There’s an interesting clause in the South African Constitution, in the Bill of Rights section dealing with freedom of speech:

16. Freedom of expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes ­
   1. freedom of the press and other media;
   2. freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;
   3. freedom of artistic creativity; and
   4. academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.

2. The right in subsection (1) does not extend to
   1. propaganda for war;
   2. incitement of imminent violence; or
   3. advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.

Which raises the question:

I have, for example, defended Operation Iraqi Freedom, both in print and online. (The arguments and caveats are beside the point for present purposes.) Was doing so unconstitutional? Does that constitute “propaganda for war”?

If you were to argue, for argument’s sake, in favour of military action to topple the economic illiterate Robert Mugabe, the brutal tyrant of Zimbabwe, would you have the constitutional right to do so, in South Africa? How about advocating intervention in Darfur, or a foreign civil war, on humanitarian or regional stability grounds? Is that propaganda for war? Is that illegal?

How about suggesting that South Africa can’t afford the costs of fighting AIDS because it must stand ready to defend itself from invasion by the United States? (I kid you not.)

I’m taking the question ad absurdum, perhaps. Surely advocating self-defence (of the sensible variety) isn’t covered. But what exactly does constitute “propaganda for war”? Any constitutional law experts willing to venture an opinion? Is such a clause not deplorably broad and vague?

Perhaps this is why our border guards didn’t give our allies from Botswana free passage, in time for the invasion of Lesotho. The constitution prohibited us from telling the officers we’re going to war, so if a party of heavily-armed troops turns up at the border post, please let them through. Perhaps that’s why our troops were so surprised when the Lesotho Defence Force actually had the temerity to shoot at them. They never got any of this “we will fight them on the beaches” stuff, because Lesotho doesn’t have beaches to fight on, and besides, it would have constituted unconstitunional “propaganda for war”.

Voir la vie en steampunk:

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” [known as the UnterGunther] set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

More details and pictures of this spectacular stunt by the clandestine urban explorers can be found at what appears to be the UnterGunther’s own account, and over at greg.org.

Just to be a drip, I’ll note that I’m a little surprised that the court cleared them of breaking into the Panthéon. The court’s duty is surely to apply the law, not make exceptions for horological Robin Hoods? These guys might have been both good and competent, but doesn’t a message that says, “It’s okay to break in, as long as you fix things, not break things,” set a somewhat disputable precedent?

Still. It rocks. Around the clock. (Sorry.)

“Taser” is a trade name for any of a range of stun guns used by law enforcement officers and soldiers to inflict non-lethal force. Now, a CBS report says the United Nations has described Tasers as a form of torture, after several deaths have been attributed to their use.

The UN has completely lost the plot, here, both on the facts and on PR.

First, torture is an interrogation technique in which pain or suffering is inflicted on a subject to persuade them to disclose information. It doesn’t extract very convincing confessions, but can force subjects to disclose other information, which may prove useful and may save lives. Either way, torture isn’t very useful at all if the subject dies. Killing is not the point of torture.

Second, Tasers are intended to subdue suspects, not kill them, nor to extract information. They are intended to incapacitate a subject. This is not torture, either in intent or effect. It does, however, make Tasers a useful alternative to guns, which deliver lethal force and imperil innocent bystanders. It also makes them useful as a weapon in situations where force is required, but lethal force is not justifiable. Of course, that Tasers sometimes turn out to be lethal is rather problematic. Of course, this problem must be addressed sooner rather than later, either by limiting their use to situations in which lethal force would normally be authorised, or by fixing them so the risk of killing a subject is much lower.

However, a simplistic label of “torture”, and a simplistic call for a ban on Tasers will leave law enforcement little choice but to revert to billy-clubs and guns as their only options. Is a beating with a billy-club really more palatable than a disabling electric shock, when administered to a suspect who resists arrest? Isn’t that “torture” too? And as for guns, some reports suggest that they’re even more lethal than Tasers.

