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The victims of "post-colonial sequestration", by contrast, failed to make it past the barrier of independence and international recognition. Instead they fell into a state of half-recognised, but contested, existence. After the war of 1948-49 the "Palestine question" disappeared almost entirely from the international scene, only to re-emerge with the defeat of the Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Tibet too has undergone long years of neglect in the international arena, punctuated by periodic (and notably near-half-century) reincarnations of interest: the bloody British occupation of Lhasa in 1904-05, the insurrection against Chinese rule and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and now the uprising of March 2008 (see Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories", 18 March 2008).

The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more sustainable forms of development?

What of the link between democracy and sustainable development? Most respondents held that voter pressure meant that democracy was of benefit to sustainable development. Yet consultation with a more specialised group of experts found that only 28% believed that capitalism (often paired with democracy in its liberal variant) aided sustainable development, against 36% who said that capitalism inhibited it. Overall, Doug Miller saw in the figures an activation of people's survival instinct: as the planet "speaks" through extreme weather events, citizens are starting to listen.

Many of the issues the roundtable addressed had been highlighted in a keynote paper commissioned ahead of the meeting from Ian Christie. This made four basic propositions about democracy, ecologically sustainable development, and environmental/sustainability campaign organisations (SD-NGOs). He argued that together, these phenomena offer a paradox about the relationship between democracy, civil society and sustainability; and that resolving it is now an urgent and complex task - for the west, for newly industrialised democracies, and for emergent democratic civil society in the global south.

productivity, wealth, and national incomes have advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted, a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.

in 1999, the Alaska Permanent Fund paid each person of whatever age who had been living in Alaska for at least one year an annual UBI of $1,680.

By universal basic income I mean an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not. In most versions–certainly in mine–it is granted not only to citizens, but to all permanent residents.

The "end of the end of history" has many architects. Today, several states (an increasingly assertive Russia and China in particular) embody alternative political models that have come to challenge any notion of liberal-democratic hegemony; others (such as Venezuela and Iran) experiment with forms of rule that too take them further away from its orbit. These models and forms face many problems of their own, but they may not be quite as unattractive - either to the people of these countries or to many observers around the world - as lingering triumphalists in the west might assume.

There has been a tendency to focus the work of democracy-support in very practical ways: toolkits, implementation, strategy and policy. This was and remains essential; but there is also a need to reflect on the underpinnings of these practices in how democracy itself is understood in this new, testing global environment.

The dominance of a liberal-democratic conception with an American accent is reflected in the overwhelming predominance of United States institutions, academics, journals - and ideas - in the democracy-support "industry". Again, this is not in itself a problem: all discourses of democracy are grounded in specific social-political contexts and  power-relations. But the current circumstances of the kind described above - authoritarian challenges, stalled democratic transitions, discontent with democracy, deep and growing economic problems - suggest that an expanded understanding of democracy might be a route towards a healthy redefinition of democracy-support.

And let me say that commitment to international action on justice means today to prevent genocide, the world must through the U.N, urgently act in Darfur.

Most of all my parents taught me that each of us should live by a moral compass.It was a simple faith with a fundamental optimism.That each and every one of us has a talent.Each of us a duty to use that talent.And each of us should have the chance to develop that talent. And my parents thought we should use whatever talent we had to help people least able to help themselves. And as I grew up surrounded by books, sports, music and encouragement, I saw at school and beyond how some flourished and others, denied these opportunities, fell behind. They had talent, they had ability. But they did not have the chance to fulfil their promise. They needed someone to champion them. They needed the support of people on their side. And is not our history the story of yes, progress through the fulfilled talents, even genius, of some but, yes, also of the wasted potential of millions for too many, their talents lost and forever unfulfilled?

Strip away the rhetoric about globalisation and it comes down to one essential truth: You can buy raw materials from anywhere,You can borrow capital form anywhere,You can engage with technology half way across the world,But you cannot buy from elsewhere what in the global economy you need most; the skills and the creativity of all our people – and that means that in education we must aim to be number one.

