To lighten the mood before departing to meet his destiny at the ANC conference in Polokwane, South African president Thabo Mbeki signed an absurd law you’d expect to find in a Monty Python farce.

The new Sexual Offences Act says that teenagers under the age of 16 caught kissing, petting, touching or even hugging each other can be criminally charged. It bans any sexual behaviour, from touching on down, among teenagers, even if it is consensual. The law doesn’t specify whether being in possession of teenage hormones will constitute a crime, or whether you’ll have to prove they were for personal use only. Either way, if you’re not 16 and you’re horny, be careful you don’t earn yourself a spanking.

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For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up. — Hosea 8:7

It felt strangely like a wake, watching the inevitability of Jacob Zuma’s election as the new head of the ANC, and proposing a wry toast. Unless he is convicted on corruption charges, which is far from certain, South Africa’s list-based proportional representation system makes him a near-certainty to become the next South African president in 2009.

That’s what you get for half-hearted commitment to market reforms and economic freedom.

Although many praise the ANC for having steered a sensible economic course, I’m far from enamoured with its record. Instead of freeing the economy, it has largely pursued a brand of national socialism not unlike that followed by the racist National Party during the Apartheid years. That the intended beneficiaries of government’s policy were infinitely more fair doesn’t change the fact that government tried — and failed — to deliver services that are beyond the ability of a government to deliver. If national socialism didn’t even work for a tiny fraction of South Africa’s population, what chance would it have of providing for the entire population?

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Pictured alongside is Lauren Bush, the niece of US president George W Bush. She made the news recently with a charity project called FEED. Each designer canvas bag sold will generate enough money to feed one child in the developing world for a year.

Good Magazine quotes her as saying: “I would love for [this] to be completely nonpolitical because I think it distracts from the real humanitarian point of the project.”

But that’s not good enough for Sky News, whose Adam Boulton spent most of his interview with the 23-year-old trying to trip her up over his own prejudices about her uncle. According to the Sky report:

However, the US is often seen by some as the main obstacle to helping the Third World in terms of world trade.

It has the largest economy but as a proportion of its wealth it does not give as much as some other nations.

Nevermind that this is irrelevant, ill-informed and uncalled-for editorialising. Nevermind that it confuses aid with trade. Nevermind that the US is the biggest global aid donor in nominal terms, is on a par with many others in relative terms, and that the Bush administration has increased aid commitments to Africa compared to previous US administrations. Nevermind that the US is the leading promoter of trade (as opposed to aid) in the fight against poverty. Nevermind whether trade should be preferred to aid. Nevermind whether simply dispatching an arbitrarily chosen share of gross national income on foreign aid is better or worse than spending less money more effectively. Nevermind whether throwing good money after bad in foreign aid is likely to address “Third World” poverty (as opposed to merely soothing the collective conscience of the rich). These weren’t the questions Boulton asked of Lauren Bush.

Instead, Boulton threw his own simple biases about the US president at his college-age niece, which strikes me as pretty low. If he’s going to bash Bush, why pick on her? Is she to blame for the public’s perception (or more accurately, the media’s lack of objectivity) about the US? Why would she have anything at all to say about US policy on foreign aid or free trade? Why not ask her directly under which conditions she believes aid works, and when she believes aid trumps trade in poverty relief? Why not ask her about her own project, instead of harrying her with cheap shots about her uncle?

When the activistreporter closed by asking why she didn’t want to go into politics, she tartly shot back: “Because of questions like these.”

That barb didn’t make it into the online version of the report. Well done, Ms Bush, for revealing the brave Bush-bashing Boulton as nothing more than an editorialising chicken-hawk who can’t handle being smacked down by a good-looking girl.

So these evil Japanese scientists create supermice that aren’t afraid of cats, right? (See the Guardian link for an amusing video demonstration, and this link for another.)

So the South Koreans create cats that glow in the dark. And the balance of nature is restored.

