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Author: Bryant

Kings of smarm

Last week’s Apprentice was intensely dull, so I’m only just now getting around to writing about it. Executive summary:

Sex still sells and the women are still using it. The contestants are stuck in the mode of individual achievement these days; they can’t stop running around long enough to delegate to non-contestants. Nick used some pretty good tactics to buy himself an out, and they worked. Bowie got kicked out for no good reason. Omarosa is smart enough to turn people around and get them to like her in one week flat.

This week’s, which I haven’t watched yet, scrambled the teams.

The bar has been set

President Bush says, regarding his National Guard service in Alabama:

 There may be no evidence, but I did report; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged.  In other words, you don’t just say “I did something” without there being verification.  Military doesn’t work that way.  I got an honorable discharge, and I did show up in Alabama.

This really simplifies the question. It’s not about the honorable discharge, or whether or not it was OK to miss some service as long as you got the OK from your CO, or any of that. It’s about whether or not he showed up in Alabama. This isn’t a matter of missing documentation, either; it’s about documents which show no service in Alabama in 1972.

Character WISH

This week’s Game WISH asks:

What are your characters’ mottoes, in ten words or less? Quotes and formal mottoes encouraged.

That’s fun! In no particular order:

Paul/Emoticon: For God, France, and humanity.

Reese: It’s all about the roads.

Mr. Wellstone: Fame follows fashion.

Cian: One must always journey to find wisdom.

Stick: Break dimensions, go to jail.

Clarice: Hail Britannia!

Constantine: Friends and family; blood and bone.

Jayson: Fortune follows.

(That last is a bit of a cheat, being my own family motto. But I like it.)

The record says

So, how’d I do on predictions?

Arizona
I said it’d go Kerry, Clark, Dean in that order. It did.

Missouri
I said Kerry, Edwards, Dean. Yep.

Oklahoma
I said it’d go Clark, Edwards, and Kerry in a tight race. (Polls had Kerry ahead of Edwards for second.) Yep again.

South Carolina
Edwards won it pulling away, as per prediction.

Delaware
I said Lieberman would come in second to Kerry and then quit; I was right but only by a couple of hundred votes. Edwards nearly beat him. Lieberman did quit.

North Dakota
I said it’d be Kerry, then Clark, then Edwards. Dean beat Edwards for third.

New Mexico
I had Kerry beating Dean by only a few percentage points. I missed. Kerry beat Clark by 21 percentage points.

So not too bad. It wasn’t actually hard or anything; I just looked at the polls and then adjusted for the Edwards bounce. Everyone missed Edwards in Iowa and New Hampshire, so I figured they’d miss him again this time, and I was right. Anyone can be a fairly accurate political prognosticator without too much effort.

Time and again

Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is out. He’s made it available on the Web under a Creative Commons license again, so you can always download it and read it if you aren’t sure about buying it in the store.

This one didn’t work so well for me. As an extrapolation of current cultural trends, I can’t make it dovetail. Doctorow gets the tribal aspect of Internet culture right — we do form tribes across the time zones, driven by our own interests — but I’ve never ever seen a tribe form around a specific time zone. In fact, part of the attraction of the Internet tribe is the knowledge that whenever you log onto the MUD — hit the IRC channel — visit the bulletin board — fire up AIM — whatever — someone will be there. Part of the attraction is that the Internet is always on. Time is irrelevant.

And the tech sucks. One of the McGuffin ideas is broken; one of the character plans to make a fortune from a scheme in which people with more than 10,000 songs on their car MP3 player get to skip tolls. Doctorow loves redistribution of information, which I appreciate, because I do too. However, incentivizing heavy file sharers does not magically pay for itself. Rather, it costs you money because people move towards the behavior which you’re rewarding.

Now, you can fix this by changing the threshold from a fixed number to a percentage; the top 5% by the number of songs shared metric get a free ride on the Mass Pike. But I don’t want to rant endlessly about a single technical point. I want to observe that Doctorow is letting his passions and his technical fondness take over his actual story. He wants extrapolations to say a certain thing, so he writes them that way. Eastern Standard Tribe veers too far towards polemic.

Real thing or nothing

The Massachusetts Supreme Court just ruled that civil unions won’t satisfy the constitutional requirement to permit gay marriage. This guarantees that a Massachusetts constitutional amendment will wind up on the state ballot in 2006. Despite all the whining about judicial activism, this is the only way Massachusetts voters were going to get to vote on the issue — the Massachusetts legislature wasn’t going to go out of their way to put a constitutional amendment allowing gay marriage on the ballot. Seems to me that a) the judges acted correctly, fulfilling their obligation to rule on Constitutional questions and b) their actions have made it possible for the matter to be considered by the voters. Ironic.

Mini super

Welcome to your handy guide (biased and slanted) to today’s primaries.

We have seven primaries today, which will greatly affect the chances of three and a half candidates. (If Kucinich, Lieberman, or Sharpton win any of the primaries, that will have an effect as well, but I’m dubious about their chances. Which is a shame, at least in one case.) Dean’s strategy is to spend all his money on Michigan and Washington in an effort to win both of those states. Winning Michigan would put him solidly back in the race. However, he’s not expecting to win anything today.

So we have Clark, Kerry, and Edwards. Kerry’s still in the race unless he suffers a catastrophic failure today. He needs to win at least three of the states he’s projected to win, and really wants to win all five of them to cement his status before the upcoming contests with Dean. Edwards and Clark both have to win the states they’ve targetted. Here’s the breakdown.

Arizona
Not very tight race between Kerry and Clark, with Kerry leading. Clark would love to win this state but it seems unlikely. Dean would like to beat Edwards here. My guess: Kerry, Clark, Dean.

Missouri
Kerry has Missouri almost wrapped up. Edwards wants to get enough votes here to pick up some delegates. Clark is nowhere in the mix. My guess: Kerry, Edwards, Dean.

Oklahoma
This is Clark’s must win; unfortunately, Edwards and Kerry are pushing him hard. Kerry more than Edwards. If Clark loses this state he’s more or less out of it barring a really unexpected victory elsewhere. If Edwards wins this state he’s in excellent shape. If I had to bet money on this one, I’d say Clark, then Edwards, then Kerry.

South Carolina
This is Edwards’ must win. Kerry is polling well here. Dean would like to beat Clark here, but the race for third is neck and neck. It’s sort of bad that Clark can’t beat Kerry for second in a southern state; it weakens the argument that Kerry can’t win over southern voters. Edwards wins this pulling away, with Kerry a strong second.

Delaware
Lieberman is making a stand here. He’ll come in second to Kerry. Fairly unimportant state this time around except insofar as it’s where Lieberman has spent all his time and energy and he still won’t win it. Lieberman’s campaign ends here.

North Dakota
Kerry has a fairly big lead over Clark. Edwards is a distant third. I expect that order to hold in the polls.

New Mexico
Dean recently said he could win this state. He’s running second to Kerry in the polls, with Clark nipping at his heels. Maybe he was looking at old polls? Maybe he has interesting internal numbers. I’d say Kerry wins it but only by a few percentage points.