I’ve seen very graphically how to lose an audience, how to gain an audience, and how to keep an audience,” he laughs. “We did some tests and that was a hell of a thing. It was like opening out of town. I could feel the energy in a room dissipate during a scene, or I could feel people get excited. Or I could see people walk out. Ah! Any of those things will tell you something. You may get 15 different reasons [from test audiences] why a scene doesn’t work, and none of those reasons will be right, but if every single person is telling you for some stupid-sounding reason that a scene doesn’t work, probably the scene doesn’t work. None of them can put their finger on why.”

[...]

“It has always been my ambition to never have a director’s cut, that the best movie I can put out is the one I’m putting out,” says the filmmaker. “Even though I took things out, I did it for a reason. There’s an old saying amongst writers and directors: Kill your children. If it’s not working, pull them.”

-- Joss Whedon on Serenity over at Playing Now

This is the Age of Legislation (or, actually, the Age of Administrative regulation). Yet it is still the case that the legal understandings that course through and inform the interpretation of legislation, constitutions, and the common law are largely the production of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. Legal actors--their ideas, beliefs, and concepts--give life to the law. If that is correct, the Federalist Society and its various supportive adjuncts may come to have a formidable impact on American law.

-- Brian Tamahana in Laissez Faire Redux? over at Balkinzation.

I start needed to post some analysis rather than just cross linking to other analysts. Maybe when I have some time [ha!].

Blimps are so cool... except when used in war.

The idea is pretty wild, even for the dreamers at Darpa: build a giant blimp that can haul 1,800 soldiers and their gear 12,000 nautical miles, in less than a week.

[...]

The Defense Department has renewed its interest in blimps in recent years; a pair of tethered airships kept watch over the giant American military complex near the Baghdad airport, when I was there. The "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) Walrus is particularly intriguing because the Pentagon is trying to figure out ways to make American forces less reliant on deep-water ports, foreign bases, and billion-dollar airports to wage war. The Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command has its own plans for a such an airship.

-- via Defense Tech

Hooray for Principled Conservatives

The nasty tone that marks current exchanges in the public sphere between liberals and conservatives is disheartening and counter-productive (even if it can sometimes be a guilty pleasure). One consequence of this all-out-attack mode is that it stifles internal criticism amongst conservatives and amongst liberals. Any breaking of the ranks is taken as an act of disloyalty.

-- Brian Tamanaha in Hooray for Principled Conservatives over at Balkinization.

A wonderful article which goes through some contemporary conservative criticism of the status quo. In particular, Tamanaha goes on to explain:

A longstanding faith of conservatives--of the Burkean type--is that it is wrong, foolhardy, and doomed to failure, to try to remake a society by massive government (war or legally imposed) intervention. A society has an organic existence shaped by its customs, moral beliefs, and traditions; things change slowly through internal shifts in prevailing ideas. The very notion that we could (or should) invade a nation to help (or forcibly) transform it into a democracy is about as un-conservative as you can get. Principled Burkean conservatives should be howling in protest at the neocons and Bush for trying to justify this adventure in terms of spreading democracy. This is not to say that more democracy in the Middle East is a bad idea, but rather that this is not the way to make it happen.