Why are they afraid to say stagflation?

U.S. lawmakers seem eager to get China to revalue the yuan upward. This bit of commentary by Greenspan et al is subtle in that it is timid to press home the conclusion.

Greenspan poured cold water on the idea that a revaluation will shrink a record bilateral deficit with China that hit $162 billion last year. It will mean that suppliers will turn to other countries like Malaysia or Thailand...

"So essentially what we will find is we are importing from a different area but we'll be importing the same goods," Greenspan said. "The effect will be a rise in domestic prices in the United States and as a consequence of that..."

Private-sector analysts have suggested that a possible impact is higher U.S. interest rates if, as a result of a yuan revaluation, China buys fewer U.S. Treasury securities than it now must do in order to keep the yuan pegged to the dollar.

In short, Greenspan predicts inflation. Other analysts predict a rise in US interest rates to compensate for a drop in demand for U.S. Treasuries. The ongoing U.S. budget deficits require that debt be sold, so there won't be a drop in the supply of U.S. Treasuries. In short, it adds up to stagflation.

Red team advantage, or not?

At first this seems simple: if you want to be victorious, wear red.

Of 441 bouts, reds won 242 and in all four sports reds triumphed in more contests. And the red advantage was higher in close encounters: 62 per cent of red-garbed competitors won these. But in pushover contests there were similar numbers of red and blue winners. "If you're rubbish, a red shirt won't stop you from losing," Barton says.

However, it's not clear to me that they were able to rule out alternative hypotheses, such as blue relaxing an opponent and helping them win, or a combination of the two posited effects. Merely cutting out red won't eliminate the bias if other colors have an effect.

More oppressive than Gwen Stefani

I've seen a few blogs complaining of Gwen Stefani's use of asian woman as being demeaning by perpetuating stereotypes in the West.

Gwen Stefani has hired four geisha-like Japanese women to hawk her new Asian-inspired accessories line... Despite their all(sic) being fluent in English, she has stipulated in their contracts that they must only speak Japanese.

This past week, I ran across this piece regarding social conservatives in Japan.

In an effort to reinforce national family values in Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is pushing to rewrite Article 24 of the island nation's constitution -- the legal crux of women's rights in post-World War II Japan.

The LDP says the move is necessary to stem a tide of individualism that's corrupting family and community values. As Masahiro Morioka, an LDP member in the House of Representatives, said in a report on Article 24, "The constitution must ensure that protecting family is the foundation of securing the nation."

The tone is pretty familiar here. A key difference is that they're promoting traditional Japanese values instead of traditional Christian values. Individualism is the enemy, rather than secularism. My intuition informs me that individualism is also a code word for Western values; thus, they consider Western values to be corrupting. They're certainly freaked out at the low birth rate for Japanese women; traditional marriage there is unattractive to modern career women.

Normally, married Japanese women have not only to look after their own parents during old age, but also to care for their parents-in-law. When it comes to raising kids, "they can't expect much cooperation from their partner" because of the long work hours required at many Japanese corporations and because of established gender roles that assume that the woman does the child-rearing...

Supermom and retirement home duty is a pretty heavy load.

Surprise revisited

It has come to my attention that in April, Jim Dunnigan wrote a piece warning that China is apparently planning an OOTB (out of the blue) attack on Taiwan. Nice to know my speculation last year wasn't far off the mark.

He followed up recently with a piece in May detailing the strategic importance of some oft ignored islands between China and Taiwan.

The lesser of energy evils?

James Locklove, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, has riled environmentalists by claiming nuclear power is the only green solution capable of fending off global warming.

Meanwhile, the EU has two top priorities in energy research, aimed at cutting carbon emissions to keep up with the Kyoto Protocol: clean coal technologies, and underground sequestering of carbon dioxide from power plants.

Now that oil is becoming a liability, coal and nuclear are rising to the fore due to economic pressures. Alternative energy apparently isn't ramping up quickly enough to meet the expected need nor stave off global warming.

On a related note, last month China announced that it intends to build 40 new nuclear power plants by 2020. Currently, coal provides most of China's energy needs.