I ran this by my cat, Pandora, and she’s most upset at this notion. Apparently, there’s a whole bunch of reasons cats named Pandora prefer to be invisible when they get up to whatever they get up to in the dark.

(Hat tip: James Taranto)

Laurence, a student of international politics of Commentary South Africa fame, has had an interesting article published by the Mid East Web for Coexistence. It summarises the state of play in Iraq, and notes, with caveats, some reasons for optimism. Not everyone agrees with him, sadly.

Here’s news, via Yahoo:

Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of auroras borealis, the spectacular color displays seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

This is just weird. I grew up with a huge world atlas published in 1972. Before the actual maps, all of which came in in several varieties to illustrate political, commercial, geographical and natural features of the earth, it contained lots of useful information on geography, ecology, astronomy, the environment (yup, environmental pollution was a major chapter even then), and demographics. It was a staple of my general knowledge education as a child.

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An open letter to the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, signed by 100 scientists, claims the UN climate conference in Bali is “taking the world in the wrong direction”.

Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.

Among the 100 signatories, famous, infamous and otherwise, are the frequently link-worthy Luboš Motl, Ross McKitrick whom I’ve mentioned as having helped to break Michael Mann’s hockey stick temperature chart, John Maunder, who I presume is somehow related to Edward Maunder, discoverer of the correlation between sun spot cycles and in particular the Little Ice Age, Lord Lawson of Blaby, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer who featured prominently in the film The Great Global Warming Swindle, Vincent Gray and David Evans, whom I mentioned the other day along with William Alexander, professor emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at our very own University of Pretoria.

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Duncan McLeod posted an interesting note about what he calls a “whistleblower’s haven”, Wikileaks. It’s a site where anonymous users can upload (and analyse) confidential or secret documents. It’ll be a godsend for journalists, no doubt.

He cites reliability and misinformation as a major potential problem, but as much as I’d love to see secret documents related to corrupt deals with government, government-owned entities or political parties, there’s another reason why I’m not very enthusiastic about it.

Quotes McLeod: “We also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.”

However, revealing confidential documents is itself unethical. In many cases it will be illegal, and it almost certainly will be a breach of relevant employment contracts or non-disclosure agreements.

What would make any particular employee a reasonable and fair judge of what constitutes unethical behaviour?

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Pope Benedict XVI has sent a stern message to “climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.”

Just this last September, His Holiness led a sort of new-age hippie festival, which struck me as not a little odd. It suggested that he had bought into the whole eco-cultist thing, which seemed to confirm that environmentalism is, to borrow Michael Crichton’s memorable notion, nothing more than a religion for the secular age.

It looks like he may have changed his mind. Maybe it’s the hot air rising from the tropical splendour of Bali, where tax-guzzling party-goers are manufacturing consensus, or perhaps the efforts of a few rational skeptics to talk sense into the faithful (remember when skepticism was a good thing in science?), but apparently the cardinals are upset: “…senior cardinals close to the Vatican have since [the eco-festival] expressed doubts about a movement which has been likened by critics to be just as dogmatic in its assumptions as any religion.”

That the Pope is calling for some balance in the approach to environmental issues — favouring sensible care for the environment without succumbing to dogmatic fervour, melodramatic alarmism or grandiose notions of saving the planet no matter what the cost — is welcome indeed. Perhaps the Pope knows blind faith when he sees it, after all.

The same can’t be said for the Daily Mail, which ran the story. Beneath a saturated snapshot of a stern Pope, guess what picture they ran?

The caption? “Adrift: Polar bears on melting iceberg” Hey, guys, icebergs melt. All the time. That’s what they do. Polar bears are common around ice caps, ice floes, ice shelves, ice rivers, and, indeed, icebergs. That’s where they live. That’s where their food lives. This is normal. That’s nature. It’s not a catastrophe. It’s not a picture of impending doom. This is exactly the sort of unthinking, dogmatic alarmism the Pope is warning against.

