Imagine that we’re in an alternate timeline other than the insanity we currently live in and you’re posting what you would do if you had a time machine and wanted to act like a real dick. The idea is that your dickish move should result in our current timeline. They should be things that sound so insane and unlikely that a dick with a time machine could almost be a viable explanation for their occurrence.
For example: (Yes, I posted something similar in the other thread.)
I’d screw with the 2008 election so that President McCain ends up choosing a ditsy former beauty queen for a running mate; likely losing the election.
I’d go to 1947, and convince all the major newspapers in Chicago – especially the Tribune – to switch their nightly production method to a new method, that would require them to start their press run hours earlier than before. Sufficiently early, in fact, that in the next year’s Presidental election they would have to go to press before any state’s polls had closed, forcing them to predict the winner without the benefit of results.
I’m going to go back about 3,000 years, find some shepherd, and dictate several spiritual books to him in Hebrew. I’ll sneak a code in there that predicts all kinds of stupid stuff.
You remember back in '89, when all those stories about submolecular heating in palladium alloys hit the science press? Fleischmann and Yukihara were going around in circles trying to figure out what was happening. Of course, eventually IBM, Apple, and General Motors got involved and we started to figure out what was really going on, and that led to the new materials we enjoy now.
But what if someone (heh heh) had convinced Fleischmann had gone with his original idea, called a press conference with Pons, and announced his original conjecture? Nobody would have been able to replicate the experiments, and it would have discredited the field for a generation or more, maybe even put it into crackpot territory, up there with the Kennedy shooting and the Iraq invasion.