My latest weekly column at GuildMag is now online. Some disappointed fans are expressing their anger over the announcement that the next Beta Weekend Event would not be this weekend. Some leaked information through Reddit, and the usual assortment of blog posts, videos and podcasts round out the bill of lading for this week.
May 25, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Herbert Hoover, far from a poster boy for laissez faire government
Steven Horwitz in The Freeman debunks the “high school history” notion that President Hoover was a proponent of laissez faire capitalism which caused the Great Depression. They’ve got the right culprit, but the wrong crime:
One of the most pernicious myths in the economic history of the twentieth century is the belief that the Great Depression was caused, or at least worsened, by Herbert Hoover’s dogmatic commitment to a “do nothing” laissez-faire policy in the aftermath of the stock market crash. This argument is part and parcel of the set of beliefs about the Great Depression that I have dubbed the “high school history” version of that event. (It includes the claims that laissez faire caused it, Hoover’s inaction worsened it, the New Deal did wonders, and World War II got us all the way out.) This claim about Hoover’s dedication to laissez faire is, as I have suggested, utterly false.
In fact Herbert Hoover was long known as a Progressive who favored much more government intervention in the economy. From his days with the U.S. Food Administration in World War I through his time in the 1920s as secretary of commerce, Hoover constantly pushed his beliefs that laissez faire did not work and that government must take a more active role. When the economy went south during his first year as president, it came as no surprise that he put those beliefs into action.
Hoover not only signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, as everyone knows, he also encouraged businessmen to keep wages up, expanded the real amount of government spending, reduced immigration to near zero, set up all manner of government lending facilities, and increased the budget deficit. Along with the Federal Reserve System’s failure to do its job, resulting in a 30 percent drop in the money supply, these Hoover interventions were responsible for turning what might have been a severe, but short recession into a Great Depression. So the “high school history” story is right to blame Hoover — but it does so for exactly the wrong reasons.
But it’s been a great way to tarnish free market advocates and effortlessly refute their arguments, because “everybody knows” that laissez faire doesn’t work. Our high school teachers wouldn’t have mislead us all about that, would they?
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Grabbing the Dragon‘s tail
Brid-Aine Parnell at The Register on today’s successful rendezvous with the ISS:
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has just made history with the first ever commercial cargoship to be captured by the International Space Station’s robotic arm.
Image from NASA TVFlying above northwestern Australia, flight engineer Don Pettit aboard the ISS reached out with the Canadarm and grabbed the Dragon at 9.56am EDT, 14.56 GMT.
Reg staff are not sure if astronauts are given cheesy lines to say at these big moments, but Pettit had a great one ready.
“Looks like we’ve got a dragon by the tail,” he announced to Mission Control Centre in Houston.
“Looks like this sim went really well, we’re ready to turn it around and do it for real,” he joked.
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Ottawa assault and robbery victim spent 75 days behind bars after 911 call
The Ottawa police have promised an investigation into this weird miscarriage of justice:
Ottawa police are investigating how an elderly victim of a vicious attack in his home ended up spending 75 days in jail after calling 911 for help.
Marian Andrzejewski, 74, called 911 after two men broke into his Ottawa apartment in October 2010, robbed him and punched him repeatedly.
But instead of getting help, Andrzejewski was scolded by the dispatcher when he struggled to communicate in broken English and ended up in handcuffs himself when police finally arrived.
H/T to Mike Brock for the link.
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“SWATting”
This is a rather disturbing development:
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.
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QotD: Sherlock and the fickle tide of fashion
[Y]ou can see why men wanted to get the look. Perhaps they noted the effect Cumberbatch, by no means your standard telly hunk, had on lady viewers […] and decided it must have something to do with the clobber. So it is that Britain’s latest men’s style icon is a fictional asexual sociopath first seen onscreen hitting a corpse with a horse whip. Surely not even the great detective himself could have deduced that was going to happen.
Alexis Petridis, “No chic, Sherlock”, The Guardian, 2010-09-04
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