Word: effectives
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There's a lot to love about "Cause and Effect." The fetching but elusive Ensign Ro Laren is in it. Generous amounts of drive plasma are vented from the starboard warp nacelle - always good. The writers actually give Dr. Crusher something useful to do for a change, and Kelsey Grammer makes an awesome, beyond-random cameo as the captain of the other ship. Plus, the whole conceit is brilliant. It's like one of Philip K. Dick's epistemological passion plays: we watch the same scenes four times, almost word for word, and they mean something slightly different each time...
...Cause and Effect" could be a metaphor for the whole Star Trek franchise. Each new version - and to date we've had five Trek TV series and 10 Trek movies - repeats the same basic scenario, but each iteration is burdened more and more heavily by the past, and each one ends in collapse. Then the loop starts all over again, but with that sense of looming doom one notch darker. Even I, a fan, am surprised that Star Trek is still with us after 43 years...
...enjoy it quite the way I used to. Star Trek will be a slightly melancholy pleasure, like spotting your high school sweetheart years later, all dolled up on the cover of a magazine. Cause and effect: with all this rebooting, I suspect something ineffable has finally been booted right out of Star Trek. There won't be that sense of intimacy, of something both brilliant and ridiculous, that told fans what they were watching was secretly theirs. That was all in the past. This is the future...
...Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA. We now know that Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract...
...Cuba. The harsh economic sanctions are a historical relic from past efforts to dislodge Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom several presidential administrations—beginning in the 1960s—have tried unsuccessfully to shake from power. The sanctions may have actually had the opposite of their intended effect politically, allowing Castro to blame the U.S. for Cuba’s sluggish economic development. As disagreeable as Castro’s actions toward America may have been, an embargo rooted in personal enmity against this single political leader is no longer a practical foreign policy...