so that is a sonic boom.

Sometimes you don't quite understand things until you experience them for yourself, and thus internalize them. Here is a small example.

I was in the middle of writing a post about 9/11 when what sounded like some kind of explosion rattled all the doors and windows of my apartment building, which is about as soundproof as a cardboard box. It sounded like something HUGE being dropped on the roof, and perhaps simultaneously in the first floor hallway below me. I knew it was too abrupt to be an earthquake. The interwebs quickly informed me it was a sonic boom from the space shuttle Discovery reentering Earth's atmosphere on its way to land at Edwards AFB.

Of course all my SoCal friends were soon Facebooking and Twittering about it. Most people's first thought was "earthquake." But at least one friend, who is from Lebanon, had a different first thought: "Israelis."

I immediately thought of the notes my Gaza blogrades had written about the weeks after the war, when Israeli planes would fly over Gaza, deliberately breaking the sound barrier over populated areas. This happened in Lebanon after the 2006 war as well. I've heard this practice called "simulated bombing" or "phantom air raids." It's not bombing, but it sounds like it. (And, you might add, feels like it, because the blast wave is forceful enough to be felt in your chest cavity, like being close to fireworks or the amp at a rock concert.)

Of course the only imaginable purpose of this practice is to terrorize people. It's intentional triggering of whatever fresh post-traumatic stress these very same planes have recently created. Imagine if you'd very recently spent weeks living in terror of those sounds: the incoming roar of a low-flying plane, the deep boom of explosions that are felt as much as heard. To you those become the sounds of death, of grief, of helpless, mortal fear. Yeah, a sonic boom would have scared the crap out of me in such a situation.

Like so many things the IOF does, which seem to have no possible rationale other than deliberate torture, I have to wonder: Who thinks up this shit?