout the 1800s & 1900s. Now, we have crony capitalism, by which subsidies create the appearance of growth, business institutions require bailouts to ensure that they do not topple, and stimulus programs create work at a rate far less efficient than the market would. It won’t be until the zombie dies that we will have a truly rich and flourishing economy…
• Herbert Hoover was not a “free market” president. Knock it off.
• Tom Sowell on his book Dismantling America:
  
• Resources are not decreased by unhindered market forces, they are increased:
  
• Religion:
• You’d be hard pressed to find a Catholic who would tell you that the Catholic Church has never made a mistake. The molestation scandal and the inquisition speak to this fact – even while both are far overblown. Take this off the list – the Crusades. The Crusades ensured that you are not facing Mecca 5 times a day.
• Redistributivism:
• The Department of Housing and Development should be shut down immediately:
  

  In the 1990s, the feds were embarrassed by skyrocketing crime rates in public housing—up to 10 times the national average, according to HUD studies and many newspaper reports. The government’s response was to hand out vouchers to residents…, dispersing them to safer and more upscale locales. Section 8′s budget soared to $19 billion this year from $7 billion in 1994. HUD now picks up the rent for more than two million households nationwide; tenants pay 30% of their income toward rent and utilities while the feds pay the rest. Section 8 recipients receive monthly rental subsidies of up to $2,851 in the Stamford-Norwalk, Conn., area, $2,764 in Honolulu and $2,582 in Columbia, Md. But the dispersal of public housing residents to quieter neighborhoods has failed to weed out the criminal element that made life miserable for most residents of the projects. “Homicide was simply moved to a new location, not eliminated,” concluded University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh in a 2009 article in Homicide Studies. In Louisville, Memphis, and other cities, violent crime skyrocketed in neighborhoods where Section 8 recipients resettled. After a four-year investigation, the Indianapolis Housing Authority (IHA) in 2006 linked 80% of criminal homicides in Marion County, Ind., to individuals fraudulently obtaining federal assistance “in either the public housing program or the Section 8 program administered by the agency.” 

• Random:
• If you are considering buying a house in a metropolitan area, look here first. Maybe renting would be better.

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