Now take a look at the way the Drug War is conducted over the past 40 years. It goes back farther, but start from 40 years ago: There's very little spent on prevention and treatment. There's a lot on policing, a ton of stuff on border control and a lot on out-of-country operations. And the effect on the availability of drugs is almost undetectable; drug prices don't change on measures of availability. So there are two possibilities: Either those conducting the Drug War are lunatics, or they have another purpose.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.

Iran has been calling for it for years, and the Arab countries support it. Everyone except the United States and Israel support it. The U.S. won't allow it because it means inspecting Israel's nuclear weapons. The U.S. has continued to block it, and in fact blocked it again just a couple of days ago; it just wasn't widely reported. Iran's nuclear program, as U.S. intelligence points out, is deterrent, and the bottom line is that the U.S. and Israel don't want Iran to have a deterrent.

The intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to . . a faceless professional.

Anything feasible and potentially effective should be explored.

Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact.