At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.

When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.

They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?

I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.

Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.

Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.

The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.

Because I could have been killed.

A “prank” phonecall that could easily have gotten the victim killed. Difficult to describe that as a mere “prank”. Bordering on terrorism, if not over the line.

It actually happened. The phenomenon is called “SWATting,” because it can bring a SWAT team to your front door. SWATting is a particularly dangerous hoax in which a caller, generally a computer hacker, calls a police department to report a shooting at the home of his enemy. The caller will place this call to the police department’s business line, using Skype or a similar service, and hiding behind Internet proxies to make the call impossible to trace. Anxious police, believing they are responding to the home of an armed and dangerous man, show up at the front door pointing guns and screaming orders.

That is exactly what happened to me. It is a very dangerous hoax that could get the target killed.

The report documents the license requirements for 102 low- and moderate-income occupations — such as barber, massage therapist and preschool teacher — across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It finds that occupational licensing is not only widespread, but also overly burdensome and frequently irrational.

On average, these licenses force aspiring workers to spend nine months in education or training, pass one exam and pay more than $200 in fees. One third of the licenses take more than a year to earn. At least one exam is required for 79 of the occupations.

Barriers like these make it harder for people to find jobs and build new businesses that create jobs, particularly minorities, those of lesser means and those with less education.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Friedrich August Hayek, the Viennese-born Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher, who led the intellectual equivalent of the D-Day charge against central planning in the postwar era. His lessons are worth remembering in 2012, especially now that left-wing politicians in France, Greece and elsewhere seem intent on forgetting them.

Hayek’s great adversary was John Maynard Keynes, whose faith in the ability of government economic planners to “correct” the operation of markets inspired generations of disciples in government and academe. In the long run, Hayek got the better of the argument with Keynes. Indeed, his ideas contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and continue to influence economic thought to this day.

Hayek and Keynes were punctilious professional colleagues and scholarly rivals. Yet for all the correctness that characterized their relations — Hayek was, for example, Keynes’s guest when the London School of Economics fled the Nazi bombings to the relative safety of Cambridge — the Austrian could not shake a profound distrust of Keynes.A brilliant economist, captivating teacher, witty conversationalist and bon vivant, Keynes seemed to almost everyone who knew him a Renaissance man and one of his country’s most powerful minds. Hayek found Keynes glib and superficial, but it was Keynes’ intellectual dilettantism that most appalled him. When Keynes wrote A Treatise on Money in 1930, Hayek spent a year carefully analyzing it, and then wrote a devastating review. At their next meeting, Hayek was outraged when Keynes airily said that he now agreed with Hayek, having long since changed his mind. Hayek always regretted that this incident led him to neglect replying to Keynes’ next book. By the time Hayek was alive to the danger, it was too late.

The question of whether it is truly sexually gratifying to have a Wartenberg pinwheel roll over your nipples while handcuffed to a stretcher bar with a ball gag in your mouth is something I hadn’t really thought about in the sheltered life I lead. I haven’t even been beaten with a Perspex ruler. I did once go out with an Englishman who was reputed to have an extraordinary collection of canes and crops for flogging but, apart from asking if I rode, which I did not, nothing in our brief acquaintance seemed to unlock that door.

These arcane sexual matters now have a pass into normal conversation ever since the breathtaking success of the new trilogy of novels Fifty Shades of Grey set in an idealized world of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism) and all their sex toys. The author, under the pseudonym E.L. James, was on Time’s 2012 100 Most Influential People in the World list, which tells us something, I expect, but probably nothing good. The plot of the novels is bog standard Cinderella with a modern twist: a young virgin, Anastasia, meets an extremely wealthy unable-to-commit Adonis, Christian Grey, who has a thing for inflicting physical pain because of—here comes the contemporary bit — his abused childhood involving a crack cocaine-addicted mother. By the end of the second novel, Christian has reformed and he marries Ana in book three.

I was genuinely riveted for at least the first 20 chapters. One always likes learning about a new culture. Now I know that the beginning position for a submissive is sitting on her ankles, hands positioned on spread thighs and head down until Master allows you to look up. The novel is a tease: you get to see the drawer of sex toys in volume two — clamps and various devices to wear in one’s bottom or front — but the actual descriptions of congress are, apart from explicit names for various bits of the body, pretty tame. Like much soft pornography, this book has the sound and scope of a prudish author and a legalistically prudent publisher.

Politicians marshalling an army of PR consultants to appear authentic. Multinational companies selling products with folksy, homespun brands. Public inquiries that have nothing to do with the public. The paradoxes proliferate in journalist and academic Eliane Glaser’s enjoyably hyperactive new book, Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Her ambition is overarching: she wants to show us the way to the truth of the matter. She wants to cut through the crap. She wants us to follow the royal road of social critique. In short, she wants us to see things for what they are. (A bit rubbish, as it turns out.)

