Jesus is not a Republican
That's the title of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by religious history professor and evangelical Randall Balmer. While it's not the only quarrel he has with the religious right, he was particularly disappointed by the tepid response to extraordinary rendition and torture by the Bush administration:

Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the administration's use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear 'fetal screams' could possibly countenance the use of torture. Although I didn't really expect that the religious right would climb out of the Republican Party's cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.

I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies. 'It is our understanding, from statements released by the Bush administration,' the reply from the Family Research Council read, 'that torture is already prohibited as a means of collecting intelligence data.' The Institute on Religion and Democracy stated that 'torture is a violation of human dignity, contrary to biblical teachings,' but conceded that it had 'not yet produced a more comprehensive statement on the subject," even months after the revelations. Its president worried that the "anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration," thereby creating a public-relations challenge.

I'm sorry, but the use of torture under any circumstances is a moral issue, not a public-relations dilemma.

(Links added.) The essay is excerpted from Balmer's forthcoming book, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament.


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NOTES: Balmer via Brian Tamanaha ("Balkinization"); Republican Jesus via Jesus' General. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:32:00 AM -- |  

 
Re-reading Tolkien
As I've mentioned, we're currently reading The Lord of the Rings, or that is, I'm reading the books to Maddie before bedtime most evenings. Those many thousands of my readers who have not already read J.R.R. Tolkien's books might want to skip the following, or risk spoiling their full enjoyment of the stories later on. Those who continue are not guaranteed any great reward, either, just one reader's response to one well-known and beloved work of fiction.

Maddie is pretty wrapped up in the books. When the reassuringly powerful wizard Gandalf fell in the first one, she was inconsolable, and it was very hard not to tell her he'd be back. Later on a schoolmate told her anyway, probably from watching the movies, so the trauma was temporary. (Cheater. :))

The Lord of The Rings was one of my big reading experiences when I was a kid, in 8th grade or so, I think. As I told Maddie, I too was just stunned when Gandalf fell -- it was as if a beloved franchise player like Hank Aaron or Phil Niekro had suddenly died in a car crash... orchestrated by the front office. My reaction -- and I quote -- was "What!? WHAT!?" I just couldn't believe it. The final scenes as Gandalf faced his nemesis, the Balrog -- "you cannot pass"; the "Doom, doom, doom" drumbeats from the deep, his companions' headlong escape from the Mines of Moria, the final, implacable lines of the chapter: "Grief at last wholly overcame them, and they wept long; some standing and silent, some cast upon the ground. Doom, doom. The drum-beats faded." -- all are as fresh as ever in my imagination.

I've not checked around much about what's written about The Lord of the Rings, and I don't claim any fresh insights. But as a reader-out-loud of the Tolkien Ring saga to Maddie, you can't help but notice some things.

Above all, it's a world of landscapes. Tolkien spends a lot of words -- and lovely ones -- on the hills, trees, streams, sky, and more trees of the world his characters struggle through, and the land emerges on each page in clear yet everchanging focus -- often more sharply drawn than many of the characters traversing it, quite by Tolkien's design and inclination, I think.

I also can't help but think that the story owes much to the apocalyptic wars Great Britain had been embroiled in, whether or not that was conscious, intended, or admitted. The renunciation of the ring of power is a little harder to assign to that framework -- nuclear weapons? the totalitarian temptation? -- but not everything has to fit, after all.

It's also hard to decide whether to assign the ever-present sense of loss in the story to the World War framework as well -- i.e., to the decline of the British Empire, spent in battle with its greatest foe -- or to something more fundamental: regrets at a rural, magical way of life passing beyond reach. Cheating a bit myself now, I've read Michael Moorcock's critical piece "Epic Pooh," which is a pretty negative take on The Lord of the Rings. Moorcock takes issue with a lot, particularly Tolkien's elevation of the petit-bourgeois and the rural. I think he's wrong in that; you write what you know and feel, and that's what Tolkien knew and felt. It was a means to an end: allegiance to a world itself was the main thing Tolkien wanted, made vivid -- and then said good-bye to.

