Daily Archives: 24 January 2013

Technology Transfer

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Is this the administration’s new paradigm?  Barnini Chakraborty, writing for Fox News, reports

More than a decade of advanced American technology could be handed over to one of the country’s top economic rivals unless the government intervenes to stop the sale, lawmakers say.

The concerns surround the sale of A123 Systems—a firm backed for years by U.S. taxpayers—to a company run by a Chinese multi-millionaire with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Chakraborty understates the case, though.  More than mere economic rivals, the People’s Republic of China are our political and military foes, also, as events in the South China Sea demonstrate, as the PRC’s active blocking of meaningful steps to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons and to prevent northern Korea from spreading their nuclear weapon technology demonstrate, as the angry words and covert threats of the PRC leadership against the US whenever we protest their misbehavior demonstrate.

This particular technology transfer

would essentially transfer sensitive battery technology with “key military applications….”

And

…the technology behind [A123 Systems’] ultra-light lithium-ion phosphate batteries being bought will play a major role in modernizing the way electricity is generated and distributed. The new tech could also be used in key military operations and to power satellites and unmanned military drones.

This is one example, and it hasn’t yet played out.  The transfer may still be blocked, at least officially and legally.

There are other examples wherein this administration has acted positively to prevent such transfers to the PRC.  It’s entirely possible that this isn’t a new paradigm (although it’s hard to understand why the question still is an open one and the transfer not already blocked), but merely an example, alongside those others, that shows this administration…has no clue of what it’s doing with American technology.

More on Becoming a Dependent

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog reports that a

federal appeals court [the First Circuit] on Thursday [last] ruled that insurance companies can be required to pay long-term disability benefits to a recovering drug addict if the person would face a significant risk of relapse by returning to work.

The Law Blog expands:

The case…involved an anesthesiologist from Massachusetts…who became heavily addicted to Fentanyl, a prescription opioid used in her practice.

[The anesthesiologist] spent about three months at a treatment center, according to her attorney.  After she was discharged, her employee benefit plan that was administered by Union Security Insurance Company cut off her long-term disability benefit payments, totaling $4,000 a month.  Her therapist and other doctors feared that she had a high risk of relapse and cautioned her not to return to work where it would be easy to access the drug, the opinion said.

The anesthesiologist justified her suit by claiming that she shouldn’t have to fall off the wagon for her claim to be accepted.  She shouldn’t have actually to be disabled in order to collect disability benefits.  Never mind that there was no certainty of relapse asserted, by her or the Court, only a likelihood.  Never mind that her condition was entirely self-inflicted.  Never mind that she could have found work—even in the medical field—other than as an anesthesiologist.

Indeed, as the Appellate Court said quite clearly, she had not relapsed, and so she wasn’t back in her disability condition.  She was, though, out those $4,000 per month, payable for an actual disability.

The Court then noted in its opinion (cynically, say I)

The plaintiff’s risk of relapse was not merely theoretical.  In perhaps the most striking actualization of this risk, the plaintiff was arrested in May of 2005—some six months after her departure from [the treatment center]—for driving under the influence of alcohol[.]

Notice that.  She was driving under the influence of alcohol, not Fentanyl.  Some risk of relapse onto the drug.

The Court also noted in justification of its ruling (again cynically, say I) that the insurance company could have inured itself from this sort of…suit…by  “writing into the plan an exclusion for risk of relapse.”

The insurer, though, hadn’t included such an explicit exclusion because at the time they sold the policy they had no reason to believe a Federal Appeals court would rule so capriciously.  After all, the Fourth Circuit already had ruled differently on an identical case:

[The] Fourth Circuit…said the denial of benefits to an anesthetist addicted to the same narcotic was “reasonable.”

Now we know better.  If there’s a possibility of a disability occurring in the future, that disability exists presently.

Another brick in the wall of manufactured dependency.

A PRC Takeover

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Examiner.com has the tale.

Taiwan’s most popular and independent media organization, Next Media, is about to be sold to China-based tycoon Tsai Eng-Meng, in a deal which would give him and his company (Want Want China Times Group) control of 50% of Taiwan’s entire print news industry.

This would be an ordinary monopolist action by a Republic of China citizen, whose outcome would be subject to RoC law.

However.

The $600 million takeover is not so much a business deal as it is a proxy invasion of Taiwan’s independent press by the Chinese Communist Party.  Eng-Meng, who is Taiwanese himself and holds large financial stakes in China, has been a vocal supporter of unification between communist China and democratic Taiwan.  He is also an ally of Beijing’s communist government.

Objections are flowing, and they center on

the fact that Eng-Meng already has a record of using his existing media empire to promote pro-Beijing bias and censorship in [the RoC].

And

The free people of [the RoC] may be about to lose control over their own press to the Chinese Communist Party, without a shot even being fired.

If that sounds apocryphal, consider that the PRC has had a primary goal of conquering the island nation ever since the Communists won their civil war and the losing side escaped to Taiwan.  This is another step in reaching that goal.