The NYTimes comes out in favor of raising interest rates, agreeing with the Economist.

NORIMITSU ONISHI

"China is a big continent and has an inclination to think that it is No. 1 and that others are uncivilized," said Minoru Shibata, a researcher at NHK, Japan's public broadcast network. "Therefore, they feel that giving Chinese names to foreigners is doing them a favor."

What load of crap.

Xinhua likens Hong Kong's Martin Lee to Chinese traitor
China's government mouthpiece Xinhua compares Hong Kong's democracy campaigner Martin Lee (李柱銘) to Wu Sangui (吳三桂), one of the most notorious traitors in Chinese history.
As if that will encourage the Taiwanese to love China. But it just shows that for the Chicoms, democracy is as fearsome as terrorism is for those of us who love life.

Ian Buruma, writing on the dangers of the assumption that the United States represents what we assume to be universal values, and that freedom to pursue happiness, to elect our own leaders and to trade in open markets, should be shared by all, regardless of creed, history, race or culture:

France's armed intervention was deeply resented. Some nativist reactions were relatively benign: romantic poetry celebrating the native soul, or a taste for folkloric roots. But in other cases the native soul, especially in Germany, turned sour and became anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan, and anti-Semitic. Some 19th-century nativists claimed that Napoleon was a Jew. This was not just because he liberated the Jews from their ghettoes and declared that France would be their homeland, but also because universal ideals, promising equality for all, have often been associated by nativists with rootless cosmopolitanism, which in their eyes is synonymous with Jewishness.

Yeah, my cosmopolitainism makes it hard for me to understand nativists.