Another day, another buckload of good stuff to share, so let’s get at it!

We will start with this little observational gem :

I will buy whatever it takes to prove capitalism doesn't work!

Possibly a little unfair, but still pretty funny. For me, it is the Starbucks that sells the joke. You can’t go to a protest without wearing or using some kind of product of capitalism unless you show up naked (and that would probably get you arrested) but you would definitely make your point better if you were not holding 25 cents worth of coffee and syrup that you paid five dollars to get.

Myself, while I am fairly left leaning, I am not against capitalism. I think capitalism is beautiful. Everyone doing their own thing, freely exchanging goods via money, each transaction making everyone involved a little bit happier. It works remarkably well for something with nobody in charge. No guiding will, no big long term plan. Just people exchanging their time for money, and money for goods.

My objection is to perversions of capitalism like the stock market and the financial services industries, to corporations able to pervert the rules and the rich able to simply bribe the people who are supposed to be keeping the system working into letting them loot and destroy it.

What I am against is the breakdown of law and order where it is needed most, in the arena of capitalism where all our destinies are always in play and where power and money make maintaining law and order extremely difficult and extremely necessary.

Plus, I hate Starbucks, and all my clothes come from Value Village. So there!

Speaking of regulating capitalism, there is a good article over at the New York Times called Why We Regulate which attacks the current mythology of financial anarchism that the right wing espouses.

I consider myself a financial (not fiscal) conservative. I think the big financial area should be soundly and solidly regulated. All this bullshit about how government intervention is always bad and how bad regulation is for the markets is just self-serving short-sighted hedonism. Of course the markets do not want to be regulated. Nobody likes to be told they cannot do what they want to do.

But you know who really really hates government intervention? Criminals, that’s who. What we have now is criminals advocating for less police and fewer laws. And somehow, the people doing the advocating can call themselves “conservatives” with a straight face.

Helps to have no conscience, I suppose.

In a sane world, it would be conservatives who were backing strong law and order in all venues.

You know what I think would have a huge psychological effect? If all cops that worked white collar crime and financial regulation wore cop’s uniforms at all time. No matter the agency, they should look like cops, the police, when they are out in public. Then it would be super clear to everyone that it is law and order that these anarchists are spitting on, and worse.

In other news, can you believe that George Lucas has actually done something cool?

Of course, he is doing it in the form of being a huge dick, but he is being a dick to other rich people, so it all works out.

Turns out, George has been trying for four decades to build a huge new state of the art $300 million movie studio right on property he owns in Marin County in California, and the other rich people in that area have been cockblocking him every single step of the way.

They don’t want some movie studio in their back yard increasing the traffic in the area and sullying their pristine neighborhood with something as lowly as people actually doing productive things.

Presumably, the thought of labour that is not directly in service to their own needs filled them with a deep and unendurable disgust.

So George has finally given up on his move studio, and has decided to build something else on the property instead : low income housing.

He is working with a local charity to plan housing for low income families and/or elderly people on fixed incomes, and he is even donating all the expensive land-use and environmental surveys to the project in order to smooth the way.

Now, instead of a movie studio in their back yard, the rich people of Lucas Valley (actual name!) will get to have poor people there instead.

Awesome move, Mister Lucas. Plus I love it when rich people fight amongst themselves.

Finally, over at Salon.com they have a rambling but highly informative article about the first gay President of the United States.

Turns out, it is quite clearly (and queerly) James Buchanan and furthermore, it was not even much of a secret why he had remained a “lifelong bachelor” (gee, me too!), the only unmarried President in the history of the U S of A.

I mean, check out this letter he wrote to a friend after the love of his life, William Rufus King, left him to be an ambassador in Paris :

I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.

I would say that is fairly unambiguous, n’est-ce pas?

I like the point the article makes about what the author calls “chronological ethnocentrism”, the belief that our current era is the most enlightened and all previous times must be less enlightened in direct proportion to how far in the past they lay.

But the truth is, our recent era is far more intolerant than Buchanan’s, and we have a lot to learn about how things change over time, and not always for the better.