The Observations Podcast Observations Podcast

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.