Saalon Muyo

I’m not stupid, it’s just that the media keeps catching me saying stupid things.

I’m glad Katie Couric doesn’t let them off the hook very easily in this interview, since this is yet more bullshit peddling by the McCain campaign about Palin’s readiness to do anything more complicated than run a state with less people in it than my county. Palin said something very specific to a voter in response to a question, and rather than address why she said it or what she meant by it, we get a line about how it’s “gotcha” journalism. If context was what was missing, why didn’t either of them provide any of that context?

Let’s try a different question. If your intention is to prove how fit to lead Gov. Palin is, why did Senator McCain need to sit in on her rehabilitation interview and spend the majority of the time talking? Is the hope now that if people just see her smiling and nodding on the screen while McCain talks that they’ll go “Oh, right, she’s much better this time,” and forget about that minute long increase-confidence-about-healthcare-reform-and-job-creation-economic-trade-umbrella-shore-up-the-economy-for-trade-and-heathcare ramble from her last interview?

Watch the above video. Couric asks Gov. Palin if she and Senator McCain are on the same page about whether you say out loud that you’re willing to do something like, say, kill Bin Laden in Pakistan if you find him there. Gov. Palin’s response is, basically, “Well, you know I talked to the president of Pakistan and we agree that we need to do everything to stop terrorists.” So, not an answer. Then Senator McCain jumps in to at least try and deflect the actual question with the “gotcha” journalism talking point.

Take Senator McCain out of this interview, and the answer you’re left with is another non-answer to a simple, specific question: “Did you meant what you said, or do you disagree with Senator McCain on this issue that he’s been blasting Senator Obama on for months?”

I do wish that, since Senator McCain was there, Couric had also asked, “How is what Senator Obama said about crossing into Pakistan worse than you singing ‘Bomb Iran?’” I’d like to hear the spin on that one, since we’re all here. If dad’s going to be a part of the job interview, you might as well grill him, too.

George Will is pretty conservative.  I’m not a full blown pinko lefty, but I’ve spent most of my politically-interested life reading and disagreeing with Will’s old school conservative views.  He’s a Goldwater style conservative, whose primary enemy is inflated government.  My enemy are those who take advantage of the many to increase the wealth of the few, and to combat them on this scale, an active government is required.

Will is someone I believe is dead wrong on most issues, but I’ve usually respected his consistency on his own views.  Well, at least economically.  It’s OK to be wrong, just don’t be a liar or a hypocrite.  And I’m sure if he read anything I’ve written, he’d find little economic common ground with me as well.  That’s cool.

The last thing I expect is to see him agree with my views on a Republican presidential candidate.  I should have given him more credit.  Maybe I’m just used to conservative columnists still crowing about liberal tax-and-spend Democrats seeking big government while George W. Bush inflated the size of government more than any president since FDR.  If your complaint is the expenditure of tax dollars, corporate bailouts should bother you more than welfare, because it’s costing you more.  But “tax and spend” is more of a rallying cry than a statement of ideological opposition.

George Will, at least, sticks to his Goldwater guns and criticizes Senator John McCain for a whole host of things, including his temperament and - thankfully - his undisciplined economic liberalism.  Mr Will asks: “So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history?”

Myself, I have no problem with spending tax dollars, within reason, for the public good.  I believe the purpose of the government is the protection of its people and its ideals, and that protection should not simply be military.  Its people should not die from hunger or from curable diseases, nor should they suffer because of unequal opportunity.  This is why I support universal health care, public schools and welfare programs, even when they are not administered properly.  Many of McCain’s supporters insinuate that Senator Obama’s economic plans will veer us toward Communism while raising no great cry as our government assumes control over our banking system.

I don’t know if George Will intends to continue his complains about McCain, or if we’ll see the traditional political shift pre-election where everyone shores up their ranks, but I want to thank him for what I imagine was an unhappy task when he wrote things like

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

and

For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people.

and finally

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

I know Mr. Will disagrees with Senator Obama on most things, and probably wants nothing to do with the economic policy Obama will support.  That’s why it’s so praiseworthy that he was willing to level the same criticism on Senator McCain.  I doubt Mr. Will wants to see President Obama, but as someone who has for so long decried big government, I can’t imagine he wants to see President McCain much more.

