I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
Scroll down for Amygdala archives! You know you want to. [Temporarily rather borked, along with rest of template.]
Amygdala's endorsements are below my favorite quotations! Keep scrolling!
Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period.
fi
You must either open a Google/Blogger.com/Gmail Account, or sign into comments at the bottom of any post with OpenID, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress, AIM account, or whatever ID/handle available to use. Hey, I don't design Blogger's software: sorry!
Posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion.
Comments on posts over 21 days old are now moderated, and it may take me a long while to notice and allow them.
I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
If you like my blog, and would like to help me continue to afford food and prescriptions, or simply enjoy my blogging and writing, and would like to support it --
you are welcome to do so via the PayPal buttons.
Donate to support Gary Farber's Amygdala:
Please consider showing your support for Amygdala by clicking below and subscribing for $5/month!
Free koala bear included! They're so cute!
To subscribe for further increments of $5, simply click above again, after completing one, for as many $5 subscriptions as you desire!
Advance notification of cancellations are helpful, but it's all up to you.
"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
There was anger: David Vitter, Louisiana's freshman Republican senator, gave the federal government an F on Friday for its handling of the whirlwind after the storm. And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared, "We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died" amounted to "nothing more than poverty, age or skin color."
There was shock at the slow response: Joseph P. Riley Jr., the 29-year Democratic mayor of Charleston, S.C., and a veteran of Hurricane Hugo's wrath, said: "I knew in Charleston, looking at the Weather Channel, that Gulfport was going to be destroyed. I'm the mayor of Charleston, but I knew that!"
But perhaps most of all there was shame, a deep collective national disbelief that the world's sole remaining superpower could not - or at least had not - responded faster and more forcefully to a disaster that had been among its own government's worst-case possibilities for years.
"It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad," said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. "I'm 84 years old. I've been around a long time, but I've never seen anything like this."
Around the nation, and indeed the world, the reaction to Hurricane Katrina's devastation stretched beyond the usual political recriminations and swift second-guessing that so often follow calamities. In dozens of interviews and editorials, feelings deeper and more troubled bubbled to the surface in response to the flooding and looting that "humbled the most powerful nation on the planet," and showed "how quickly the thin veneer of civilization can be stripped away," as The Daily Mail of London put it.
There's a bunch more there; read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5.
Riding on the running board of a big white van, microphone in hand, the city's highest-ranking police officer rolled up Friday afternoon to deliver the first scrap of good news that the 20,000 miserable people holed up here in the sprawling convention center had heard for nearly a week.
"We've got food and water coming," the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, shouted to the crowd. "We've got buses that are going to take you out of here."
The unannounced arrival of Mr. Compass, in a crisp navy-blue uniform, was a sudden and even surreal turn at this dank outpost of suffering, filled to bursting with the people who had flocked here days earlier to escape the floods of Hurricane Katrina, only to become a trapped horde of the hungry, the filthy and, here and there, the dead.
Soft applause and cheers rippled in a rising and falling wave as Mr. Compass proceeded along the mile-long terrace front of the convention center, crammed 10-deep with exhausted men, women and children. "Thank God!" an elderly woman gasped.
But some kept silent, any joy or relief tempered by skepticism that Mr. Compass and the city would deliver on one more set of promises. Others cursed, deeply resentful that they had been left to survive by their wits in the cavernous - at night, pitch-dark - convention center without food, water or protection from the thieves and thugs who they say had terrorized them.
One angry man shouted over the applause, "It's about time!" A woman ran alongside Mr. Compass's van, shrieking at him: "We're ready to go now. We don't need no food. Get us out of here!"
Standing at the curb, Glenda Cloud, 50, said: "They can keep their food. We've got people dying in here."
Mr. Compass said that as night was falling, military helicopters lifted off with some of the most seriously ill storm victims. He said he expected that at least a few buses would also take some of them away later. He said more buses would take away those without serious health problems on Saturday.
Just how many had died was not clear, though the breadth of the horror was in plain sight. On the sidewalk, a woman with short gray hair lay dead on her side, legs drawn up toward her belly. The old woman whose corpse had become a recurring image Thursday on the television news still lay slumped, a day later, in her wheelchair. Inside, amid the stench from overflowing bathrooms, a woman and a teenage boy suffered seizures in the arms of family members.
