I only watched about 15 minutes of the debate last Thursday.  It was painful to watch.  The next leader of the free world is either a senile old man or another old man who lied the entire night.  Everybody knew this was the choice for several months now but I was hoping that Biden would show some life and convince the undecided that he at least can make it through another four years.  After all, he had time to prepare and supposedly people helping him prepare.  I don't think it is hard to counterattack Trump and all his lies.  Yet it looks if nobody prepared him.  So either Biden is really senile or he had idiots helping him.

So the question for the Democrats is: Should and can they replace Biden?  If so, who should replace him?  If they had a good replacement available, I would say yes, go for it.  But Harris is terrible and most democrats don't want her or believe that she can win.  But who can?  Three governors:  Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Whitmer of Michigan and Newsome of California seem to be the three politicians who are mentioned the most.  Shapiro is Jewish and given the problems with Israel right now, I don't see him in a good position to run.  Newsome is attractive to many but I think he comes across as too slick and beholden to the left wing of the party for the moderates to accept him.  Whitmer maybe a good choice since she likely would win Michigan, a swing state that the Democrats must have.  But she is not that well known nationally and coming from a state with many Arabs, will it hurt her the opposite way for Shapiro?

I know this whole thing may not happen anyway since Biden won landslides in the primaries.  He would have to pull out himself after listening to others.  This is unlikely.  Also bypassing Harris would make it seem like the Democrats did poorly in the last four years also.  But if say Biden drops out and Harris is not nominated, I nominate Jon Stewart!  Stewart would destroy Trump in a debate.  It would not only energize the base but I think it will bring in independents who want no more politicians.  Yes, the same people who voted for Trump in 2016 just because they want a big change.   Stewart may not be a great leader but he wouldn't be worse than Biden and Trump.  He is intelligent and full of energy.  He also did a lot for the 9/11 responders.  It is a longest of long shots but I think the Democrats may need a hail Mary at this time.

 Just realized that the Democratic convention is in Chicago this year.  It was also in Chicago in 1968.  That was the first time I took an interest in our national politics.  There were a lot of protests of the Vietnam war.  It was total chaos.  I think Dan Rather, who was a young reporter then, got hit by the police inside the convention hall.  The republicans blamed the democrats for allowing lawlessness.  Ironically, mayor Richard Daly had run the city like a republican would have.  He was very tough on the protesters.  Add to the infighting between the liberals and the centrists of the party, the convention contributed to the defeat of Humphrey by Nixon in the general election.

So will the democratic convention this year in Chicago turn out to be a repeat of 1968?  Will it be a disaster for Biden?  Only time will tell.  But the protests of the Gaza situation seem eerily similar to the protests of Vietnam.  The only thing is, the U.S. is not fighting today in Gaza.  Also, no young men are being drafted today.  But things will be volatile still.  And given the closeness of the election, if the convention is not peaceful, it will hurt Biden.

 As Pro-Palestinian protests rage across the country's college campuses, I find it hard to not say anything about the hypocrisy of so many of the people in power.   For the most part the demonstrations have been peaceful.  Yet many students and faculty member have been arrested.  There are calls from many politicians to send in the National Guards and arrest and kick the students involved out of school.  There have been businesses which fired employees for supporting the Palestinians.  There have been powerful law firms which have said they won't hired those students involved in the protests when they graduate.   Wealthy donors have threatened to take back donations to schools if they continue to allow the protests.  Is there really free speech in our country?

Josh Hawley, Senator from Missouri, is one of those people who advocated the National Guards be deployed to stop the protesters.  This is the same guy who went to Hong Kong to root on the so called democracy seeking students.  Never mind those protesters burned people and subways, built bombs and stormed and took over government buildings.  Yes, sort of like the January 6 insurrection in our country.  Hawley was also photographed giving the insurrectionists a power fist to encourage them.  So Hawley encourages people protesting violently and trying to overthrow governments but is against people who are protesting peacefully.  This is a great example of hypocrisy of those in our government.

 The World Cup has started.  Before it started, there has been controversies regarding Qatar hosting the competition.  Western media have accused Qatar of bribing to be the host.  This, of course, has been debated over 12 years.  But add human rights issues, including the bad treatment of foreign workers, and you have critics and defenders of the country going at each other.  The head of FIFA said that given Western countries' human rights record in the past, they have no right to complain about others.  He was then being criticized for "what aboutism".  In other words, defending someone by accusing others of doing the same in the past.  So here is my take.

Regarding bribes, I think it is pretty well-known that money and favors are exchanged in deciding the host of every major sporting event.  Salt Lake City was accused of that in securing the Winter Olympics.  Even if no money directly changed hands, there are always direct or indirect favors secured for the votes.  Members of the committee to decide the host are wined and dined at every candidate city.  They are all rich people with perhaps business deals in the backburner.  Qatar, I am sure bribed.  But the whole system was installed by Western powers with most of the powerful positions controlled by Western countries.  So the Western media should attack those people and countries, not candidate cities who are only playing the game the way it was set up.