Most importantly, however, rashly throwing about the word “torture”, without any apparent thought, dangerously devalues the term. With such shrill activism, fit only for the tabloid press, the UN is crying wolf. If it gets so hysterical on this issue, why would it attract serious attention when one day it raises the alarm over real torture? Is it any wonder so few people take the UN seriously these days?

This is tragic, in a side-splitting sort of way:

Zimbabwe’s latest inflation figures had been delayed because there were not enough goods in the shops to measure price increases, the state statistical department said yesterday.

It’s instructive for various reasons. The most obvious is that price controls, which Zimbabwe imposed to curb consumer price inflation, cause shortages. Eventually, those shortages become critical, as they have done now. Pity it’s the Zimbabwean people who pay the price for their government’s failure to grasp Economics 101, but it’s hardly surprising.

The other point to make is that the consumer price index that is usually held up as a measure of inflation is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It measures a possible effect of inflation, perhaps, but it does not measure inflation itself. Inflation is not a general increase in price levels. Inflation is an increase in money supply.

For an illustration, consider this chart, which measures US money supply against the value of the US dollar:

As the value of a dollar decreases, consumer prices will, of course, tend to increase too, but that increase is not in itself inflation. An Austrian School monetarist, Frank Shostak, has this to say by way of defining inflation:

The subject matter of inflation is the debasement of money. For instance, historically inflation originated when a ruler would force the citizens to give him all the gold coins under the pretext that a new gold coin was going to replace the old one. In the process, the king would falsify the content of the gold coins by mixing it with some other metal and return to the citizens diluted gold coins. On account of the dilution of the gold coins, the ruler could now mint a greater amount of coins for his own use. (He could now divert real resources to himself). In short, what was now passing as a pure gold coin was in fact a diluted gold coin. The expansion in the diluted coins that masquerade as pure gold coins is what inflation is all about. As a result of inflation, the ruler could engage in an exchange of nothing for something.

Under the gold standard, the technique of abusing the medium of the exchange became much more advanced through the issuance of paper money unbacked by gold. Inflation therefore means here an increase in the amount of paper receipts that are not backed by gold yet masquerade as true representatives of money proper, gold. Again the holder of unbacked money can now engage in an exchange of nothing for something.

In the modern world the money proper is no longer gold but rather paper money hence inflation in this case is purely the increase in the stock of paper money. Please note we don’t say as monetarists are saying (sic) that the increase in the money supply causes inflation. What we are saying is that inflation is the increase in the money supply.

Note that inflationary monetary policy remains, today, a way for governments to “inflate away debt”. But more pertinently for Zimbabwe, this shows that inflation can be measured simply by checking the records of the central bank: how much money did it print last month, as an annualised percentage of money in circulation? That’s inflation.

Measuring inflation does not require shelves full of consumer goods of which prices can be determined. Why would such a measurement be meaningful if prices are capped by government anyway? More pertinently, why would such a measure be meaningful if the shelves are empty in the first place?

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting front-page story recently about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. This project isn’t about laptops, you understand — it’s about education. But mostly, it’s about laptops. Building little green-and-white machines called “XO” that look like toys, to be sold for $100 to kids in poor countries. Problem is, the XO isn’t turning out to be very popular. So who do we blame? Microsoft, of course! And Intel!

With a subheadline one might expect from a newspaper that engages in left-wing editorialising, rather than hard business reporting, the Wall Street Journal agrees with him: “How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants”.

How, you may ask? Well, by supplying computers for the poor themselves. This, you see, is a bad thing. It appears to be less about computers for the poor than it is about who gets to wear the halo. Can’t have corporate profiteers nick Nick’s halo, now can we?

Mr. Negroponte’s ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

Negroponte does say he thinks it’s a good idea for people to sell cheap laptops:

“I’m not good at selling laptops,” Mr. Negroponte has told colleagues. “I’m good at selling ideas.”

