The flawed US parole system

There is so much that is wrong with the US (in)justice system that one does not know where to start with trying to reform it. From overly-aggressive police departments, over-zealous prosecutors more interested in gaining convictions than justice, and a legal system where one needs good lawyers to get even a shot at justice but many people simply do not have access to them and the public defenders offices, while often endeavoring mightily on behalf of their indigent clients, simply are overwhelmed. And all that is soaked in a deep-rooted racist mentality. Changing all those things requires money and political will to go against the punitive mindset that seems to prevail

But if one were to start with something significant but feasible, it might be with the parole system that in theory enables prisoners to obtain release before completing their sentence provided they have given evidence of good behavior and the promise of not returning to crime. There is one aspect of it, however, that is a problem and that is the requirement that one must admit guilt for the crime before one is eligible for parole at all. This puts those who have been wrongfully convicted because of all the problems listed in the first paragraph, in a bind. If they admit to a crime that they did not do, they may get an early release. But they are forever barred from trying to establish their innocence and also they and their families have to live with the stigma of having committed a crime.
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Don’t they carefully vet the White House physician?

The White House physician is an important job, since he is supposed to supervise the health of the US president. So it is surprising that Ronny Jackson, who held that post under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is a proponent of wild conspiracies, the most recent of which concerns the Omicron variant.

Roughly 24 hours after most people in America first heard about the Omicron variant of Covid-19, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson (R) offered a conspiracy theory to explain what was happening.

“Here comes the MEV – the Midterm Election Variant,” tweeted Jackson, who, not for nothing, is also a physician. “They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election – but we’re not going to let them!”

And then there was this from Fox News personality Pete Hegseth: “Count on a variant about every October, every two years.”

The idea here is clear: The emergence of Omicron is a political gambit by Democrats designed to aid them at the ballot box.

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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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