The strange case of the Michigan school shooter

In many ways, the tragedy of the high school student who shot and killed four students and injured seven others follows a pattern we have become drearily familiar with in this gun-soaked and violent country.

What makes this different is the strange role played by the parents. Usually parents express shock and disbelief at what their child did and try to find reasons that might at least partly exculpate them. But in this case, the parents seem to have played a different role, almost as if they were aiding him. Apparently they had purchased the gun just four days before and seemed to have left it in a location that was easily accessible to their 15-year old son. Furthermore, there had been warning signs on the very day of the shooting that the boy was disturbed and had violent fantasies.
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Dropping the term ‘alien’ when describing immigrants

One of the offensive ways in which immigrants are treated in the US is using the term ‘alien’ to describe them, sometimes in the form of ‘illegal aliens’. So it is a welcome sign that some states are recognizing it as dehumanizing and moving to drop the term altogether and replace it with words like ‘noncitizen’ or ‘migrant’.

Immigrants and immigrant-rights groups say the term, especially when combined with “illegal,” is dehumanizing and can have a harmful effect on immigration policy.

The word became a focal point of debate in several states earlier this year as the number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border swelled and led to fierce backlash against Biden administration policies by Republican governors and lawmakers.

Lawmakers in at least seven states considered eliminating use of “alien” and “illegal” in state statutes this year and replacing them with descriptions such as “undocumented” and “noncitizen,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Only two states, California and Colorado, actually made the change.
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The covid-19 variant naming system

As with any virus, the Covid-19 virus will mutate over time and this requires scientists to give each variant labels to distinguish among them. Since they want to keep track of even the smallest changes, they require a system that can identify the nature of the changes and their location on the virus. But that technical name is hard for the general public to keep track of and so the WHO has adopted the Greek alphabet sequentially to label as they appear just those variants that they think most likely to affect the public and that we need to keep track of, that they call ‘variants of concern’. There are now seven of them. So the variant with the scientific name B.1.617.2 is called Delta and the latest variant B.1.1.529 is called Omicron. The earlier Alpha has the scientific label B.1.1.7 and Beta has the label B.1.352.
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The Omicron variant

The news about South African scientists detecting a new variant of the covid-19 virus that has been labeled the ‘Omicron’ has been worrying to say the least. What has caused scientists and the WHO to express concern is the large number of mutations that it has, over 50 overall and more than 30 on the spike proteins that the virus uses to invade out bodies’ cells. That makes it hard to predict what it can and will do without further study. But it is far too early to press the panic button.

There have been many examples of variants that have seemed scary on paper, but came to nothing. The Beta variant was at the top of people’s concerns at the beginning of the year because it was the best at escaping the immune system. But in the end it was the faster-spreading Delta that took over the world.

Prof Ravi Gupta, from the University of Cambridge, said: “Beta was all immune escape and nothing else, Delta had infectivity and modest immune escape, this potentially has both to high degrees.”

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Xenophobia and the story of Kabuliwala

We live in an age where many people are fleeing their native lands and seeking refuge in other countries. The causes for the creation of so many refugees are many, the most common being wars, economic hardships caused by climate change, and fears of persecution either as individuals or as members of some minority community that is being targeted by the majority community with the government either not doing anything about it or even condoning the abuses.

While I am technically not a refugee, I left Sri Lanka with my family because I fell into the last category. As such, it gives me a small window into the refugee mindset and know that leaving one’s country and all that is familiar for another land where one has to start afresh, sometimes not even knowing the language, is a very difficult decision, not made lightly. Hence refugees should be treated with compassion. But sadly that is often not the case. It is easy to view refugees as somehow threatening and many politicians have used them as an easy target to inflame nativist tendencies in the population to create hostility to the refugees.
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What NFTs are and how they work

I have been casually following the story about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but had little idea what they were other than that an NFT was some form of digital work that one could own. The radio program On the Media had an entire show where they talked about it and that rekindled my interest and gave me some idea about this new world of speculation.

Host Brooke Gladstone discussed NFTs with Anil Dash, one of the people who in 2014 developed the idea that led to NFTs. Dash says that he and an artist friend Kevin McCoy did this as a blockchain-backed means for artists to assert ownership over their digital work. Dash now says that that initial goal of creating ownership rights for artists seems to be in danger of falling by the wayside, to be replaced by the kinds of speculative behavior that we have seen before with bubbles.
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How FOMO was used to swindle people

In the US where we are inundated with stories of the lifestyles of the rich, it should not be surprising that some people dream of joining that group. But most people are not born into wealth and need to find some way of getting there. Some have an entrepreneurial bent and try to market an idea. The tech world is appealing and the person who is held up as a model is the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. If you do not have an idea for a product or the stomach to do all the work of developing one, the next best thing is to identify someone who has and become an early investor so that one can reap the benefits if and when the product becomes wildly successful.

But identifying good ideas in the early stages is a gamble, especially if one is unfamiliar with the world in which it operates. What may seem like a terrific idea can turn out to be a smoke-and-mirrors exercise in which someone with very persuasive skills manages to convince rich people who lack the technical knowledge to cough up lots of money by promising a product that will revolutionize the field. The FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) phenomenon can be a useful lever of persuasion, where people fear that by not investing, they may be missing out on the equivalent of the next Apple.
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Vicious union busting tactics

Big companies like Amazon, despite making huge profits for its owners and shareholders, fight tooth-and-nail to prevent their employees from forming unions that could help provide better pay and working conditions.

In another excellent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver describes the lengths the companies will go to fight unionization.

High profile prisoners highlight awful prison conditions in the US

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the leader of the far right group known as the Proud Boys, is currently serving a five-month prison sentence but has asked a judge to release him early because of the terrible prison conditions.

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio is serving a five-month sentence for stealing and burning a Black Lives Matter banner from a historic Black church in the capital, after Donald Trump’s election defeat.

On Monday, Tarrio asked a judge to release him, arguing that he has been exposed to inhumane conditions.

Asking that his sentence be reduced or that he be allowed to complete it under house arrest, he claimed to have been harassed by correctional officers and said his cell regularly floods with dirty water from a toilet in a neighboring cell.
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Tarrio described abusive guards, smoke-filled hallways and medical neglect, saying he witnessed a prisoner have a seizure who lay for a half hour before help arrived.
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According to his attorney, Tarrio has endured “serious abuses of his rights on a daily basis”, including jail employees repeatedly ignoring his requests for medical treatment, throwing cold, often inedible meals into his cell and denying access to running water.

“Mr Tarrio has been intimidated and antagonized by correctional staff to dissuade him from making complaints about the horrendous conditions,” Tarrio’s attorney, Luca Dansie, wrote.

Tarrio is hardly a sympathetic figure except to those on the far-right but that does not mean that he deserves to be subjected to the terrible conditions that exist in many US prisons. Nobody does. The fact that he is a high profile figure with access to the media has the benefit of bringing these conditions into the public eye. Perhaps prison reform is one issue where both the left and the right can get together and actually achieve something worthwhile. It is long overdue.

Is your phone spying on you?

I am getting weary about hearing of all the ways that our devices are spying on us. The main ways in which we give away information are the sites that we visit and the searches we make. But we know about those and have grudgingly come to accept them as facts of life and the price we pay for the conveniences they provide. But there are other, more disturbing aspects, like that the cameras and the microphones on our devices may be surreptitiously recording us.

If you think your smartphone is spying on you, you’re probably right.

Apps are designed to track your moves, and your phone’s microphone can be picking up your conversations.

So if you’re suddenly bombarded with ads on your social media for things you’ve never searched for but have spoken about, it’s no coincidence.
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