[. . .]

Glaser is even better when it comes to ‘scientism’. Awe-struck deference is everywhere, she argues, from Brian Cox’s television series Wonders of the Universe to the World of Wonders science museum in California. ‘Scientific wonder carries with it a sense of humility, which is ostensibly about meekness in the face of extraordinary facts’, she writes. ‘But it blurs into deference towards scientists, with their privileged access to those facts.’ Indeed, anything that Stephen Hawking says, be it about the existence of God or the plight of the planet, is treated as if it comes straight from the oracle’s mouth. ‘In modern culture, scientism is the new religion. God knows what happened to scepticism.’

This conflation of fact with value, this belief that science, having seemingly supplanted moral and political reasoning, can tell us what to do, is highly damaging, Glaser argues. Political decisions, necessitated by science, become a fait accompli. So when, in 2009, US President Barack Obama lifted the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research, he felt no need to make a moral, political case for the decision: ‘The promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgement of science.’ This is not to say that stem-cell research is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that a politician needs to make the case for it being a good thing.

Yet while there is plenty of critique in Get Real, there is plenty that is unquestioned, too. So no sooner has Glaser put scientism on the rack than, a few pages on, she’s espousing its most prominent manifestation: environmentalism. The chapter even begins with some all-too-persuasive facts from the mouths of Those To Whom We Must Defer: ‘Climate scientists generally agree that the safe limit for the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million (ppm). As I write this, we’re already at 390ppm.’ She soon proceeds to read off a number of Malthus-heavy assertions passed off as fact: ‘Global warming, population explosion, peak oil, biodiversity in freefall: Planet Earth is facing unprecedented and multiple crises. It is little wonder, therefore, that as the situation becomes more desperate, self-deception becomes more attractive. If the world is turning into a desert, it’s tempting to put your head in the sand.’

It’s a bizarre reversal. Having eviscerated the deference towards science in one section, in another she proceeds to lambast those who resist the science for their ‘denialism’. It does not seem to occur to Glaser that a principal reason for opposing the environmental orthodoxy is that it attempts to pass off a moral and political argument about how we should live our lives — low-consumption, little procreation and an acceptance of economic stagnation — as a scientific necessity. Could there be a more flagrant form of the scientism that Glaser so eloquently takes to task elsewhere?

I remembered the joke this morning when I read the Financial Post’s daily market commentary: “The S&P 500 added more than 2% in the two previous sessions as immediate concerns over rising yields in Spain and Italy ebbed and on bets the Chinese GDP data would surprise on the upside.”

This commentary can sound so knowledgeable and wise. But to suggest that daily market movements can be explained in such simple cause-and-effect terms is laughable. If you want proof, all you need to do is read the commentary every day. You’ll just as often see statements like this: “The S&P 500 shed more than 2% in the two previous sessions despite immediate concerns over…”

It can’t work both ways: either these events affect daily stock prices, or they don’t. Once you accept this, you realize that commentary linking the S&P 500 to surprising Chinese GDP data sounds a lot like the joke about Katarina Witt and Billy Martin.

Here’s my own version of the daily market report: “The S&P 500 added more than 2% during the last two sessions because of an incredibly complex and largely random combination of factors that cannot possibly be distilled into one sentence. Analysts expect gains to continue during the second quarter, but since this already priced into the markets, no one should give a fiddler’s fart what they think. Meanwhile, money managers have released their forecasts for the year, which will be widely read and acted upon, despite the fact that their previous forecasts were dead wrong. Tune in tomorrow for more of the same. In the meantime, stick to your long-term plan.”

H/T to Terence Corcoran for the link.

So there he was, the secret ruler of modern Britain, the dark, rotting heart of the British state, the man who has wielded his ‘extraordinary power’ in order to ‘manipulate officialdom’ and extend his influence over ‘politics, the media and the police’. I hope you weren’t fooled by Rupert Murdoch’s diminutive stature or his octogenarian demeanour as he appeared before the Leveson Inquiry yesterday, or his denials about using his ‘political power to get favourable treatment’. Because this small, old newspaper owner is, in fact, the mastermind of a ‘shadowy influence-mart’ who has exercised a ‘malign influence on our politics for the past 30 years’. And now, thanks to Lord Leveson, we finally have an opportunity to ‘banish’ this ‘tyrant’ from our shores and a ‘glorious opportunity for meaningful reform’.

