Foreign powers calling the tune on the US economy

... foreign central banks now are in a position where they can influence, through their asset allocation, the allocation of credit inside the US economy.

... says Brad Setser.

Right, left and centre

I told my brother that I find Hillary more scary than Sarah. He replies:

You understand that she scares me because of the fundamentalism and reported vindictiveness. As for her daughter being up the spout, my complaint is that the social conservatives and left-wing social engineers claim to have all the answers to raising my children, yet can't get their own houses in order. At least liberals pretend to be more understanding of the weaknesses of others.

On the right wing here, we have, off the top of my head:

Jimmy Bakker (evangelist) - caught stealing, cheating on taxes, and convincing religious young girls that he should have sex with them

Ted Haggard (anti-gay evangelist) - caught doing heavy drugs and having sex with a male prostitute

Larry Craig (outspoken anti-gay senator) - caught trolling for gay men in an airport

Mark Foley (right wing congressman) - caught trolling for underage congressional page boys

Sarah Palin - see the above

Karl Rove (I believe the grandson of one of Goebbel's propaganda minions) - engineered Bush's victories and the anti-gay marriage movements in 2004, plus the outing of Valerie Plame, covert CIA agent. Married, but well-known in Washington circles as liking the underground gay sex clubs.

Rush Limbaugh (very right-wing TV radio voice) - drug addict. He got probation for obtaining the drugs. His housekeeper went to jail.

Dick Cheney (VP) - strongly supported the anti-gay movement, which got voters out, while his own daughter is gay.

Tammy Faye Bakker (evangelist and ex-wife of Jimmy, now deceased) - both evangelist husbands went to jail for tax evasion and theft, yet she managed to publicly cry her way through both trials, and got off scot-free.

Jimmy Swaggart (evangelist) - caught hiring prostitutes

Jeb Bush (former governor of Florida, brother of Pres. Bush) - kept the hard-line anti-drug line, except for his addicted daughter. His wife was caught trying to smuggle jewelry through customs.

I could go on, but you get the point.

My observation, and supported by some conversations with southern Baptists, is that the draconian rules that they want to impose on society are for everyone else, to keep them in line. I don't like, nor need, that kind of government.

All I'm looking for is a FISCAL conservative.

And by the way, whatever happened to "moral suasion"? Why does everything have to be banned or compulsory?

For example, I've always thought that aborting inconvenient children is very wrong, and the "they haven't developed nerves yet" argument is irrelevant hooey - we all went through that stage and it doesn't make killing any better if the victim is unconscious (even Peter Pan woke up the pirate first). And maybe US demographics, like here in Britain, would be very different if the slaughter of the innocents hadn't happened - but we are all bending under the weight of a thousand daily coercions.

As I said to my brother: And I trust that you and all Americans who understand theConstitution will remember to keep telling the State to s*d off.

A modest disposal

Disposing of 28 million cluster bombs will cost £30 million, it says here. I have a better suggestion - there's still time to arrange it, and it could turn a profit:

The only issue is, who would feature as the Guy?

Sell in May and go away

The truth of the adage is borne out yet again. Perhaps we're approaching fair value at last?

The "All Clear" sounds on Google Chrome

It seems that Google has amended the User License Agreement on its new Chrome web browser (htps: James Higham, Wolfie). And City Unslicker likes it because it's "open source".

Sarah Palin and the sisterhood

I've been looking around the internet for Giles cartoons - our family, like so many others, used to get the compendium annually. What I'm looking for (WILF, as schoolchilden have been Pavlovised to write in their exercise books these days) is one of the typical family home scenes, with the cats glaring loathingly at one another from their lairs and perches.

I am reminded of these cats when I read women columnists about Sarah Palin. They bray about strong women and bleat when one turns up. No, I don't suppose Palin is at all a saint, but the Presidential elections are, in my view, entirely correct to focus on strength of character, and general policy direction. No human being - not even Dr Kissinger - has full information and understanding of every situation he (or she) (or s/he, if you're going to do the full Greenham Common on me) may encounter. That's what advisers are for. What you want in the Chief Executive (and potential replacement) is a decision-maker.