I've learned to handle the archaic turns of speech that may charm when read silently, but that can still trip me up when reading them out loud, well over 500 pages into the story. Although I actually rather like many of the songs and poems, I confess I can feel a bit silly reading some of them out loud; luckily, our deal is that Maddie reads or sings all of them, sparing me that chore. More seriously, Sam's subservience can grate, and descriptions of Orcs (goblins in Tolkien's world) or Southrons can verge on a peculiar, fictional variety of racism -- though to a lesser or maybe just more transubstantiated degree than, say, C. S. Lewis' descriptions of Calormenes in the various books comprising the Chronicles of Narnia.

But there are also throat-catching moments that I hope I've read well to Maddie: the fall of Gandalf -- "fly, you fools!" he cried, and was gone," -- and Frodo's decision to press on alone with the Ring among them.

I was particularly struck at how moved I was by what had seemed a foregone conclusion to me in past readings: Frodo's decision to take the "One Ring"and leave the safety of the elf-stronghold of Rivendell to carry out a counterintuitive, dangerous mission. A council has decided to destroy the Ring -- the weapon of weapons and the blackest of magic in Tolkien's world -- rather than risk corruption by its power. But when the question is posed who exactly shall carry out the mission...

No one answered. The noon-bell rang. Still no one spoke. Frodo glanced at all the faces, but they were turned to him. All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if in deep thought. A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice.

'I will take the Ring,' he said, 'though I do not know the way.'

I defy anyone with a heart who has read the story thus far (perhaps especially out loud), not to be moved, and even to aspire to something greater in oneself at that moment, or at least to conjure the possibility. Surely that's one measure of a great book.

It may be a measure of the simplicity of The Lord of the Rings that its pivotal moment can be so clearly identified. (Or, of course, it may be a measure of my own simplicity that I choose this one.) But if so, it is a simplicity and a moment that has been well earned. The long journey up to that point, as a narrative, has succeeded in convincing you of the idyll before, the dangers ahead, and the crystalline moment of decision when one proceeds despite one's own fears; the long journey to follow will repeat versions of this moment, each one posing the questions: what would I do, what do I do, when my own decisions loom? How do I wish to be? What's a world worth, to me?

The story is thus not some mere celebration of the virtues of a simple world, but a celebration of the defense of a cherished world, painstakingly assembled leaf by leaf, stone by stone, story by story. Often characters come most alive when they reveal their deep attachment to some particular place. The dwarf Gimli finds his holy place in the "glittering caves of Aglarond" and delivers a rare, lengthy soliloquy on its beauty to his initially uncomprehending friend, the elf Legolas; likewise, Legolas venerates forests like Lothlorien or Fangorn, eventually persuading the dwarf of their virtues; the future king Aragorn is rarely more vivid than when he navigates the river Anduin past the monumental gateway to the kingdom he is returning to. And Frodo and his fellow hobbits -- a pygmy race with no notable powers of their own save steadfastness, stamina, and a taste for mushrooms -- find their promised land right under their feet and in their memories, in their homeland of the Shire.

The Lord of the Rings is also an accounting of the price paid by these defenders of the world of Middle-Earth. Particularly the elves pay a high price, doomed to eventual exile by their very victory, which undoes their own lesser rings of power even as a new age of men begins. While the era of elves passes into Middle-Earth history, Frodo's home of the Shire abides -- but here again, Frodo can not fully share in that; the defender is marked by his experience, and finds himself apart from and cut off from his own home.

I think the recent movie versions of the books, while quite excellent, can't help but fail in this aspect of Tolkien's achievement. The books reconcile the story's heroic and tragic elements in a final narrative that seems to float to the ground as softly as a dandelion seed. A movie, even a trilogy of movies, seems to be too impatient a medium to allow the gentle pace and elegiac mood of the books' final chapters.

Finally, there's the matter of the Ring itself. I know of no other books where a token like the One Ring is so successfully imbued with power and kismet as in Tolkien's saga; it assumes nearly the status of a character of its own -- weighing down its bearer, preying on his mind, directing his footsteps. Frodo's struggle to impose his own will on that of the Ring is a wonderful tale, clearly told.

As I've grown older, I've been tempted to mentally relegate The Lord of the Rings to a lesser literary shelf. But re-reading it, and sharing it with my little girl, has convinced me I was right the first time, as a boy: warts and orcs and all, this remains a rewarding masterpiece for me. And, I hope, for Maddie.