Guess who did, after all, manage to speak in Bali?

Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Lord Monckton. Or, to be more precise, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. A Scottish member of the House of Lords, Monckton was born Christopher Walter. He is a descendant of a member of Churchill’s cabinet who founded the law firm Monckton Chambers, a licenced day-skipper with the Royal Yacht Association, a puzzle-setter of considerable renown, a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers (one of London’s great Livery Companies), and a Knight of the Order of Malta. As a Catholic Tory, he has startlingly mediaeval views on handling deadly epidemics, which suggests that when he does see a crisis, he’s all for acting in dramatic fashion. On the upside, he is opposed to European political union and thinks it’s a good idea that people own their own homes. Oh, and he’s a gadfly around Al Gore.

He describes the former US vice president’s jeremiad An Inconvenient Truth as “a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors”, and for the use of that word alone, he deserves our respect.

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Iraq is a disaster, right? Everyone knows that, don’t they? Nobody with half a brain still supports the US-led coalition in its efforts, do they? Odd, then, that the markets disagree.

Markets tap the combined knowledge of their investors. These investors put money on their confidence in predicting the future. Because they have money in the game, it is fair to suppose that they’re more likely to have studied and thought about what they’re buying than you or me. This is why markets are often described as “pricing in” all existing knowledge that may affect the future value of the investments that are being traded.

The predictive power of regular stock and bond markets, though well understood by classical economists such as Friedrich Hayek, has been popularised in recent books such as Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, and The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.

Using markets as prognostication tools underlies the idea of purpose-designed “prediction markets”. The classic example is the Iowa Electronic Markets, where real-money futures contracts on political and economic events are traded. It has become famous for being more accurate at predicting the outcome of US elections than the exit polls that hitherto have been the best available method short of counting ballots.

Several companies, including Google and HP, use prediction markets to support decision-making.

So, if relying on markets as a predictor of the future is a pretty good idea, then this Bloomberg report is cause for optimism about the future of Iraq:

Holders of Iraqi bonds are giving President George W. Bush a vote of confidence.

The country’s $2.7 billion of 5.8 percent bonds due in 2028 returned 15.2 percent since July… Only Ecuador’s debt gained more, rising 18 percent. Iraq’s securities yield 6.21 percentage points more than Treasuries, the most of any dollar-denominated government debt.

While the war in Iraq has dragged Bush’s approval ratings lower, his policies in Iraq have turned around investor opinion on Iraqi debentures.

Granted, a lot of people, especially outside the US, are heavily invested in the notion that Iraq is a disaster. Their entire worldview is based on the notion that nothing good can possibly come of the foreign policy of Bush the Imperialist Warmonger. Instinctively, they feel what’s good for the US is bad for the world. So if the liberation of Iraq turns out to be a hard-won success, as the markets now appear to predict, don’t expect much more than a grudging silence from the anti-war left. For them, maintaining partisan hypocrisy will prove much less painful than joining the Iraqis in celebrating peace, prosperity and freedom. I’d buy futures on that.

(Hat-tip: Greg Mankiw)

I haven’t blogged much about the US presidential contenders, because in truth no candidate on either side of the aisle has really grabbed my attention to date. I’m lukewarm, at best, towards all of them. However, a WSJ survey of economists gives some useful pointers, and they point strongly in the direction of the GOP:

Asked which presidential candidate would be best for the economy, only half responded but most threw their support behind Republicans. Thirty-five percent said Rudolph Giuliani would be best, while 19% chose John McCain and 15% picked Mitt Romney. Hillary Clinton got the support of 8%, while John Edwards was the only other Democrat to register with 4% of the vote.

Whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t much matter to me. Economic policy, on the other hand, does matter. A vote of confidence by people who’ve actually been to economics class — and who will therefore tend to disavow the populist economic fallacies that permeate so much public, academic and media opinion — matters.

(Via Greg Mankiw)