American voters can prove that democracy is alive and well by ousting their dangerous President Anatole Kaletsky

One of the more devastating criticism's of Bush I've seen.

The closing paragraphs are truly scary.

American voters are very reluctant to turn against their president at a time of war. This is a truly terrifying idea. It implies that a president can virtually guarantee his re-election by keeping his nation in a permanent state of war.

This may sound like Orwellian paranoia but it is not far from the thinking of many Republican political analysts. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives have been consciously searching for a new enemy to unite America and restore its military alertness, social discipline and moral fibre. No wonder they seemed so well prepared psychologically when this enemy finally appeared on September 11.

The President is not in the least embarrassed by a preference for warfare: his favourite campaign slogan is “the best defence is offence”. If the American electorate now votes for Mr Bush, war could be restored to the political primacy it has enjoyed throughout most of human history — as the last refuge of politicians determined to keep power.

Damn it. I know I'm not supposed to do this, but The Times has a policy of not allowing non-UK people from reading their online editions. So here's the whole thing. And If they don't like it I'll take it down again.

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Reject this failed statesman
ANATOLE KALETSKY
American voters can prove that democracy is alive and well by ousting their
dangerous President
WHO WILL win the American election? At present, the evidence points very
marginally in favour of John Kerry, because the polls probably underestimate
Democratic support by about one point. Beyond that, it is impossible to say
anything definite about the winner of next week’s election. The loser, however, is
very clear. It is American democracy.

Democracy will be defeated in many ways on Tuesday. Several of the flaws in the
American democratic process are obvious and widely deplored, but they are quite
unimportant. The winner of this election could again be the candidate with fewer
votes. Many thousands of voters will again be disenfranchised by complex
registration procedures and faulty voting machines. And there is again a serious
risk that the election will be embroiled in lawsuits, with the final outcome
decided in the courts.

These are embarrassing problems but they reflect the strengths of American
democracy as much as its weakness. The risk of a winner who lags behind in the
number of votes casts nationwide is a hazard inherent in any federal system, with
checks and balances against populism, centralisation and the tyranny of
majorities. Ironically, it could be Mr Kerry this time, who benefits from the
decoupling of national and state voting — which underlines the absence of serious
partisan bias in the electoral college rules. Similarly, the legal arguments about
how votes should be counted can be seen as signs of openness and transparency. In
other countries, disputes about registration procedures are simply crushed by the
weight of bureaucratic resistance, while legal allegations of bias against
election officials are almost unheard of — not necessarily because such things
never happen, but because they are almost impossible to bring to court.

Why, then, do I maintain that democracy will be the sure loser in next week’s
poll? Because if America were a healthy democracy, George Bush would not even be
running in this election. He would have been ousted by his own party, in favour of
another candidate with a better chance of keeping the Republicans in power.

The primary function of democracy is not to elect good leaders, since nobody can
predict in advance how a politician will perform. It is to eject leaders who have
manifestly failed. The ability to remove leaders who turn out to be corrupt,
dangerous, outrageously dishonest or manifestly incompetent is the primary
privilege and duty of any democracy. And if any leader in our lifetime deserved to
be ejected by voters, regardless of their ideology or political persuasion, it is
surely President Bush.

He inherited a prosperous, peaceful, law-abiding country which was universally
admired around the world. He promised, if elected, to govern as a “compassionate
conservative”, to end partisan confrontation in Washington and to run a “humble”
foreign policy which would respect other countries and show restraint in the use
of America’s global power.

Four years later, he presides over a struggling economy, the steepest four-year
loss of jobs since the Great Depression, and now has the biggest budget deficits
and trade imbalances on record. Far worse, he started an unnecessary war on false
pretences and mismanaged it so disastrously that the instability of the Middle
East is probably now a greater danger to world peace than the Soviet Union was
during the Cold War. The President has failed in his primary military mission of
capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda.

Even the task of eliminating the Taleban and stopping the flow of fundamentalist
teachings from Saudi Arabia has proved too much. Imagine the state of the world
today if instead of invading Iraq, America had finished the job against Saudi
Arabia, the Taleban and al-Qaeda. If, for example, Mr Bush had devoted a fraction
of the military manpower and the $200 billion wasted in Iraq on rebuilding
Afghanistan that benighted country would soon be the Switzerland of the Himalayas.

To make matters worse, Mr Bush has failed in all these tasks, while breaking every
promise he made about his character and leadership style. Instead of running a
bipartisan government of national unity, he has been the most ideological,
divisive and extremist leader America has ever seen. Instead of showing humility
in his international dealings, his punitive and aggressive foreign policies — not
only against Iraq but also against North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and even Germany
and France — have transformed America into the most hated country on earth.
Instead of respecting the primacy of the US Constitution, he has imprisoned
thousands of people without trial or charge — many no doubt dangerous terrorists,
but some presumably just ordinary people caught in the wrong place at the wrong
time.

If Americans cannot bring themselves to vote against the President after this
record, we must ask whether American democracy is capable of performing its
primary function. Can voters no longer remove a failed leader from power? The
answer is even more troubling than the question: American voters are very
reluctant to turn against their president at a time of war. This is a truly
terrifying idea. It implies that a president can virtually guarantee his re-
election by keeping his nation in a permanent state of war.

