The Hall of Fire

A nation healed! A world repaired! We are the ones we've been waiting for! This is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal! Oh, Prim, come on! Obama was practically slapping a "Kick Me" sign on his own backside with this sort of grandiosity. So no...

but now we're getting closer to the topic I don't want to discuss

I agree.

Can I gently suggest that you both (hal and Cerin) have made your points and that it would pointless to keep arguing about it back and forth?

halplm wrote:Sorry, VtF, I've gone way off topic in your thread, didn't mean to start a whole thing here

Not that far off-topic, I don't think. I'm comfortable with this subject being part of the discussion here.

That's more like it!

But wait, it was a trick! Obama is pulling his ads. It's foolish to buy national ads instead of focusing all the money on Ohio and Michigan! You just wasted 6 million dollars, sucker!

Thanks for the laugh, Faramond!

Faramond, any thoughts about the Obama ad? I'm genuinely interested to know what you think of it.

Here is Obama's latest ad, entitled "Pocket". I'm curious to know what people think of it. Is it deceptive? Effective? A good response to the series of negative ads that McCain has put out? Too negative? Not negative enough? What do you think?

Letter 180 is to Mr. Thompson and is a draft, and has some interesting insights into Tolkien. In the letter Tolkien describes the writing process he went through as he wrote the Lord of the Rings. He begins by introducing the notion that legends depend on the languages to which they belong, but als...

soli, as you well know, there are limitations to the protections of free speech even under the U.S. constitution, where free speech is valued perhaps more than anywhere else. But this really should be the topic of a separate discussion, I think.

A rare bit of good news in the incredibly sad, frustrating (and infuriating) realm of primate depletion. Almost 50 percent of the world's primate species are threatened with extinction, a stunning statistic. The Western Lowland Gorilla is the most numerous and wide-ranging of the four Gorilla sub-sp...

I misspoke earlier when I said that Farmer Maggot was initially an evil character. In fact, the first reference to him in the first draft of this chapter is Bingo referring to him as "good Farmer Maggot". And actually, soli, I have to say that that version really does still retain a lot of...

Welcome to Mialamdriel! What a great name! Tell us about it.

Is there any principle here, beyond just a feeling that oil companies are making too much money?

I don't think so, Faramond.

Except that "said family" likely doesn't have any money to spare to "invest" in Exxon; it is all tied up in paying for gas, food, shelter, etc.

Are you seriously claiming that all this is some sort of fiction invented by 'non-reputable right-wing sources?' No, I'm suggesting that -- as often is done by ideologues on both the right and the left -- it is a twisting of some truth, some half-truth and some fiction. Show me some of "his co...

Most of the fires in California this year, including the big Big Sur fires, were caused by lighning strikes, which is very unusual. Some of them were caused by human carelessness, however. And a few were deliberate arson, which really gets my dander up.

You still have failed to provide any links to any reputable sources, soli. Right now you are just looking like a radical right-wing mouthpiece.

Solzhenitsyn was a great, truly courageous, and brilliant, man. I honor his memory.

Any hear of this site? http://www.votesmart.org/ ? Here is the article on them over at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vote_Smart I haven't looked a lot yet on the Presidential level but have on the state level and it really lets me know what people voted for and what the bill was a...

Faramond wrote:It appears to me that part of this conversation is about board governance and should probably be happening in the Naith.

You are right, Faramond, and I apologize to the board for allowing it to seep out here. I will try my best to prevent it from happening again.