Observations: The QandO Podcast

The week, Dale starts by discussing Donald's Trump's long-standing, yet inexplicable, love for tariffs. Then he moves on to the surprising notion that Donald Trump realizes that the post-WWII "Rules-Based International Order" has come to an end. We've reverted to the normal international environment of Great Power diplomacy, and that's a game that Donald Trump is perfectly willing to play.

This week, we discuss the various legal strategies being used to stop Donald Trump from implementing his executive orders.

If you thought Donald Trump did a lot in the first two weeks of his second term, his third week in office showed that he's the most radical president elected since 1932.

This week, Dale and Michael discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of Donald Trump's first two weeks in office. And tariffs.

Joe Biden kicked off his last weekend as president by simply declaring the Equal Rights Amendment had been magically ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, like it was a real thing. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, after spending the last four years threatening to shut down TikTok, and even signing an executive order to do so in 2020, decided that he'd keep the app running via an executive order. There's one thing Trump hasn't changed his mind about, though: Immigration.

This week's wildfires in LA are a perfect illustration of a government system, at all levels, whose policy results are so negative that one has to ask an important question. Is our government completely incompetent, or is it actively malevolent?

This week, we discuss the big victory that Elon, Vivek, and DOGE scored against Congress, and it's duplicitous Continuing Resolution. It's an amazing first victory, especially since DOGE doesn't even officially exist yet, and Donald Trump still isn't president. On the other hand, whether victory will be as easy when they try to cut real funding, real jobs, or entitlements, is very much an open question.

In this podcast, we discuss the downfall of the Assad regime in Syria, and take a deep dive into the drone sightings mystery.

The assassination of United Healthcare's CEO has exposed a dark movement in American culture.

Seventy-eight years ago, the WWII allies, calling themselves the United Nations, created the international settlement we've lived under since then. But that settlement no longer reflects the world we live in. Trump's threat to levy 100% tariffs on the BRICs nations is a failure to recognize that the Post-WWII settlement is dying.

Donald Trump's executive department nominations have been met with varying levels of shock and disbelief in Washington, DC. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the nominations Trump has made so far.

The 2024 Election is over, and Donald Trump looks to have taken it by a clean sweep. The wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left seems to indicate that they've learned nothing from defeat. But the more interesting question is what, if anything, Donald Trump has learned from his previous experience as president.

With two days left before the 2024 election, we try to get a sense of how things will go on Tuesday. TL;DR: We have no idea. We'll see when we do the Election Livestream on Tuesday night.

Both polling and betting averages have now switched over to favor Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election. We may be seeing the same sort of preference cascade that we saw with the Reagan-Carter race in 1980, where the electorate shifted strongly in the last two weeks of the campaign. Democrats, for the last weeks of the election campaign, have fallen back on their tried and true tactic of characterizing the Republican candidate as a devotee of 1930s Germany. Meanwhile, after three months into her campaign, Kamala Harris still can't explain why anyone should vote for her.

The Feds have launched a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for removing non-citizens from the Voter rolls. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris put out a new commercial, showing real men doing really manly things, in what may be the cringiest and least convincing political ad ever. Finally, the Democrats are clearly serious about gutting the 1st Amendment.

Despite assuring us that they're on top of things, reports from the scene of the devastation in North Carolina indicate that, once again, FEMA is incapable of responding to a disaster quickly or competently. Plus, we look at how changes in both parties are resulting in a massive re-alignment in American politics.

Nearly every major institution in every Western country suffers from a crisis of legitimacy. Government's won't deliver on the policies the electorate wants. The news media won't tell the factual, objective truth. Entertainment is more interested in ideology than entertaining. Education has become more indoctrination than training to seek the truth. A Golden Age is coming to an end, and the future doesn't look promising.

Once again, Donald Trump escaped an assassination attempt, with the shooter being driven off by gunfire from Secret Service, and apprehended shortly thereafter. How much does the political rhetoric around Donald Trump contribute to a climate of violence? Well, at least this will probably short-circuit what was turning into an impending 4-day news cycle about his ill-advised Taylor Swift post.

In this episode, we discuss the state of the current presidential race, including Trumps sentencing delay, the upcoming debate and much more. We conclude, however, by discussing what it means to live in, as one of our chat commenters put it, a "post-reality society." Because that's the direction in which we're heading.

The sheer amount of narrative-pushing and propaganda on display in today's media is astounding. Americans have no idea how often they're lied to by the media, as well as by every other major institution.

Performing a Google news search to find stories on Kamala Harris' proposed tax on unearned income produces interesting results...or rather, a LACK of interesting results. The importance of which is not what Google shows you, but what it refuses to show. You can, of course, find the stories elsewhere, such as a news search in the Brave search engine. But not in Google. Now, perhaps it's some sort of weird error. Or, perhaps, it's an integral part of manufacturing a false consensus by withholding information in the world's most popular search engine.

We start the episode by looking at how the Left and Fascism are inextricably intertwined, even though the traditional political spectrum places them on opposite ends. We also discuss the propagandization of the media, and why society seems to be in such constant flux and anxiety.