At least, that’s what the Leveson cheerleading squad, the media and celebrity groupies of this inquiry into press ethics, would have us believe. These people are rapidly taking leave of their senses. Their depiction of Rupert Murdoch as the dastardly puppeteer of the British political sphere has crossed the line from rational commentary into David Icke territory, sounding increasingly like a conspiracy theory about secret rulers of the world. And their claim that Murdoch singlehandedly ruined British politics — that he is, in the words of one commentator, the architect of modern Britain’s ‘heartlessness, coarseness and spite’ — speaks to their inability to get to grips with the true causes of political crisis today. Yesterday’s shenanigans made it pretty clear that Murdoch-bashing has become a cheap substitute for grown-up debate.

It is of course true that Murdoch is very influential, as you would expect of a man who, in Britain alone, owns both the newspaper of record (The Times) and the bestselling tabloid (the Sun). But not only do the Murdoch-maulers overestimate how influential he is; more importantly they misunderstand the origins and nature of his influence in modern Britain. It is not that Murdoch set out to create a ‘shadow state’ that could ‘intimidate parliament’, as madly claimed by Labour MP Tom Watson. Rather, it was the increasing alienation of parliament and politicians from the public which boosted Murdoch’s political fortunes, making him the go-to man for ministers and MPs desperate to make a connection with us. In other words, Murdoch didn’t destroy British politics in his scrabble for greater influence — it was the already existing death of British politics, its loss of meaning and purchase, which, by default, made Murdoch influential.

The Hunger Games “universe” is the inevitable result at the attempt to implement Agenda 21.

• Herding the population into tightly controlled resource production “districts”.
  While there are no “arcologies/super cities” as forwarded by Agenda 21, I don’t think such things could possibly be created by such a system anyway. The Agenda 21 structure is simply too anti-technological and too government heavy. The “Hunger Games” police state “Districts” is a much more believable result of enforced population reduction & control.
• In the “country” of “Panem” no one is allowed out into “the wild”. Agenda 21 demands “rewilding” of all space outside of habitation districts. In the Hunger Games, crossing the electrified fence can get you shot. Killing wild game (poaching the government’s animals) will get you shot. Pristine Earth policed with heavy weapons. Sound familiar?
• Travel is largely by High Speed Rail, and solely by High Speed Rail between Districts. Cars/trucks are only mentioned in the Capitol. The more poor the district, the more likely you are to be forced to walk everywhere. Only the Military has anything resembling air travel and even that is curtailed (one character dreams/reminisces about winged flight vs. hovercraft).
• The utter disdain for Carbon Based Fuels.
  The Heroine from Hunger Games comes from the Coal Producing District (District 12). As described, there simply could not be enough coal produced by that district to have coal be a viable energy source, therefore the coal must be being used for other non-energy-related tasks. Likewise, “District 12″ is the pariah of the Districts. Nobody loves Coal, and nobody loves the people who produce it. “Power” is produced by a nameless “District 5″ by nameless means, though Nuclear is suggested on the website.
• There is no Religion in the Hunger Games world.
  Agenda 21 specifically declares non-pantheistic/non-”natural” religions (particularly Judaism, Islam & Christianity) as something that must be eliminated. “Nature worship” is apparently OK.
• The Government is Hollywood/Hollywood is Government.
  Hollyweirdoes love Agenda 21. The 3 books of the series are not kind to Hollywood and the kind of government the majority of those weirdoes would create. It presents “The Capitol” as a cross between San-Francisco Body Modification, Hollywood & Rome where nonproductive decadence, self importance, absurd vanity and utter banality are the rule. Any wonder the Movie(s) (will) suppress this aspect of the books?

Other Themes, late in the series: Revolutions aren’t always led by noble causes.

As someone who likes MMOs — and who isn’t necessarily convinced they need saving — I’m treating my uninterrupted weekend with the game as an opportunity to see how far it can deliver on its big ideas. If it can convince me that we really have been doing everything wrong since World of Warcraft, then ArenaNet could be on to something.

I opt to play a female human warrior. My choice of race is down to the fact that the human starting area — lush farmland under attack by roaming centaur warbands — is the most frequently cited example of GW2’s evolving ‘events’ system, where quests are thrown out in favour of dynamic objectives based on the independent actions of players, monsters and friendly NPCs. I become a mail-clad warrior, meanwhile, because I want my character to put some bloody clothes on. The land of Tyria is populated by clear-faced underwear models, and it’s an uphill struggle to make a female character who doesn’t look 15 years old. The best I can do is a kind of Disney Joan of Arc, a waif-thin airbrushed beauty wielding a sword bigger than she is. I avoid spellcasters entirely because there’s only so much Renaissance-themed fetish gear I can handle.

