Also, if you're going to limit yourself to subsections of shows' runs, I think it's fair to say that only seasons 2-5 of Buffy really qualify.

Ahem: The Shield? The Sopranos?

The magazine, as I understand it, is basically a loss leader and brand identity maintainer. Playboy Inc makes its money on its various cable channels (several of which do not carry the Playboy name) and to some extend on subscription areas of its websites. (It is indeed a little surreal how awesome their professional staff is: I've had to deal with their tech people occasionally and they were all top-notch.)

"Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning. Does he understand it?"

Boychik, this is From's entire schtick. He has made an entire career out of being ever so sad about how wrong the conservative movement was a decade ago (especially of course in such a way that betrayed basic conservative principles which are as everyone knows never wrong in and of themselves). The current behavior of conservatives in the moment is, of course, beyond reproach and not even really worth thinking too hard about: there will be plenty of time for that in ten years when his next book comes out.

That is a debater’s rhetorical tact, not a serious policy option. Is it? I would say it's at the very least a defensible proposition that US policy toward the Soviet Union and its outposts (and vice versa) became a lot more rational after the USSR got nukes. The problem, of course, is that rationality is not, in and of itself, and end state. Nukes took direct conflict between the US and USSR off the table for as long as the USSR existed thereafter. But both countries found plenty of other means of expressing their differences of interests. An Iranian nuke will take direct conflict between Israel and Iran off the table. But it doesn't exactly guarantee anything else.

"If we're going to be considered a rogue state, well, what's the difference between Iraq and North Korea?" Cyclops asks. "Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction." In "fairness", a land invasion of NK would have been a nightmare scenario even before the DPRK got nukes. The north side of the DMZ is one of the most heavily fortified places on earth, and the NK army is well dug into the mountain ranges. And you wouldn't have had the luxury, like Iraq, of quietly building up all of your forces and picking your start date: a sudden movement of US forces into the area with known-hostile intent would provoke an immediate reaction, and you'd suddenly be attempting an amphibious+air insertion under fire, while meanwhile the NK artillery is busily reducing the 6th-largest economy and 3rd-largest city in the world to rubble behind you. And that's even assuming that China would tolerate US military adventurism along its border, which they almost certainly would not. ...which is not to take away from Cyclops' main point: the weak get picked on, and the strong left alone. It's just that WMDs really were never the, uh, x-factor in the decision.

"On first blush, that would seem to be a testimonial to the discipline of the all-volunteer military." Actually, I think that's primarily a testimonial to the spectacularly unappealing nature of heroin itself. It takes a very particular kind of personality to think that it's a good idea.

There is no requirement from God, Elvis or the Flying Spaghetti Monster that a sales tax or VAT be flat or regressive. It can in fact be made progressive: just offer a full refund plus interest on sales tax to anyone making under $20k/yr (modulo dependents etc).

LS: you can answer that question for yourself by going back through the archives of this very blog. The answer might surprise you.

Fucking hell. I've been calling the GOP "our domestic Phalange" for years now as a JOKE. I guess that will teach me...something.

So an "anemic" defense budget is where we only spend, what TWICE as much as the next ten largest countries combined on "defense"? Some anemia.

You can be legitimately proud of this one, man.

Okay, gotcha: any Muslim who appears to be friendly or reasonable is actually practicing Taqiyya and is secretly conspiring to implement sharia law and make us all dhimmis in our homeland. So any evidence of Muslims acting reasonably is actually more evidence of how sneaky they are Brilliant! I love completely non-falsifiable hypotheses! Evaluating evidence on a case-by-case basis is haaaaaaaarrrrd!

In fairness, Spencer, the way you tie your lures always did strike me as a little swishy. :)

"To the degree you are a good Muslim, as defined by rigorously following and promoting the entirety of the Koran (with Islam lacking as it does any centralized institution to contextualize those 7th Century scriptures in a 21st Century world, what other definition could there be?) it becomes increasingly difficult to be a good citizen." O RLY? So uh, I seem to recall there's this other major monotheistic religion that also has a somewhat musty and bloodthirsty central text and that also lacks a central authority to interpret it. How'd they do with that whole democracy thing, anyway?

And by the way: I pretty much agree on all counts. The two great themes of ASoIaF are "living in the middle ages basically sucked" and "leadership is hard." In the latter category we have, well, basically every male Stark of adult age. Jon, much like Cersei, convinced himself that acting like a badass was more important than actually watching his flank. Jon's motivations were "better," but what of it? Practically his first act as Lord Commander was to make a point of alienating and distancing his friends and supporters, and he followed that up by repeatedly pissing in the faces of people who were potentially friends but also potentially enemies. No shock how it worked out.

Crow: I'm willing to believe that ONE of the deaths at the end of ADwD are fake-outs, but not BOTH. Between the demonstrated ability of the Red God's priests to occasionally resurrect people and the drawn-out prologue chapter that established that skinchangers can resurrect themselves, I think we can safely expect Jon to survive his temporary case of steel poisoning. Ergo, Stannis is dead.

I don't pretend to have good answers to any of these questions, but I'd like to propose a counter-question: What the fuck, precisely, is Littlefinger up to? Varys has, at least, kinda-sorta tipped his hand to the narrator. But Littlefinger? He clearly has two goals: be king and have incredibly creepy sex with Sansa Stark. But other than the admittedly not-bad-on-its-face step of hiding out in the most fortified castle in the world while his enemies slowly kill each other off, we really have no idea of how he intends to reach the end goal. And no matter who eventually wins the multi-way civil war, they're still likely to have a bigger army and a better claim by blood to the throne than Littlefinger. So... which one of them is actually his agent?

The song is awesome, but nowhere near as awesome as the "OH NOES YOU RUINED HARDCORE 4 EVER" wailing from the more-punk-than-thou brigade in the youtube comments.

I'm not sure what wigs me out more: the fact that the "Liberal Jews are the enemy / reactionary Zionists are our allies" meme appears to be well on the way to mainstream in the American public discourse (thank you, Glenn Beck), or the fact that it's happening with basically no pushback from mainstream orthodox/conservative organizations. Thanks for making it a self-fulfilling prophecy, guys!

Jaime: the meme comes from an effusive, utterly uncritical article about Israeli airport security that made the rounds of the blogosphere a year or two back: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother It's about 1 part actually useful suggestions (better baggage-handling procedures, avoiding long queues and bottleneck points, armed marshals on all flights) to three parts moronic chest-thumping: "we totally deter terrorists by careful profiling of behavior", which anyone with the slightest clue about how things work in Israel knows means "eyefuck anyone who looks slightly Arabic, detain anyone who looks nervous and who cares if it's actually having any more of an effect than the air marshals", but which TSA-tired Americans desperately interpret as a sign that Israel has some magic sauce that we can sprinkle onto JFK, LAX et al. (The fact that TLV, on the busiest week of its life barely carries the same number of passengers that LAX does in a single day is also conveniently glossed over.)

Hey, 7/30! That's my birthday. An excellent day to get hitched-- mazel tov!

The Captain America movie is, sadly, set entirely in the WW2 era; I presume that fishing him out of cryogenic storage will be the opening hook of the Avengers movie... ...except that I'm willing to bet money that one or both of Captain America and Thor will tank badly, Marvel will get cold feet and the Avengers movie won't get made. (And I'd consider an outside bet that Green Lantern fails badly enough to actually kill off superhero movies entirely for a while, save of course for the inevitable third Nolan bat-film.)