Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 18, 2024 • 6:45 am

First, encomiums to Matthew Cobb, who, as this tweet below suggests, has formally retired as a professor at the University of Manchester.  He’s still giving lectures to first-year students, though, and his biography of Francis Crick is finished (he needs a title, though; please suggest one that’s racier than “Francis Crick: a Life.” The book will be out in a year (such is publishing), but I’ve read drafts and it’s EXCELLENT.

Welcome to a Hump Day (“arè bungkuk” in Madurese): Wednesday, September 18, 2024, and National Cheeseburger Day (didn’t we just have that?) Today we’ll feature a New Mexico speciality: the green chile cheeseburger, an awesome burger:

It’s also International Read an eBook Day, Rice Krispies Treats Day (I love ’em!), National Red Velvet Cake Day, and World Bamboo Day (if you want to buy 3-ply bamboo toilet paper, go here). 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This is an amazing testimony to the power of Mossad, which seems to be back in gear (although of course Israel won’t admit responsibility). In a tactic that I still consider unbelievable, Israel made several thousand pagers in the hands of Lebanese terrorists explode at the same time!  As of this morning’s reports, about 2800 people were injured and nine killed.

Hundreds of pagers blew up at the same time across Lebanon on Tuesday in an apparently coordinated attack that killed eight people and injured more than 2,700, health officials said on Tuesday.

The attack came a day after Israeli leaders had warned that they were considering stepping up their military campaign against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah said that pagers belonging to its members had exploded and accused Israel of being behind the attack. The Israeli military declined to comment.

The wave of explosions left many people in Beirut in a state of confusion and shock. Witnesses reported seeing smoke coming from people’s pockets, followed by a small blasts that sounded like fireworks or gunshots. Amateur footage broadcast on Lebanese television showed chaotic scenes at hospitals, as wounded patients with mangled hands and burn injuries sought treatment. Sirens blared throughout the city as the day ended.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that at least eight people had been killed and more than 2,700 others injured, including 200 who were in critical condition. Dr. Abiad said many of the victims had injuries to their faces, particularly the eyes, as well as to their hands and stomachs. One of those killed was an 8-year-old girl, he said.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, characterized the attack as “criminal Israeli aggression” and called it “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty.”

Excuse me? This is a war against terrorists who fire dozens of rockets at Israel every week. Criminal aggression my tuches: what is criminal aggression is Hezbollah’s firing a gazillion rockets at northern Israeli cities on a daily basis. Here’s an answer to all the Israel-haters baying that this violated international law (as if Hezbollah’s rockets don’t do that multiple times a day), here’s a response:

More:

Three officials briefed on the attack said that it had targeted hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives who have used such devices for years to make it harder for their messages to be intercepted. The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

What’s salubrious about this tactic is that only Hezbollah members can be targeted (I guess they can’t control who is using a pager, but they’re usually person-specific). There was VIRTUALLY NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE that I know of. You can see a video of a victim here, and several people standing a few feet away are completely uninjured.

The most intriguing question is obvious: How did Israel do this? Surely the pagers were bought in different places, and surely not in Israel. It seems as if Israel would have to have gotten to the pagers in advance to make them explosive, but that seems impossible.  Yet it was done. Sadly, Israel, who won’t even admit responsibility, would never (even if it did admit it) reveal such a secret, though the Lebanese will probably find out how it was done by dissecting pagers. Oh, and who uses pagers any more? I suspect it’s because terrorists think that cellphones are easier for Israel to monitor. Still . .

I just learned that the Jerusalem Post has a page with mini-articles answering some of these questions, but not the Big One. Sky News n Arabic (via Israel 7 National News, has since reported that, according to a Lebanese source, the beepers were tampered with before they reached Hezbollah, with explosive materials put into the batteries that would detonate when the battery temperature got high. But that of course raises other questions, as the beepers were apparently made in Budapest in a company (“Gold Apollo”) licensed by a Taiwanese company.

Of course the NYT’s headline denigrates this effort, as they would.  Taking out 10% of Hezbollah’s members, probably on the eve of an Israeli/Hezbollah war, would seem to me to be a useful goal, even if the explosions are premature:

But did they read the Times of Israel, which says this morning that the devices were designed to be used in case of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah (that may well be in the offing), and set them off when the plot was discovered:

Israel caused thousands of Hezbollah terror group pagers to explode Tuesday, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000, amid fears that Hezbollah was about to uncover that the devices had been tampered with, according to Wednesday reports.

