backdoor view: Islands in the stream: The extraordinary homemade dams holding back the Mississippi as desperate residents try to save their homes

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Islands in the stream: The extraordinary homemade dams holding back the Mississippi as desperate residents try to save their homes

Desperate measures led to successes, and some failures for those whose walls were not high enough.

I don't know how Ted Kennedy got in here, but what the heck.

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"If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed."-The Bulletproof Mind

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
By 2050 earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.' Orwell-1984

Ronald Reagan's Thoughts in quotes

"Man is not free unless government is limited."

"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty."

“The cultural environment for a human holocaust is present whenever any society can be misled into defining individuals as less than human and therefore devoid of value and respect.”

"Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide."

"I notice that all those people who favor abortion have already been born."

"We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added."

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."

"Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence."

"Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged."

"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

"The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much."

"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15."

"I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'."

"Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

"Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure."

"They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong."

"Don't be afraid to see what you see." Ronald Reagan