“From my point of view, if the world were to have 30 million” laptops made by competitors “in the hands of children at the end of next year, that to me would be a great success,” he said in a recent interview. “My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It’s in the education business.”

Good thing too, because as the article makes clear, Negroponte’s laptop actually costs $188, and prospective customers are balking, turning to alternatives such as Intel’s Classmate, which doesn’t cost much more, is backed by a large company, and comes with Microsoft Windows. Other companies are also eyeing the huge untapped markets in the developing world.

“The Intel machine is a lot better than the OLPC,” says Mohamed Bani, who chairs Libya’s technical advisory committee but doesn’t have the final say on buying laptops. “I don’t want my country to be a junkyard for these machines.” Libya has decided buy at least 150,000 Intel Classmates. The future of the One Laptop program there is now uncertain.

… Nigeria, for example, so far has failed to honor a pledge by its former president to purchase one million laptops. That’s partly because they no longer cost $100 apiece, says Tomi Davies, a Nigerian-born technology entrepreneur who helped Mr. Negroponte set up talks with Nigerian officials.

… The higher price also has made the laptop vulnerable to competition from sellers of more traditional, Windows-based machines. For many education ministries, “it’s a no-brainer you go with Microsoft,” says Mr. Davies.

But that doesn’t stop him from complaining about the competition from alternatives such as Intel’s Classmate laptop:

Mr. Negroponte says he communicated this month with Intel’s chief executive, Paul Otellini, and demanded that Intel stop selling the Classmate. Intel, which says there is room in the market for many machines, has refused, according to a spokeswoman.

… “We can’t compete,” complains Ayo Kusamotu, One Laptop’s attorney in Nigeria. “The minute we started getting some traction, they [Intel] intensified their effort.” Nigeria recently agreed to purchase 17,000 Intel Classmates.

In May, Mr. Negroponte appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and blasted Intel, suggesting it was trying to drive his nonprofit out of business. Intel’s Mr. Barrett called that idea “crazy.” Two months later, Intel announced it was joining One Laptop’s board. The agreement included a “nondisparagement” clause, under which Intel and One Laptop promised not to criticize each other, according to Mr. Negroponte.

He claims, disingenuously, that the competition actually raises prices by not permitting his projects to achieve the anticipated economies of scale. What I’m seeing is that even his higher price point of $188 is sufficient to drive the prices charged by other producers down.

I’d think, if the purpose of the OLPC project is not to sell laptops, but to promote education, Negroponte would be delighted that so many private companies have picked up on his idea and realised that they can, indeed, provide cheap computers to developing-country customers. After all, a non-profit surely exists to serve a public purpose, not to compete against the private sector.

He may well dispute the arguments by customers about why the competing machines are better, and he may well have a point. I’d recommend open source software for educational computers myself. If he’s unable to deliver on his promises, when private companies can, the market is no longer failing. If he’s unable to convince prospective buyers, on price, performance or features, bitching in the press about competition strikes me as a desparate act to retain control of the market. Why try to shut up companies that are merely trying to promote their own products, unless you don’t think your own product can win on merit? Such tactics are hardly consistent with the supposedly altruistic motives of a non-profit organisation.

He’d gain a lot more respect from me if he’d stopped at declaring victory: “See? I told you it could be done!” But sadly, his slip is showing, and he just has to go on to reinforce the canard that non-profits are good and for-profits are bad. All he does is show that academics and non-profits are pathologically prejudiced against the power of free enterprise. Even when the empirical evidence in the market contradicts them.

Brett Jolly, the obscure businessman who made an unlikely claim, some months ago, to have found a green stone, which at 7 000 carats could be the world’s largest diamond — twice as large as the Cullinan, and 150 times the largest green diamond ever found — is whining. He has reportedly asked the National Prosecuting Authority to investigate a fraud case against his business partners. He’s also suing for R300 000 in civil court, since this is what he claims to have spent on the unlikely caper, before the stone was even superficially examined by someone who had actually seen real diamonds before.