Israeli intelligence services originally wanted to detonate the pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah, Axios reported, citing American and Israeli officials. They chose to act early, however, when a Hezbollah member became suspicious of the devices and planned to alert his superiors, Al-Monitor reported.

So yes, there was a strategic goal: to incapacitate Hezbollah members, and though it did that prematurely, it did indeed show the power (and smarts) of Israel.

*A study that got tons of publicity showed that black babies survived at a higher rate when birthed and cared for by black doctors than white doctors.  This led to all kinds of accusations of racism, implying that white doctors just didn’t care very much about the condition of black babies.

But I became aware of problems with this study from this tweet by Steve Stewart-Williams, a respected researcher, whose website post summarizes a new paper in PNAS, which you can access for free here,  The paper refutes the “racism” accusation by noting that the original study left out a crucial variable: birth weight. It turns out that black babies with very low birth weights, and thus a lower chance of survival, are disproportionately cared for by white doctors. Actually, I’m surprised, given the Zeitgeist, that it was actually published.

The authors do all kinds of fancy statistics, but note that in the original and subsequent analyses, researchers neglected an important comorbidity in their analysis: birth weight. If they add in whether or not the birth weight is below 1,500 grams (3.3 pounds), the doctor-race effect disappears.

There is, however, a very simple way of illustrating how a single health condition left out of the Top 65 comorbidities accentuates the empirical finding of racial concordance. We created a variable indicating whether the newborn’s birth weight is below 1,500 g*. Column 4 shows that regardless of the list of control variables included in the regression, replacing the entire vector of comorbidities with this single variable greatly reduces the magnitude of the racial concordance effect while improving model fit. In fact, the effect is statistically insignificant in the fully specified model (with a coefficient of −0.033 and a SE of 0.039). Column 5 replaces the single very-low-birth-weight indicator with a vector of the 30 different ICD-9 codes that describe the nature of the condition in detail. Not surprisingly, the inclusion of more granular information on the incidence of very low birth weights substantially increases the R-squared of the regression (to 0.39). It is worth emphasizing that the estimated racial concordance effect is statistically insignificant in all models reported in both Columns 4 and 5 that include hospital or doctor fixed effects.

. . . In other words, the newborns attended by White and Black physicians are not random samples. Black newborns with a very low birth weight are disproportionately more likely to be attended by White doctors than by Black doctors. Those newborns are also more likely to have a low chance of survival. The exclusion of the very-low-birth-weight variable from the regressions then suggests that, on average, Black babies attended by White doctors will have poorer outcomes than Black babies attended by Black doctors. But this effect may have little to do with racial concordance. It can instead arise because Black newborns attended by White doctors are more likely to have a vulnerability closely linked to mortality.

I would expect that the MSM and other outlets would give this critical analysis, which debunks the racism trope, as much play as they did the original study. But I wouldn’t hold my breath!

*If you’ve read Elizabeth Weiss’s work or her new book (see also my posts here and here), you’ll know that museum anthropology exhibits, subject to overly restrictive, and sometimes ridiculous, demands of Native Americans, are hiding artifacts, reclaiming them, or even warning observers that some displayed objects have “spiritual powers”. A new article in the NY Post by Weiss (yes, a tabloid, but Weiss is reliable and I know the anthropology examples cited (h/t Stephen) verifies the fulminating wokeness of museums:

Smothered by political ideology, America’s great museums are failing their mission as the protectors of our shared human heritage.

I should know: I’ve spent the last year immersed in a study of the world-renowned museums of New York City, after Heterodox Academy’s Segal Center for Academic Pluralism awarded me a fellowship to explore museum exhibits for viewpoint diversity and accuracy of information.

Tragically, I found that museums have become just another arena for pushing political agendas, especially those supporting the postmodern ideology that identity — race, gender, nationality and class — is more important than truth.

A few examples:

At the American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall, indigenous superstitious beliefs that harm can come from artifacts intended for shamans are treated with complete seriousness.