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UPDATES, 6/24: (1) Paul has started a "Talkin' Tolkien" forum about these and other books, movies, etcetera that he and forum members like. (2) It turns out the great science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin read the books to her kids (and three times, too!), and wrote about it: Rhythmic Patterning in The Lord of the Rings. Via Kate Nepveu, who is keeping a LiveJournal about re-reading LotR, with lots of commenters pitching in. (Thanks, Chad.)
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:03:00 AM -- |  

 
U.S. reactions to terrorism and climate change
A couple of weeks ago I watched An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's movie warning about global warming. In it, Gore asks the question,

Is it possible that we should prepare for other serious threats in addition to terrorism? Maybe it's time to focus on other dangers as well.

Speaking to The Nation's David Corn this May, Gore predicted:

Six months from now ... you and I will agree that the period between the spring and the beginning of winter was a period when the country changed dramatically on global warming. Now, I have felt in times past that we were close to a tipping point, and I've been wrong. I don't think I am wrong this time.

On Thursday Brett Marston, who watched the movie with me, pointed out an academic paper, On the Divergent American Reactions to Terrorism and Climate Change, by the well-known policy and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, that touches on some of the issues those two statements raise. From the abstract:

Two of the most important sources of catastrophic risk are terrorism and climate change. The United States has responded aggressively to the risk of terrorism while doing very little about the risk of climate change. For the United States alone, the cost of the Iraq war is now in excess of the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol. The divergence presents a puzzle; it also raises more general questions about both risk perception and the public demand for legislation. (emphasis added)

And that's without even getting into the relevance of the Iraq war to reducing -- rather than exacerbating -- the risk of terrorism.

Sunstein's article is very interesting and well researched; it's a superb introduction to the topic. Unlike Gore, however, Sunstein is skeptical that Americans can be mobilized any time soon to support meaningful policies to counter climate change, unless a 9/11-like event changes American perceptions of their own vulnerability to this threat, or until the costs of global warming risk reduction improve.

In one study he cites, American respondents appear to have an exaggerated perception of their own personal risk from terrorism, reckoning the likelihood of (presumably lifetime) personal serious harm from a terror attack at 8.27%, or about the same as rolling an "3" or less with two dice. By contrast, a 2006 Gallup poll showed two in three Americans believed global warming would not create a serious danger in their lifetime -- despite a majority being convinced it is already underway; a second study showed only 13% of Americans were most concerned about the direct impact of global warming on their family or community, as opposed to its impact on the U.S. as a whole, people throughout the world, or nature. Sunstein:

...doubts about the personal benefits of climate change policies help to explain divergent public reactions. As I have emphasized, legal initiatives are more likely if the citizenry is fearful; and Americans are far more fearful of terrorism than they are of climate change. The pattern of regulation is a natural product of this fact.

Now it doesn't take a brainy academic to come up with that; Sunstein's real work is in trying to explain the mechanisms leading to these different fear levels. Choosing between various economic/psychological models ("cultural cognition," psychometric, "rational choice"), Sunstein settles on a behavioral economics account, which permits and expects a certain amount of biased and even irrational behavior. In a passage that begs for less jargon and more clarity, he explains:

...it emphasizes the extent to which the public demand for regulation is based on intuitive cost-benefit analysis, affected by bounded rationality. In that analysis, both costs and benefits very much matter, but their assessment is influenced by heuristics and biases, including the availability heuristic and an undue emphasis on short-term effects.

Translating, "bounded rationality" seems to imply a narrow focus on immediate consequences while ignoring wider issues, while "availability heuristic" apparently means something like "ignoring problems for which one doesn't have enough information." Fair enough, I can buy that.

Trouble is, I don't know what to do with it. Surely, at the pragmatic level Sunstein is aiming for, the question is how American risk perceptions might be recalibrated to something resembling accuracy. The model (like it or not) is Europe, where governments and citizenries have by and large not gone completely overboard with expensive, misguided, and/or immoral solutions to terrorism, and have reacted constructively to the challenge of global warming.

