The so called Chinese Military threat

Nobody doubts the fact that China is a rising power and would continuously be so for the foreseeable future. It has the land, the people, the economy and the aspirations to be a great power competing head to head against the United States. It has already (or will be) in the near future, the world’s second biggest economy overtaking the Japanese and will be the biggest in the next 10 years or so (according to some estimates). Every country is trying to cash in to the Chinese Miracle but at the same time, fears are being raised that along with the economic rise, the Chinese military is also being modernized. It was just a matter of time, before the military would have its budget raised.

The main complaint is that the budget which is being presented to the world is not transparent and it masks the hundreds of billions of dollars in more hidden expenses. The United States and the rest of its allies are worried about it, mainly the United States since it is seen as competing with the Chinese for influence in Eastern Asia. It is also worried that the Chinese have never renounced their desire to ultimately force the unification of Taiwan which the U.S. has by law declared to defend in case of Chinese invasion. Other countries of the region while profiteering from the Chinese market are also warily looking at the increasing power of the Chinese armed forces.

The ups and downs of the Economy

You see that every time the stats for the economy comes out then the experts start to get worried or happy depending upon how it is looked at and whether it is a good report or a bad one. When the economy (like the weekly job data, retail sales, productivity and the like) shows signs of going up, all kinds of experts come out and start celebrating and when it goes down, then the same experts say we are in a slump. What wrong with the picture here.

We are told not to look for data in small or one time periods but since the situation is so uncertain and everybody is looking desperately for some clues, and since nobody knows about the future, any glimpse of hope or despair is attacked like that is the trend for the future. It can also be that the mid term elections are coming and there is a scare among democrats of losing one or both the houses or even narrowing their majority. Anyway unless the situation is consistent in a quarter or so, we should not be jumpy on stats which can change drastically from one month to another.

House Sells no matter what

No matter what the housing market seems like today or in a year, people will still keep on selling or buying houses according to their needs. The incentives do help but if there are no jobs or job security or ability to hold down jobs, the housing market will have its ups and downs. Recently I have seen houses going up for sale. Despite all the negative news about the houses not being sold quickly or sometimes below their listed price. People still put up their houses for sale. Maybe they want to downsize, move to another place, move to a bigger house or have a short sale, foreclosure or bankruptcy, divorce or death, the interest rates have not that much effect on the housing market.

I always see signs coming up saying house are for sale and wonder if what the experts say that do not put your house up for sale right now because the market is bad. Well it may take more time to sell (like the job hunting) but eventually it will be sold maybe at a low price but it will definitely have a buyer. But right now it is true that the houses are not going to sell that fast as the government and real estate professionals will like but it will sell.

The Wiki leaks of Afghanistan war

Almost 91,000 documents have been allegedly leaked out regarding the Afghanistan war and it seems that there is nothing important that was not known earlier, although now it is somewhat official. The gist of the documents deals with how we are not winning the war (whatever the criteria that is based on), that Pakistan is helping the insurgents and the like. The founder of the website that leaked these documents promises to release more of it in the future plus more of the documents on the Iraq War. The American officials have condemned it and the Pakistanis have shrugged it aside. Although the leaked documents are old but the U.S. officials are saying it will endanger the work of the spies hired by them in Afghanistan.

As I wrote it before, Afghanistan is not Iraq and as such would need to have an entirely different approach to war notwithstanding the surge in troops. The criteria of what it means to win the war should be defined and stick to it rather than change it with each success or failure in the war. The timetable of troop withdrawal to appease the public should be shelved immediately since this is a war and not some TV episode that will end in two to three episodes. Here Pakistan is the key and we should be focusing more there since any failure in Pakistan would bound to have repercussions in Afghanistan. As for the leaked documents, only the most curious would find the time to read all of it and still would not find any thing which has not been said before. So we should get past it and focus on the real war.