It is now clear that the delusional hope that the severe credit and liquidity crunch that hit US and global financial markets would ease has been shattered by the events of the last few weeks. This credit crunch is getting much worse and its financial and real fallout will be severe. The amount of losses that financial institutions have already recognized - $20 billion – is just the very tip of the iceberg of much larger losses that will end up in the hundreds of billions of dollars. At stake – in subprime alone – is about a trillion of sub-prime related RMBS and hundreds of billions of mortgage related CDOs. But calling this crisis a sub-prime meltdown is ludicrous as by now the contagion has seriously spread to near prime and prime mortgages. And it is spreading to subprime and near prime credit cards and auto loans where deliquencies are rising and will sharply rise further in the year ahead. And it is spreading to every corner of the securitized financial system that is either frozen or on the way to freeze: CDOs issuance is near dead; the LBO market – and the related leveraged loans market – is piling deals that have been postponed, restructured or cancelled; the liquidity squeeze in the interbank market – especially at the one month to three months maturities - is continuing; the losses that banks and investment banks will experience in the next few quarters will erode their Tier 1 capital ratio; the ABCP and related SIV sectors are near dead and unraveling; and since the Super-conduit will flop the only options are those of bringing those SIV assets on balance sheet (with significant capital and liquidity effects) or sell them at a large loss; similar problems and crunches are emerging in the CLO, CMO and CMBS markets; junk bonds spreads are widening and corporate default rates will soon start to rise. Every corner of the securitization world is now under severe stress, including so called highly rated and “safe” (AAA and AA) securities.

This is indeed the message that comes from true market prices – that are not indirectly available via the ABX indices. Those prices tell you not only that the mezzanine and equity tranches of subprime CDOs are now worth close to zero; they also tell you that prices for the AAA and AA tranches – that until recently were hovering near par of 100 – are now down to 79 and 50 respectively. Hundreds of billions of subprime RMBS and senior tranches of CDOs are still being evaluated as if they are worth 100 cents on the dollar. What the ABX is telling you is that they are worth much less; thus the losses from subprime alone are an order of magnitude larger than recognized by most firms.  But most firms are not using such market prices – or their proxies – to value their illiquid assets.

Britain’s future: Labour candidates’s view

I am agnostic on the need for a written constitution, because of the power it hands to the judges.

so I let's have a national debate.

“Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” Burnyeat argued. “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”

Strauss said, political philosophy is good for something: “If for no other purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or utopian thought, we would need a genuine political philosophy reminding us of the limits set to all human hopes and wishes.”

“I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. In “Re-education,” Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted. “Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.”

Beans, Blogs, and Feeds Four basic conditions? That's all you got, Surowiecki? Your conditions have just met their match: bloggers are a wise crowd. Diversity of opinion - That's a no-brainer. Bloggers publish hundreds of thousands of posts daily, each one charged with its author's unique opinion. Independence of members - Except for your friends saying "You've got to blog about that!" bloggers are not controlled by anyone else. Decentralization - There is no central authority in the blogosphere; publish your blog anywhere you want with any tool you want. A method for aggregating opinions - Blog feeds make aggregation a snap and there is no shortage of services that take advantage of that fact.

Does the lone bird see the cohesive beauty of the flock? It doesn't matter because this fact remains: the whole is greater than the sum of all it's parts. As a blogger, you are both an individual force and a neuron in the giant, interconnected mind that is the blogosphere. Yes, it sounds like a bad sci-fi movie, but it's all true.

The crucial test is whether one’s pet theory can distinguish between selection for trait A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along.

Lacking arches, domes fall down; so arches are selected for supporting domes. But arches are linked to spandrels for reasons of geometry; so spandrels aren’t selected for, they are ‘free riders’ on selection for arches. The moral is that phenotypic traits can carry information about linkages among the mechanisms that produce them. Free-riding is always suggestive of such linkages, and free-riding is ubiquitous in evolution.

When you ask Darwin’s question – why are phenotypes often similar? – you do indeed get Darwin’s answer. But if you ask instead why it is that some phenotypes don’t occur, an adaptationist explanation often sounds somewhere between implausible and preposterous. For example, nobody, not even the most ravening of adaptationists, would seek to explain the absence of winged pigs by claiming that, though there used to be some, the wings proved to be a liability so nature selected against them. Nobody expects to find fossils of a species of winged pig that has now gone extinct. Rather, pigs lack wings because there’s no place on pigs to put them. To add wings to a pig, you’d also have to tinker with lots of other things. In fact, you’d have to rebuild the pig whole hog: less weight, appropriate musculature, an appropriate metabolism, an apparatus for navigating in three dimensions, a streamlined silhouette and god only knows what else; not to mention feathers. The moral is that if you want them to have wings, you will have to redesign pigs radically. But natural selection, since it is incremental and cumulative, can’t do that sort of thing. Evolution by natural selection is inherently a conservative process, and once you’re well along the evolutionary route to being a pig, your further options are considerably constrained; you can’t, for example, go back and retrofit feathers.

