A depressing series of news days lately. What can make us feel good? Jon Stewart? Stephen Colbert? Star Wars? How about all three? Yet another reason to regret leaving San Diego--where the Force for Change ends at Comic-Con. May the force ever be in your odds!...
The effort to develop a single 5th generation fighter plane has been a challenge for the US and its allies. The F-35 is very expensive and may underperform. The quality of debate about this plane...
Given the low salaries many of us start out at, we probably overly identify with the crisis contained within this trailer (no significant spoilers):
Watch Game of Thrones or you might be foolish enough to dare a mighty Khal to engage in a slap game.
 As a change of pace for Friday Nerd Blogging, I thought this nicely combines a kid's imagination with Joss Whedon in entirely unpredictable ways. Oh, and as long as Joss is involved, I think this counts for FNB, right?Yes, we miss Charli.
 Charli has volunteered me to sub for Friday Nerd Blogging duty for her for the next three weeks.  It turns out that sending her links to fun stuff is a bad idea.  That will teach me.The most important pop cultural event of the next week is clearly the return of Breaking Bad.  Too bad it does not have any dragons, super-heroes, or other Comic-con bait.  So, BB cannot count for Friday Nerd Blogging.  The good news is that there may be a spin-off of the series as its end is near.Of course, the other big event of the week is Comic-con.  So, here is part 1 of a series that represents the best IR...
As if controversies over graphic sex, gratuitous nudity and rat torture weren't enough, now this. Yep, that's George W. Bush's head on a spike, in the Game of Thrones Season 1 scene where Joffrey torments his fiance Sansa by forcing her to view various decapitated heads.Fans didn't actually catch this, until producers pointed it out on the DVD commentary. The news was popularized on a Reddit thread, picked up by  IO9 and quickly caused a stir. According to the producers, this "wasn't a political statement... we just had to use whatever head we had lying around..."At Lawyers, Guns and Money,...
I was shocked, shocked to learn that Bloggingheads.tv advertised my discussion with Rob Farley over gender and race in Foreign Policy / Game of Thrones by promoting only the clip where I discussed "nudity":Since that clip was not much more than a throwaway comment in a wide-ranging discussion, yet in fact touched on one of the most, er, much-trumpeted aspects of the show so far, I thought I'd take the time to expound a little bit since after all, many commentators disagree with me and find the nudity and sex scenes in the both gratuitous and somewhat exploitative. For example, Emily Nussbaum...
Given that George R. R. Martin has clearly thought enough about religion in his series to both deal explicitly with these themes in the books and to create an extra feature about it for the TV show, I am supremely puzzled as to why some of the most interesting religious aspects of the book series are being left out on screen. Consider the "baptism" scene in last week's episode, in which the Priest of the Drowned God splashes seawater over a man to inculcate him into the tribe of the Iron-born to the words "what is dead may never die." If you haven't read the books, you would entirely miss...
Some of those who missed the ISA panel on popular culture have asked me if I can send them my remarks. So I decided to upload them in video format as well. You can see my presentation on Battlestar Galactica and civil-military relations below. This is essentially a presentation of a research paper I did with two students, which will be published later this year in Nicholas Kiersey and Iver Neumann's Battlestar Galactica and International Relations.While we're on the topic of civ-mil and popular culture, let me be the first to say that BSG is not the only cultural artifact through which these...