The exhibit comes with a medical-style warning label: “CAUTION: This display case contains items used in the practices of traditional Tlingit doctors. Some people may wish to avoid this area, as Tlingit tradition holds that such belongings contain powerful spirits.”

and

Similar warnings are found behind the scenes in curation rooms used by museum staffers and visiting scholars.

There, pregnant and menstruating women are currently told to stay away from “objects of power” that contain human hair, and everyone is cautioned to not even look at the bird-bone whistles that can summon “supernatural beings.”

. . . . Now, however, nearly all of the museum’s Native American exhibits have been shuttered completely due to the Biden administration’s “Indigenous Knowledge Mandate” and regulatory changes to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

one more:

Meanwhile, art museums are increasingly restructuring exhibits around identity politics — leading to confusing displays with no natural organization or flow.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibit “Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800” focuses on “class, gender, race, and religion,” which in practice means that geographic locations and artists are jumbled throughout the halls.

Furthermore, exhibit curators redrew the border of Europe to include some of Asia and Africa — apparently a clumsy attempt to retrospectively insert diversity into the past where none existed.

Similarly, “The African Origin of Civilization” exhibit paired ancient Egyptian works with far more recent African pieces, to show how Egypt influenced the rest of Africa and vice versa.

Yet anthropologists have debunked such theories, leading curators to point to “similarities” in depictions of universal concepts found in all cultures, such as the relationship between mother and child.

*As reported by the Times of Israel, a new poll shows why a two-state solution isn’t in the offing—at least any time soon.

A poll of Israelis and Palestinians published last Thursday reveals that the two sides nearly mirror each other in their unprecedented levels of fear and distrust. In addition, Jewish Israeli respondents report record-low rates of support for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the forms of a one- or two-state solution or a confederation with Palestinians.

An indicator of the prevailing distrust is that about 90% of respondents on each side attribute extreme, maximalist aspirations to the other. Sixty-six percent of Jewish Israelis and 61% of Palestinians believe the other side wants to commit genocide against them, and an additional 27% of Jewish Israelis and 26% of Palestinians say the other side wants to conquer the land “from the river to the sea” and expel them.

Furthermore, a record-high 94% of Palestinians and 86% of Israelis say that the other side cannot be trusted.

The findings were published on Thursday in the “Pulse” Israeli-Palestinian poll, a joint public survey conducted in July by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University. The lead authors were Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, Dr. Khalil Shikaki and Dr. Nimrod Rosler.

It polled 1,270 Palestinians — 830 from the West Bank and 440 from Gaza in person — and 900 Israeli adults online, both Jewish and Arab, in the second half of July.

. . .The poll found some striking similarities between Israelis and Palestinians. For example, both sides believe that their victimization is the worst compared to other peoples who have suffered from persecution, a view held by 84% of Jewish Israelis and 83% of Palestinians.

The survey also found that an overwhelming majority on both sides legitimize the use of violence against the other. Eighty-one percent of Palestinians justified Hamas’s actions on October 7 as a reaction to the siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed by Israel and Egypt to prevent Hamas from arming itself. For comparison, only 28% of Arab Israelis justified October 7.

Among Jewish Israelis, 84% believe that Hamas’s atrocities justify the ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The figure is surprisingly high even among left-wing voters, who once represented the bulk of the Israeli “peace camp”: 73% of those in the “moderate left” and 44% who self-identify as members of the “firm left” approve of the war.

This is why it’s a touchstone of someone’s geopolitical acumen if they say that a “two state solution” must be implemented immediately (cf. Kamala Harris). It simply will not work under these circumstances, and you don’t have to be a genius to know why. You just have to read the polls—or the news.

*The Wall Street Journal wrings its hands over the exploding federal debt, and criticizes both Trump and Harris as being part of administrations that not only caused this problem, but whose promises to spend more money is exacerbating it.

The U.S. isn’t fighting a war, a crisis or a recession. Yet the federal government is borrowing as if it were.

This year’s budget deficit is on track to top $1.9 trillion, or more than 6% of economic output, a threshold reached only around World War II, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Publicly held federal debt—the sum of all deficits—just passed $28 trillion or almost 100% of GDP.

If Congress does nothing, the total debt will climb by another $22 trillion through 2034. Interest costs alone are poised to exceed annual defense spending.

