The Dish

 Salon interviews Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash. In response to a question about the effect a shrinking global population will have on our economy:

We have to harness older people as a resource. Their wisdom and knowledge is a huge resource, whether it is middle-class professionals becoming consultants when they retire, or looking after grandchildren so their own children can work. They are the social glue running things. All of this needs to be harnessed. Yes, the old will have to work longer. Why not? We will need to work harder on medical technology to ensure that the old stay fitter longer. Much of the reproductive revolution happened by keeping young kids from dying. Now we need another revolution to keep the old fitter for longer.

(Image from from Thierry Bouet's photo series)

Andrew O’Hagan takes aim at the happiness industry:

I don’t know if people had ‘personal goals’ in previous centuries. People certainly had ambitions, perhaps even, though I doubt it, the ambition to live a happy life. But since the 1990s it’s the idea of having ‘one shot’ at happiness that has taken hold. Only One Shot makes it plain that a failure to grab that chance is nobody’s fault but one’s own. ‘According to the World Health Organisation,’ the book’s author, Randall Scott Rogers, reports, every year in the US ‘33,000+ people commit suicide, 400,000+ people attempt suicide, 17 million suffer depression, 27 million suffer alcohol and drug addiction, 60 million suffer some form of mental illness, and $11 billion is spent on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching and stress-management programmes.’

Massie thinks it possible:

True, Nick Clegg would need to secure the agreement of his party before making any deal with Cameron and true too that this is usually seen as a major obstacle. However Clegg has already begun the business of burying Labour which itself opens the door towards either a formal or informal arrangement with the Conservatives.

Jackie Ashley doesn't believe that such a coalition would sustainable for long.

  Tom Ricks interviews historian Geoffrey Wawro:

Americans look at the Middle East through the lens of terrorism. This is analogous to the Cold War tendency to view the Middle East as a place under perpetual threat from Communism. In fact, most Middle Eastern peoples detest terrorism, and their security services are committed to its destruction. Unfortunately, states like Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq under Saddam play a double game. Although frightened by terrorist extremism, they succor groups that they can wield tactically against their enemies, chiefly Israel. In the event of a U.S. war with Iran, those groups — like Hezbollah — would be unleashed against Americans and U.S. interests as well. What this means for Americans, is that we must proceed delicately.

It is foolhardy to imagine we can "rid the world of terrorism," if only because terror attacks are an asymmetric weapon wielded by weaker states against stronger ones. Syria is certainly a "terrorist state" in the sense that it gives cover to anti-Israeli terrorist groups — which Damascus regards as no more objectionable than Israeli F-16s — but it is also a country that we can do business with, solidifying gains in Iraq, managing Lebanon and the Kurds, and fighting al-Qaeda. This complexity, with its strong odor of amorality, exasperates Americans, but is an ineradicable piece of the Middle Eastern landscape, of the "quicksand" I describe in my new book.

(Photo: A US soldier from the 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, is reflected on water logged on a street during a patrol at an area in Baghdad, 13 January 2008. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.)

From Frum's take on the spat:

Manzi could have safely disputed Levin’s claims on global warming if he had observed a couple of conditions. First, acknowledge Liberty and Tyranny as a good and important book. Second, acknowledge Levin’s “service” (i.e., leadership) of the conservative cause. Third, isolate criticisms to one particular finite point – avoid drawing any larger conclusions – and be sure to wrap any criticisms in a blanket of compliments. Just because one particular chapter happens to be slovenly, ignorant, and hysterical should not lead you to question the intellectual merit of the book as a whole.

Manzi negligently violated the rules, and the results are as you see.

"Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn't choose them. I don't fault them, but it took time to reject them.

Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.

Something is wrong, I know it, if I don't keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.

May I stay forever in the stream," – Mary Oliver, Blue Iris.

(Photograph from Inconsequential Blogger.)

Otherworldly images.

"Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other, — what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? " – William James, The Will to Believe, 1896.