Since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democrat's presidential candidate, the race has turned from a shoo-in for Trump to a Harris lead. In this podcast, we discuss how the Trump campaign strategy has responded. So far, the response…doesn't look very effective.

This week, we start by discussing the Democrats' switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris as their party's presidential nominee. But looking at how the changeover was handled raises issues of how American media is increasingly propagandized and, even more frighteningly, the rise of what Michael Shellenberger calls the Censorship Industrial Complex.

This week, we discuss the events surrounding the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

There were national elections in both France and the UK this week. In France, the non-populist parties managed to game the system to ensure that Marine Le Pen's National Rally couldn't form a government. In the UK, Labour ended up with 410 of 650 seats in Parliament on a 33.8% share of the vote. Meanwhile, in the US, 70% of voters want neither Trump nor Biden as president, but they'll get one of them anyway. Can somebody define what "democracy" actually is?

The Supreme Court overturned the Chevron Doctrine this week. That's important, and has long-term consequences. But all eyes are on the Biden Campaign in the aftermath of his debate with Donald Trump. Biden's debate performance has raised serious questions about whether he should be running for another term. And, perhaps, even doubts about whether he is capable of finishing this one.

This week, we start by wondering if we're stumbling into WWIII. We then turn to the recent and current European and US elections, where populist parties seem to be on the rise. Not that any of this should be a surprise, since populism is always a response to a political system that doesn't respond to voter concerns. We conclude with a look at a couple of Supreme Court decisions that we're waiting for before the current term ends.

This week, we cover the response to the Israeli hostage rescue, and ask an important question: What's the proper moral context for military operations against combatants who flout their disregard for the rules-based international order? Bird Flu is increasingly in the news. Millions of chickens are being culled, and we're told that Bird Flu has made its way into other livestock and farm products, such as milk and eggs. How much should we trust the warnings of the same people who mishandled COVID-19 so badly?

This week, we have one topic: Donald Trump's conviction in New York.

In this episode, we take a look at some interesting international stories from the past week. Then we start an initial inquiry—which we'll have to take up again later—about the results of financializing the world economy.

In this episode, we discuss the latest activities in the legal cases against Donald Trump. We also discuss the upcoming election, and the Biden administration's general ineptitude, especially in regard to the Israel/Gaza conflict.

We start with an update on the YouTube situation, where one of our podcasts has been permanently banned. We then discuss Jared Bernstein, the man who is Biden's Chief Economic Advisor, besides having no formal education in, or apparently knowledge of, economics. His response to a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) question was…interesting. MMT is the luminiferous aether of the 21st century. Politico--surprisingly--reports that the usual suspects are the funding force behind the current wave of pro-Palestine protests on campuses. The Biden administration's new Title IX rules are going to be held up in federal courts for years. Finally, Kristi Noem, in day 8 of the puppycide saga, has now suggested the Joe Biden should've shot his German Shepherd, Commander. She's pretty much destroyed any political future she might have been hoping for.

We received a Community Guidelines warning, and had a video removed from YouTube. The offending passage was Dale reading verbatim from a Federal Court opinion in a podcast released nine months ago. YouTube's moderation process, like their DMCA process, is unacceptably faulty. We also discuss how a Trump/Biden contest seems like a failure of our political system. Finally, Kristi Noem thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate how good she is at making tough decisions by telling us about the time she shot a puppy. And a goat, for good measure.

This week we start with several seemingly unrelated news items. But they all share a common thread: A childlike conception of the world that can only be found in societies descending into decadence. But decadent societies not only build nothing, they preserve nothing that was already built. The end result of decadence is always disaster for a society that engages in it.

It's a bit of a short podcast this week, taken up mainly by a discussion of a complex economic question. Since the 1970s, workers' wages have largely stagnated. Wages stopped increasing with productivity. Wages have declined as a share of GDP. Meanwhile, wages for the very top income earners, "the 1%", have sharply increased. Either we've gone back to 19th-century unregulated capitalism...or the government is somehow involved. Also, Arizona Democrats are being forced to learn how laws work.

After a 2-week hiatus, we're back! We start with immigration, and the legal troubles of one of the least sympathetic 'migrant activists' ever. The Democratic Party of Ohio may have screwed up royally. The collapse of the 99c Store chain raises some troubling economic and cultural issues. And finally, the last hour covers Ukraine, and Anthony Blinken's statement that Ukraine would become a member of NATO. Why? Also, why does NATO still exist? And, to a larger issue: Russia is already a defeated power undergoing demographic collapse. Why are we trying to win harder?

In this episode, we recreate how institutional propaganda was manufactured, in real time, over the last 24 hours. In a speech given last night (16 Mar 24), Donald Trump promised a tariff on Chinese cars made in Mexico for export to the US, if he's elected. If not, he predicted that these cars would cause a bloodbath for the US auto industry. His comments were perverted by the media and the Biden campaign into a statement that not electing him would result in a bloodbath in America, as if Trump was promising some sort of coup. It's more glaring evidence that our sense-making institutions are not only fundamentally broken, but actively dishonest.

