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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The tricks of memory

I keep getting reminded of how unreliable memories can be, especially about things that happened a long time ago. While forgetting details and even entire incidents are common, more concerning is when we ‘remember’ things that did not happen. The latest such incident occurred when a few days ago I was watching the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty starring Danny Kaye. I was a huge fan of Kaye’s comedies as a boy, which often showcased his ability to sing comic songs, and this film had two of them. I recall watching it a long time ago and enjoying it so when I saw that it was streaming, I decided to take a second look.

The film is about a timid, milquetoast of a man who is bullied by his mother, his boss, and his fiancee and who escapes into daydreams where he is the hero of adventures. Like so many films that we recall from our childhood, it did not age well. (It was remade in 2013 with Ben Stiller in the title role). I would have stopped watching after about ten minutes but what kept me going was that I distinctly recalled that right at the beginning, while he is waiting at a traffic light, he daydreams that he is the pilot of a military plane that is flying through a major storm. Despite the dangerous conditions and the plane being buffeted by the strong winds, he remains calm and collected and his crew admiringly tell each other that they are confident that he is the one person who can pull them through. In the background, the engine makes a ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound, a recurring background machine sound in almost all his daydreams.
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Smash-and-grab raids

There are many films, too many to name and I am sure each one of us have our favorites, about grand heists, where an elaborate plan is made to steal something extremely valuable. The films are similar in the way that the place to be burglarized is carefully cased to take place when the place is closed, and the details of the security precautions carefully noted so as to find a way to enter and take take the goods without alarms going off and escape without being detected until much later when the thieves are well away from the scene of the crime and have got rid of any incriminating evidence and disposed to the goods. Much of the fun in these films (such as in The Italian Job) is seeing the planning and execution of the heist with split-second precision.
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The weirdness of the present calendar

When it comes to the calendar, there are only two things that are fixed by nature that we have no control over: the length of the day and the length of the year as approximately 365¼ days. All the other divisions are purely arbitrary. While some cultures have calendars that ascribe significance to the lunar months that last approximately 28 days, it is safe to say that we can safely ignore it. How many of us keep track of the lunar phases from day to day anyway? But despite the fact that we can subdivide the days in the year in any way we like, we have arrived at a system that makes little sense. We divide the year into four months of 30 days each, seven months of 31 days each and one month of 28 days, becoming 29 in a leap year.

But the really weird thing is the length of the week as seven days. As a result of the present system, any given date will fall on a different day of the week from year to year, which makes long term planning of events more difficult.
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