Your core argument has been on the law reform agenda of many criminal defence lawyers, if not their clients, for many years.

The financial/resource imbalances have dogged criminal justice every bit as much as witnesses rights and so forth.

I have known clients who have consented to a conviction on a 'lesser charge' simply to get the hell to end. That affords justice to no one. At best, revenge is served. More often the continuing consequences change the lives of the accused forever.

I have experienced the criminal justice system from many perspectives. I have been a defence lawyer, an accused, a witness, and a complainant. The process is stressful enough without the added financial burdens. To be dragged through and dumped at the end can shatter lives more effectively than a jail sentence.

The issue is not "How would we pay for this?" (the mechanical bean-counter approach), but "Why is it taking so long to accept that we can't afford not to?"

Much is made fo the costs of wrongful conviction, but wrongful accusation seems to be unimportant politically.

One question that occurs to me from your case is why the minor was not charged with making a false allegation? (and/or false statement ot police). Have police investigated the nature of the relationship with the neighbour?

Interesting article. I can't agree that blogging should be as important as writing books and publishing research papers for academics. There is a place for it though. A problem would be that unless the academic put an amount of time into the site it would be unlikely to generate much traffic and so when the really interesting idea was posted - there would be noone to read it. So there is perhaps a need to aggregate ideas into communal blogs? Which is sort of what OLO is?
I have a blog with a specifically environmental focus at www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog .

Blogging is very different to scholarship.

A blog is immediate, and invites quick responses. It can enable debate and discussion. But it is also hard to tell who is whom. Anyone can (and probably has) started a blog.

Bloging can, perhaps, enable immediate peer review - but again identity is a question that looms large.

Blogging also invites more casual, more personal commentary. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We are still working out the acceptable boundaries in online communications.

As an academic and a practitioner, I can see positives for blogs, but I can also see some real problems as well.

The immediacy of blogs is a double-edged sword. It *is* possible to produce well researched material for blogs, but it is also possible that the need to be regularly writing /something/ can quickly lead to writing /anything/ to have somehtign there.

Good writing is still good writing whether it is a blog or an academic paper. The value of the blog is this, it is immediate, it gets to the point, it serves the people.

Surely there is already enough unrefereed crap (and refereed stuff in low quality journals that have no impact whatsover -- one of which you are an editor of) produced by Australian academics that we don't need to encourage the situation.

I'd prefer to see Australian academics produce one good paper in a good international journal than 100 blog entries or 100 papers in journals of no particular value.

EVERY academic should blog?

That could be fine in subjects like law and economics where there is really no real subject and you can ramble on about whatever you like. The paradigm example is Becker-Posner Blog, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ where we have University of Chicago professors of economics, Gary Becker, and law, Richard Posner, jointly blogging. We also have, inevitably, the Anti-Becker-Posner blog, http://www.anti-becker-posner.blogspot.com/

But what in the hell would a professor of pure mathematics or chemical engineering or information and communcations technology or particle physics usefully blog about on a daily basis?

McConvill's article, sincerely meant as it surely is, is a sorry sign that Australia has literally lost the plot, as far as parlaying prosperity from the knowledge economy.

Modesty apparently precluded McConvill from posting a link to his own interesting blog at http://www.observationdeck.org/james/

Popularisation of academic ideas has been an accepted function of academics for at least 150 years, and those who do it well have been honoured for doing so.

But it is no substitute for serious research and the articles and books that are necesary for that to be published. The idea that anything worthwhile can be said in 1000 words is nonsense. To demonstrate a truth and deal with possible objections may take a few lines, or several books. The populariser can rarely do more than sketch a proof.

Ozbib

I'm a free-lance journalist in a provincial NSW city. Recently I wrote a column for the local newspaper about a PhD thesis on aged care(Laughing It Off; Uncovering the Workplace Experience of Aged Care Nurses, by Valerie Adams, of the Hawke Institute at the University of South Australia). When I asked for permission to quote it, Valerie said she saw it as one of her functions as an academic to raise public awareness -- in this case, about problems in nursing homes.

Some academics find out things that their communities need to know. They should become 'public intellectuals' in the sense that Tim Dunlop wrote about in his piece on blogging for the Evatt Foundation (8uphttp://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/91.html). Perhaps, as MikeM writes, the public doesn't want or need particle physics blogs. But there are subjects (important ones, even if they aren't hard science) where having information and informed opinions made widely public can make a difference. That's where academic blogs could come into their own.

