My life is my message

Mar 17 2010

Today, what is or is not allowed into Gaza is never entirely clear and can change from month to month. Broomsticks and chamomile have recently been permitted; toys, music, books, and shampoo with conditioner have been prohibited; and the importation of pasta required the direct intervention of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Almost all of the materials needed for reconstruction after Operation Cast Lead last year have been blocked, although some imports of glass have finally been permitted after months of extended negotiation. As a result of this, there is little productive enterprise within Gaza today. It is only recently that Israel has started to permit limited exports of cut flowers and strawberries, for example, after seven months of blockage. The number of employees in the industrial and construction sectors has fallen from over 53,000 in 2007 to fewer than 3,000 today. According to the most recent report from the World Bank and PalTrade, 70 percent of industrial establishments are closed, 20 percent are operating at 10 percent capacity, and only 10 percent are working at 20-50 percent capacity. Even watching the otherwise beautiful sight of a Gaza sunset as I did recently, one is reminded of the restrictions in place by staccato bursts of Israeli naval gunfire warning Palestinian fishermen to keep their boats inshore.

Most of what one buys in Gaza seems to have come through a tunnel: shoes, clothing, chocolate bars, utensils, appliances. Even fiancés, livestock, automobiles, and a lion have been brought into Gaza this way. (The drugged but uncaged lion, it seems, woke up part way across. After puzzling how to recapture it, smugglers built two halves of a makeshift cage, which were then separately lowered into the tunnel from the Gaza and Egyptian ends, and very, very carefully pushed together.)

Comments (View)
+
I can’t remember another ethnic or religious lobbying group publicly siding with a foreign country against the President of the United States…especially when the country in question is engaging in behavior that the international community believes is illegal.
Comments (View)
+
Michael Murphy is an alleged womanizer who seduces women, uses them to satisfy his needs and then discards them like trash. What sets this player apart from the rest, though, is that he’s done all of this while in the slammer — with five female guards, a clinical therapist and other prison workers. The 36-year-old’s exploits while at a Montana prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for burglary, forgery and theft, are detailed in new documents published Monday by The Smoking Gun. Prisoners are considered legally incapable of giving sexual consent — seeing as they are, you know, prisoners — but some of the women involved with Murphy see themselves as the real victims, according to the Associated Press.
Comments (View)
+
There’s about as much educational benefit studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary
Comments (View)
+
Gosh, I’m not sure how to describe it. I was there for the birth of all three of my children. I did the first F-18 intercept of a Bear bomber off the coast of Canada. I represented Canada in a bunch of different levels, including as a fighter pilot. I was a test pilot doing all sorts of very fascinating, challenging, brand new work. I went to Mir, I went to the ISS. But nothing compares to going outside for a spacewalk. Nothing compares to being alone in the Universe; to that moment of opening the hatch and pulling yourself outside into the Universe.
Comments (View)
Mar 08 2010

Best Divorce Letter Ever

pbh3:

Best Divorce Letter Ever
Do you think she’ll take him back?
Comments (View)
Feb 28 2010
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, generate 40 terabytes every second—orders of magnitude more than can be stored or analysed.
Comments (View)
Feb 23 2010
Comments (View)
+
Comments (View)
Feb 22 2010
WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.
Comments (View)
Page 1 of 55