My common sense prism seems to be broken... I see these Covid-Trump-Hope moments through cartoons — old cartoons... The top cartoon from Bruce Petty's Money Book is savage. The one above is from MAD magazine. Both are from the mid 1980s... and since then, life has taken many twists and turns that are the same as before. We don't really know what we are doing, but we are doing it... The machine is sputtering but we still use it. We replace the technologies with faster ones, but the shit seems to be the same with a different shade of colour.

So, as the Christians-for-Trump chastise the Christians-for-Biden who made the Jacobins overtake the Burke conservatism, momentarily, tch tch..., our lockdowns has disrupted the flow of our petty exchanges. Instead of visiting artisans markets, we now get stuff delivered to our isolation pad... And before they had a chance at proper living, our youth will find themselves in a home care for oldies — old so soon.

And looking at the small end of the telescope of history:

Burke soon took an active part in the domestic constitutional controversy of George III’s reign. The main problem during the 18th century was whether king or Parliament controlled the executive. The king was seeking to reassert a more active role for the crown — which had lost some influence in the reigns of the first two Georges — without infringing on the limitations of the royal prerogative set by the revolution settlement of 1689. Burke’s chief comment on this issue is his pamphlet “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770). He argued that George’s actions were against not the letter but the spirit of the constitution. The choice of ministers purely on personal grounds was favouritism; public approbation by the people through Parliament should determine their selection. This pamphlet includes Burke’s famous, and new, justification of party, defined as a body of men united on public principle, which could act as a constitutional link between king and Parliament, providing consistency and strength in administration, or principled criticism in opposition.

Read more:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Burke-British-philosopher-and-statesman

Burke was annoying. He was a man of "THE" System... He hated revolutions and loathed people power, if this meant that the lower class controlled their destiny and rejected the notion of the divine. 

Nowadays, we're more concerned about the style of chiffons we're going to wear in our virtual public. 

In Britain, the high streets have been on unstable ground for a long time, as local councils have seen city centres as cash cows, upping parking charges and using armies of attendants to pounce on unsuspecting out-of-towners who stayed ten minutes too long in a space. The decline in the number of shops in our high streets has been inevitable.

Large, suburban retail parks with free parking and easy access have really given our city and town centres a drubbing. And now a year-long series of lockdowns and restrictions on trading have meant that many of us have turned to online shopping; Britain has become a nation of people waiting in for deliveries of lounge wear and perhaps the odd fancy top for a weekend Zoom party. As a Generation X new wave punk, I find this utterly depressing.

In fact, it’s really made me nostalgic for the old days. When I was 15, I had a part-time job as an Avon representative – I would go up and down my street, which was my patch, selling bottles of Timeless perfume and scented body lotion. At Christmas, my order books would be full of costume jewellery and bath salts, and favourite perfumes in novelty Christmas bottles; this was as sophisticated and as remote as early 1980s shopping got. My mum used to get the Freemans catalogue, so every six months we would have a house full of women getting excited over Lulu’s newest collection of skin-tight snow-washed jeans that they could pay 90p-a-week for over 25 weeks.

...

I hope that, after lockdown and post-Covid, our youth come out of their homes, get off their screens, interact with a world that is dangerous, messy and exciting and, most importantly, revolt against ‘Instafashion’ they neither chose nor styled themselves. And if they don’t, they can rest assured there will be some extremely interesting and stylish Gen X raves going on in care homes in the coming years… 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/514490-lockdown-high-street-online/

Dangerous street?... No, most of our youth, when the lockdowns are over, will be of doing barbecues-on-Sundays age, if not about to retire from a life of unemployment... Life... Was it worth it?

Would not miss it for quids...

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned of an “explosion of risk” from criminals using digital technologies.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made the problem worse, because it has moved more crime online, she said on Wednesday.

Ms Yellen told a US Treasury roundtable that cryptocurrencies held promise, but were too often used for crime. 

However, she said new financial technologies could help fight crime and also reduce inequality.

• Home working increases cyber-security fears
• Yellen to be first female US treasury secretary
• Trump 'doesn't understand economics'

“We’re living amidst an explosion of risk related to fraud, money laundering, terrorist financing, and data privacy.

“As the pandemic has moved more of life online, crime has moved with it. We’re seeing more – and more sophisticated – cyberattacks aimed at institutions that hold up our society: hospitals, schools, banks and even our government,” she said.

The former Federal Reserve Bank chair also warned of the misuse of cryptocurrencies and other virtual assets.

“I see the promise of these new technologies, but I also see the reality: cryptocurrencies have been used to launder the profits of online drug traffickers; they’ve been a tool to finance terrorism,” she said. 

Ms Yellen vowed to modernise the Treasury’s approach to dealing with financial crimes. 

This week, bitcoin hit record highs after Elon Musk revealed he had bought $1.5bn and would accept the cryptocurrency as payment for Tesla cars in the future. 

Ms Yellen said financial technology (fintech) should also be used to address persistent inequality in the US. 

She said Covid-19 had exposed massive inequality, which she described as “one of the worst subplots of this pandemic”.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56021100

I like "Trump 'doesn't understand economics'"... No-one does. Or to say the least, we do know that we have to accept (or not) artificial flexible values of our exchanges — goods, services and currencies — that have no basis in the natural world, day to day, BY STYLISTIC CHOICE... And let's not mention taxation, which cyber-money tends to avoid by being "direct private transactions"...