It’s not all aesthetic hell, however:

Guild Wars 2’s events system is starting to make sense. “Events are very visual,” Flannum says. “They don’t require a lot of explanation. You run into a city and there are centaurs attacking everyone – you kind of know what to do, right?”

[. . .]

We cooperated wordlessly, matching the capabilities of our characters to the present need without any planning or leadership. When the behemoth fell, a cheer went up. It dropped a glimmering treasure chest, from which everyone received a boon of item upgrades and general purpose loot. My gold-ranked contribution to the fight earned me half a level and filled me with genuine pride. What was remarkable about this encounter is that it provided top tier thrills with none of the set-up, none of the stress. This is exactly what ArenaNet are aiming for, Eric Flannum says. “One of the things that we really wanted to avoid was this feeling that the game doesn’t really start until max level.”

What was remarkable about my time with GW2 as a whole is that situations like this one — impromptu mass cooperation, with a real sense of a collective experience — came about several times. I have questions about how events will operate when zones are either over or under-populated, but if nothing else my time proves one thing: the system works.

Industrial development: World GDP stood in real 2010 dollars at about $19 trillion in 1972 and has tripled to $57 trillion today. Average per capita incomes rose in real dollars from $5,000 to $8,100 today. Just to explore how incomes might evolve between 1972 and 2000, the researchers simply extrapolated the current growth, investment, and population growth rates to calculate GDP per capita for 10 large countries. They stressed these were not “predictions” but added that if one disagreed then one was obligated to specify which factors changed, when and why. A comparison of their extrapolations with actual GDP per capita (in 2010 dollars) finds U.S. GDP per capita $56,000 versus actual $44,000; Japan’s per capita GDP was projected to be $120,000 versus actual $46,000; the now defunct USSR would be $33,000 versus Russia’s $2,200; and China’s per capita income was supposed to grow to $500, but was instead $1,200.

Population: The Limits researchers noted, “Unless there is a sharp rise in mortality, which mankind will strive mightily to avoid, we can look forward to a world population of around 7 billion persons in 30 more years.” In addition, they suggested that in 60 years there would be “four people in the world for everyone living today.” In fact, average global life expectancy rose from 60 to nearly 70 years. On the other hand, the global fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has during her lifetime) fell from about 6 per woman in 1970 to 2.8 today and continues to fall.

[. . .]

Food supplies: According to the data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, global food production has more than tripled since 1961, while world population has increased from 3 billion to 7 billion. This means that per capita food has increased by more than a third. The latest figures from the United Nations show that as world population increased by a bit over 10 percent between 2000 and 2009, global food production rose by 21 percent.

[. . .]

Nonrenewable resources: Probably the most notorious projections from the MIT computer model involved the future of nonrenewable resources. The researchers warned: “Given present resource consumption rates and the projected increase in these rates, the great majority of currently nonrenewable resources will be extremely expensive 100 years from now.” To emphasize the point they pointed out that “those resources with the shortest static reserve indices have already begun to increase.” For example, they noted that the price of mercury had increased 500 percent in the last 20 years and the price of lead was up 300 percent over the past 30 years. The advent of the “oil crises” of the 1970s lent some credibility to these projections.

To highlight how dire the situation with nonrenewable resources was, the MIT researchers calculated how quickly exponential consumption could deplete known reserves of various minerals and fossil fuels. Even if global consumption rates didn’t increase at all, the MIT modelers calculated 40 years ago that known world copper reserves would be entirely depleted in 36 years, lead in 26 years, mercury in 13 years, natural gas in 38 years, petroleum in 31 years, silver in 16 years, tin in 17 years, tungsten in 40 years, and zinc in 23 years. In other words, most of these nonrenewable resources would be entirely used up before the end of the 20th century.

[. . .]

Environment: In most of the Limits model runs, the ultimate factor that does humanity in is pollution. In their model pollution directly increases human death rates and also dramatically reduces food production. In fact, as the world economy has grown, global average life expectancy has increased from 52 years in 1960 to 70 years now. It must be acknowledged that globally, pollution from industrial and agricultural production continues to rise. But the model assumed that pollution would increase at exponential rates. However, many pollution trends have not increased exponentially in advanced countries.

Consider that since 1970, the U.S. economy has grown by 200 percent, yet the levels of air pollutants regulated by the federal government have fallen by nearly 60 percent. For example, in both the U.S. and the European Union sulfur dioxide emissions have dropped by nearly 70 percent since 1990. Recent data suggests that sulfur dioxide emissions even from rapidly industrializing China peaked in 2006 and have begun declining. Earlier studies cite evidence for a pollution turning point income threshold (purchasing power parity) of around $10,000 for demands to reduce this form of air pollution.