Current Events: Taiwanese Elections, Obama Tackles Immigration, and Comet Landing

A lot has been going on in the past few weeks that is worth of comment, and if I had unlimited time I could write a half a dozen essays around current events. But for now I’ll just settle for some (relatively) brief observations on a few news items. Starting with news from home, Taiwan held local elections in cities and counties around the country this past Saturday, and the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) did much worse than expected, losing most of the mayoral and county commissioner races, including in usually KMT-leaning areas such as Taipei and Taoyuan. At the risk of over generalizing, this result can be ascribed to disapproval of the governments’ performance, with food scandals, economic issues, corruption, expropriation of land with poor justification, and attempts to force through the service trade agreement with China all contributing factors. I should point out, however, that it would be a mistake to overestimate the importance of Taiwan-China relations in voters’ minds, as a lot of people in Taiwan, like elsewhere in the world, are more concerned with local issues (in other words, the food scandals probably hurt the KMT more than the service trade agreement did). In any case, the results were good news for Taiwan as a whole, even though in places such as Taipei it was a matter of a mediocre candidate beating a terrible one, and places like Hualian and Taidong on the east coast remain in the hands of terrible politicians. Our local Green Party candidate unfortunately didn’t win election to the city council (though one Green Party candidate in Taoyuan was elected to their council with a high vote total) and the KMT mayor in our city won, though by an unexpectedly narrow margin. Still, while the KMT and KMT-leaning independents hung on in many places and even the winning DPP and DPP-leaning candidates who won around the country are in many cases just the lesser of two evils, I’m certainly much more happy with these election results than those in the US at the beginning of the month.

Speaking of the US, I have been glad to see US President Barack Obama take strong actions in a number of important areas, even if it is overdue and often insufficient. The one which garnered the most attention, of course, was his executive order allowing some 5 million undocumented residents of the US to remain in the country without fear of deportation. Many Republicans had a predictably hysterical reaction to this. But contrary to their claims, Obama’s action was neither unprecedented nor illegal, and it was clearly justified. Many presidents have taken executive action relating to immigration, and both Reagan and the first Bush took actions very similar to Obama’s. The Supreme Court just a few years ago ruled that the executive branch had discretion in determining when to pursue deportation and that the law did not obligate authorities to deport all undocumented people. Many Republicans also complained that Obama should have left immigration reform to Congress. The problem with this complaint is that he did leave it to Congress for a long time, and Congress – more specifically, the House Republican leadership – did nothing. The Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill (an imperfect one which placed far too much weight on “border security”, but better than nothing) almost two years ago, and the House never even voted on it. So how long was Obama supposed to wait for Congress to act? If anything, Obama should be criticized for waiting as long as he did, and for not covering more people with his executive order.

In news (much) further afield, last month saw the first soft landing of a probe on the surface of a comet when the European Space Agency’s Philae lander, dispatched from the orbiting Rosetta probe, touched down on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Admittedly, the landing was not without a hitch; the harpoons that were supposed to anchor the probe to the comet’s surface failed to deploy, so the probe bounced twice before coming to rest, the first time traveling as far as a kilometer before landing and bouncing a shorter distance the second time. This was because due to the small size of the comet, its gravity is extremely weak. It is estimated to be about one meter per second, meaning you could easily throw a ball into space and with a hard enough jump you might be able to launch yourself. In any event, the probe ended up next to a cliff that left it mostly in shadow, so it could not recharge its batteries with its solar panels. However, it managed to send off some data before its power ran out, and simply by landing the probe made history. We can look forward to more space exploration milestones in the near future, as an unmanned test flight of the Orion capsule that NASA is developing for future crewed space exploration is coming up which will send the capsule further than any such capsule has traveled from Earth since the Apollo missions ended in 1972. While this would be even cooler if it actually had a crew (after all, unmanned probes have traveled thousands of times farther), if the test goes as planned it will be an encouraging sign that we may say real human crewed space missions to destinations beyond low Earth orbit in the not too distant future. Finally, looking further ahead, next year the New Horizons probe will make its rendezvous with Pluto on the edge of the Solar System, and the Dawn probe will visit Ceres. While humanity is still trying to get its act together on Earth, it’s good to see us continuing to explore beyond our home world.