This may sound like Orwellian paranoia but it is not far from the thinking of many
Republican political analysts. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
neoconservatives have been consciously searching for a new enemy to unite America
and restore its military alertness, social discipline and moral fibre. No wonder
they seemed so well prepared psychologically when this enemy finally appeared on
September 11.

The President is not in the least embarrassed by a preference for warfare: his
favourite campaign slogan is “the best defence is offence”. If the American
electorate now votes for Mr Bush, war could be restored to the political primacy
it has enjoyed throughout most of human history — as the last refuge of
politicians determined to keep power.

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nthellworld.co.uk - user community
http://www.cableforum.co.uk/ [from: JB Ecademy]

Mr Blog Entry - 10/27/2004: BT appears to be blocking third-party VoIP

He claims that BT is blocking port 5060 for (A)DSL customers. This is the port normally used for SIP based VoIP.

Anyone from BT care to comment? [from: JB Ecademy]

The coolest websites around right now. Check em out.

del.icio.us
Flickr
last.fm

del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager. Instead of trying to manage your own bookmarks and browser history into folders and drowning in too much information, try del.icio.us instead. When you bookmark something, you can add a bit of free form text but most importantly add some free form tags. When you come to look at your list of bookmarks you can search and sort them by tag as well as by history. What makes it interesting is that del.icio.us groups everyone's bookmarks so you can see all the posts people have made with the same tags. Here's the stream of bookmarks tagged with Japan. And you can see other people who have tagged the same web page as you. There's lots of RSS feeds and other ways to cut the data and the system is open enough that there's a ton of helper apps appearing as well. See this for more. Soooo del.icio.us people can%u2019t stand it! - The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com

So now instead of trying to build a brittle hierarchy that is always wrong like DMOZ or Yahoo, we're building a big connected tag space. So now apply it to photographs.Which is where Flickr comes in. Flickr makes it really easy to post your digital photos to the web. Just like del.icio.us when you post a photo, you can add free form text to describe it and free form tags to categorise it. Want to see a constant stream of photos tagged with "Japan"? just go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/japan/ Again, there's an open API, lots of RSS and people are starting to build extensions.

Which brings us to Music. Last.fm watches what you listen to via all the common PC based music players like Winamp and Windows Media Player. From this it builds a profile of what you like. And crucially you don't have to rate music or tag lots of songs, you just have to listen to music. Now it's got lots of profile information it can find people with similar tastes to you. And having found them, you can then listen to a radio station that selects tracks that have been listened to by people like you. You get the randomness of people's listening habits with the filter that overall theyre a good match to you. There's also the sort of things you'd expect of recommendations, links to Amazon, samples and a music library. And again there's an open API and RSS. Which means that last.fm didn't have to write all the plugins for all the music players, that got done by the community. And crucially and like the other two systems, you don't have to search through a fixed category hierarchy that doesn't make sense. The "Similar Artists" and "Similar People" lists are built by what people actually listen to, not some arbitrary label like "Downbeat Ambient".

What's common about all these systems is that on one level they answer a personal need. A better bookmark system. An easy way to post photos to the web. A music recommendation system with no effort. But because they aggregate social behaviour, they add value that wouldn't have been possible with just an individual's actions. And because they are open and explicit they're creating feedback loops that add more value. And the open APIs are leading to a community of developers enhancing and adding to the basic structures. [from: JB Ecademy]

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What's up with this? http://www.georgewbush.com/ gives Access Denied. You don't have permission to access "http://www.georgewbush.com/" on this server.

So try this. Google search for "George W Bush" and hit "I'm Feel Lucky". That takes you to the same place.

Then there's the blog at http://www.georgewbush.com/blog/ Access denied.

Is this some weird thing where I'm not allowed because I'm in Europe? Or is it genuinely damaged? [from: JB Ecademy]

It seems that there's a routing problem (probably) in NTL which is preventing people from accessing Ecademy if they are using NTL as their ISP. I'm escalating this through both NTL and Globix (our provider).

Apologies for the break in service. [from: JB Ecademy]

Links: Locative Media [from: del.icio.us]

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the "Semantic Web" are finally paying off. [from: del.icio.us]

Is Marc Canter, the new Dave Winer?

Here's one for the logistics specialists among you.

How do you do just in time manufacturing and shipping when your manufacturing is happening in Asia and the Far East, but your customers are in Europe and America?

Are we stuck with the current systems of having large numbers of middlemen involved in getting the goods in bulk from China to distributors and then retailers in the US?

It seems to me that there's a huge prize for anyone who can work out how to cut the middlemen out and ship direct from the manufacturer to the customer's door. [from: JB Ecademy]

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Tremendous rant on the Inquirer

Until they can answer the question, they are doomed to failure. Can anyone in the DLNA answer it?

Here it is again: "Why would a consumer want to buy something that has more restrictions and less functionality for more money than current solutions?"

I just wish one of you spineless but very rich companies had the balls to stand up and do the right thing for the consumer. Fat chance, but I thought I'd ask.

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Audioscrobbler :: Forums :: Official News and Announcements :: We're Hiring. Job Spec

One of the coolest web sites on the planet is looking for a developer. www.audioscrobbler.com, last.fm

And they're based in London. [from: JB Ecademy]