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Saturday, Sep 19, 2015 - 23:50 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Points Posthaste

Though Mr. Ham hadn't bothered to pull out his cigar and make an announcement this year, the past fortnight saw my fifth ICT over and done with - but first, an elections wrapup.


Final Dissection

By all indications, bar comprehensive private polling, the almost-70% popular vote share for the incumbents came as a shock even to themselves (definitely, I'm no insider, so take this with a grain of salt). For example, the retiring Inderjit Singh, whom was one of the very few to both have his ear being very close to the ground as an incumbent MP and be candid enough to mostly speak his mind, confessed that his call on Nomination Day was for them to "[score] at best 60% of the popular vote and to lose the same seats they had lost in GE2011, with perhaps having a 50-50 chance of winning Fengshan." In fact, after the campaigning, Singh's prediction became 60±2%, with a thirteen-to-fifteen seat loss. Of course, we know how that turned out.

His post-analysis is perhaps more interesting, for the factors that were raised - and those that were not:

  • LKY/SG50/Pioneer Package

    It is notable that Singh lumped exactly the same "feel-good" elements together as we did, with the inclusion of regional - mostly Malaysian - instability; given that 1MDB has managed to misplace another billion with a deputy public prosecutor found dead in an oil drum, and their ruling party's new defence shifting to "we're racist, but we're not corrupt!", this had to be an unfair advantage. However, his take was that this accounted only for 2-3% of the 10% swingback, while my own take was that it could have accounted for most of it.

  • Policy improvements, inclusive growth

    1-2%. Eh, why not?

  • Spoiler Tier opposition

    Basically, voters are only getting more discerning, as they increasingly refuse to vote for distressingly weak (i.e. almost all non-WP/SDP) opposition candidates, with spoilt vote percentage trends also bearing this out. Quite a few commentators have opined that having more than maybe two credible opposition parties is pointless, and from the circuses that happened, it's hard to disagree too strongly.

  • Freak Result Fear

    Mentioned here as "Rally rip-off", or the possibility that the incumbents could actually lose their two-thirds majority. Judged to have swung it another 1-2%. Note that the widely-circulated bookie odds, if true, meant that they were well off the mark, which has led some to suspect that they had been planted for this purpose, but let's not get too conspiratorial.

  • New Citizens/AHPETC super-spamming

    Completely ignored. Well, even as an ex-incumbent representative, he couldn't say anything at all on this.

On to a second opinion. Among all the reasonably-publicized online pundits, one of the small minority who correctly called the large swingback attributed it almost solely to the LKY factor (again, magnified by SG50 and the Malaysian drama). This is near-impossible to prove definitively, but indirect secondary data in the form of government satisfaction somehow shooting up from around 73% throughout 2014 as our former Minister Mentor's condition turned critical, to touch 80% during his national mourning period, does lend some credence to this viewpoint.


(Source: blogs.ft.com)


One way or another, the incumbents are certainly enjoying their renewed mandate, with the PM going as far as to state that the opposition's tack of appealing for votes to force the government to work harder as "against human nature", and his emboldened Defence Minister now calling to activate the military against the Indonesian forest fires.

However, if the 10% swingback was indeed mostly down to our departed founding father - as I am, and was, personally inclined towards - the implication is that sentimentality can fade quickly, as the Chiams discovered to their chagrin. Although, as mentioned in the previous post, the incumbents have integrated party with state so deeply - even disregarding further bargains - that one should really rationally cease to bother with politics at all. S$97 million for a "score-keeping and state-of-the-art information diffusion system", i.e. the Internet? Whatever man, it's all good.

To conclude with the electioneering, the next big event would be the Presidential election, to be held before end-August 2017, and it would be intriguing if Tan Cheng Bock - who has kept himself admirably neutral - stands again, given that a fair proportion of the anti-incumbent vote has probably wised up.


ICT Recounting

Polandball Special Forces overview

- my vocation's hardly that garang... or that funny


Another two weeks - okay, nine days - rendered in service to the nation. Fine, it wasn't all that taxing, but the main point was that, with all due respect, there were better things to do. The people were nice (though I suppose I'd do better if I could actually put names to faces), but I don't want to have to pretend that the army is especially time-efficient.

