Kendra_Smith_Laughs > Recent Status Updates

"As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority."

"Through the midnight emptiness the few sounds carry with amphoric hollow and the city in its quietude seems to lie under edict. The buildings lean upon the dim and muted corridors where the watchman's heels click away the minutes"

"Emerging from economics and political science resource curse literature (...) offers an analysis of the typical oil state and its pathologies. It suggests that Equatorial Guinea will now become a member of a class of states that includes Nigeria, Venezuela and Kazakhstan, among others, in which the influx of oil money fuels a distinctive form of pathological development (...)"

"At each step of the way the main concerns were volume and fees. Who had an interest n maintaining quality? Perhaps it was not the government subsidy but these perverse incentives that led to the huge boom in bad lending and the crisis of 2007-2008."

"Night sounds and laughter drifted from the yellow shacks beyond the railspur and the river spooled past highbacked and hissing in the dark at his feet like the seething of sand in a glass, wind in a desert, the slow voice of ruin."

"These inter-Palestinian differences, exacerbated by the rivalries between the newly independent Arab states, are described by Dr. Husayn in painful detail. As he shows, much of the pre-war polarization between partisans and opponents of the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, dating to the revolt and before, continued into the postwar era."

"The uncle came through the door, looking about, hesitant. He stopped in the center of the room, arrested in the quadrate bar of dusty light davited between the window and its skewed replica on the far wall, a barren countenance cruelly lit, eyes watery and half closed with their slack pendules of flesh hanging down his cheeks. His hands moved slightly with the wooden smile he managed. Hey boy, he said."

"These inter-Palestinian differences, exacerbated by the rivalries between the newly independent Arab states are described by Dr. Husayn in painful detail. As he shows, much of the pre-war polarization between partisans and opponents of the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, dating to the revolt and before, continued into the post-war era."

<> (Balfour)

"Many peasants in villages neighbouring the new colonies had been deprived of their land as a result of the land sales. Some had also suffered in armed encounters with the first paramilitary units formed by the European Jewish settlers. Their trepidation was shared by Arab city dwellers in Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem - the main centers of Jewish population then and now - (...)"

"When he reached the houseboat he shipped the oars and the skiff slewed to a stall and settled ponderously against the tire-casings nailed there. He swung himself up with the rope in one hand and made fast. The skiff bobbed and slid heavily and the bilgewater surged. The fish sculled sluggishly. Suttree stretched and rubbed his back and eyed the sun."

"He came back upriver rowing slowly, the fish struggling in a thin gray bilge in the floor of the boat, their soft barbels fingering with dull wonder the slimed boards and their backs where they bowed into the sunlight already bleached a bloodless pale. The brass oarlocks creaked in their blocks and the riverwater curled from the bowplanks with a viscid quality and lay behind the skiff in a wake like plowed mire"

"What the private issuers discovered was that if scrutinizing conventional mortgages was profitable, subprime was even more so. The financial engineering was more elaborate and one could charge more money for the services. The techniques of the fixed-income investment bankers were now brought fully into play."

"The mechanism of life is jammed, the way minutes and hours and days knit themselves, gather in the separate strands and knit them fast together into life, into being - it is jammed, blocked, broken."

"I want to live, I say. I don't want to tell my story. I want to live. Z says, the old story has to end before a new one can begin."

"With the few exceptions of citizens openly affiliated with the opposition, who experience regular jailing and other forms of harassment and abuse, "everyone is in their own corner," as one of my friends put it"

"Once, perhaps, their differences had invigorated them, but as time passed they seemed to find something more troubling in them, something whose deadliness became ever more apparent as they themselves neared death. It was as though, in old age, they were coming to the realisation that because of one another they had not lived."

"Marriage keeps other people outside, my friend says. In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them. My daughters like this friend of mine."

"The idea, in the wake of the savings-and-loans disaster, was to spread risk outward from those immediately involved in lending to mortgage borrowers and to attract investors by turning mortgages into securities that offered a wide range of yield-risk profiles. And it worked. In 1980, 67 percent of American mortgages had been held directly on the balance sheets of depository banks."

"How could this domestic drama shake the world's financial system and precipitate a global crisis? The simple answer is that real estate may be mundane, and McMansions may be nondescript, but they account for a huge share of total marketable wealth worldwide."

"(...) eyes strained against the darkness of my own ignorance, I struggled to comprehend the grandeur and violence of the adult world, to grasp its double nature of seeming and being. And in this duplicity, this difference between how things looked and what they were, was something I couldn't be reconciled (...) In much the same way I saw the romance of marriage as a covering for something unapologetically practical"

"I remember from childhood how easy it was to imagine, how hard to create: the difference between what I could conceive of and what I could actually do was bewildering. In adulthood I have learned that to envisage is nothing: success is a hard currency, earned by actual excellence."

"Form is both safety and imprisonment, both protector and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals the truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place?"

"'Consensual' views of society represent society as if there are no major cultural or economic breaks, no major conflicts of interests between classes and groups"

"We exist as members of one society because - it is assumed - we share a common stock of cultural knowledge with our fellow men: we have access to the same 'map of meanings'. Not only are we all able to manipulate these 'maps of meaning' to understand events, but we have fundamental interests, values and concerns in common which these maps embody or reflect."

"Indeed, the Exxon-funded group, the Institute for Democratic Strategies, played a pivotal role in the manufacture of Equatorial Guinea's 1996 presidential election (Shaxson, 2008). "And that" an opposition member of parliament put it to me succinctly, "was when petroleum started. Petroleum was like a life-jacket for the regime, an oxygen-balloon to help it float.""

"His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, (...)"

"In the fall of 2007, even as quite a different crisis loomed on the horizon, it was the dollar that was still at the center of attention. The Economist warned of a "Dollar panic". Germany's Spiegel magazine announced a "Pearl Harbor without a war." Bill Gross, the kingpin at bond trading giant PIMCO, was reported to be selling dollar assets, as was billionaire investor Warren Buffet."

"Is it a lack of courage to think big? Could not the country that thought out the Marshall plan do the same for its own good? Is it because the prejudices against race and welfare programmes are no obstacles to a grand rescue operation abroad but they assert themselves stubbornly against such a vision at home?"