The conquering heroes of the subprime meltdown gathered in Manhattan yesterday to tout their latest ideas and the prevailing theme seemed to be: Short the west.

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"The theme is challenged by other aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, interjecting, and unsettling it, " she says.

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Every year at Cannes, a key theme tends to emerge regarding the type of ideas that are the most celebrated and talked about.

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Mr Buchanan then explains the underlying mathematical ideas before returning to his grand central theme, and examining the possibility that the distributions of wars and revolutions might also obey a power law.

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And there are plenty of variations on the theme: A version of the Levitron called "Floating Ideas" gives you a base over which you can float a variety of objects, including models of the space shuttle, a VW Beetle and a picture frame.

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Still, even in a grand bargain (or theme park), you eventually have to whittle down the ideas to a manageable few.

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It is a subtle and absorbing book (though the Eliot theme sometimes seems contrived) not because of its ideas in themselves, but because they carry the force of experience.

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He used a storyboard when rounding up ideas about what people might want to see in a theme park what kinds of rides, whether there should be trains, and so forth.

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So you can see there are various ideas going around this business of having a second chamber but the common theme is that they want people from national governments, national parliaments, to be involved.

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An underlying theme of the weekend gathering was greater understanding through the exchange of, and conversation about ideas.

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