@Finn dAbuzz,
But, Finn, inflation is a very effective method of transferring wealth from those who have it to those who don't.
The rendering of the painful high level of the initial long-term loan repayments to those who loaned the money, the haves, leaving aside the agents who facilitate these transactions, into pin-money in a few years results in such a transfer.
I knew a chap who bought a house for £200 in 1938 on a 30year mortgage and who had his repayments suspended for the six years he was in the services during the war who found himself by the mid-sixties with a house worth £2000 and repayments less than the price of a pack of cigarettes per week. His good fortune was at the expense of those who provided his loan.
It is generally recognised that Mr Obama represents the have nots, some in the biological field as well it is rumoured, and it would therefore make sound political sense, particularly with the have nots being the largest section of voters, and having youthful aspirations, for him to give inflation a good blow on the bellows.
Once the aspiring younger end have settled in to their almost free houses and tarted up the environs it is easy for them to elect a Mrs Thatcher type to put a stop to such nonsense and prevent those following on from them, their own kids, from shafting them in like manner.
PS- for those perplexed by the exchanges between Bernie and George it might be useful to remind readers here that they represent the triumph of culture over structure which is a feature of our civilisation at this time. The posts are a sort of symbolic literary code as A2K is not conducive to visible significations of rank such as dress or manners or personal conduct which are ascriptive of rank in a cultural setting as opposed to the role kinship patterns play in a structured setting. Bureaucracies provide an element of structure in the modern world and are not unlike, in many respects, those primitive societies where structure dominates. But our protagonists are not members of the same bureaucracy.
In a structured society there are relationships and in a culture society there are encounters. A man might choose, and choice is endemic in culture societies, to have an encounter, as suggested, with ladies garments but one can hardly have a dignified relationship with them when one sports a beard, hairy spindly legs and a bald pate. Whether Thomas brings those to an arrangement of the sort envisaged I don't know but if he doesn't it might be possible to achieve a compromise.
The main thing though, to stay on topic, is that in a culture society so advanced as to have got around to its leading intellectuals envisaging encounters with ladies garments, with or without the permission of the lady or the specifications of which garments, the language, and the symbols of magnificence it is easily capable of bearing, employed become crucial.
Comprehension is shifted from the context, two complex nations in conflict, to the communication itself. The whole burden of the message is that culture has entirely replaced structure which is odd when the conflict putatively under discussion is between two social systems where structure remains an important consideration and, as such, virtually incomprehensible to highly cultured disputants.
40-15 to George is my score. But I am biased towards "city clubs" and getting pissed.