[...]
Many refugees said they had come here after hearing directives on the radio that they do so, because the Superdome and other shelters were already filled. But Kenya Smith, head of intergovernmental relations for New Orleans, said Friday that the convention center was never designated as an official shelter.
Mr. Smith said that hotels, had apparently sent guests here under the impression that it was. At the convention center, he said, the refugees were told - he was not sure by whom - that FEMA would send buses to take them from the city.
Yet federal officials were not even aware of the crowd at the convention center for three days into the crisis, according to Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Mr. Brown told network television interviewers on Thursday night that federal officials had just that day learned about the crowd at the center.
"Don't you guys watch television?" asked Ted Koppel, interviewing him on "Nightline." "Our reporters have been reporting about it for more than just today."
"We learned about it factually today that that's what existed," said Mr. Brown, who indicated that officials had heard word of the problem earlier but were too busy dealing with refugees at the Superdome to confirm it.
Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, indicated in an interview on Thursday that his department had been well aware of the crowd at the center. Some of those had been brought here after being rescued from the floodwaters, he said, but "most people just went in there" on their own.
He said many tourists took shelter here - along with perhaps 100 armed thugs. "The tourists are walking around there and as soon as these individuals see them, they're being preyed upon," Mr. Compass said Thursday.
On Wednesday, Mr. Compass said he sent eight squads of 11 men each to take control of the convention center, but the first squad made it only 30 feet inside before being rushed by more than 50 people. On Friday, before Mr. Compass arrived, a convoy of 17 police and military vehicles, some with lights flashing and sirens wailing, sped past the convention center in an apparent show of force. Several military helicopters also hovered over the building in what appeared to be another show of security muscle.
Shortly after Mr. Compass spoke to the refugees, 1,000 members of the National Guard and 60 police officers, armed with loaded shotguns and automatic rifles, took up positions on a grassy median running along the center of Convention Center Boulevard.
The mere presence of the security forces had a calming effect on many refugees, who said they had been shaken by cries for help on some nights by what they took to be victims of rapes and assaults.
"We heard people, men and women screaming," said Chantell Jones, 19. "But no one got up to help because we were scared for our own lives."
Other refugees found the arrival of the police and military anything but calming. They said they felt that the police, in their attempts to gain control of the convention center, and the National Guard members, had been as menacing and terrifying as the civilians who sporadically fired guns inside and outside the center, often setting off stampedes.
"The police would draw their rifles and guns down on us," said Emily Baker, 56. "They were very afraid of us."
Ms. Baker said the police also came in one night and "took two white people out of here" in what she interpreted as a selective rescue. "It was our first time seeing the police here," she said. It was not immediately possible to obtain comment from the police in a city without electricity and with little phone service.
Rapunzel Weaver, 45, a cook, said she had been sobbing for days at the center because she worried that her stay there might drag on endlessly. She said she stopped crying after Mr. Compass arrived. "This is the first we have heard from him," she said, "and I believe him."
Deontrenise Gibson, 41, who worked in the convention center as a waitress until July, said: "He's a man of his word. We've heard a lot of lies. But I believe him."
The refugees said they had been told several times since Tuesday, sometimes by police officers in squad cars, that buses were on the way to evacuate them. But the buses never came.
"We've been lied to so much," said Raymond Whitfield, 51, who works at a coffee processing plant.
Soon after the armed troops moved into position, other soldiers began bringing in military meals. Some also pitched tents for what looked like a medical station. And already, some lawyers were circulating through the storm victims, promising to find compensation for them with a class-action lawsuit against city and state officials. Carl Richardson, 45, a truck driver, said he added his name to a list of potential plaintiffs being compiled by a well-dressed man and a woman partner.
Mr. Richardson said he was not especially looking for money. "If I get a little apology, I'll be happy," he said. "I'm a diabetic and I haven't had anything to eat in five days. I've gotten by, with a little orange juice that I scrounged from a co-worker who brought a little food with her."
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5.