I share James McConvill's belief that academics should be blogging. I even see it as a civic duty, rather than just a good career move.

As one who has spent years of retirement in a study of world history and politics, a well as gaining Honours in International Relations, it is becoming hard to fathom out whether much of the facts exhibited on our Online is mostly spin copied from media accounts, or academically well researched.

We could ask what the feature below indicates - just one-sided opinion or a reasonably factional account?

From Jay Parini, writer for the “Guardian”.

From the report, it seems from a book by George Packer, that G W Bush attacked the wrong nation, especially as Iran has been in the Pentagon’s sights ever since the end of WW2.

Packer says that the 9/11 terrorist attack. no doubt made Bush change direction, even though Neo-Cons like Paul Wolfowitz along with Dick Cheney and Paul Rumsfeld had their sights well on Iraq in their Project for the 21st American Century way back in the 1990s.

As an observer, Parini writes how incredible it was for Bush to believe that one could change Middle East mentality at gunpoint. In such a place so far violence has only bred more violence, amply shown today in Iraq, where knocking out Saddam. a ruthless dictator, has only turned such ruthlessness into Islamic-backed terrorism with the Shias and the Sunnis slaughtering each other in a battle that is near enough now a civil war. .

Parini says one can only imagine how delighted Osama bin Laden must be to have had the Americans take his bait, In doing so, George W’ has managed to transform bin Laden from a third-rate religous fanatic into a historical figure far more prominent, and possibly even more respected, than the present American President is ever likely to be

Part Two

With mostly ex-oil executives running today’s White House, it is hard to free the minds of university Phds from the fact, that getting the Iraqi oilfields was the main ambition of many prominent US Republicans, especially former oil company executives such as the US Vice President Dick Cheney as well as the President himself. It was also well publicised some time ago, that Condoleeza Rice was also well into oil. It is hard to believe such characters would have forgotten about Iranian oil also, said to be of the highest world quality.

Parini says that James Risen another author, is even blunter than Packer on Iraq. His research is exhaustive and shows that the CIA knew well in advance of the Iraq War that Saddam had no nuclear weapons. Startlingly, Parini suggests that at one time the US even provided Iran with designs for a nuclear bomb. (Possibly this could tie in with Iraq’s attempted building of an atomic installation which was bombed out by the Israelis in 1982. It is also interesting that the US at the time had backed Iraq in the attack on Iran.)

Risen also points out how the US has been able to keep down the true facts about its failures in Afghanistan. How after the Taliban had been able to abolish the growing of drug-crops, Afghanis now supply 87% percent of the world’s heroin, largely owing to American support of the warlords.

Indeed, it seems that the US under George W Bush has done much more harm in this world than good, and Risen believes it will doubtless take decades of patient diplomacy to rectify the situation. According to Parini, one reads such books from well-publicised writers with ever growing dismay.

If all the above is true, us outsiders could well wonder how George W’s main allies, us Angligophilic cousins might finish up in the end, especially if George W' tries to occupy Iran?

Thankyou Bushbred for another well reasoned and researched comment.

Regarding blogging - I don't understand. I mean, many academics have had their own websites for over 10 years now. There's nothing special about blogging - it's just a type of forum or website. Blogging is best suited to discussion-based subjects, and was made popular by websites who offered free space for people to create blogs using easy templates. So again, it's nothing new.

Academics regularly post course information, data, etc. on the net for their students. I'm currently making a website for the benefit of my own students.

And as someone else pointed out, some subjects will suit blogging, some not. Good solid research can take a long time and a lot of hard work. Anyone can fart out a 1000 word comment, as the author has just proved.

cherylmcg, you hit it. Academics do possess valuable information that the rest of us would benefit from knowing. Look at Madeleine Albrights comments about "Axis of Evil." Or what about Sandy Day O'Connor and her recent comments. It is irritating to me that people who have the power to speak up and make a difference at a crucial time do not do so for fear of retaliation. I assume that's the reason. Or maybe these women are just as greedy as the men and are saving it for their memoirs.

Where does that leave us peasants? I'm so tired of good people doing nothing when it is in the worlds best interest that they do so.

