American Presidential Races

1992 was an unusual race because there was an unusually strong third party candidate (Ross Perot), that led to an unusual occurance of a president being denied a second term, and this also produced the meteoric rise of Bill Clinton, who was barely on the radar at the beginning of the election year.

2000 was an unusual race because of the unpopularity of both candidates, because the Florida count went down to the wire, because of the coincidence that the Governor of Florida was the brother of one of the candidates, and because the Supreme Court played an unusually decisive role in determining the winner of the election. It's unusual because it was won by a candidate who won fewer votes (but who won more electoral college votes)

2004 was an unusual race because of the improbability that a dullard like dubya would win a second term, and because of the viciousness of the attacks on John Kerry.

2008 was an unusual race because a black guy won. (Actually his mom's white). And it's unusual because the primary was very heavily contested. Nobody believed that anybody would vote in a Republican again, even if he's a half decent guy like John McCain.

2016 was an unusual race because the guy who won was unbelievably even less qualified than Dubya. It was unusually mean-spirited. It was the first election to feature a female candidate for a major party. And for only the second time in hundred years, the winner of the election polled fewer votes than the loser. Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million and still became president, because of the quirks in the way Republicans and Democrats are spread out amongst the states.

2020 is maybe the most unusual race of all because it will take place in the middle of a pandemic, and because both candidates are really really old. Biden might have to beat Trump in a landslide in order to win the presidency, but it's possible that he just might do it.

And that would mean that in the last 30 years, the only "normal" presidential race took place in 1996 and 2012.

Changes in Singapore

The 1985 recession in Singapore was some kind of a turning point in our history, but I don't know cos I was too young to make sense of it.

In the mid 90s, there were 4 revolutions. First was the post cold war hyper globalisation era. Second was the rise of China. Related to the first two were the second great influx of migrants. Third was the rise of the internet and the relaxation of free speech in Singapore. And last was the Asian Financial crisis. Together, this meant that the Singapore of my adulthood was very different from my childhood.

There was another big revolution in 2011 with that crazy election, and this current pandemic will be a harbinger of some change, but we don't really know what that change is. But I can tell you that I've lived in America for a while, and it's a place where construction workers are paid well. It takes forever to build anything, and the construction costs will be high. There will be big impacts on the Singaporean economy if construction costs go up, which is probably going to be inevitable if you want migrant workers to live a better life.

Liverpool Luck

Liverpool won two lucky Champions League titles by overcoming 3 goal deficits against Olympiakos, AC Milan and Barcelona. In the 2004-2005 season, they had to beat Olympiakos by 2 goals in the final group stage match in order to progress. It was just Olympiakos, but Rivaldo was in that side. They fell behind by 1 goal and had to claw back 3 goals in order to win, which they eventually did. And there was that final in Istanbul where … you know what happened.

There was also that other crazy night at Anfield, where Barcelona played the second leg of the semi-final. Barcelona took a somewhat lucky 3-0 lead to Anfield, and got outplayed, although the Liverpool keeper made a few pretty good saves to allow Liverpool to race 3-0 ahead. And they did all this without Mane or Salah on the field. And towards the end of the second half, there was that iconic Trent Alexander Arnold corner.

And yet their luck in the English Premier League seemed to desert them. They last won the top flight league in 1990, 2 years before the formation of the Premier League, and they hadn't won any EPL titles. The first one they challenged for was 96-97, when they had Fowler, McManaman and Collymore. But they had a soft underbelly, and this was underscored by their nickname, “the spice boys”. They won a trio of cups in 2001, and finished second in 2002, and appeared to be on the ascendency, but they blew it in the infamous summer transfer window when they bought Diouf, Diao and Cheyrou. There was another good team, which had Mascherano, Torres, Gerrard and Alonso, and they raced Man U all the way to the end of the 08-09 season, but they came short, and that team was quickly dismantled afterwards. Then there was that 13-14 season when they raced Man City all the way, with Luis Suarez, Gerrard, Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling. But they came up short in the last few games, including those infamous games against Chelsea and Crystal Palace.

But all those misadventures were with a team that was good enough to win the title, without clearly being the best. Liverpool were also unlucky not to have won 2 premier league titles by now. Last year they somehow managed to get 97 points in the league without winning, and this year, when they were the clear leaders, and a win or two away from the title, the premier league looks to end early, and even if they win a title, it will be without playing a full season.

But if you want to go back even further, you'd have to look at the two big stadium disasters that probably helped to end their status as England's greatest team. First was the Heysel disaster, in which their fans played a part. It would be hard to know how the match would have ended if the disaster didn't happen. What happened was that the collapse of the stand took place a few minutes before the game was to start, and they decided to play on anyway, because the police were afraid of what might happen if the match was abandoned. I think many of the players on the pitch were not able to concentrate on that match. It was the European Cup final against Juventus, and they lost.

The other disaster was the Hillborough stadium disaster. There was the disaster itself, in which poor crowd management caused a stampede and 95 people died, and there was the bad press afterwards, which wrongly blamed the Liverpool fans for the disaster. It was an FA cup semi-final, and Liverpool ended up winning the competition. But it's also conceivable that the stadium disaster cost them a league after Arsenal won the last match by 2 goals to win the league, in one of the most dramatic finales of a league season. Kenny Dalglish, who was Liverpool's manager, said later that the strain of going to all the funerals was a factor in him walking away from the job. His next two successors, Graeme Souness and Roy Evans, were not up to running a top club side and Manchester United ended up, in Alex Ferguson's words, “knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch”.

There's always an element of luck in football, and Manchester United's treble in 1999 was a famous example of this. There were moments when they could have been kicked out of the FA cup, or the Champion's League. And incredibly Liverpool's champion's league win was not even the luckiest. That honour would have to go to Chelsea, although they were somewhat unlucky in the manner they were knocked out in quite a few of the previous years.

Luck has played some role in Liverpool football club over the last few decades, but you have to distinguish the scale of the strokes of luck. Hiring Bill Shankly, Alex Ferguson and Jurgen Klopp are strokes of luck, although you have to wonder why Man U didn't manage to hire either Klopp or Guardiola. The stadium disasters were massive strokes of bad luck. Falling off the top around the same time that the premier league was taking off is also another stroke of bad luck, as is peaking around the same time that the incredible Man City team of 2018 was peaking. The pandemic was real bad luck, but you have to wonder what's the main effect of this, since you don't really know how the teams will change the next time the pandemic lifts enough for the league to carry on.

China, America and Shame

I can't remember when I started being truly disappointed with America.

Maybe it was when I first visited it in the late 80s and I saw that LA / Hollywood had poor people everywhere.

Maybe it was when I was reading the lyrics of any socially conscious rap album in the 90s, which basically spells out to anybody who cares to notice all the problems in gory detail.

Maybe it was after 9/11, when I thought that Americans were going to be more enlightened about the Middle East and Islam, and what happened were the start of the forever wars.

Maybe it was during the Great Recession, and I remember reading a book by Kevin Phillips, and they spelt out pretty clearly how things were going to go down. (Prophetic too).

And maybe it was the election of Trump. Even after the last 4 episodes, you felt there was a silver lining. The only silver lining for Trump will be gone if he wins the elections in November.

It is a familiar feeling. When you look at the USA, it makes you feel the way you used to feel about China when it was backwards and poor. So much of what happened in China until the 80s made you feel ashamed, and so much of what happened in the US made you feel ashamed.