I expect we’ll be back to our respective teams in the coming months, but I want to thank Mr. Will for doing what any of us should do in his place.  Kudos.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican nominee for Vice President:

There’s not even an answer in there to agree or disagree with. There are barely any complete sentences. That’s what you do when you get asked a question that you don’t know the answer to and hope that if you keep talking you’ll somehow hit something close enough that they move on.

Seriously, if you were running a job interview and the candidate gave that answer to a question you asked, would you even continue the interview any further, save out of politeness? Worse, we’re not hiring a Software Engineer I here, and the issue is a little more important than “What are your thoughts on the Model-View-Controller pattern of web development.”

I agree with Cafferty’s comment here. If you’re not scared by the prospect of this nominee potentially becoming President, you should be.

I’m out for a week.  Heading down to Florida to hit Disney World and go on the Disney Cruise.  It is, I assure you, a much needed vacation.

I’m oscar mike in 60 mikes.  See you on the other side.

Dear Mr Kring,

I have been very critical of your show, Heroes, over the past two years.  Even when many were praising it during season 1 I found it to be slow moving and derivative.  There was enough promise to keep me watching, though, so I stuck with it through a disappointing end of season 1 and an even more disappointing season 2 run.  I say this so that you understand this is not the critique of a Heroes fanboy who’s looking for the show he loved to come back.  It’s the critique of a genre lover who sees the resources you’ve been given being squandered on uninspired and pretentious storytelling who wants your show to live up to its potential.  That’s the context.

Now the critique.

I’ve heard you say that you never read comic books and don’t know anything about the genre in which you’re writing.  You say this as if it’s a good thing, a badge of honor.  It’s not.  Working in a genre with which you are not familiar does not give you a leg up on the competition, but almost guarantees that you will walk walk ground already well explored.  When Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, one of the many works Heroes mirrors but fails to live up to, he was responding to a genre he knew well.  It was a seminal work precisely because he had done his homework, and his understanding of the genre did not chain him to following conventions.  In fact, it allowed him to brilliantly subvert them.

Heroes, meanwhile, is to me like someone playing the melody of a symphony without knowing the harmonies, counter-melodies and rhythms.  You see the plot devices you’d expect from the genre, but they play out in entirely conventional ways.  There are characters that fit into the mold of a superhero story, but without the development they’d need to be anything other than archetypes.  There are the powers we’re familiar with, but no invention as to their use.  It has never ceased to be a superficial retread of ideas better explored thirty years ago.

Take, as an example, your most persistent villain, Sylar.  If you were more familiar with the genre, you might have seen a very similar villain in J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars.  The similarity isn’t the problem, but that Sylar reuses a plot idea that was more deeply explored in the previous work.

In Rising Stars we learn that whatever power is behind the supers of that world is finite, and that with every use the strength of all supers decreases.  Yet, if one super dies, their power redistributes, boosting everyone else.  The power-thief in Rising Stars goes into action out of fear of losing their own power, while Sylar simply does it out of egoism.  One deals with an interesting and believable human motivation while the other gives us a one-dimensional villain.  I’m sure that your writing staff is capable of a more nuanced and interesting villain that is still as evil as you’d like him to be, but so long as you try to hold yourself apart from your own genre you risk being a faded copy.

Another example, this one from the upcoming season.  I  hear you’ll be introducing a serum that grants people powers.  I hope that you can find something interesting in that plot, as the already similar 4400 tackled this very idea a few years ago.  4400 was by no means a perfect show (and this idea is by no means original), but it explored the ideas behind its genre conventions in interesting ways.  I’m concerned that you are not using this idea because you saw it and believe you can do it better, but because you simply did not know someone already went there.  Not to say this is a new premise in the genre, but considering other similarities I admit to some concern.

