A Second Hand Conjecture

Sadly, Myrna Bushell, Bideford (UK) town councillor and stripper/phone sex business owner, is resigning her office due to a lack of respect from colleagues.

But in parting she also cited the time constraints necessary for local councilpeople, concluding that you either had to be wealthy or unemployed to have time and interest in the work. I consider that to be a profound political insight applicable to more than one level of government the world over.

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Russian FM Sergei Lavrov reportedly went berserk on David Miliband in phone discussions over the Georgia war. Apparently he was raving, shouting obscenities, and ridiculing Miliband’s knowledge of history.

There’s something incredibly deranged about that government. They’ve taken the traditional Russian penchant for seeing itself under siege (real or imagined), and pressurized it to a delusional pitch.

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Patrick Condell goes on an epic rant about that “cloistered, bubble-headed fool of an Archbishop” for embracing Sharia law in the United Kingdom.

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Andy Burnham, the UK’s Labour Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, was caught in thick mascara at Prime Minister’s Questions on Thursday (glamor shot here). It might seem a light affair, but the peril for the British public is substantial. As Taxtrust points out, the gentleman from Leigh with an otherwise meaningless departmental title, will have to actually do something now. That is, lest be be remembered exclusively as the British Breck Girl. FWIW, Burnham has denied using any cosmetics, in a classic Kelly LeBrock defense. Don’t hate him because he’s beautiful.

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There’s a moment in Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, where he relates the truism that we’ve all experienced conversations with a mild-mannered, educated and seemingly rational person from the Arab world, where quite unexpectedly they say something nutty in the most casual way. “Of course the Jews planned 9-11″ for instance. As Steyn notes, when this happens it’s a peculiar form of media and culture-shock, and you’re not quite certain what to say in response. But this strange cultural dissonance can also be experienced between Europeans and Americans just as easily on certain issues.

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Click to enlarge

I thought the map Lance posted from the other day (originally from Strange Maps), which expressed the GDP of foreign countries as US states, based on their approximate equivalent GSP, was a pretty interesting visualization. However, I got to thinking what the same exercise might produce if the big boys were projected onto US geography. If you take the top five national economies in the world minus the US (Japan, PRC, Germany, UK), they easily fit into four macro GSP regions in the contiguous United States. I threw together the quick little map above from the data.

Incredibly, once you’ve applied the big four to the map, you will find that you still have around 800 billion dollars left to play with (including Alaska and Hawaii, which are not depicted). Underneath each country I included (in parentheses) how much additional money in US dollars you would have to add to the economies of each economic superpower to make them genuinely equal the collective GSP of each US region.

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