  • If there was ever a productivity suggestion that had to be made, it would be on the installation of equipment on vehicles - which has tended to involve plenty of nuts and bolts, often involving hard-to-reach spots.

    In my opinion, there has to be a better and faster way to securely affix Box A to Car B than to fumble about with bolts, often wasting minutes trying to position the piece just so that the blasted last bolt can finally get in. Yes, in practice, this probably isn't too much of a problem in an actual campaign where the equipment more or less stays on throughout, but eh, we're a fourth generation modern fighting force, right?

    One could almost imagine a modular mounting standard for equipment, with fixed distances between fastener holes, and maybe even just a few fastener sizes to simplify logistics, but that could be too much to ask. Then again, it's not like there's much else to do.

  • On the positive side, I've never had cause to complain about the food (though taxpayers might plausibly grumble at the cost). I've always regarded my undiscerning palate - all the more when slightly hungry - as a blessing. Heck, I even like combat rations, which reminds me, when is Soylent coming to Singapore?

  • Returning to the not-so-positive side, I discovered that although they have relaxed standards for the IPPT, I had relaxed my own standards even further. Recall my all-too-brief fitness phase some four years back? Well, I haven't even been checking my weight for the past couple years or so... which turned out to have increased by some seven kilos from my last known figure. It wouldn't be so bad if it were mostly muscle, but fat hope of that. Well, time to get it off - let's see what can be done in three months?

  • Sleeping on the ground (or a bench) is an art in itself. It took several nights to rediscover a reliable slumber position, which was - head supported by SBO (it's surprisingly comfy), boots off, and lower legs up on a field pack (or equivalent). The last is essential to keep pressure off the tailbone, which proved the major impediment to falling asleep.

  • Been having fairly poor luck in card games recently.

  • Prata is, well, prata.

  • Check shoes and boots before usage - the glue seems to disintegrate nowadays if kept in storage unused for some months.


Resulting in crocodile openings; "Young, but I'm not that bold"
[Lyrics]


Latest Reads

There was time in camp to get through some of the second-hand buys from Eastpoint Mall before the WP rally at Simei - Clancy's The Teeth of the Tiger, Ludlum's (ghostwritten) The Janus Reprisal, and partway through Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter, with Cussler's Sahara held in reserve.

The Teeth of the Tiger first. Sadly, it's main redeeming quality is being an exemplar of how to write a mediocre thriller. You can read the customer reviews yourself, but without giving too much away, it is no exaggeration to say that the book is a collection of repetitive clichés ("not here to sell Girl Scout cookies", "wasn't the Olympics" and "computer lit up" spring readily to mind), that it's one big post-9/11 anti-Muslim terrorist stew (they're kinda dumb and like pr0n, and one of them gets his comeuppance by having an American football shoved into his hands as he lay dying - pigskin, y'know), and the protagonists win by continually poking terrorist buttocks with a pen. Yes, you got that right.

And then one realises that it hit the New York Times bestseller list when it came out anyway, and one can understand, if not quite forgive, Clancy for dropping his level. Apparently, the hardest part in being a successful author is getting noticed in the first place. Burst on the scene with a true blockbuster like The Hunt for Red October, then keep it up with a good sequel or two, and you're well on the way to having it made. The brand could even get so strong as to survive duds like Teeth, though in Clancy's defence, he could have been rushed to fulfil a contract specifying a certain number of novels in X years.

For some authors, their brand becomes arguably stronger than their actual writing - Clancy himself spun off the Op-Center and Net Force series, and by all accounts has been laughing all the way to the bank. The Janus Reprisal doesn't suffer overly from riding on Ludlum's name - or vice versa - that said, being a relatively digestable read. Strikingly, despite being published in 2012, it had incorporated "kilodollars", a poorly-disguised cipher for Bitcoin, into the plot, if not in a critical role. Not quite into The Day of the Jackal timeless classic category, but worth a lazy afternoon in transit.

And we come to The Bonesetter's Daughter. No, I haven't finished it, nor read The Joy Luck Club (see, first novel hit again), but from what I've seen, Amy Tan can surely write. No firefights or spies here, and the content's a little heavy on the mother-daughter relationship end, which is not exactly my alley, but I wouldn't put it down too readily still.


Endpoints

In no particular order of anything:




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