There are already quite a few Australian phd students blogging, partly about their research, partly about life or what's left of it while researching. There's no reason to think they'll stop once their research is done, so the academic blog is already a reality.

Some are researching blogs and blogging, and blogging about it.

Some universities are setting up blog facilities for students and most already have busy discussion forums.

Academics have already realised the need to account for themselves and it's not difficult to find quite a lot of work on the net. The trick is to know what's reputable and trustworthy, and what's not.

Sorry, much as I enjoy blogs and blogging, I cannot agree they should become this important.

With so many voices competing for attention, populism will start to creep in at an early stage, ensuring that the rigour with which it is necessary to refine and polish an argument or a position will become an unaffordable luxury.

I'm also a bit concerned by this observation -

"The added beauty of blogging is that academics are not burdened by having to pad their contribution with references to articles and books written by others - who says they have a more enlightened opinion anyway?"

Surely the point of references is to illustrate the path along which the author's thought processes have travelled. To ask readers to do their own background checking of potential sources is pretty arrogant, I would have thought.

What the writer is asking us to accept is that the very concept of the carefully researched, cross-referenced and tightly argued paper is out of date, and should give way to the stream of top-of-the-head ideas and observations that populates the average blog.

Just because the technology exists doesn't necessarily mean that it should obsolete all previous delivery mechanisms. People still listen to radio long after the invention of television, and will continue to read printed newspapers and magazines well into the future.

There is also a physical limit to the amount of time people can devote to reading blogs. Our understanding of the dynamics of internet behaviours is in its infancy, and it could well turn out that blogs are a passing phenomenon, blown away by their own weight of numbers... seen one, seen 'em all.

Mr McConville's own blog gives a clue too, being simply a vehicle for self-promotion...

"Nothing of interest in the book shop... Well that’s about to change. In late April, my latest book “The Pursuit of Truth: Opinions on Law, Life and Contemporary Affairs”, will be released."

One can only tremble at the concept of academia jumping on the same self-serving bandwagon, and the subsequent elimination of academic rigour in favour of individual chest-beating.

In my previous post I questioned McConvill's claim that EVERY academic should blog.

I certainly was not suggesting that NO academic should blog. I suspect that being an effective blogger is like being an effective op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Some academics cut the mustard. Others shine in other ways. (Maybe some shine in no way at all, but we won't go into that here.)

Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton, and an influential, twice weekly columnist on the Times. (It is lucrative: 1400 words a week attracts half a professor's salary.) His columns regularly feature among the top 25 most emailed articles in the paper. But there are thousands of economics professors who could not succeed in this job.

Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at Berkeley. His blog, http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ is widely read and influential. An important reason is that he distills quotations from formal news media that he thinks are important and often comments on them.

Even so, while his blog has an economic basis, it is mainly about American politics. His typical catchcry?

"Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now."

Many may agree with him, but this is not exactly the core of his discipline.

What, exactly, is McConvill advocating?

blogging does provide an opportunity for us, as academics and practitioners, to engage in regular and rapid discussion with each other. that very immediacy can become a trap.

blogging is no more a replacement for more deliberate scholarship than email or conference chats. but it could be at least as important as either to the community of scholarship.

equally, just like email and conferences, blogging cannot, must not, become a demand on our time that is presumed to have a higher priority than all the other things we're expected to juggle. classloads, research, consulting, clients, personal lives.

blogging will work for some, and be unworkable for others. indeed, that is what we can already see.

I agree with the original article. I agree with many of the comments. Some of the points where I disagree have already been raised by other posters.

And there, ladeez and gemmun, you have it. This is the benefit of blogging for me. An idea is raised, discussed, analysed; some of it refuted, some of it endorsed; new ideas are developed and pursued.

This is not what most of us get round the weekend barbecue or in the pub or at the dinner-table. That's usually singing to the choir. The sort of detailed exchange we're having here, with supporters and opponents and those not convinced either way, is increasingly hard for an ordinary person to find. Newspapers try, talkback radio tries (I suppose), but ideas don't get kicked around. A TV newsbite or a short column is not enough to take the shine off something that's superficially attractive but doesn't stand up to examination.

But shove a shaky idea -- academic or not -- out here and it gets pushed off its pedestal fast. Or the shover recognises where the weaknesses are and goes back to do the work needed to shore it up.