Abstract  Most versions of secularization theory expect advanced modernity to weaken religion. In contrast, this chapter argues that two different dimensions of contemporary society affect religion in opposite ways. Rising levels of human security and well-being are assurned to drive towards religious decline, while growing cultural diversity is assumed to push towards religious growth. These two hypotheses are simultaneously investigated, using world wide data for 50 000 respondents from 37 countries with a predominantly Christian heritage. As dependent variables, two dimensions of religious involvement which relate to two core aspects of secularization theory are analyzed: church-oriented religious involvement and preferences for a religious impact on politics. The findings from three different analytical strategies demonstrate that each of the two religious orientations is positively related to the cultural diversity, and also that each of them is negatively related to human security and well-being. Furthermore, the results also indicate that the religious changes which took place between 1981 and 1999/2000 are negatively related to human well-being and security, and positively to cultural diversity. Thus, a set of comprehensive analyses of one and the same set of world wide data indicate that human security and cultural diversity affect religious involvement in opposite ways. It seems too simplistic, therefore, to view modernization as a universal cause of religious decline.

Economists distinguish between “Risk” and “Uncertainty”: the former can be priced by financial markets while the latter cannot. The distinction between the two was made by the famous economist Frank H. Knight in his seminal book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921). In brief, “Risk is present when future events occur with measurable probability” while “Uncertainty is present when the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable”.    This distinction between risk and uncertainty helps to explain the recent market panic and turmoil. Today, the FT cites a market economist at Lehman who said: “We are in a minefield. No one knows where the mines are planted and we are just trying to stumble through it”. A few days ago another market participant put it this way: “It is not the corpses at the surface that are scary; it is the unknown corpses below the surface that may pop up unexpectedly”.   Unknown minefield; unexpected corpses: this is “uncertainty” rather than “risk”. Risk can be measured and priced because it depends on know distributions of events to which investors can assign probabilities. Uncertainty cannot be priced by markets because it relates to “fat tail” distributions and extreme events that cannot be easily predicted or measured.

A few days ago the CFO of Goldman Sachs justified the massive – 30% plus  - losses of the two Goldman Sachs hedge funds by arguing that these were unpredictable “25 standard deviation events” that should occur only once in a million years. The same thing was said by the LTCM “masters of the universe” when their highly leveraged hedge fund went belly up in 1998.

The proliferation of such products, as I have often noted before, carries many benefits for the financial system (most notably that they disperse risk across a much wider pool of investors). But this trend also carries at least one downside; it is adding to the opacity of the financial world. For although many corners of the structured credit universe are becoming more transparent, almost as soon as one chink of light emerges, another shadowy wave of activity emerges that is far more opaque.

As the cultural historian Markman Ellis writes, in Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the British coffee house, a “heady combination of news, literature, debate and writing”, was “the central locus of newly egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation, including forms of structured discourse, such as lectures and debates, as well as unregulated discourse, such as gossip and chatter”.

The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and “gabbling” (“Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings”). The education on offer was “a school . . . without a master”.

The eighteenth-century coffee house was undoubtedly a great vehicle for the reading of newspapers. A Continental observer in the late eighteenth century noted that, whereas the French coffee house was a place where games were played, in Britain “you neither see billiards nor backgammon tables” because people frequent coffee houses principally to read “the PAPERS”. There was a close and sometimes volatile relationship between the coffee-men and the newspaper-men, which came to a head in 1728, when the coffee-men launched an abortive scheme for setting up their own newspapers. Coffee shops had long been used as places for reading papers without having to pay for them. The coffee-men resented the high price of newspapers and the fact that there were so many of them. The newspaper-men objected that coffee houses relied on newspapers to attract custom. There is a comparable symbiosis now between cafés and information, whether in the form of newspapers (Starbucks has an exclusive deal with The Times, Costa with the Daily Telegraph) or internet connection. It is hard to see which party owes most to whom. As a pamphleteer of 1729 wrote, “Papers mutually beget company, and Company papers”.

New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five.

But here is also the opportunity. At present, we are all being dragged down by the way media and public life interact. Trust in journalists is not much above that in politicians. There is a market in providing serious, balanced news. There is a desire for impartiality. The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for the news being real news is not.

It is sometimes said that the media is accountable daily through the choice of readers and viewers. That is true up to a point. But the reality is that the viewers or readers have no objective yardstick to measure what they are being told. In every other walk of life in our society that exercises power, there are external forms of accountability, not least through the media itself. So it is true politicians are accountable through the ballot box every few years. But they are also profoundly accountable, daily, through the media, which is why a free press is so important.

Nick Pearce objects to my joining those who deny the possibility of state neutrality in relation to culture and identity. He says that I thereby regrettably place myself outside the liberal egalitarian tradition, but then adds that "in reality few believe that the state can or should embody one version of the good life". So, it is unclear to me what the objection about neutrality is.

Some critics of multiculturalism worry about "where it will all end", and so deny that multiculturalism is compatible with individual rights, with equality before the law, with civic belonging.