Exactly. He's changed the past by virtue of being there in the first place (the past as quantity P is not the same as P + McFly—unless it's scenario 2 above), and he's for sure changed the field of available choices, and thus the lives, of anyone he comes into even the most trivial contact with, and they'd change the…

Okay, but what about the prep? In my experience, the colonoscopy is the easiest part of the process to endure, since, as you point out, you're pretty happily drugged for it and for a good while after. It's the prep-work I never want to repeat, and it's genius how from beginning to end (no pun intended) "it gets…

I saw his repeating Dodd's "processing" questions to her as lighthearted fun and nothing more, both the mood and context of it being wonderfully dismissive of the grave importance and utility it bore in Dodd's hands. I doubt Freddie was attempting to cult-bind her to him, a task I doubt he'd be equal to in any case.

I dunno. I think the ending, far from fizzling out, is deeply ironic, and the film's sharpest indictment of cult, in no small part for its calm, because it's Freddie's new-found calm achieved through his seeing through Dodd's bullshit and, it would seem, by his confronting and embracing his demons on his own (women:…

Many atheists, maybe even most of them, are agnostic. Their unbelief isn't a positive belief in any way analogous to religion, because their opinions are subject to change with the evidence as they understand it. Most people don't think it's very practical to take explicitly agnostic stands on things for which there's…

From a script authored by the same guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai.

MORE MONEY! MORE ROCKS!

Weird. I thought I was replying to EdSaid.

Wrong, as others have pointed out, but an easy mistake, given that Zora's the one who found work "taking pleasure from the serpent" while Pris, showing herself to be an acrobat of death (and more formidable than Zora), renders "pleasure model" a distinction without a difference.

Thousands of instances of a conceit that's usually situationally employed ("unfortunately, I was thinking with my dick") and rarely (if ever?) taken seriously as any kind of reductive truism about male cognition, would seem in any case to be legitimated after the fact by giving a pass to a patently sexist, hippie,…

Naive is better, but it isn't adequate either. There are no grounds to judge the crew as naive about the true nature of their mission if they had no indication (apart from Vickers' preemptively reproachful grade-school librarian's tone) of ulterior motives to go on. They do, however, seem naive about how to go about…

Who was gullible? Who was fooled by whom?

I remember there being the prototype Bat only, which he had hidden away on a rooftop, so it wasn't available for Bane/Talia to use. I don't remember there being engineers figuring anything out about the autopilot after the explosion.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/19/is-the-master-based-on-scientology-and-l-ron-hubbard.html

And nothing to absorb recoil.

And no dictionary pretends to be standardizing the language. They're purely descriptive and based on attested usage.

Two of these and you can throw a Zaireeka party.

What I hate about revisionist historians is the ability to blame the South for going to war to preserve slavery while at the same time claiming that the freeing of slaves was not part of the Republican plan. One merely needs to read the Republican party platform of 1860 to know that is false.

Freeing the slaves was not part of the Republican plan and it's not evident there in the platform. When they're speaking of the abolition of slavery they're talking about it only in the federal territories, not the states. Article 8 can't be understood apart from 7, and their background is the the Kansas-Nebraska bill…

I challenge you to define rambling and point to an instance of it in my post. Better, why not actually read the post or stop pretending you didn't and address some of its questions. Anti-intellectualism right out of the gates is less than impressive.