To Sunstein, the greater European readiness to support climate change risk-reduction efforts is simple to explain. It's "because the analysis is much more favorable to risk reduction in Europe" -- citing MIT economists Nordhaus and Boyer,* whose economic models suggest Europe would be the major beneficiary of the environmental effects of reducing emissions, while the US would be a net loser. While Sunstein accepts their findings at face value, or at least without further discussion, at least two critics of the Nordhaus/Boyer approach claim those results stem in part from subjective and somewhat startling valuations of the enjoyment of warmer temperatures:

Nordhaus and Boyer propose, on the basis of relatively slim evidence about warm versus cold-weather recreation in the US, that the subjective enjoyment of the climate is maximized at a year-round average temperature of 20°C. This is roughly the temperature of Houston or New Orleans, cities where anyone who can afford it uses air conditioning for most of the year...

More importantly, Ackerman and Finlayson argue the Nordhaus/Boyer estimates ignore the greater climate variability (and consequently climate severity) expected and observed under global warming. If so, one or two more Katrinas or "Hurricane Epsilons" might cause American perceptions of climate change costs to catch up and even surpass European ones in a hurry -- especially as rising sea levels heighten vulnerabilities to such storms.** (The median expert estimate is that sea levels will rise one half meter by 2100.)

This isn't to accuse Nordhaus (or Sunstein, for that matter) of being a shill for Exxon -- these are hard things to think about and model; you start simple and work your way up. It's only to say that issues like this that make me take Sunstein's analysis with several grains of salt. To his credit as a social scientist, he is trying to be somewhat agnostic about the accuracy of risk perceptions, but he can't avoid trying to peg those perceptions to "reality" benchmarks -- when those benchmarks are necessarily riddled with assumptions of their own, and seem to be trending worse and worse as new data and analyses are added to our knowledge of global climate change and its likely effects.

Remarkably, given the title of his article, Sunstein seems to overlook something I (and my fellow scholars here at the Newsrack Institute of Public Policy) think might be particularly important: the degree to which very big issues like terrorism and global warming crowd eachother out in people's thinking.

I can't back this up with a knowing reference to some classic of public opinion research, but it seems likely to me most of us have room for one or two major issues we are ready to take or at least demand some action about. After that, it's usually either overload (maybe yet another way of saying "availability heuristic"), or unfocused, low level anxiety about "all the other crap going wrong out there" (maybe yet another way of saying "blogging"). If so, overestimating the importance of Huge Issue #1 may lead, in the aggregate at least, to underestimating the importance of Huge Issue #2 -- and in that case, Sunstein has performed a huge service just by introducing the Kyoto-Iraq comparison, which has received wide attention.

Sunstein is open to the notion that leadership can affect public opinion and not just reflect it, writing, "there is no question that ... it would be possible to increase the salience and hence the level of concern about the risks associated with climate change, and hence to magnify the public demand for a regulatory response." In discussing political and policy options for leaders concerned about climate change , Sunstein frequently refers to Daniel Abbasi's Americans and Climate Change: Closing the Gap Between Science and Action, one result of a October, 2005 conference sponsored by Yale University and attended by over 100 experts from both the "science" and "action" realms. What's interesting (and heartening) to me is that I recognize many of the action recommendations made there --

• recognize climate change as an urgent and moral issue, not just a scientific or environmental one...
• execute a public education campaign...
• communicate the scale and urgency of the issue...
• convene dialogues free of economic and political compromises...

-- all carried out or echoed in a certain well-known movie by a certain former vice president.

Of course, that shouldn't surprise anyone. Gore was there, too.


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* Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming. William D. Nordhaus, Joseph Boyer. MIT Press, 2003.
** Note that catastrophic flooding need not always occur for the price to be paid -- it seems likelier to me we'll simply see continuous and quickening levee construction and repair costs as the 21st century continues, punctuated by occasional catastrophic failures such as in New Orleans. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:45:00 PM -- |  

 
Technical difficulties
Technical difficulties continue for readers of this blog using Internet Explorer 6.x and 7.x, but not for readers using Firefox. Internet Explorer 6.x and 7.x (hereafter IE6.x/7.x) readers see certain blog pages (currently including the main page) load but then vanish, leaving behind a dark gray page with the number of comments of the most recent (top) post. This happens only once scripts (and ActiveX controls, which I don't use) are "unblocked."

For pages that fail this way, I've learned that removing the comments from certain posts (so far, always the top two posts) "solves" the problem, which makes me suspect something is wrong with the Haloscan comment system or (inadvertently) with certain comments left by readers at these posts. I've posted a description of the problem at the Haloscan users forum.

