“If I were a presidential candidate… ” David Frum

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9. Iraq: Knowing everything you know now, if you had been in Congress in 2002, would you have voted to authorize force against Saddam Hussein, yes or no?

No. For an Iraqi, there was no price too high to pay to rid the country of Saddam Hussein. For Americans, the issue was not Saddam's badness, but his nuclear weapons program. Knowing that the nuclear program was not a real threat, the invasion was too large a commitment. The world is a better place without Saddam, but as with everything, the question is one of costs and benefits. The costs to the U.S. were too high, the benefits to the U.S. too few.

via theweek.com

I respect David Frum's honesty and candor and, I think, genuine desire to make things right.  I like to think Christopher Hitchens would have gotten there.

A new theory emerges for where some fish became 4-limbed creatures

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"These transitional fossils were not associated with drying ponds or deserts, but consistently were found with humid woodland soils," he said. "Remains of drying ponds and desert soils also are known and are littered with fossil fish, but none of our distant ancestors. Judging from where their fossils were found, transitional forms between fish and amphibians lived in wooded floodplains. Our distant ancestors were not so much foolhardy, as opportunistic, taking advantage of floodplains and lakes choked with roots and logs for the first time in geological history."

Limbs proved handy for negotiating woody obstacles, and flexible necks allowed for feeding in shallow water, Retallack said. By this new woodland hypothesis, the limbs and necks, which distinguish salamanders from fish, did not arise from reckless adventure in deserts, but rather were nurtured by a newly evolved habitat of humid, wooded floodplains.

The findings, he said, dampen both the desert hypothesis of Romer and a newer inter-tidal theory put forth by Grzegorz Niedbwiedzki and colleagues at the University of Warsaw. In 2010, they published their discovery of eight-foot-long, 395-million-year-old tetrapods in ancient lagoonal mud in southeastern Poland, where Retallack also has been studying fossil soils with Polish colleague Marek Narkeiwicz.

via www.eurekalert.org

This evolutionary pathway can be imagined when you consider floodplains such as Tonle Sap, where during the monsoon the river reverses flow and the fish breed and thrive among a submerged forest.

Beowulf

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BeowulfSeamus Heaney's translation has been staring over me from the bookshelf aside too many unread comrades, and I finally took it down and read it. Glad that I did, as it brought me to a world and story that lies at the root of contemporary fantasies by Tolkien and his successors, and dusted lightly with emergent Christianity. This translation is easily read and enjoyed. The NYT review captures it well:

At last count some 65 English translations of ''Beowulf'' have been published. The poem's many translators seem to have followed the same logic that drives people to open new restaurants: they're disappointed with what's out there and convinced that they can do better. Only in retrospect do they realize why they were doomed to fail. As generations of students can testify, a phrase-by-phrase rendering of ''Beowulf'' into modern English isn't that hard to manage; in the process, however, the poem's lifeblood is drained, and along with it the qualities that make ''Beowulf'' so remarkable. Paradoxically, the seeming familiarity of the language is part of the problem: you don't need to know a lot of Anglo-Saxon to guess that when the narrator exclaims ''bæt wæs god cyning,'' he is saying ''that was a good king.''

This sense of familiarity, however, is for the most part an illusion, since only the slenderest of threads binds us to the Old English ''word-hoard'' and vision of the ''Beowulf'' poet. Translators (usually scholars) faithful to the poem's complex style — one that is highly formulaic, rich in compounds, apposition, repetition and parallelism, conveyed in a resounding alliterative line — end up producing jog-trot verse, of which the following is a painful and typical example: ''What ho! We've heard the glory / of Spear-Danes, clansmen-kings, / Their deeds of olden story, — – / how fought the aethelings!''

On the other hand, those (usually established poets) who take considerable license may succeed in capturing the spirit of the poem but lose touch with its intricate diction and verse rhythms: ''Listen! / The fame of Danish kings / in days gone by, the daring feats / worked by those heroes are well known to us.'' The Norton editors were so worried that Heaney would fall into the latter camp that they assigned to him an Anglo-Saxon scholar ''who was a kind of minder.'' Heaney seems to have profited from their exchanges and to have been good-humored about the arrangement. You can see the effect in his revision of an early set piece from the poem, which he titled ''A Ship of Death'' and published in ''The Haw Lantern'' (1987): the lines ''A ring-necked prow rode in the harbour, / clad with ice, its cables tightening'' are replaced 13 years later by: ''A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour, / ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.'' The Anglo-Saxon original on the facing page enables readers to appreciate why Heaney here rejects the vivid ''its cables tightening'' in favor of the more literal ''outbound,'' thereby more closely approximating the diction, compounded style and falling rhythm of the original half-line, ''isig ond ut-fus,'' that is, icy and out-ready. Countless small examples like this add up to a translation that manages to accomplish what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right.

via www.nytimes.com

Sunlight and bunker oil a fatal combination for Pacific herring

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The 2007 Cosco Busan disaster, which spilled 54,000 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay, had an unexpectedly lethal impact on embryonic fish, devastating a commercially and ecologically important species for nearly two years, reports a new study by the University of California, Davis, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The study, to be published the week of Dec. 26 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that even small oil spills can have a large impact on marine life, and that common chemical analyses of oil spills may be inadequate.

"Our research represents a change in the paradigm for oil spill research and detecting oil spill effects in an urbanized estuary," said Gary Cherr, director of the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory and a study co-author.

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god bless us, everyone

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another, previously unpublished, christmas screed by the Hitch.

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Christopher Hitchens on Forced Merriment, the True Spirit of Christmas

If you take no stock in the main Christian festival of Easter, or if you are a non-Jew who has no interest in atoning in the fall, you have an all-American fighting chance of being able to ignore these events, or of being only briefly subjected to parking restrictions in Manhattan. But if Christmas has the least tendency to get you down, then lots of luck. You have to avoid the airports, the train stations, the malls, the stores, the media and the multiplexes. You will be double-teamed by Bing Crosby and the herald angels wherever you go. And this for a whole unyielding month of the calendar.

I realize that I do not know what happens in the prison system. But I do know what happens by way of compulsory jollity in the hospitals and clinics and waiting rooms, and it's a grueling test of any citizen's capacity to be used for so long as a captive audience.

I once tried to write an article, perhaps rather straining for effect, describing the experience as too much like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state. "Come on," I hear you say. But by how much would I be exaggerating? The same songs and music played everywhere, all the time. The same uniform slogans and exhortations, endlessly displayed and repeated. The same sentimental stress on the sheer joy of having a Dear Leader to adore. As I pressed on I began almost to persuade myself. The serried ranks of beaming schoolchildren, chanting the same uplifting mush. The cowed parents, in terror of being unmasked by their offspring for insufficient participation in the glorious events…. "Come on," yourself. How wrong am I?

via online.wsj.com

Happy Christmas !

Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

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Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

via www.vanityfair.com

we're all diminished now. vanity fair has a up a variety of links, photos, and videos of Hitch at his best.

next on my reading list

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Dave Sawyer's new report,Mind the Gap

In "Mind the Gap" Dave Sawyer explores where we stand with regard to current Canadian climate change policies and how Canada can close the gap between emissions reductions expected from current federal and provincial policies and our 2020 emissions mitigation target of 17 per cent below 2005 levels. Suggestions include expanded regulatory frameworks, as well as a renewed look at both domestic and international abatement options from offsets.