I am also worried about your reuse of your own story hooks.  I hear that we’ll be seeing a dark future again, which now makes three seasons out of three driven by the exact same device.  A hero goes to the future, sees something bad, and has to try to stop it from occurring.  I admit that the best part of season 1 was seeing that mushroom cloud in the first episode.  The power of that came from its unexpectedness, and that power is gone after the first use.

Why not put a moratorium on time traveling for a season and find a new, surprising way to set the stakes of your season.  I know you believe season 2’s weakness was waiting too long to show Peter the virus-decimated future, but I disagree.  The problem was showing him that future at all.  The Shanti virus could have been built up through your existing characters, instead of showing us an X-Men Days of Future Past style apocalypse.  The stakes were certainly missing through much of season 2, but another bout of time travel was not the way to set them.

Finally, please stop predicating so many of your plots on the gullibility of your characters.  Mohinder is tricked by Sylar for far too long in season 1, and Peter has the same problem with Adam in season 2.  There is no narrative meat to seeing our heroes be so easily mislead for episodes at a time.  Trickery is like mind control; it often plays as a lazy shortcut to getting your characters into conflict with each other.  Giving them strong, developed motivations would be more satisfying and would let us continue to respect these characters in the morning.

In Heroes you have one of the best budgeted, best known superhero series ever.  You have a certain amount of creative freedom and a national audience.  I don’t need another Watchmen, but I’d like to be surprised by the show instead of frustrated by how often I can see what’s coming episodes away.  I hope season 3 is the success I’ve been waiting for, but if it’s not I hope you have the time to right the ship before it’s too late.

Sincerely,

Eric Sipple

Just because you’re the press doesn’t mean you have to print a campaign’s press releases without fact checking them first.  I talked a little about this before.  In their desperation to post things as quickly as humanly possible, the media has reached the point where it simply prints whatever anyone near a microphone says and worries about the accuracy of it later.

In the past, journalists used to follow rules about getting rebuttals and confirmations and reaction quotes before going to print with something.  That time is gone.  At this point, we should just hook Dragon Naturally Speaking up to every campaign microphone and feed it directly onto CNN’s website.

Today Senator John McCain decided to prove he has the biggest swinging cod on the block and told us that if he were President he’d up and fire that rotten head of the SEC, Chris Cox.  No one bothered to look into the fact that the president can’t fire commissioners of independent regulatory agencies.

So for the better part of a day, Senator McCain gets to look like Mr. Tough Guy, ready to shitcan the first person who harms a single hair on the head of one of his beloved American workers.  It would be nice if someone told Arizonan Cowboy that his gun is plastic before printing his threats to shoot any varmint that gets in his way.

Yes, a President can ask for their resignation, but saying that he’d handle the situation by changing the guard wasn’t the intent of Senator McCain’s line. It was to make him look like the badass maverick again, to show that he’s not afraid to straight talk his way right the hell through those who betray his country.  He was the drunk guy in the bar telling us if that guy who just left came back in he was gonna break this pool cue over his head.  It was bluster.

And the media, the ones who are supposed to pay attention to this stuff and to report not only what someone said but whether or not what they said has any truth to it whatsoever, continues to print first and verify later.  Paul Begala made a funny joke in a column about how if Senator McCain said the moon was made of green cheese and Senator Obama said it was made of rock, they would print something like “CANDIDATES CLASH ON LUNAR LANDSCAPE.”

I’m sure that, sometime the next day they’d print some postscript about how they did finally call Neil Armstrong and he said it was, in fact, made of rock, but by that point you’d have a day of press coverage showing a false statement as equivalent to a true statement.

That’s how it works, now.  Candidate or politician speaks, press takes the dictation.  I’m sure the fact that the media has been subsumed by corporate entertainment divisions and that typists demand lower pay than journalists has nothing to do with it, either.

I think it’s smart for Senator Obama to avoid getting caught in the somewhat media-driven Sarah Palin whirlpool of attention.  The election is between he and Senator McCain.  Palin’s 33% chance of becoming president during Senator McCain’s term certainly makes her a fair target for analysis, but she was chosen as an attention magnet so spending some quality time ignoring her is wise politically.