So, yeah, academics and all 'ideas' people should blog. It's just another way of doing what's been done for centuries. No, it shouldn't replace research or teaching or all the rest; no, it shouldn't even be accorded equal status with those necessary activities. But, now that the technology for it exists, failing to blog a new idea is a discourtesy equivalent to failing to do a Spellcheck when you know you're an awful speller.

another issue with blogging is the problem of sensitive employers.

you cannot really be free to write what you think, you have to be sensistive to being fired or sued. or both.

otherwise, blogging can be fun, and illuminating.

I agree with the central tenet of this article that academics should be seeking a wider audience for their thoughts. We need people thinking and explaining things and giving a variety of views.

However a problem with "everyone" blogging is having the time to read the blogs.

The advantages of traditional academic journals is that they force individuals to think hard and long before writing, they also force upon the publisher some effort to ensure that what is written is worth reading. The disadvantage is that their audience is restricted and to the currency of the information.

Most of us have access to far too much information and not enough time to read let alone understand it. We need someone to point us to topics of interest and to items worth reading.

Onlineopinion is an excellent example of how we can get the thoughts of not only academics but everyone into the public domain quickly and where the articles have been read and edited.

I use Google news updates on particular topics and get an email each day pointing me to any news items on a given area defined by a set of key words.

I subscribe to Crikey.com.au to give me a daily summary of Australian news.

I subscribe to other industry specific newsletters and to traditional media offerings like the Economist summaries.

In 1996 I started what would now be called a blog which evolved from being my thoughts about a subject to being a summary of websites (and hence other people's thoughts) about a subject - in our case on topics related to education and technology. Each fortnight we summarise websites that cover the chosen topic. This week's is on "Sharing photographs and Imagery" with an emphasis on education uses. Find us at http://m.fasfind.com/wwwtools.

The point of this comment is that it gives examples of how to reduce information overload and to help us find blog entries that might be of interest.

I would be most interested in hearing other ways that people have found to reduce the noise and increase the information.

Part One

Ev, thanks for the compliments, as well as informing what Blogs are all about. As a matter of fact, I have accused our Onliners of sniping at each other too much, without really helping to solve the really critical socio-political situations we have today in our world. By social I mean because there is so much political and media spin these days, it seems much of what we learn in good study books might be being spoilt by blogging.

Though still a liberal Christian, I must say I often go back to Socrates, dwelling on his phrase - “Out with the Gods and in with the Good”, which helps to mean we should take a good look at our religous faiths and find where they have broken down, both churches and government schools searching and teaching accordingly.

For example, one part which is only read in university libaries, deals with the life of St Thomas Aquinas, especially with the period when he accepted the teachings of the French monk Peter Abelard, who had after accepting certain Aristotelian readings from Arab scholars, had drawn up his “Search for Enquiry” which put him on the outer with the Holy Church - because to enquire or to reason, especially as regards Christianity, was an offence against Holy Scripture or faith.

It moved me so greatly, that St Thomas Aquinas did become intensely interested in something pagan, having the insight to realise
as Socrates and later Aristotle comprehended that in this earthly world, even the deepest faith needs to be tempered with reason

It is so interesting that hundreds of years later, Immanuel Kant, concluded the above also, although still believing deeply in Christianity when he wrote the Path to Perpetual Peace, which certainly has been abused in more modern times by humanity’s natural greed, which even Adam Smith had written about when he said that because his idea of the free market relied on competition, or on human greed to get along, there always had to be areas of government on the watch to preserve what we might now call a fair deal.

Finally, though it may be historical researchers going too far, there have been reports that those Middle Age travelling Muslim scholars not only helped Christianity lift itself out of the Dark Ages, but also helped set the scene for modernity and democracy as we know it. Indeed, some researchers go on to say that unfortunately, Islam is going through its own Dark Ages, possibly needing to look back to its own interest in Greek or Socratic philosophy, when many of those whom Mahomet converted to Islam, had been greatly influenced by the campaigns of Alexander the Great, who himself had been a student of Aristotle.

Hope I haven’t bored you, Ev, but the above studies have hung in my aged mind ever since I learnt them, encouraged by the Murdoch School of Humanities, while taking classes in philosophical topics with the Mandurah University of the Third Age in WA.

