What Hath Man Wrought

Aircraft used for Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Keeping track of the news has become an increasingly dispiriting activity.

The events of Thursday, July 17th are themselves sufficient to illustrate this.

Malaysian Airlines 17, a commercial flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed in the Ukraine that day.

Also, Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the twittersphere was full of speculations about a giant hole in Siberia, something that looks much more ominous than the garden variety sinkhole encountered in places with variable water tables. The hole on the Yamal Peninsula looks positively apocalyptic, and has inspired tralk of everything from global warming, to alien attacks.

U.S. business news made its contribution to the distressing tone of the day, as Microsoft announced tens of thousands of layoffs. Microsoft! Fourteen percent of its workforce.

How can we wrap our heads around such news? The first was almost certainly a deliberate act of war, the second was quite certainly an escalation of war, the third seems like creepy symbolism from a horror film, and the fourth? -- just God's way of saying "no one and nothing is safe, not even a job at a software titan."

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