“Dick Rowland Image”
”Shoots (News, Views and Quotes)”
– The Armani Rebellion
By Jeff A. Taylor and the Reason Staff
Asked about the exile leaders on the new Iraqi governing council, an
Iraqi man told The Boston Globe: “I don’t know them. Lots of them were
wearing ties by Yves St. Laurent, Armani … I’ve seen their shoes.
They’re European.” That is shorthand for, “Whatever they’ve been dong
the past couple of decades, it wasn’t living under Saddam.”
Yet the United States really has no choice but to throw the Armani and
imams together in a room and hope it all works out. Some sort of
domestic authority must emerge soon for the U. S. even to begin to
contemplate getting troops out of the Iraqi streets, where they have
become routine targets of attack. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld now
admits that American troop levels may have to go up before they can ever
start to come back down.
You can bet the timeline the White House has in mind is next November.
President George W. Bush will want — and may need — to give speeches
next July and August citing the steadily shrinking presence in Iraq. But
before then, anything is possible.
– My Computer Likes the Porn, Not Me
By Jeff A. Taylor and the Reason Staff
Not an unlikely claim, it turns out. Hackers have developed a Trojan
piece of code that hijacks a user’s computer and turns it into a kind of
peer-to-peer host site for a porn Web server. Thousands of machines have
been infected and the code appears to be invisible to all but the most
sophisticated users.
In other words, you could think you are just surfing eBay for Pez
dispensers when in reality you are hosting 20 perverts who want your
young, hot Euro teens. The researchers who found the code, which they
call Migmaf, also note that it seems to update itself, suggesting an
arms race is underway for control of the world’s computers.
The single greatest vulnerability the forces of light have in such a
clash is that the vast majority of computer users have no idea what they
are doing. This is not a critique. It is an absolute marvel that
virtually any adult and most kids right down to newborns can bang about
on a keyboard or with a mouse and get a box of bits to do something for
them. The expectation that the computer can do something for you has
become so automatic that how it gets done barely merits a thought.
Were a computer a toaster or fridge, that would be the end of it. But a
PC’s tremendous flexibility means it can be put to many different ends.
And now that networking rings the globe, each computer has potentially
thousands of masters to serve.
Perhaps a quick fix is possible, something which will “harden” computers
without much, or any, input from users. But more likely a long, hard
slog with various scams lies ahead.
Above articles are quoted from The Reason Foundation, Reason Weekly
Dispatch July 15, 2003 Vol.6 No.28
”Roots (Food for Thought)”
– Defenders of Property Rights
Defenders Wins Smart Growth Lawsuit
On March 21, 2003, Defenders of Property Rights, on behalf of the
National Black
Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Survival Committee, defeated
the
efforts of “smart growth” advocates to gut the Small Business
Administration’s loan
program. See Forest Conservation Counsel et al. v. SBA, 1:00CV02444 EGS.
In 2000, the
Forest Conservation Council and Friends of the Earth sued the SBA in
federal district
court in the District of Columbia, alleging that SBA loans to small
businesses
contributed to urban sprawl. Rather than defend this lawsuit, the SBA
agreed to a
deal that would have imposed illegal environmental compliance
requirements on
small business loan applicants. Defenders objected to these requirements
at an oral
hearing in December, and the SBA and the plaintiffs soon dropped them
from the final
settlement.
CONTACT: Defenders of Property Rights, 1350 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite
410,
Washington, DC 20036, 202/822-6770, fax 202/822-6774, email
mailto:mail@yourpropertyrights.org
https://www.yourpropertyrights.org.
Above article is quoted from The Heritage Foundation, The Insider May
2003 https://www.heritage.org
– Evolution of Personal Retirement Accounts in Chile
Summary of Remarks
By Jos