Turns out the “stone” wasn’t plastic, as I surmised, but resin. I’m not sure you really want to go to court to show you were gullible enough to believe such an exceedingly unlikely story, and have questions asked about how the stone got photographed in a convenient office when Jolly’s original claim was the photo was taken en route from the mine to a vault in Johannesburg, but then, I didn’t bet R300 000 on this tall tale.

I’m increasingly pleased about having left Facebook. A couple of weeks ago I posted about advertising that appears in your news stream, cannily disguised to look like a photo update from a friend. Now, things are getting even murkier.

A guy named Joe discovered that not only were his purchases on Facebook partner sites like Overstock and Yelp being tracked, but they were being posted to his news stream. He didn’t opt in, and claims (justifiably, it would seem) not to have been given a clear and unambiguous way to opt out.

An AP story shows the implicit dangers of embarrassment and worse of this feature, which Facebook dubs “Beacon”. One guy discovered what his girlfriend had bought him as a present. Another found his movie ticket purchases displayed to his friends. The article not only shows how tricksey the feature is, but also notes that users cannot withdraw completely from the programme, but merely decrease the frequency of the relevant items in their news feeds. (Just like my account at Facebook is merely inactive, and cannot be deleted.)

This feature is remarkably offensive. “Hey, everyone, Jimmy bought some lube! Do you want some?” Or more realistically, as one source in the AP story says, “What if you bought a book on Amazon called ‘Coping with AIDS’ and that got published to every single one of your friends?”

Joe asks, plaintively: “Facebook, it is not OK to collect information about me from other sites. Please stop.”

Sorry, Joe. You agreed:

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service … in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience. … We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.

However, not being able to opt out of this offensive feature is contrary to Facebook’s own privacy policy, which states: “And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.”

Turns out the privacy policy and terms of use are there to bind users, not Facebook. It also turns out, as I discovered when I wanted my account deleted, that once you agree, you can never revoke any permissions you gave Facebook. Not even when circumstances — such as Facebook’s shareholding — change. They own you and the lemons you buy. Forever.

Update: Duncan McLeod has published a Financial Times article on the subject on his website.

For those not familiar with the South African power utility Eskom, here’s a taste.

In 2005, according to this news report, “8.8 million people became infected with tuberculosis and 1.6 million died of it. It takes months of careful antibiotic treatment to clear the infection.”

This sort of death toll is why projects like the Copenhagen Consensus, which is due for an update in 2008, cite disease control as a better way to spend a given amount of public money than many others (such as fighting global warming). It cites HIV/AIDS and malaria, though not TB, in particular.

The problem many countries — in particular developing countries like my own — face is that TB treatment is hard to enforce. Although South Africa has had some success with a buddy system to monitor drug treatment, the fact is that among poor communities, rigorous adherence to long-term drug treatments is a problem (and not only in the case of TB). Non-completion of courses of antibiotic medication leads to mutations that create drug-resistant super-strains. These affect not only the country of origin, but the rest of the world.

So, having sketched the bad news, the article cited at the top contains the good news:

Researchers have decoded the gene map of a strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and said on Tuesday their work has identified mutations that may help develop better treatments.

They also sequenced the genome of another dangerous strain called multidrug-resistant TB, as well as run-of-the-mill tuberculosis bugs, and found a few mutations may explain how the mutant strains evade antibiotics.

“By looking at the genomes of different strains, we can learn how the tuberculosis microbe outwits current drugs and how new drugs might be designed,” said Megan Murray of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Of course, one needs to be careful with statistics such as the number of infections and deaths cited above. It turns out, for example, that statistics on HIV/AIDS have been grossly overestimated. As the Washington Post reports from Johannesburg, South Africa:

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.