This week, we spend the first half of the podcast talking about the legal issues currently before the Supreme Court. We then move to discussions about Gaza, the budget, voting rights, and the Alabama Supreme Court decision that may sharply limit the availability of IVF treatment in that state.

This week, we discuss how the Trump civil fraud verdict is affecting potential real estate investment in New York. We then move to Trump's 60% win in the South Carolina primary, and what a Trump/Biden presidential campaign might look like. Then, we cover a large observational study of COVID vaccine side effects that was released this week, which seems to have unveiled new safety signals. SCOTUS is set to hear a case on social media regulation, challenging new laws passed in Texas and Florida. Finally, we discuss the possibility that America is entering another era of Isolationism, and what that might mean.

In our post-Superbowl return, we start with Tucker Carlson's interview of Vladimir Putin. We then address the strange coupling of US border security with approving more military support for Ukraine. Joe Biden apparently did inappropriately take classified documents home with him, going all the way back to his Senate days, but no one's going to do anything about that. Donald Trump, meanwhile, took a beating in a NY state court. We then muse about a possible security threat to the US that was hinted about this week. Finally, we note that all these stories are part of a series of converging threads of disaster, as things seem to be ever more quickly spinning out of control.

Today, we begin with Joe Biden, and the amusing consequences of wearing a hard hat backwards during a photo op. We then move to the immigration battle between the Federal government as Texas. Finally, we move to the release of recordings from a secret Zoom conference between government employees, NGOs, and activists to use their positions in the government to interfere in the 2020 election. All of these stories demonstrate the institutional failures that are leading us towards disaster. And, yes, Dale DID keep saying it was the 29th.

[Apologies for the audio issues in the first few minutes.] We start by discussing Ron DeSantis' withdrawal from the presidential race earlier today. The die is now cast. Barring illness or death of one or the other elderly gentleman, the 2024 race will, once again, be a Trump-Biden contest. Meanwhile, Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis is facing allegations of impropriety in her prosecution of Donald Trump. Finally, we discuss an analysis that indicates North Korea may be preparing for another invasion of South Korea. We have to ask, is this something they're doing on their own, or could any such invasion be a diversionary action to set up a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, to force "reunification" on both Korea and China?

It's the day before the Iowa Caucus, and we look ahead at what it means. Are the polls correct, with Donald Trump Having a lock on victory? Or is something else going on? What does it mean for the nomination race? Democrats are already prepping the electoral battlefield, declaring Donald Trump to be an impending dictator. Maybe Trump will win, maybe he won't. But it's a mistake to to think that MAGA will fade away, no matter what happens.

Our holiday hiatus is over, so we're back to talk about Trump's "removal" from the Primary ballot in CO and ME. We also discuss Claudine Gay's resignation from the presidency of Harvard.

After we discuss the cultural implications of a senate staffer recording themselves having sex with another man in a US Senate hearing room, we turn to legal matters. Rudy Giuliani lost a $148.1 million jury verdict in the defamation case bought by two Georgia election workers. Meanwhile, Sidney Powell pled guilty to six misdemeanor counts, and Keneth Cheseboro pled guilty to 1 felony count, in their Georgia election interference cases. The Supreme Court took up a case questioning the validity of charging January 6 protestors with the "obstructing an official proceeding" statute, which could overturn many J6 convistions, as well as drop charges from Donald Trump's upcoming trial. Finally, we look at the latest Harvard/Harris poll.

Interest payments on the National Debt have ballooned to $900 billion per year. For the first time in two decades, debt service now costs more than the entire military budget of the United States. This is not a sign of good economic times ahead. In other news, Hunter Biden's sweetheart deal from Federal prosecutors is dead as fried chicken, with a new series of indictments filed, though he is still getting a bit of a break. Other topics: UPenn's president resigned, Trump won't testify in NY, Ukraine funding got halted in Congress, and Blackrock's Larry Fink doesn't want to talk about ESG anymore.

It was a bit of a rough start, since Dale forgot to hit the Go Live button, but we first get into how House Democrats are abandoning "Bidenomics" as a 2024 Election slogan. We move from there into the many other failures of the Biden Administration. Whatever the policy area may be: Defense, Energy, Immigration...you name it, Joe Biden has the worst possible policy for it.

Libertarian anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei has won the presidential election in Argentina. Putting aside the irony of an anarcho-capitalist running the government, his victory makes us wonder if he can actually implement actual change to Argentina's political culture, which has largely been a long-running love affair with fascist corporatism. That, in turn, makes us wonder whether any electoral change in this country could turn around our political culture's decline into authoritarianism.

The American body politic, and indeed, that of the entire West, has been infested with Progressives. They control every major cultural institution. At this point, it doesn't matter whether the capture was the result of an intentional "Long March Through the Institutions", or happened organically. The only thing that matters is finding a way to defeat the Progressive ideologues who want to weaponize our principles of individual liberty against us.