Watch out Wayne! Does Google search know something we don’t?

Some Shorten nonsense. There’s no doubt the man is ambitious and methinks he does speaks too much. It was mighty strange, I thought, to see such a minor minister out on Saturday trying to big note himself with a comment on ratings agency Standard & Poor’s lowering its credit ratings on France and other European nations.

Quite apart from the diplomatic insensitivity of expecting European governments to be at all interested in the opinion of an Australian Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, harping on about the need for fiscal austerity may well turn out to be silly politics at home as well.

With Europe on the verge of recession and Chinese and other Asian growth rates falling, an Australian government might well be wanting to borrow more to stimulate growth itself before an election in eighteen months time.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who joined in the lecturing of Europeans, would do well to realise the same thing.

If something doesn’t work, give them more of it. Standard & Poor’s downgrades the credit ratings of France and eight other European nations and the Angela Merkel responds by calling for eurozone countries to speedily implement tough new fiscal measures. Which makes you wonder whether the German Chancellor actually read the S&P document outlining its reasons for the changes.

Some relevant extracts:

In our opinion, the political agreement does not supply sufficient additional resources or operational flexibility to bolster European rescue operations, or extend enough support for those eurozone sovereigns subjected to heightened market pressures.

We also believe that the agreement is predicated on only a partial recognition of the source of the crisis: that the current financial turmoil stems primarily from fiscal profligacy at the periphery of the eurozone. In our view, however, the financial problems facing the eurozone are as much a consequence of rising external imbalances and divergences in competitiveness between the EMU’s core and the so-called “periphery”. As such, we believe that a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating, as domestic demand falls in line with consumers’ rising concerns about job security and disposable incomes, eroding national tax revenues.

…

The outcomes from the EU summit on Dec. 9, 2011, and subsequent statements from policymakers, lead us to believe that the agreement reached has not produced a breakthrough of sufficient size and scope to fully address the eurozone’s financial problems. In our opinion, the political agreement does not supply sufficient additional resources or operational flexibility to bolster European rescue operations, or extend enough support for those eurozone sovereigns subjected to heightened market pressures. Instead, it focuses on what we consider to be a one-sided approach by emphasizing fiscalausterity without a strong and consistent program to raise the growth potential of the economies in the eurozone.

…

In our view, however, the financial problems facing the eurozone are as much a consequence of rising external imbalances and divergences in competitiveness between the EMU’s core and the so-called “periphery.” In our opinion, the eurozone periphery has only been able to bear its underperformance on competitiveness (manifest in sizeable external deficits) because of funding by the banking systems of the more competitive northern eurozone economies. According to our assessment, the political agreement reached at the summit did not contain significant new initiatives to address the near-term funding challenges that have engulfed the eurozone.

They all look the same, don’t they? Apparently there’s more than a grain of truth in that old saying. Those that study things like this reckon that people actually are better at recognizing own- rather than other-race faces. And the studies put part of that down to the way different races look at things. Chinese, it seems, focus on the centre of the face in the nose area. Westerners focus on a triangular area between the eyes and mouth. British born Chinese use both techniques fixating predominantly around either the eyes and mouth, or the nose

Now Chrystalle B.Y. Tan, a PhD student at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, has discovered how Malaysian Chinese have become better than most of us at recognising a variety of ethnic faces.

Her paper You Look Familiar: How Malaysian Chinese Recognise Faces describes how rather than adopting the Eastern or Western fixation pattern, Malaysian Chinese participants use a mixed strategy by focusing on the eyes and nose more than the mouth.

The combination of Eastern and Western strategies proved advantageous in participants’ ability to recognize East Asian and white Western faces, suggesting that individuals learn to use fixation patterns that are optimized for recognizing the faces with which they are more familiar.

Invading the privacy of Van the man. I’ve grown old with the music of Van Morrison. There are very few singers of my youth still performing great songs 40 years on like the man from Belfast. And one of the wonderful things about this performer is that over all that time he has let his voice and notes speak for themselves without pandering to the paparazzi and the gossip columnists. As to Van the man, I know nothing apart from the impressions I have gleaned for myself from his songs.

What a refreshing change from the normal star where pandering to the whims of public relations promoters is an entrenched habit in the pursuit of fame and fortune. Which is why I was so distressed by the attempt at the weekend of the Irish Sunday Independent to sell a few papers by prying into Van’s private life.

No, I’m not giving you the link. Find it yourself if you want to be a voyeur but why not listen to this great performance from a Chet Baker concert at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London.

Isn’t that bliss! And journalists are surely the clowns.