Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  State looters Again and again

  Philippe Pascot

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  On September 15, 2017, in front of millions of television viewers, Emmanuel Macron, with François Bayrou, his Keeper of the Seals at the time, delivered his first lie: “It is now impossible to be elected when you have a B2 criminal record”. Nothing could be further from the truth: in 2025, it is still possible to stand for election and be elected after having been convicted by the courts, whereas there are 396 jobs requiring a clean criminal record. Ten years after the best-seller Pilleurs d'État (State Looters), which sold 120,000 copies, Philippe Pascot takes stock of the progress and setbacks in French politics, listing all the legal abuses still available to the political class: exorbitant salaries and associated expenses, tax exemptions, multiple pensions, fictitious employment, exceptional justice, show trials, bogus declarations of interest and activities, and so many other little arrangements between friends... For Philippe Pascot, the findings are indisputable: “Behind a declared desire for transparency and moralization in the political sphere, our elected representatives continue to nurture their own interests through laws that are less and less comprehensible, in order to escape criminal prosecution and drape themselves in a circumstantial innocence. ”

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  Pandemic Panic - How Canadian...

  Joanna Baron, Christine Van Geyn

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  In October 2022, the economist Emily Oster wrote a plea for a “pandemic amnesty.” After detailing various ill-conceived public health policies throughout the pandemic, Oster concluded that “The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.” She reasoned that many admittedly poor, public health decisions were made in an information vacuum and that the salubrious thing to do going forward would be to forgive and forget.
  		 
  Oster was concerned about the fraying social fabric because of polarizing online discourse and urged the need to move forward. However, our anecdotal experience has shown a second common response to pandemic mishaps—going blank entirely on what occurred during the pandemic. We have observed a phenomenon of the surreal, sometimes inane, often unprecedented and unusual public health measures taken over the roughly three-year pandemic period being a “memory hole,” where the mind completely fogs over. Many times in the course of writing this book, we have messaged one another upon unearthing one public policy absurdity upon another: the City of Toronto taping off cherry blossoms, Quebec requiring unvaccinated people to be chaperoned in plexiglass carts through the essential aisles of big-box stores.
  		 
  We are not psychologists, but no doubt there is an evolutionary benefit to allowing a collective trauma to dissolve into the slip-stream: it is unproductive to dwell on how we got by and how our government coped in real-time. Our memories are warped, first, by the “primacy effect” our tendency to remember “firsts” exemplified by people universally naming George Washington when asked to recall former U.S. presidents. Most people have a crystal clear memory of the moment their plague year started in earnest; for us and many others; it was March 11, 2020, the day the NBA suspended games for the rest of the season.

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  Democracy in America

  Alexis de Tocqueville, Harvey C....

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  Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country’s equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. 
    
  When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop’s new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville’s classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville’s language, with the expressed goal “to convey Tocqueville’s thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today.” The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.

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  False Front - The Failed Promise...

  Kenneth Lowande

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  A provocative new perspective on presidential power. 
   
   
   
  Border walls, school bathrooms, student loans, gun control, diversity, abortion, climate change—today, nothing seems out of reach for the president's pen. But after all the press releases, ceremonies, and speeches, shockingly little gets done. The American presidency promises to solve America's problems, but presidents' unilateral solutions are often weak, even empty. 
   
   
   
  Kenneth Lowande argues this is no accident. The US political system is not set up to allow presidents to solve major policy problems, yet it lays these problems at their doorstep, and there is no other elected official better positioned to attract attention by appearing to govern. Like any politician, presidents are strategic actors who seek symbolic wins. They pursue executive actions, even when they know that these will fail, because doing so allows them to put on a compelling show for key constituencies. But these empty presidential actions are not without their costs: they divert energy from effective government—and, over time, undermine public trust. Drawing on thousands of executive actions, news coverage, interviews, and presidential archives, False Front shows that the real root of presidential power is in what presidents can get away with not doing.

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  Drawing Lines - Why...

  Kira Davis

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  It is time to draw our lines in the sand as Christians and Conservatives by engaging in public conversations with truth and conviction. 
   
    
   
  Kira Davis has built a brand on reaching out to the other side, on giving people space to be wrong, the space to discuss, the space to tolerate. Unfortunately, the people controlling the public conversations right now will have none of it. We're seeing the lengths they will go to and the lies they let stand in service of crushing 50 percent of this nation. They seek unity through complete elimination of the other side. There are times for compromise and times to draw a line in the sand; the latter has arrived. It is time to draw our lines as Christians and Conservatives.

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  Confronting Climate Gridlock -...

  Daniel S. Cohan

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  An atmospheric scientist explains why global climate change mitigation and energy decarbonization demand American diplomacy, technology, and policy 
   
   
    
  Professor of environmental engineering Daniel Cohan argues that escaping the gravest perils of climate change will first require American diplomacy, technological innovation, and policy to catalyze decarbonization globally. Combining his own expertise along with insights from more than a hundred interviews with diplomats, scholars, and clean-technology pioneers, Cohan identifies flaws in previous efforts to combat climate change. He highlights opportunities for more successful strategies, including international "climate clubs" and accelerated development of clean energy technologies. Grounded in history and emerging scholarship, this book offers a forward-looking vision of solutions to confronting climate gridlock and a clear-eyed recognition of the challenges to enacting them.

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