I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens.
This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived.
I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work.
Sooner or later -- likely sooner -- the site will be taken down. I have a fondness for some of the work I did for it, so I will risk whatever the IP consequences might be and post some of my work here.
They fall into three categories. I wrote about health (Covid, cancer research, the health insurance industry, etc.), politics (in a narrow sense involving campaigns and elections), and science (from cosmology to climate change to computer hardware). Each item was short, and divided into three parts. You'll get the gist. I will paste three of them here.
I think they help produce a sort of pontillist account of our world. Perhaps I will say something next week about why I picked these three.
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Science: Taiwan Acts to Protect Its Chip Supremacy (April 20, 2022).
The Story:
An investigative unit of the government of Taiwan, earlier this month, launched a probe into about 100 companies headquartered in the People’s Republic of China, which it suspects of illegally poaching its semiconductor chip engineers and other top tech talent, Reuters reported.
Significance:
Taiwan calls itself the “Republic of China.” The mainland of China, with its government in Beijing, calls itself the “People’s Republic of China” (PRC). The split dates to the Chinese civil war, when Mao and the communists took over the mainland, and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek retreated across the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan is home to TSMC, one of the world’s most valuable semiconductor design and manufacturing concerns. The ‘breakaway province’ possesses expertise in the field, and the PRC badly wants that, not only for obvious economic reasons but to advance its geopolitical stature as well.
Strange New Worlds:
It is not illegal for PRC firms to hire Taiwanese engineers. But Taiwanese law makes it very difficult for PRC based firms to operate on Taiwan's land, so hiring them away means persuading them to relocate to the mainland. Most engineers prefer the quality of life on Taiwan. The PRC, then, has resorted to subterfuge to operate illegally on Taiwan while pretending to be a local company, and having the local shell company hire the Taiwanese engineers. The flow of information and expertise is still across the Straits. That is the illegal poaching, and the threat, now under investigation.
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Health: Australia, Scott Morrison, and Universal Health Care (April 26, 2922)
The Story:
Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia, denied on Monday, April 25 charges that, if re-elected next month, his government will make any cuts in that country’s universal healthcare system.
Background:
The present government of Australia is run by the Liberal-National Coalition in the country’s House and Senate. This is a combination of parties (the two most significant of which are unsurprisingly the Liberals and the National Party) that have a collective center of gravity to the right of the political spectrum.
The opposition is the Labor Party, to the left of center. The Labor Party sees the preservation of the system of universal health care as a critical difference between it and the Coalition. Labor now has 68 seats in the House of Representatives, where 76 is the smallest number necessary for an outright majority.
Anthony Albanese is at present the leader of Labor. He plainly hopes that charging that the coalition is weak on the preservation of universal coverage will help gain some more Labor seats in the May 21 vote.
The Thing to Know:
There is no significant constituency in Australia for a movement toward anything less than universal coverage. Accordingly, the coalition’s leadership is bound to deny that accusation when made. It cannot say “yes we do believe that the present system is unsustainable and we will be putting forward a plan after the election to shrink it,” even though at least some members of its leadership do apparently believe the former and would like to plan for the latter.
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Politics: Macron Re-elected as President of France (April 26)
The Story:
On Sunday, April 24, the French voted in the second round of their presidential election. They re-elected their President, Emmanuel Macron, a man who has been supportive of the policies of both NATO and the European Union, both of which in their different realms have backed the government of Ukraine in the defense of that country’s sovereignty against Russia.
His opponent, on the other hand, had long been pro-Russian in her views on France’s foreign policy, and right up until the moment of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine she was denying that the Russian government had any plans to do any such thing.
Background:
The first round of voting narrowed the field of candidates down to two: Macron, the incumbent, and Marine le Pen, the nominee of the “National Rally” Party, formerly known as the National Front. MLP is the youngest daughter of the former FN party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Like her father before her, Marine represents the far right of the French political spectrum. The second round of voting, which decided the race in Macron’s favor, was not as close as many had predicted. Macron defeated Le Pen by a margin of roughly 17%.
The Thing to Know:
At a minimum, Macron’s re-election means that France will remain part of the integrated command of NATO, and that his voice will continue to be heard in EU counsels as favoring sanctions against Russia. A Le Pen administration would have meant the opposite on both those points.
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P.S. Since first writing the above, I have discovered that the website in question has disappeared again. If it stays disappeared this time, these three samples will be the only flotsam saved from the wreckage.
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