George C, WA - Bushbre

A race to the bottom. Whenever academic mentions other academics Ivory Towers it generally means he/she is unable to sustain the augment with his/her peers. So they try the new technic which is to try sway public opinion. This methodology is used by Global warming deniers, creationist and other fringe groups. Oh and Lawyers of course but no one notices that anymore because lawyers opinions are bought and sold. As long as you’ve got money to pay you’ll finder a lawyer willing to press your agument no matter what it is..

As yet another freelancer in medico-scientific arenas, the possibility that academics with interesting, in the popular sense, research awaiting journal publication could let fly in a blog prior is exciting. Spilling the beans before the learned journal has cost me a bit in threatened writs believe me, so the thought that you could use a bloggers defence is intriguing. I wonder how the defamation lawyers would regard that? Or would it mean a bit of a retreat on the part of the researcher. Learned journals don't like the idea of their author 'publishing' elsewhere after all.

Bushbred,

I find that topic interesting. Sorry I'm only replying quickly here. Here's an excerpt from a book that might interest you, by one of the world's leading Fuzzy Logic experts, Bart Kosko. (His homepage at the University of Southern California: http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/)

From the first chapter of Part 1 - 'The Fuzzy Princple':

'This faith in the black and white, this Bivalence, reaches back in the West at least to the ancient Greeks. Democritus reduced the universe to atoms and void. Plato filled his world with the pure forms of redness and rightness and triangularity. Aristotle took time off from training his pupil Alexander the Great to write down what he felt were the black-and-white laws of logic, laws that scientists and mathemeticians still use to describe the 'grey' universe.

Aristotle's binary logic came down to one law: A or not-A. Either this or not this. The sky is blue or not blue. It can't be both blue and not blue. It can't be A AND not-A. Aristotle's 'law' defined what was philosophically correct for over two thousand years.

The binary faith has always faced doubt. It has always led to it's own critical response, a sort of logical and philosophical underground. The Buddha lived in India five centuries before Jesus and almost two centuries before Aristotle. The first step in his belief system was to break through the black-and-white world of words, pierce the bivalent veil and see the world as it is, see it filled with 'contradictions', with things and not-things, with roses that are both red and not red, with A and not-A.

You find this fuzzy or grey theme in Eastern belief systems old and new, from Lao-tze's Taoism to the modern Zen in Japan. Either-or versus contradiction. A OR not-A versus A AND not-A. Aristotle versus the Buddha.'

To read the first 3 pages of Chapter 1 - 'Shades of Grey', click on this link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/078688021X/ref=sib_fs_top/102-2207782-6797740?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00O&checkSum=LCJM3DMi11FsExV%2Baojqou3NmL2jeKztaUliLpDalQQ%3D#reader-page

Also George, you may send me an email if you wish to discuss any topics in more detail:

quasar3c279@yahoo.com

Regards,

Ev.

In addition to teaching and research, academics always had a duty to engage in wider community activities. The way in which they want to do that is up to them. James McConvill obviously likes to write about legal issues. Maybe an other lecturer in law would prefer to use his knowledge by giving legal advice to some organisation. Another issue is of course that blogging for a social scientist is different than for 'hard' scientists, although there are plenty of blogs available that are written by scholars in physics, math or biology.

That said, I think it is a very useful thing to do for an academic, and especially for social scientists. Since I started a weblog (see the link below) I became more motivated to keep up with actual developments in my field of expertise (higher education and science policies) by checking a wide range of news sources on a regular basis. It also forced me to look at the news in a more critical and analytical way because I don't just want to repeat news in my blog (although that is what many blogs still do), but also want to give my opinion about what is written.

So, even though you are not damned if you don't start blogging, for many social scientists it would be a good idea to do so.

Don't know whether this is Blog or not. But here's a go.

Blairist Bulldust

Blair’s Australian visit is just a big act pushing what he wishes he had not begun such as backing Bush, but now obliged to use his natural charm - and spin - to assure us Australians that whatever the resultant mess in Iraq right now, America, Britain and Australia did the right thing.

One point Blair made a mistake by pushing, was that we must see this war to the end as we did against Germany and Japan in WW2. Surely, Mr Blair, you might get away with that to the great Australian moron, naturally always ready to back the big league, believing Big Power will always win in the long run, especially when the other ones are not allowed to have the capacity - such as armanents - to win.

But Mr Blair you could be underrating many Australians, thinking their mental capacities are only suitable for those who came down in the last shower, as indeed it looks like too many Aussies could be at present.

