Whytehawk poses an interesting question:

Foreign tourists arriving in South Africa in 2010 will (all going well) see nice new roads and sparkling stadiums overwhelming nearby buildings and clearly very expensive. They will (crime aside) hopefully have a very nice time. All starry-eyed they may pull out their chequebooks and offer to invest.

But what will they buy?

After all, we can’t have foreigners driving up property prices, can we? Nevermind the people who actually own assets and might want their values driven up by competition. What about the poor masses who need cheap holiday homes? Hey, I have an idea: ban everyone from paying anything for property. That’d make South African property accessible to anyone!

I’d say in the nick of time, but I’m neither sure if “nick” is a measure of time, nor if using it could land me in it. The nick, I mean. Having a pint may have presented a similar problem, but it is now officially legal. Yup, instead of just sneering at the yobs, they were going to ban it, the Eurocrats were.

A classical education is incomplete without Homer. He noted, for example: “English? Who needs that? I’m never going to England!”

I refer to the great Homer Simpson, of course, not to the Greek fellow who wrote funny stories about fantastic characters in fictional settings.

This virtual language lesson from Richard Nordquist might be aimed at school kids, but it is pretty amusing.

I did a double-take driving past the building in Linbro Park that used to belong to MGX. This company, as some may recall, collapsed spectacularly under a huge burden of debt resulting from misdirected dot-com era investment and alleged mismanagement. Guess who occupies the swanky building now?

If it wasn’t a government project, I’d have been tempted to short the stock.

This editorial makes a good point about the opposition of green groups to the climate agreement the White House favours, which prioritises economic development and quality of life standards, and insists on including China and India, two of the world’s four biggest CO₂ emitters, in any deal.

In a sense, [US president George W] Bush and [Australian prime minister John] Howard are calling the bluff of global warming alarmists by insisting that China and India be included in any emissions-reduction effort. They know the enviro-activists’ ultimate goal is not what the green lobby and complicit media have been selling to the public, but rather a crippling of thriving capitalist economies. Braying at a plan that insists on China’s and/or India’s participation exposes their real objective: punishing success.

China and India are by far the world’s worst large polluters, in terms of emissions as a function of economic output. This is the only sensible way to measure it, since it can be justified only in terms of economic benefit. No amount of pollution is a justifiable cost without a commensurate economic benefit. That makes it all the more reasonable for the US and Australia to insist that China and India contribute to any efforts to curb emissions.

Environmentalists accuse Bush and Howard of being disingenuous, and they have a point. The two know full well that global warming is hogwash, yet they support the greens’ measures for large-scale human interference with the fragile, ineffable mystery of life on earth.

But the real reason they’re wrong is far more serious. The leaders also understand that environmental activists are driven by an underlying anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist guilt complex. That their eco-demands will not so much clean up the environment as harm productive countries and curtail economic progress. But if that is true, why argue that green measures should be extended to China and India, two relatively poor countries that have yet to enjoy the full benefits of industrialisation and development? After all, prosperity is how countries earn quality of life, liberty and leisure. Prosperity produces the means to achieve a clean, healthy, enjoyable and productive environment. To solve the problems, including pollution, requires creating wealth, not destroying it.

It is true that successful countries shouldn’t be singled out for attempts to hobble their economies in the name of environmentalism. But Bush and Howard should be arguing against the misguided efforts by greens, not in favour of meting out eco-whippings equally. They should argue against hindering progress, instead of arguing in favour of hindering everyone equally.