Here’s a graph. Note that a huge federal debt has a number of bad economic repercussions, including reducing wages, slowed investment and slowed economic growth, and higher interest rates.

But the country’s fiscal trajectory merits only sporadic mentions by the major-party presidential nominees, let alone a serious plan to address it. Instead, the candidates are tripping over each other to make expensive promises to voters.

Economists and policymakers already worry that the growing debt pile could put upward pressure on interest rates, restraining economic growth, crowding out other priorities and potentially impairing Washington’s ability to borrow in case of a war or another crisis. There have been scattered warning signs already, including downgrades to the U.S. credit rating and lackluster demand for Treasury debt at some auctions.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and GOP rival Donald Trump aren’t the same on fiscal policy. She has outlined or endorsed enough fiscal measures—tax increases or spending cuts—to plausibly pay for much of her agenda. He has not.

Still, both Harris and Trump were parts of administrations that helped produce those deficits. Both have promised to protect the biggest drivers of rising spending—Social Security and Medicare. And both want to extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts set to lapse at the end of 2025, amid bipartisan agreement that federal income taxes shouldn’t rise for at least 97% of households.

There’s more, and some of the repercussions are above my pay grade, but what’s clear is that economists are seriously worried about the growing national debt, and about promises of political candidates to make new billions-of-dollars promises.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is studying biology:

A: What are you watching?
Hili: A microcosm in the grass.
In Polish:
Ja: Co oglądasz?
Hili: Mikrokosmos w trawie.

*******************

From Donna:

From Barry:

From Cat Memes:

From Masih; the ire of Iranian women has not abated, and many are making the brave move of not wearing hijabs at all.

Barry sent me the second video; you can ignore the first one. This gives the lie to the term “bird brain.”

A tweet about the exploding pagers, suggesting several ways it could have been done, though all seem unlikely:

It’s worthwhile to turn up the sound.

From my feed, of course:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a French girl moved from a camp in Paris to Auschwitz on her tenth birthday. She was gassed upon arrival.

Two tweets from Matthew, the first one autobiographical. What IS that plane?

Matthew’s comment is “LOL”:

40 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Hear hear, congratulations to Professor Matthew Cobb, (E)!

    Cool room number, divisible by 3, 6, and 9 – because it’s even and the digit sum is divisible by 3 and 9.

    2. Yes indeed. Hear, hear! Congratulations Matthew on reaching this life event. Hopefully you will be assigned another on-campus post within which you can continue to converse with students and former (now) colleagues for awhile. The students will keep you young.

  2. The intro to the tweet about the exploding pagers is followed by a repeat of the bird tweet.

  3. The Fairey Swordfish was a torpedo bomber that was used to attack the Bismarck in 1941. The largest battleship ever built by Germany was incapacitated by this 1930s-designed biplane with a fabric-covered airframe, naval bombardment then finished the Bismarck off, and it is now at the bottom of the Atlantic.

    3. Not only that, but Swordfish very successfully attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto harbour in 1940, which is where the Japanese navy got the idea for the Pearl Harbo(u)r attack.

    4. Notice that the Swordfish in the video clip has a torpedo slung underneath! Ready to take care of business if the Bismark should ever resurface.

    5. If I remember correctly the Swordfish torpedo attack damaged the Bismarck’s rudder, rendering unable to effectively maneuver, and thereby giving time for elements of the British fleet to arrive and finish her off.

  4. Having a BA and MA in Anthropology (Stanford U) and an PhD in Archaeology (Boston U) with a focus on what is known as “prehistoric art” (albeit not a useful term as there is little correlation between how the artifacts I study functioned in prehistoric society and how we consider ‘art’ today) I have less concern with the use of these ‘warning’ labels on artifacts in museums that denote their religious/cultural use as much as I have with with how they are culturally selective. Much of “ancient” and even “historical” artifacts from around the world that we display in museums today as “art” once were attributed powerful religious functions in the cultures for which they were created. Think of a medieval depiction of Madonna and Child or a beautifully carved reliquary–such objects were (and still are) venerated and considered sacred and even today one can visit many churches throughout Europe (and elsewhere) where candles are purchased and lit and the devoted pray to this “artwork” — which is also displayed in our museums without these warning labels. Likewise, many of the works from Ancient Greece and Rome displayed in art museums were originally part of temples or other religious structures. It would foster greater understanding of the objects and the cultures they come from to put similar labels on all these objects; selectively labeling only artifacts from certain cultures does not encourage the larger comprehension of the role of art and religion in human cultures.

