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Freedom of the Press | American Democracy

A model to the world: when they realised Oleniuk had photographed them hitting looters, they hurled him to the ground, grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards containing around 350 pictures…. When he asked for his pictures back, the police insulted him and threatened to hit him.

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The web’s best reference encyclopedia – Wikipedia

The fact that someone is a judge, for example, is a social fact — the authority that attaches to judgeship is attached by everyone agreeing that a certain person has the right to make certain statements — “Court is adjourned”, “I sentence you to 5 years in prison” — that have real force in the world. Those statements are not magic; their force comes from the social apparatus backing them up.Ebay has become trustworthy over time because the social fact of its trustworthiness grew with the number of successful transactions and with its ability to find and rectify bad actors.

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Al Gore on Global Warming

Multiply that by six and a half billion people, and then stir into that toxic mixture a mindset and an attitude that says its okay to ignore scientific evidence – that we don’t have to take responsibility for the future consequences of present actions – and you get a collision between our civilization and the earth. The refugees that we have seen – I don’t like that word when applied to American citizens in our own country, but the refugees that we have seen could well be the first sip of that bitter cup because sea-level rise in countries around the world will mobilize millions of environmental refugees.

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Working very well for them…Insurrection Act in New Orleans

Not that insurrection would be out of place here after remarks like those of Barbara Bush (GB 1’s wife): What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas…. Other hotels and bars will be able to hire the musicians at flat rates, paying the wages directly to the the council to fund the living costs of all the residents.

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I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees – G.W. Bush

The city is facing a series of issues–disappearing wetlands that protect from hurricanes, levees that are too low to hold back flood waters, rising water tables, to name a few–that if not addressed soon could have New Orleans suffering the same fate as Atlantis.Dramatic, yes…. “When we get the big hurricane and there are 10,000 people dead, the city government’s been relocated to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, refugee camps have been set up and there $10 billion plus in losses, what then?”

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