Increased land area where we can grow crops certainly wouldn’t be a negative, IMO.

Warm weather is generally beneficial to crops, as well. I don’t know, from your statement, where you are going. The globalwarmingists claim that the melting glaciers and icecaps will reduce land area through flooding, although it will obviously decrease the area covered by ice. Go figure.
As an average citizen, I can plainly see that it just ain’t happenin’. Like all alarmists, they seek to make us afraid of the future. Not a good thing.

Yeah. Compare the two characters and how they are introduced. Tom and Strider.

You’d be hard put to guess which character was going to go away and which one was the most heroic in the series.

I was just reading the Wiki entry on Tom and it seems like Tolkien liked the character and just couldn’t advance him nor write him out of the epic.

I think he wrote this over many many years. I wonder how long he debated of what to do with Tom?

Carrick: I’m certainly not going to question your scientific creds here; as a regular citizen, I’m presented with a group of people who make a very simplistic analysis of climate: increased CO2(caused by human activity) will “force” the climate to change in a very predictable way: things will get warmer and warmer until the planet is no longer inhabitable, and that this will happen in such a short time that totalitarian emergency measures must be forced on mankind as soon as possible.
This is the part that is obviously false. It’s the alarmism and the takeover of human activity by a very small faction of true believers that is the bullshit part.
I’m sure there will be some effect from our activity, but don’t think it will be either tragic or even all that unpleasant. I certainly don’t think this hypothesis is any cause for mass action.

Like this?

No, I just looked it up in the Appendix.

Well, the first thing to address is just how much of the warming trend we’ve seen is associated with anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

I’m pretty sure McCain thinks that most of it is due to anthropogenic CO2. I think the science says otherwise: It appears that decreased pollution may explain more late 20th century warming than CO2 emissions.

Of course CO2 emitted by humans is microscopic compared to the main “culprit” (burning fossil fuels), but I suspect you’re being a tad bit facetious here.

Have you heard of Hell?

Exactly what the Luddites thought about the factories, belching smoke and flame. Sorry you can’t handle a difference of vision.

If he is saying this before he is elected, what until he actually is elected.

Hope you’ve got your Vaseline ready because America is going to be subjected to the entire panoply of the Democratic agenda under the Republican flag.

Who will vote for any Republican then, after McCain has so despoiled what it means to be Republican?

How long will it take for the US to emerge from a Leftist twilight once there is no alternative to being a Leftist?

No to McCain. Vote Conservative down-ticket and fight a holding action until 2010.

Tolkien’s obsession was to create a mythology for England.

Already done, much better, by others who came before him.
The Arthurian legend springs to mind.
It’s really the NeoLuddite vision of the Industrial Revolution, with the backwards ones portrayed as the heroes.

Perhaps Peter Jackson read it the way Robert does. Certainly the pits of Saruman in the Two Towers could be seen as an early factory.

For what it’s worth I always considered it an adventure story (the greatest one ever).

But then what do I know? I thought Melville was writing a fishing story.

By the way, this is how the problem of the ring would have been handled if they had only listened to me. Of course they didn’t. It’s just like the weekly staff meetings at SayAnything World headquarters.

A crystal ball actually.

This is part of the platform according to Rob’s source:

But the document remains silent on the question of capping carbon emissions — a policy McCain endorses — and tamps down the idea of using broad government regulation to address the problem.

“Republicans caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by aficionados of centralized command-and-control government,” the platform draft reads. “We can — and should — address global warming without succumbing to the no-growth radicalism that treats climate questions as dogma rather than as situations to be managed responsibly.

So again, we don’t have a “smoking gun” that McCain is going to implement some radical socialist economic program. If anything, this accepts a human role (which is there for a fact), without succumbing to hysteria.

Lestat:

Tolkien was an Oxford professor in ancient Linguistics. He was an expert in Nordic and Germanic myths. He was not writing a metaphor, but a myth.

I believe this is correct. Tolkien makes it clear that the author’s intention is neither to create a metaphor nor an allegory, but rather a myth. He has written extensively enough about this in his writings, as Lestat points out, that again as Lestat points out, no serious scholar would question his motivation for the Similarian (his first love) nor the LOTR.

Actually, it’s a metaphor for the cultural upset about the Industrial Revolution. The Shire is the “ideal” living situation(peasantry) so beloved of the Luddites. Mordor was the Luddite vision of the Industrial economy. Our present day environazis would love to put us all back into the Shire, with them as the ruling elite.