The main reason isn’t an actual decline in the underlying numbers: “U.N. officials say the revisions stemmed mainly from better measurements rather than fundamental shifts in the epidemic.”

Why is this a problem? Well, as James Taranto trenchantly notes in his Best of the Web Today column, the Washington Post piece is quite explicit about it:

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

… Among the reasons for the overestimate is methodology; U.N. officials traditionally based their national HIV estimates on infection rates among pregnant women receiving prenatal care. As a group, such women were younger, more urban, wealthier and likely to be more sexually active than populations as a whole, according to recent studies.

The United Nations’ AIDS agency, known as UNAIDS and led by Belgian scientist Peter Piot since its founding in 1995, has been a major advocate for increasing spending to combat the epidemic. Over the past decade, global spending on AIDS has grown by a factor of 30, reaching as much as $10 billion a year.

But in its role in tracking the spread of the epidemic and recommending strategies to combat it, UNAIDS has drawn criticism in recent years from Epstein and others who have accused it of being politicized and not scientifically rigorous.

… Piot often wrote personal prefaces to those reports warning of the dangers of inaction, saying in 2006 that “the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions.”

All of this lends support to the arguments by Taranto, Don Surber, Noel Sheppard and others, that UN claims about future dangers and funding priorities are flawed, corrupt, or both.

Large government or inter-governmental spending sprees are no match for scientific and technical progress that tackles real problems, rather than hyping up politically-correct bogeymen. Scientists outwit high powered mutants¹, whereas the bureaucrats create them.

But guess who’s going to get stick when a pharmaceutical company uses the excellent work of the scientists whom Eli and Edith Broad so generously fund, to make life-saving drugs for sale in Africa?

1. with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson [↩]

Since Al Gore is now a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which in turn partners with his own investment company, Generation Investment Management, his climate change crusade can no longer be mistaken for a selfless act of political leadership.

As Generation Investment Management says: “Our preference for performance-based fees aligns our interests with that of our clients and is typically based on long-term performance.”

I’m all for private investment into alternative energy and green technology research. There’s a lot of great innovation going on there, and the field is full of promise and opportunity. In fact, private investment and free markets are how one discovers where the real cost-benefit of green technology lies. Competing marketing messages is how consumers discover new products, and get the opportunity to satisfy unmet needs or wants. If this includes the need for a cleaner environment, good on them, and good on the companies that profit from supplying that need.

Provided, of course, that governments don’t introduce market-distorting protectionist or interventionist policies.

Green activists love to paint skeptics as “oil-company funded”. As if the generalisation is true, and even when it is, as if oil companies don’t have a contribution to make to the debate, or have no right to lobby against laws and restrictions that are inimical to their interests.

Gore’s venture into capital merely underscores the point that environmentalism is a big business. Thousands of “climate scientists” depend for their income on global warming being a scary crisis that needs research funding. Thousands of green technology and alternative energy companies rely on the climate change scam for their marketing.

Every time Gore calls for a biofuel subsidy, a green tax rebate, a legal restriction, an environmental mandate, or a carbon offset, know that it is simply a marketing message for Al Gore Inc and his partners at KPCB. Know that he is simply lobbying for protectionism in favour of his own vested interests. All protectionism distorts markets, prejudices one group in favour of another, and ultimately destroys wealth. And so does every law or government policy on Al Gore’s action agenda.

What a great post over at Murder of Ravens:

Whenever I fill my pipe – perhaps a Sasieni made back in the 1920’s out of briar that was 100 years old back then–with a fine matured Virginia, sit back, light up, see the ember glowing in the bowl, and taste the exquisite flavor, my mind and soul find peace. There really is nothing to compare to the taste of the Virginia, the feel of the warm briar in my hand, and the visual beauty of the finely grained wood. They all combine into one of the most satisfying sensory experiences known to man.

(Via Nuke Gingrich.)

That’s it, then. Campaign 2008 is over, and Mike Huckabee has won.

You wouldn’t dare argue, would you?