Remember there are those, Mr Blair, whom you can’t bulldust that the war in the Middle East, is like fighting the planes, tanks and subs as the Germans and Japs. had against us.

First to remember, Mr Blair, is that both Germany and Japan were first into attack, not like the so-called enemy like when your Bush buddies illegally missiled the Iraqis, finding that the enemy had not much more than their own bodies to carry the explosives, with US bomber pilots getting top awards and not an enemy fighter plane to oppose them. Wonder they can sleep at night

Don’t you know, yet, Mr Blair, that you and the other two Anglopholics, Bush and Howard, are really committing what Mubarek of Egypt has been saying for so long, that the main problem in the ME, and always has been, is American and British intrusion and injustice, and the only thing that might stop it, could be a replacement for underground oil, getting fuel from crops, etc, as even the Nazis did early in WW2, easily taking France running their planes and tanks mostly on potato ethanol.

Let’s hope we soon take a lesson from Brazil, 90% of their fuel being manufactured from agricultural crops. Let’s hope the end of undeground fuel breaks many of the big oil barons restoring agriculture once again to its rightfull place in society, as well as we say once again, the end of earthy oil will be the end of trouble in the ME. Oh, goodness me, we forgot about dear sweet little Israel with all its nuclear rockets laying there wasted.

Eric B

"In addition to teaching and research, academics always had a duty to engage in wider community activities."

The trend towards commercialisation of academic research has had the effect of tying many research projects up in confidentiality agreements, where research results are embargoed until after the project is completed. Some prevent any discussion of work-in-progress.

More generally, academics *have* to engage their community - that is the source and the audience for their work. So-called 'Pure Research' has become increasingly marginalised in many disciplines, to the point where it is more of a pejorative - to have your work labelled as 'pure research' pretty much means 'mere research' now. To everyone's detriment.

I wonder if some academics now talk more about their work because to actually engage in *doing* it is either too hard, too messy, or too unpopular?

Part One

Not so bloggy.

Just read an article from Google called "The Nine Paths of Global Citizenship" edited by Doug McGill. Though it does give impressions concerning the Paths to Reason, Faith, Democracy. Humanity, Ecology, Free Trade, Feminism, Corporatism, and Perennialism, it seems Reason and Faith are the pair to which the rest are linked.

It is so interesting that McGill chooses Socrates as the patron saint of reason, and Albert Schweitzer the Patron Saint of Faith.

But the chosen pair are so far apart in history that Socrates should be the choice. Why, because though he never ever wrote a word, his talks or teachings came from deep within, as quoted by Plutarch. And so fitting regarding our political and globally social problems of today, because Socrates talked about one world, as we might talk about globalisation and one system of democratic thought.

It is also critical that among his Socratic reasoners, McGill chooses Immanuel Kant, who in opposition to his later German contemporary, Wilhem Hegel, chose peaceful negotiation as a social cleanser while Hegel chose war as the cleanser of the soul.

Part Two

As the above Socratic theorem leans much towards democracy, it is so important that McGill chooses an American, Woodrow Wilson, who is said to be the original founder of the League of Nations. However, McGill who groups Socratic reasoners together when he brings in Woodrow Wilson as the founder of the League of Nations, fails to mention Immanuel Kant, who was grouped earlier among McGill's Socratic reasoners.

Indeed, Immanuel Kant is so important historically, being well known as the one so disgusted with Napoleon breaking the Enlightenment code of Liberty Equality and Fraternity, that he wrote a thesis on a Perpetual Peace achieved through a Federation of Nations, the idea from which both the League of Nations and the United Nations were actually devised according to most historians.

Further, in relation to the above, in his Path to Democracy, McGill quotes Jonathen Schell, who argues in his “Unconquerable World” that the string of non-violent revolutions that occurred in the late 20th century in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, South Korea and other countries is evidence that America’s present very active seemingly imperialistic military dominance as the way to democratise problem nations like Iraq, goes against the grain of the obvious successes of modern people power.

Finally, it also must be emphasised, that the strength of such people power, as proven, is not generally related to the ballot, but similar to the 1688 Glorious Revolution in Britain, which behind the scenes was strongly influenced by the English philosopher John Locke, still a very popular historical figure in the US of A.

George C, WA - Bushbred