Can't we all follow Angry Nerd's example? If we could all just lighten up and learn not to get our "boxers in a bunch" over silly little misguided worldviews defending idiotic wars, those lighthearted self-deprecating "philosophical libertarians" wouldn't get all "exhausted with our ridiculousness" all the time.

I think that deep down many in the Bush administration were sort of unrepentant cold warriors that saw the world as a dangerous place full of bullies and thugs, and if the US with the most powerful military in the world doesn't stand up to those bullies and thugs, who will?

Nobody provided any credible evidence to justify immediate invasion. On the contrary, so much of the "evidence" brought forth by the administration turned out to be misleading and problematic AT THE TIME that it became very clear there was a concerted effort to exploit the fears of 9-11 and mislead the country into…

"But everyone here seems to be trying to absolve Iraq of all culpability here. I truly don't understand. Are you guys posting from Iraq?"

The dicks, pussies, and assholes speech is a dangerously simplistic and self serving way of thinking about the world.

Dr.Robuttnik, you are misremembering history.

Watching it now as a grownup, the build-up is still effectively creepy, but the doll…not so much.

Amen on the Zuni fetish doll. Everyone I know that happened to catch that as a child, was horribly, wonderfully traumatized by it.

Here here on the Continental Op short story collection (I think it's published by black lizard and is just called "The Contintental Op".

A.I.?
I saw A.I. only once; in the theater when it came out.

Hm…yes. According to internets, LOTR came about when Tolkien's publisher asked for a sequel to the hugely succesful The Hobbit. Tolkien decided to revise The Hobbit in a few places, (notably in the section dealing with Golum) to make it fit better with LOTR.

The ring Bilbo finds in The Hobbit does not corrupt him, until LOTR. It seems clear that Tolkien made up all the stuff about it being the "one ring to rule them all" well *after* writing the Hobbit. If he had the whole LOTR plot in mind while writting the Hobbit, it sure doesn't show.

It's hard to imagine a big deal studio remake allowing the moral ambiguity and shades of columbine that are in the Swedish version.

Film version
I saw the film and haven't read the book.

Bad score?
I haven't seen this movie, but judging based solely on the scenes in the links above, it looks like the score is a bit too hamfisted and probably helped ruin the movie for those that didn't enjoy it.

reviewer baggage
Obviously we all bring our own backgrounds with us when we go see a movie.

Cornell may not have directly provided the funding, but unless something very weird was going on, I'm guessing it was instrumental in the whole process. Those guys were student's at Cornell, right? The research was proposed as part of their dissertations? Their advisers were Cornell professors? When they submitted…

where re-phrasings of "no use crying over spilt(sp?) milk" are concerned, I prefer the phrase "you can't un-fuck a butt".

Can you tell I'm sleep deprived?

In the case of this article, the Cornell experiment is mentioned very briefly as a colorful example of people's willingness to tune out any information that seems inessential. This isn't a report on that research, and including the researchers names would perhaps only confuse matters.