Qatar was not the only host country in a major sports events who was accused of human rights abuses.  But it is the only country I think of that is actually created by Western powers, especially the UK.  It was an UK "protectorate" until 1971 when it was given independence.  Basically, the British and Americans chose a monarch that was on their side and promised free flow of oil.  The UK set up the government for Qatar.  The Western powers all know that this government is not democratic nor would it uphold human rights.  But they did not care.  Even today, they get more angry with the decrease production of oil from OPEC than their human rights abuse.  It is like the police letting the mafia run the city and is benefitting from that arrangement and yet pretend to be shocked that the mafia is extorting money!  This is not about "what aboutism", but about hypocrisy.

 Almost all midterm election results are in.  I think by now everybody knows that the Democrats are retaining the Senate while the Republicans are likely to win the House with a slim majority.  The results are much better than the Democrats expected.  So here are some winners and losers from Tuesday.

The biggest loser is Trump.  His endorsed candidates, most of them deniers of the 2020 election results, lost in most cases in competitive states.  These candidates, most of them incompetent, may have been the reason that the GOP lost the Senate again and did much worse than expected in the House.  This shows again the Trump is bad for the Republicans.  But that was obvious even in 2020 and many still followed him.  Will this finally convince the GOP to get rid of Trump?

The big winner was Ron DeSantis who is also one of the reason that Trump is a big loser.  DeSantis did not pledge allegiance to Trump and won big.  His victory margin was impressive and may make him the front runner for the GOP in 2024.

Mitch McConnell is a loser.  Even though not his fault, by not winning the Senate, many in the Republican party want to oust him as minority leader.  I don't like McConnell but he has done a great job serving GOP interests in the Senate and it would be a mistake for them to oust him.

Kevin McCarthy was a winner and a loser.  He most likely will become Speaker.  But he will not have the majority he needs to push his agenda through without the Tea party extremists.  So his hands are tied and he may have to seek compromise with the Democrats to pass relatively moderate agenda.  But if he compromises with the Democrats, he will likely to have his leadership position challenged by the extremists in his party.  He may even lose his leadership position.  But given McConnell and McCarthy are both spineless, I don't feel sorry for either one.

One who did not lose but may lose influence is Joe Manchin.  If Warnock beats Walker in the runoff, the Democrats will have an extra vote in the Senate and may not need to kowtow to Manchin in many issues.  He may lose his position as the most powerful man in the Senate.

A possible winner is our democracy.  By defeating most election result deniers and not having much controversies in this election, hopefully our democracy is more stable than any time since Trump was elected in 2016.

 Rishi Sunak is the new prime minister of the UK.  The first person of color tapped for this job, it is an important milestone.  There are also celebrations in India as Sunak is of Indian descent.  But as in the case of Kamala Harris, Sunak is brown on the outside and white on the inside.  Even more than Harris because he is one of the richest person in the UK and is the leader of the Conservative party.  So his policies are likely pro corporations and the wealthy.   He was the equivalent of the Secretary of Treasury under Boris Johnson and so it is unlikely that his policies will be much different those of Johnson and Truss.  Those policies have not been working so I doubt that Sunak will be able to get the UK out of the financial crisis any time soon.

I understand that the parliamentary system means that the leader of the party with the most members of parliament becomes prime minister.  But there has not been any election since Boris Johnson led his party to victory.  So basically Truss and Sunak are not elected by the majority of the people but by just members of the Conservative party.  This is democracy?

Trevor Noah showed someone calling in a show in England who said that as a white country it makes no sense that an Indian guy becomes the leader.  He said it would be like him going to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia and become their leader.  Hmm!  I think that has been done before.  But the white guys in those situations used guns and bombs to gain power.  Sunak won by voting, even if it is just by the members of the Conservative party which are mostly white.

 Trump recently made racist remarks about Elaine Chao, his former Transportation secretary.  Chao is married to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.  When asked about Trump's racist remarks, McConnell had no comment.  Is he so spineless that he cannot defend his wife against racism?  Interestingly, Chao also had no comment.  Is she so hateful of her Chinese ancestry that she did not think the comments were racist?  Or is she keeping quiet because she is being accused of helping her family's business while in office?  So maybe these two terrible people deserve each other!

 Just returned from a trip to Detroit.  It was a good trip for my nephew's wedding and seeing my family.  The return back to LA area was not pleasant, however.  The flight out of Detroit was supposed to be 9:45 p.m.  At around 7:30 there was an announcement that the pilot was not going to make it on time and the flight had been pushed back to 10:30.  Around 8, the gate agent brought a cart full of snacks and drinks for us.  I told my wife that it is never a good sign when they are offering snacks at the gate.  Sure enough, it was followed by announcement that the pilot had just been cleared to take off from New York.  The flight will be delayed until 11:30.  I didn't have a good feeling about that since it is not known how long the pilot had been stranded in New York and if he is in shape to fly to LA when his plane lands in Detroit.  Sure enough, just around 10:45 it was announced that the pilot does not feel he is in shape to fly to LA when he lands in Detroit.  So the flight was canceled and rescheduled to 7 a.m. next morning.

