links for 2009-08-09
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"The telephone rang. It was the head of the Biblical Service of the Protestant Federation of France [Service biblique de la Federation protestante de France]. She asked me if I could write a page on Gog and Magog for the French President." Thomas Römer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and specialist in the Old Testament, had just been plunged into the midst of international politics. This apparently banal theological inquiry had unsuspected ramifications, for it was incited by George W. Bush. "The prophecies are being accomplished." "I also learned during this phone call that the President of the United States had brought up Gog and Magog in a conversation with Jacques Chirac. The discussion was about current events in the Middle East. After having explained that he saw Gog and Magog at work, George W. Bush added that the Biblical prophecies were coming to pass," Thomas Römer continues...
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The economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about... the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills.... The battle will be over how to get the economy's winners to pay for an increasingly costly poor.... For much of the past 200 years, unskilled workers benefited greatly from capitalism.... [M]achines... replaced people as deliverers of brute force. But even today they cannot replace many of people's manipulative abilities, language skills and social awareness... a fast-food "associate" deploys an astonishing repertoire of spatial and language skills. But in more recent decades... there has been little gain in the real earnings of the unskilled. And, more darkly, computer advances suggest these redoubts of human skill will sooner or later fall to machines. We may have already reached the historical peak in the earning power of low-skilled workers, and may look back on the mid-20th century as the great era of the common man.
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The NYT, for all its travails, is a recognizable version of the publication I’d previously known. Personality, depth, world-view, tone. The poor Washington Post is not. Laying off — that is, buying out — so many reporters who knew so much about their topics has had a more profound effect than I would have guessed. …And the resulting paper seems more obviously desperate to try anything that will draw attention in this new age. …I’ve thought of the Post as my hometown paper for years and feel as if I’ve come back to see a family member looking suddenly very ill. …If someone asked, what do you notice that’s changed, the Post would be high on the list.