    1. I’d suggest reading Elizabeth Weiss’s article here, for surely you’re not saying that other artworks or crafts should be displayed in the same way that Native American ones are. Some of them can’t be displayed because they are too “spiritually powerful”.

      An excerpt from her piece:

      e can expect bare display cases because some objects will be deemed too “spiritually powerful” to display. AMNH curators have already made similar decisions recently in the renovation of the Northwest Coast Hall. For instance, curators decided not to display a bird bone whistle because Nuxalk elders warned that the whistle could be used as a “summoning tool for supernatural beings.” And Haida tribal members instructed museum staff not to put a headdress on view or even handle the headdress because of the “danger” that they’d encounter—after all, one must “be wary of any object that incorporates human hair.” In other instances, absurd narratives, such as those found in the Northwest Coast Hall, will be taught to children as facts. Children will be told that objects have spirits, that Native Americans came from supernatural animals, and that shamans’ masks contain powers that one should fear.

      1. Perhaps they’ve also been influenced by the MR James short story “Oh, whistle, and I’ll come to you, my lad.” The 1968 BBC film version of this piece is terrifically terrifying.

      2. Obviously I am not saying that the artifacts should not be displayed, I am only pointing out issues in treating artifacts from some cultures differently from others. We might better understand why such artifacts were created and how they were used and functioned in societies if we recognized some cross-cultural similarities.

    2. My takeaway was different. It shows the indigenization of museum curator culture. The curators are developing away from a traditional scientific role in acquiring knowledge about artifacts and then disseminating their knowledge to museum visitors. Instead they are becoming “knowledge keepers” who sequester away their knowledge as well as the artifacts themselves. All in the service of cultural safety or something.

    3. A label informing visitors that, e.g., “The X people believed that this whistle could summon supernatural beings,” would indeed enhance understanding that artifacts often not only had aesthetic value to the X people, but also religious/spiritual.

      But to remove a whistle from display because modern day elders of the X people have “warned that the whistle could be used as a ‘summoning tool for supernatural beings’ is to treat the belief as TRUE.

      The ancestors of every person alive held beliefs in spirits, magic, sorcery, and origin myths etc. that we know, today, are not true. Nevertheless, past beliefs are not to be ridiculed because they were the best humans could do in making sense of their world at the time they lived.

      But today, science has accrued so much knowledge of the natural world that any person who professes to believe in such things as, say, whistles that summon spirits, or unborn children of gods causing earthquakes, etc. ad nauseum, is not worthy of the least respect.

      And for educated people (such as museum curators) to force other people to act as if these beliefs are true – by doing such things as denying the public the opportunity to see certain artifacts because of their purported magical power – is simply outrageous.

  6. Thanks for the Stewart-Williams analysis. It seemed likely at the time that somehow the sicker babies were being non-randomly assigned to more highly trained and skilled physicians who were the ones selected to cover a high-risk service. (We see this all the time in non-randomized studies of outcomes in numerous medical and surgical conditions.) These “elite” paediatricians were more likely to be white, we know now. What wasn’t clear was how this non-random allocation could subvert the claimed apparently random (or more properly haphazard) assignment of general paediatricians to newborn infants. Even if a newborn discovered to be sick after the assigned paediatrician laid eyes on it was promptly (or not) transferred to a specialist, the study protocol would have captured the race of first doctor.

    Stewart-Williams provides the key to the puzzle. Extremely low birthweight (usually a combination of prematurity and “small for dates”) is a highly relevant predictor of infant death. It can be identified before birth, even if a mother arrives in labour having had no prenatal care. She would then be referred during labour immediately (and non-randomly) to an expert specialist, likely white, paediatrician, upstream from the claimed pseudo-random assignment of routine general paediatricians.

    It makes me grumpy that content experts who participated in the original study would not have controlled for very low birth weight and for the institutional procedures, which must have been well known to them, that put these vulnerable infants into the care of its most highly qualified doctors.