As I am not running against either her or John McCain, I can afford to spend a little time staring at the train wreck that is Sarah Palin.  Much like Michael Corleone, I find that every time I think I’m out, she says something that pulls me back in.  So it goes.

Asked during a town hall with Senator McCain what specific skills she could cite to rebuff critics, she gave an expectedly vague answer.  Apparently confidence and readiness are specific skills.

Asked for “specific skills” she could cite to rebut critics who question her grasp of international affairs, she replied, “I am prepared.”

“I have that confidence. I have that readiness,” Palin said. “And if you want specifics with specific policies or countries, you can go ahead and ask me. You can play ’stump the candidate’ if you want to. But we are ready to serve.”

So that’s the spin Palin is using to explain that her best definition of the Bush Doctrine was “His world view.”  Stump the candidate.   I could have answered that Bush Doctrine question, and I lack even the foreign policy badge of being able to see Russia from my house.  The pathetic covers being fronted by the pundits that the average American couldn’t have answered that question are foolish.  The average American is neither qualified to be nor interested in becoming President or Vice President.  The average American couldn’t define Astrocytoma, but you should probably be concerned if your doctor can’t.

Let’s not forget that less than a month ago you could have asked Ms. Palin what the Vice President does and she’d have been stumped by that one as well.  I’m glad she knows the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull, but I’d feel more comfortable with the prospect of her holding national office if she knew the difference between a publically funded and privately held company.  Especially when the companies in question are major financial institutions whose failures may seriously cripple our economy.

When you answer “If you want specific skills, you can go ahead and ask me,” to a question about what specific skills you have, you just failed the interview.  Please don’t answer a question by rephrasing it as a statement.  This isn’t a Socratic dialog.  It’s a national election.

“I am prepared,” is not a skill.  “I have that confidence.  I have that readiness,” are also not skills.  If a question like “What are your specific skills?”  stumps you, is there a question we can ask that isn’t a game of Stump the Candidate?

Am I missing something here? ’cause it sure looks like an “or” would have served this better than an else if.

                            if (tokenInfo.IsParentCalculation)
                            {
                                LoopTableSave();
                                GetValue(tokenInfo.Id);
                                LoopTableRestore();
                            }
                            else if (tokenInfo.AliasOf != 0)
                            {
                                LoopTableSave();
                                GetValue(tokenInfo.Id);
                                LoopTableRestore();
                            }

Dear God am I about to get busy.

I apparently lack the ability to see past a certain point when I’m queueing up stuff, ’cause I’ve got like, 4 major projects that all start racing downhill in October.  That’s a really, terribly not good thing.  I saw this coming about a week ago and started getting scared.  I’ve done this to myself before, and it rarely ends well.

And I made this decision I’m going to regret.  I’m going to get through it.  All of it.  Even if it leaves me with fatigue fueled pnuemonia.  A couple of years ago I decided I would write a novel length thing for the web, on a three-time-a-week deadline.  I got through it and came out with the ability to write a novel and have it not suck.  Now I need a new skill.  I need to come home every day and get through a part of the pile of crap waiting for me.

Procrastination is my most familliar personal demon.  I doubt I’ll ever stake the jerk through the heart, but perhaps I can learn to evade him a little better.  We’ll see.

I go on vacation Saturday.  When I get back, it begins.  We’ll see if I can make it through.

Carly Fiorina is right. Running a corporation is a completely different set of things than being Vice President.  For one, they don’t give you $21 million for getting voted out.

“Do you think [Sarah Palin] has the experience to run a major company like Hewlett Packard?” the host asked Fiorina.

“No, I don’t,” she replied. “But that’s not what she’s running for. Running a corporation is a different set of things.”

Also, when you’re President, the price of massive failure only includes things like global financial collapse and nuclear war, so clearly we should be holding our presidential and vice presidential candidates to a less stringent standard than being a CEO.