As I say, Robert108, there is plenty to call bullshit on with the creed of the global warming alarmists.

I think you’ve pretty much hit all of the issues: difficulty in predicting, magnitude of the effect and even whether the effect, whatever that is, is a net positive or negative for humanity.

Increased land area where we can grow crops certainly wouldn’t be a negative, IMO.

I find this basis of this whole MMGW laughable. Somehow in our lawful and responsible pursuit of happiness and economic prosperity we are supposedly destroying our planet and subsequently ourselves.

Only envy could dream this crap up.

Tolkien’s obsession was to create a mythology for England. He began writing of the First Age of Middle Earth around 1919 (this is from memory, don’t hold me to exact dates). He was so obsessed with this that he never published his main work because he continually revised it. Both the Hobbit and the LoTR are set in this world, but not the only stories. The Silmarillion is a good summary of his work, but certainly not the breadth of his work. If you like a more scholarly analysis of his unwritten works you can read the 10 volume Hisotry of Middle Earth (HOME). I actually find his stories about the 1st Age of Middle Earth far more interesting than the LoTR, though like most that was how I was introduced to Tolkien. I hate The Hobbit, it is so childish to be unreadable as an adult.

OK… then you are Gollum…. or maybe Tom Bombadil?

Tom Bombadil was a character Tolkien created for another story. Tolkien put him in LoTR because he liked him. In editing it was pointed out that Bombadil did not advance the story, but Tolkien liked him too much to remove him. The screenwriters for the movie did not have the same problem.

Actually, it’s a metaphor for the cultural upset about the Industrial Revolution. The Shire is the “ideal” living situation(peasantry) so beloved of the Luddites. Mordor was the Luddite vision of the Industrial economy. Our present day environazis would love to put us all back into the Shire, with them as the ruling elite.

Far to simplistic.

The Shire represents innocence and is set in a pastoral setting because that is the traditional setting for innocence. This is no more a metaphor for the Industrial Revolution than it is for WWII, though I find WWII more plausible, but still wrong. His motifs are far more traditional and mythic.

Tolkien was an Oxford professor in ancient Linguistics. He was an expert in Nordic and Germanic myths. He was not writing a metaphor, but a myth.

Carrick: All writers write from their knowledge base, and from their own imagination; seeing a metaphorical meaning is the right of every reader. If Tolkien really wanted such totalitarian control of how people interpreted his stuff, he shouldn’t have published it, IMO.
I just think he didn’t want to get involved in the controversy, that’s all.
I’m not restricted by his personal needs, and neither is anyone else.

The smoke and flames of Mordor

The smoke and flames must represent the industrial revolution because fire has never been used to represent evil before?

Are you an idiot?

Have you heard of Hell?

Tolkien’s Gawain and the Green Knight is far more accurate to the tradition and more enjoyable than White’s abomination.

You certainly have a right to your opinion. I also like “Morte d’Arthur”.

Both “accurate to the tradition” and “enjoyable” are completely subjective judgments.
I guess I offended your sense of orthodoxy about Tolkien.
Tough.

Whistler, do you read tea-leaves too?

‘The Once and Future King”? That is probably the worst Arthurian legend ever translated or written. The sad part is that it has become so popular that most believe that it is an accurate rendition of the story.

Tolkien’s Gawain and the Green Knight is far more accurate to the tradition and more enjoyable than White’s abomination.

Even Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle is better than White and it is mindless fiction.

Peasants are typified by the ruling elite, because they are uneducated, and therefore, “unspoiled”.

That sentence doesn’t even make sense.

You obviously get your Tolkien analysis off of some website, because no serious reader who has read his entire works would advance such theories.

As is probably evident in my former posts, I love discussing Tolkien. But your insistence on politicizing everything has made even this not fun.

ToTR is not a metaphor for anything.

Everytime I read Tolkien, I feel like he was going to take his saga in a very different direction using Bombadil and Goldberry, and then changed his mind and made him a quaint, even pointless appendage to what emerged afterwards.

Notice how the tone of Book I changes immediately after the Withywindle/Old Man Willow episode and the escape from the Barrows – Less fantasy and more nerve-wracking drama.

It’s true sure, but it’s so overly broad as to be troubling. I mean, just the fact that our population is growing adds more carbon into the air because more of us are exhaling C02.

What’s the solution? Restrictions on the number of children we can have?