The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions-and Iraq may be one of them-when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently.

One of the biggest divides in Canada - I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career - is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they're mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue.

There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own.

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.