A Second Hand Conjecture

I was searching for an image on my backup drive today and came across a cache of header graphics I’d thrown together for posts over the years. The diversity of subjects was kind of interesting as a gallery. Here’s a few rather random selections:

The HIV Epidemic:

Eurabia:

Slobodan Milosevic:

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Here at ASHC we get an enormous amount of traffic from people looking for Sarah Palin photographs. My friend Jason over on postpolitical says he’s experiencing the same phenomenon on his blog, and we took to calling it the hunt for “Palinporn.” Toward that, my favorite keyword from this hidden web image search also comes from Jas: “A MILF we can believe in.”

Of particular interest I’ve found, are those lovely pictures of casual Sarah in the Kuwati desert visiting Alaskan National Guard troops. So here is a gallery of all the pictures we have of that, culled from public-domain government websites, some of which appear to be no-longer publicly accessible.

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Arkansas Blog has the updates on this horrible tragedy.

Arkansas State Democratic Party Chair Bill Gwatney was shot and critically wounded at State Democratic Party Headquarters on Capitol Avenue about 11:50 a.m. today, witnesses at the scene said. Police were not releasing the victim’s identity, but it was supplied by several people on the scene.

A suspected shooter was shot and taken into custody after a chase into adjoining Grant County. His condition wasn’t known. Sources say they are working to confirm tentative information that the suspect, who was critically wounded, was a former employee of a Gwatney car dealership.

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According to social psychologist William Szlemko, people who adorn their cars with bumper stickers are far more likely to engage in road rage. Seems like a perfectly sensible conclusion to me. Anyone who would in effect vandalize their own car just to try to force a point to some nameless stranger behind them, has to have a peculiar sense of proportionality to begin with. Or *ahem* lacks a blog.

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A Huckabee blog calls it quits (sort-of). Facing the inevitability of McCain, he asks only that Huckabee “not look for or accept any positions in McCain’s cabinet.” Now there’s one of the first things I can agree with Huckabee supporters on.

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Michael Weiss casts about for reasons from the blog world to support McCain. I’m largely unmoved, but this is a particularly good line: “Where Joe Lieberman has been unable to cast himself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat, McCain has had some success in becoming a kind of Pat Moynihan Republican.”

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Hat tip: Tyler.

Chris Blattman has a conjecture, possibly high wages in Africa are holding back growth:

One thing that has always struck me in the African countries I have worked is that the real wages (i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of living) of African formal sector workers seem to be incredibly high, at least compared to that of workers in China or India. Given that firms in China and India seem to be more productive than their African counterparts, it creates a double disadvantage for African workers, and raises the question of why the situation continues. Why don’t manufacturing wages fall in Africa, stimulating more jobs for more people at wages still higher than those available in agriculture or informal business?

Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to four times higher than the youth I worked with in India? I don’t begrudge anyone anywhere a living wage. It’s the relative differential that puzzles me, and that could be keeping Africa from doing business globally.

There are probably lots of plausible reasons. Perhaps we ought to consider (and get data on) the informal sector in Africa, which could be larger and have more moderate wages than the formal sector ones. It may be that all my notions and data about African wages are erroneous.

Another possibility, however, is that the largest employers of skilled workers in most African countries are international NGOs and the local government. They are competing, in many cases, for the same pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers as the manufacturers and service sector firms. Neither the government or NGOs, moreover, seem to set wages according to the local market or local conditions, and it requires little imagination to wonder whether they set their wages higher than the market would normally do.

Bonus, Tyler has now introduced me to Chris’ great blog, which I haven’t read before. Given my and Lee’s interest in the Dark Continent, I am putting it on the blogroll.

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Start off with a look at his wonderful post and photo’s on the destruction of Serbia’s oldest theater. Then poke around, read who he is. Enjoy. Yet another part of the antitotalitarian left searching for what that means anymore:

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis with a particular – but far from exclusive – focus on South East Europe. I come from a traditional left-wing background, but believe that the recent failure of most of the left to oppose fascism, genocide and tyranny in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in the Middle East and elsewhere, has definitely discredited left-wing politics in its traditional form. This blog will therefore, among other things, be discussing what a new progressive politics might mean in the twenty-first century.

An author, historian, and fascinating blogger. I like this bit at the end of his bio:

I have been variously accused of being a neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism. Depending on how you define these terms, some or all of this may be accurate.

Being a humane anti-totalitarian leftist takes some cheek these days doesn’t it?

Finish up with a visit with the Ghost of Franco.

Hat Tip: Bob from Brockley

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