Funnily enough, men don't have a hangup about strong women. We just want them to carry us upstairs:

Ideally, they won't eat us afterwards.

But this ain't good enough for Eve's sisters. Apparently, Palin's a baaad mother because her teenage daughter is up the duff (remember that, everybody who's been in a similar situation); it doesn't occur to these sexist critics that if teenage girls weren't genetically programmed to be (for a crucial moment) just that bit quicker and more devious than their mothers, the human race would have fizzled out long ago.

Julia Hartley-Brewer is the political editor of the Sunday Express. As an avowedly "card-carrying feminist" and atheist, she is confused by Palin (and, as a new mother herself, honest enough to be utterly confused in the abortion debate). She opines:

Although I don't share Palin's views on abortion (see last link above), I admire her courage in choosing to bring a disabled child into the world. I can't help wondering though whether Trig deserves more than a part-time mum with a breast pump in one hand and a Blackberry in the other as she tramps along the campaign trail.

Multi-tasking? Right to work? Or back to "Kinder, Küche, Kirche"? (Well, not Kirche, obviously.) J H-B (mother and working journalist) wishes her well and at the same time is "glad she's not my "mom.""

To her credit, Suzanne Moore is a bit less confused.

See, strong women are not a new thing, or a Left thing. If my mother hadn't been strong, she wouldn't have survived an attempted strangling by a crazed American GI trying to take random revenge for the death of his buddy - and to cap it, she went to his CO the next day (because otherwise the man might have repeated the attempt with another victim, probably successfully).

Nor would she, a young lone woman, have taken two horses and fled into Germany from East Prussia, where a raping and murdering Communist horde was sweeping through the country. And survive, like others in those chaotic days, by stealing from the ships in the harbour at Hamburg (though her sack turned out to be full of tobacco; she bought a pipe).

After her marriage to a British solder, there was communal living in a Nissen hut with heating from a fire in an empty white-spirit drum, and the austerity Fifties; and as an Army wife, a move to new family quarters about every six months, we worked out later. Not new new, of course - I can still remember the swarming cockroaches in the kitchen cupboards at Willich.

Strong? Don't make me laugh. The strength of women isn't demonstrated by swarming up the greasy pole of office bureaucracy (and legislating for extra handholds, and complaining about frangible ceilings); it's proved in much more gutsy ways than that. And ask any copper which sex they'd rather face in a fight (or look at King Stephen and Matilda).

By the way, all this talk of men being competitive and women co-operative is balls. A female friend is quite emphatic that women bosses are far worse. Recent research shows that verbal bullying (so common in girls' schools, and among the predominantly female staff in the British education system) does more long-term damage than the physical kind.

Jealousy!

And the cats continue their spiteful staring-match.

"Marmite" exists, probably

My brother (why are my wife and family all cleverer than me ?) tells me that "dark matter" is implied in all the modern cosmological models, it's just that no-one knows what it is: "At one point, they thought it was neutrino flux, but that doesn't account for enough energy. Maybe it's The Force." I await further information.

Meanwhile, Professor Brian Cox (billed by the Sunday Express as former drummer for D:ream - keyboards, according to the Mail) did a broadcast last night on the Doomsday Marmite Machine and explained that it's all about trying to find the giant and unstable Higgs particle. Even if successfully created in the device, its existence will only be confirmed by the myriad better-known particles into which it disintegrates - only the intense pressure of the early Universe was capable of sustaining the so-called "God particle."

In the Sunday Express article today, the seemingly perma-upbeat (if only we all had his secret) Cox tells us that there are 12 sub-atomic particles, yet I could have sworn that the TV programme listed 16 in a four-by-four arrangement - Cox struggled to recall the last one, which turned out to be the gluon.

Irrelevantly (perhaps), some shots of the Large Hadron Collider remind me of a wonderfully atmospheric scene in "Alien":