    1. Re your last paragraph; the misanthrope in me thinks that was intentional. Any findings that white doctors are NOT racist would not serve the right people.

  7. All I can think of as suggestions for the Francis Crick book are bad plays on words, like “Crick: From the neck up” or something stupid like that. I don’t seriously think that would be a good title, but maybe it’ll trigger something for the good professor.

  8. The question no one is asking the candidates is, How do you plan to deal with the size of the debt? Both of them have plans for more spending, which means more debt.

  9. I think the Israeli attack on Hezbollah via their pagers is brilliant, and I am still chuckling over it. It has three direct benefits, 1) it cripples Hezbollah’s communications, and they had just switched to pagers because they were concerned they could be tracked via cell phone; 2) it should cause major demoralization; 3) it puts 2,500-3,000 fighters hors de combat. People will complain that non-Hezbollah were injured, but compared to rocket-, drone-, or air-strikes, as well as invasion, this was down-right surgical. Well done!

    EDIT: Late looking at news today, but it’s being reported that there is a second wave of exploding devices in Lebanon. This time hand-held radios.

    1. The follow-on is brilliant. No electronics are safe now. Even clay tablets with styluses are suspect. A runner bringing word of mouth might be an assassin.

      Especially before it leaked out how it was done, I was reminded of the old joke:
      Three old guys are sitting by the pool at a fancy Palm Beach resort, getting to know one another.
      Guy 1: “I had a successful business making batteries but I was wiped out by a fire. I decided to retire down here with the insurance money.”
      Guy 2: “Same here. I had a successful electronics business but I was wiped out by a big explosion. Insurance paid, here I am.”
      Guy 3: “I had a successful agri-business in Kansas until a tornado wiped me out…”
      The other two guys look at him with open-mouthed awe and respect.
      “How did you do a tornado?!”

    2. Brilliant yes, but also lucky. If one of those terrorists was on a commercial flight when his pager detonated, it could have brought down the plane. Still, the roll of the dice worked and I am delighted with the schadenfreude.

        1. I saw some videos and they did not look capable of bringing down a plane.

          Your tweet on the pagers is a mistake: it repeats the previous tweet. Perhaps it was to show the exploding pagers?

  11. Here’s a shot for the retiring Prof. M Cobb.
    Cobb on Crick
    “A life Story”

    Trojan horse pagers, “killer” move and has caused a lot of confusion amoungst the population… can I trust my phone! Yikes.

    JKR tweet. The guys a prize wanker.

  12. As the national debt increases, one can reasonably expect inflation to rise. Why?
    1. If the debt is purchased by the fed, monetizing it, then the money supply will increase, causing inflation (Friedman – inflation is a monetary phenomen
    2. If the debt increases but there’s no increase in demand, then that can lead to higher interest rates, which decrease spending and investment
    3. Because investors and economists know this, the mere fact that it is rising can lead to a fear of expansionist monetary policy, which will also drive up inflation now as a hedge against future inflationary pressure
    4. Inflation is a way to make the cost of borrowing by the governement today cost less in the future. High inflation reduces the real value of debt. One way to think about this: let’s say you buy a house today and your mortgage payment is 25% of your income (you make $100k / yr., and you pay $25k in annual house payments). If your income stays the same, you will continue to pay out 25% of your pay to fund your mortgage. However, if inflation drives your income to $200k, then your mortgage payment becomes only 12.5% of your income (although at that future date other things like food and other immediate necessities consume more of your pay). Inflation is a way to get more dollars to flow into the federal coffers in the future to pay for the dollars that are output today.
    Of course, inflation hurts us as citizens as our income always lags behind the inflationary rate, so we pay more for less, but the government politicians can benefit greatly.
    Modern Monetary Theory, the great economic lie that says this is OK, is all to prevalent in the minds of policy makers.

    1. Have you read Brendan Ballou’s, “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America”? I’m only just beginning it, but according to the introduction, the government is playing a large role in this diabolical destruction. I’m not far enough into it to speak to how the gov enables it. I have been aware of private equity and how it’s taking out companies right and left, though. It’s a hard read. “Hard” as in troubling. Part of me doesn’t want to know about it because it’s so disheartening.

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