I can't be sure, because I'm having trouble getting my Flash working, but I think that if you go here, and click on "Disaster takes toll on youngest survivors," you'll see a remarkable video of children speaking from the convention center, which should shame many; if it's the one I saw on tv, you have to see it.
Military vehicles bearing food and supplies sloshed into the drenched heart of this humbled and stricken city on Friday, while commercial airplanes and cargo planes arrived to lift beleaguered hurricane survivors from the depths of a ghastly horror.
Five days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the chaotic scene at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport evoked the ongoing mix of hope and despair that has gripped this city. Disorder prevailed, as thousands of survivors with glazed looks and nothing more than garbage bags of possessions waited in interminable lines for a chance to get out.
Patrolmen yelled out the number of available seats on each flight, and passengers boarded planes not knowing where they would land, and not caring. An increasing number of cities and states across the country were offering to take them in.
The airport was a stark landscape of triage, with rows of people on stretchers and others bound to wheelchairs, including someone already dead, in a wing that had been converted into the world's largest emergency room. A morgue had been set up in one concourse.
[....]
Scores of amphibious vehicles and Humvees carrying thousands of freshly dispatched armed National Guardsmen pushed through New Orleans in a daylong parade, hoping to replenish the dire needs of the stranded and attempt to restore order to a city that had devolved into wantonness. In one more sign of the boundless despair, police officials acknowledged that a number of New Orleans police officers had turned in their badges, refusing to risk their lives to try to right the city.
Another new ingredient was a spate of fires that broke out and were left to burn, because hydrants were not working and there was no way in the water-soaked city that firefighters could get to them.
Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, in the first attempt to gauge when New Orleans might be drained, estimated that it could take six months to pump out the water and another three months to dry the city. State officials said that pumps would be turned on Monday.
In a city too bruised to know what to feel, many of the famished survivors applauded the arrival of the relief trucks, though others, enraged at how long their wait has been, showered them with profanities.
A critical juncture was reached when the overwhelmed Superdome, site of unimaginably squalid conditions, was mostly emptied by day's end. Thousands of other survivors, though, remained stranded in the putrid convention center. Others and were said to remain perched on rooftops, even this long after the storm.
No one could convincingly say when the last of the living would be removed from the city, though state officials said that they hoped to complete the process by Sunday. Dead bodies continued to present themselves at every turn.
The Superdome, where upward of 25,000 people had sweltered in conditions described as unfit for animals, was mostly emptied, though hundreds of people were still there late in the afternoon on Friday. They had renamed the place, rife with overflowing toilets and reports of murder and rape, the "sewerdome."
Edgar John Thead, 68, who sat with his 65-year-old wife, said he had been in line for the buses at 4 a.m., but had to withdraw because his diabetic wife could not stand the heat. "I'll be the last one in line," he said.
Throughout New Orleans, thousands of people, many of them among the city's most impoverished and marginalized citizens, were still unsure when and how they would get out.
More than 15,000 were estimated to be holed up at the four-story convention center, which at some points apparently attracted as many refugees as the Superdome but was ignored much longer by rescue operations. Conditions there were even more ghastly than at the Superdome, with armed thugs seizing control and, the authorities said, repulsing squads of police officers sent to retake it.
[...]
Outside the Hyatt Hotel next to the Superdome, scores of tour buses in ankle-deep water waited to evacuate people who had been living in and around the stadium. "It's been hell," said Donnieka Rhinehart, 26, a nursing assistant who said she had lived in the stadium with her two small children since Monday. She said she witnessed a rape and heard that a girl's throat had been cut. The quickest way out seemed to be the airport, after government officials arranged for more than a dozen carriers and cargo operators to volunteer planes to fly people to safety. But the lines never seemed to diminish. As soon as one flight took off, seven or eight helicopters would land on the tarmac with additional batches of survivors.
Airport authorities did not know where the helicopters came from. "Helicopters just appear," said Carolyn Lowe, a deputy director of the airport.
Other cities and states continued to extend interim refuge and other forms of aid for the affected areas. Philadelphia announced that it is willing to take in a thousand families from New Orleans, and Detroit offered refuge as well. New York, Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Utah, Virginia and Washington are among other states offering general support or to take survivors. Some of the states promised to allow children of evacuees to enroll in their schools.
Post a Comment