We had then stand in line to get vouchers for hotel and food.  We were among the first in line but still took 15 minutes to get the vouchers.  We then had to make reservation for the hotel and find the shuttle to that hotel.  Since the hotel did not anticipate a sudden surge in business, it had to get the shuttle out to the airport and that took about 20 minutes.  When we got to the hotel, there was one clerk who had to work the system of vouchers.  It took another 20 minutes to get our room.  So it was well past midnight when we got to bed.  We had to get up at 4:30 to catch the plane.  Thankfully we made it and the plane took off as scheduled.

When we got to LAX, we had to get an Uber or Lyft.  We were jammed into a bus to take us from the arrival area to the rideshare parking lot.  The bus was jammed with people.  The drive to the parking lot took 20 minutes even though the lot is less than a mile from LAX!  The parking lot was jammed with buses.  People were wandering off the bus to find where Uber, Lyft and taxis were located.  Massive amount of people from buses with luggage.  We looked like bunch of refugees.  Once getting in our ride, it was an hour and half through LA traffic to get home.  

So for someone who hates to travel, it was not a fun experience.  I am sure a lot of people had experienced much worse than this.  But that is my point.  The airlines had no back up plans.  The airports are horrible, although DTW is a lot better than LAX.  Traffic everywhere and no good public transportation.  LAX has been under renovation for years and I doubt it will improve much after renovation is completed.  And it will still have no train going in and out of the airport then!

I also want to rant about the gas prices here in California.  It is again over $6.  The official word is that Saudi Arabia raised the price of oil to the U.S. and that there are several refineries in California  undergoing maintenance and are offline.  Well, the refineries were being maintained a few months ago when the price surged.  Do we have such ancient refineries that we have to maintain them every few months?  The price of gas jumped almost a dollar in the one week I left LA.  The price of a barrel of oil from Saudi Arabia went up 20 cents.  Since a barrel of oil can produce about 20 gallons of gasoline, that means each gallon should only go up a penny!  Someone need to explain the math to me here!

 Just returned from a vacation to visit my 7 months old grandson.  It was a lot of fun to see and play with him.  But back to reality.  I just saw this article in CNN where the life expectancy of the U.S. has declined by more than two and a half years since the pandemic started.   To put into perspective, a change of a few tenths in a year is very unusual.  The current life expectancy of Americans stand at 76 years, the lowest since 1996.

Half of the decline is due to COVID.  The second largest cause of the decline in drugs.  The sad thing is that both of these causes could have been mitigated.  They are both unforce errors by us and the leaders of our government.  While American Indians had the worst decline among all ethnic groups, no group is spared.  Whites, for example, had the least decline in 2020 but had the second highest decline in 2021, worse than Blacks and Hispanics.  I think this is because Whites had the best health care and got in line first for the vaccines so they did better in the beginning.  But in the past year, Whites are among the worst of the anti-vaxxers.  They are also the most likely to call for freedom of not wearing masks in crowded public places and opening up of everything.  Advantages forfeited.

I have always said that the first freedom, in my opinion, is the freedom to be alive.  No freedom if you are six feet under.  Asian Americans did the best among the ethnic groups in these past two years.  I think many Asian Americans came from countries where individual freedom is not as important as the well being of the whole society.  I think if you live in Idaho or Wyoming, it may not make much difference what you do.  But if you live in crowded places like LA or NY, I think there is a responsibility to make it safer for each other.  I won't waste my breath here ranting about the ineptitude of our government in the pandemic, opioid crisis and mass gun shootings.  Too many unforced errors to talk about!

 The FBI raided Trump's Mar-A-Lago estate.  Supposedly, there were documents that Trump took from the White House that should not be taken out.  I don't know if they can find any of these since Trump would have had plenty of warning that the Justice department was looking for these things and he could have disposed of them before the raid.  Maybe down the toilet?  But in any case, the justice department felt it was important enough to get warrant for the raid and they did carry it out.

Of course, Trump and the GOP are up at arms over the raid.  Saying this is all political and the Justice department and the FBI are doing the work of the Democrats.  But the judge who signed the warrant was appointed by Trump.  The director of the FBI was also appointed by Trump.  So it is absurd to say this is just the work of Trump's enemy.  Of course this argument doesn't prevent the GOP from calling for defunding the FBI!  Who is against law enforcement now/

During a deposition, Trump answered only one question:  his name.  He pleaded the Fifth to every other question.  What was that he said about those who plead the Fifth?  Oh right, must be guilty otherwise why would one has to plead the Fifth?