I wouldn't usually suggest this, since I hate getting this kind of advice myself, but IE6.x/7.x readers who see this before "unblocking" scripts might consider downloading Firefox 1.5 and using it as their browser instead, at least for the time being. It's a better browser than IE6.x in many ways, including "tabbed browsing" (one window, many web page tabs) and "live bookmarks", which let me see which blogs have updated without viewing the page. I want the blog to work for IE6.x, too, of course, and will do my best to figure out how to fix the problem.


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UPDATE, 6/22: It looks like Safari browsers are having the same problem. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |  

 
"All right. You've covered your ass, now."
More from Barton Gellman's review of the new Ron Suskind book, "The One Percent Doctrine":

The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Now beat it. But wait -- there's more!

Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."

"All right, Crumpton. You've covered your ass, now." Now beat it.

I'd prefer to think this is just run of the mill (for Bush/Cheney) extreme fecklessness and incompetence, rather than yet more high crimes and misdemeanors by our ruling duumvirate. But it seems important -- for their sake! -- to try to rule out darker explanations for why Bush didn't care much about an imminent attack, and didn't heed warnings the attacker would elude capture.*

Come November, there should be some investigations. Make them happen. Call your Democratic Congressman, or your Democratic challenger and let them know you want these matters -- the August 6 memo, the Downing Street memo, NSA warrantless surveillance, Tora Bora, torture, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Katrina, and more -- investigated, with a view to impeachment if warranted.



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* Reminds me of the recent Atlantic Monthly article about al-Zarqawi by Mary Ann Weaver:

During my time in Jordan, I asked a number of officials what they considered to be the most curious aspect of the relationship between the U.S. and al-Zarqawi, other than the fact that the Bush administration had inflated him.

One of them said, “The six times you could have killed Zarqawi, and you didn’t.”

posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:54:00 PM -- |  

 
"You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?"
The Washington Post's Barton Gellman, reviewing Ron Suskind's new book "The One Percent Doctrine," writes that Suskind learned that supposed Al Qaeda linchpin Abu Zubaydah was almost certainly nothing of the kind:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Entrusted with no more than arranging minor logistics -- "travel for wives and children and the like," Gellman summarizes -- it seems Zubaydah may have known where the odd loaner pickup truck was located, at best. Nonetheless, he was identified as an important Al Qaeda operative, for instance in a April 20, 2002 radio address by President Bush:

The United States also continues to work with our friends and allies around the world to round up individual terrorists, such as Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan.

Zubaydah continued to be touted as a prize catch in the "Global War on Terror": in July 2003, the White House Press Secretary released a "fact sheet" referring to him as a "key plotter," and Bush himself referred to him as a "key operator"; in January of this year, Bush bragged "But Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad -- there's a series of chief operators who are no longer a threat to the United States. I mean, we are dismantling the operators. And when we find them, we bring them to justice as quickly as we can." And on November 8, 2005, during the debate over the McCain amendment, Scott McClellan used Zubaydah to deflect questions about why the CIA should be permitted to torture:

MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear. [...]

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from the military?

MR. McCLELLAN: David, let's talk about people that you're talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You're talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.

And to top it off, Suskind reports the disturbed "key operator" Zubaydah had in fact become the object of directly, presidentially condoned torture. While Bush's involvement in U.S. torture has been widely assumed, I don't think that involvement has been reported this directly and in this much detail before. From Gellman's review:

'I said he was important,' Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. 'You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?' 'No sir, Mr. President,' Tenet replied. Bush 'was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,' Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, 'Do some of these harsh methods really work?' Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, 'thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.' And so, Suskind writes, 'the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.'

(Emphases added.)

Jesus wept. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" Too late to worry about that; impeach Bush -- then put him in day care under close supervision. And I'd like his supporters to never, ever talk to me or anyone else about their "moral values" again.

Via Jack Balkin ("Balkinization"). posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |  

 
The Glittering Caves of Aglarond
...as described by Gimli in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers":

... ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces!"

("Gems and crystals" link via Teresa Nielsen Hayden.) Having finished the "The Fellowship of the Ring" about a month ago, I'm now reading "The Two Towers" to Maddie and passed this point a week or two ago, so I want to show this cave to her. OK, they're all crystals in the linked photos. But some pretty amazing ones, I think you'll agree. posted by Thomas Nephew at 8:30:00 AM -- |