Film review Oppenheimer (2023), runaway fusion, and runaway AI

In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, during the Manhattan project to develop the nuclear bomb, one of the concerns was whether the nuclear explosion created during a test might create such high temperatures that it leads to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere fusing together and triggering a chain reaction that essentially sets the atmosphere on fire, frying the entire planet. Oppenheimer tells general Leslie Groves, the director of the project, that the calculations of Arthur Compton showed that the chance of such a thing happening was less that three in a million, and thus acceptable. When Groves said that he was hoping that the answer would be zero, Oppenheimer replied that you could not expect such an answer from theory alone..

While the idea that theory can never give you absolute certainty about anything is correct, the actual story is more complicated. It turns out that the Oppenheimer-Compton story is based on an article written by Pearl S. Buck, based on an interview she had with Compton, and some of the details are apocryphal. Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical program at Los Alamos, who had shown how fusion reactions lay behind the energy production of stars, had concluded early on that the chance of a runaway fusion reaction igniting the air was so small as to not be worth worrying about.
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Tariff uncertainty not over

Chinese and US trade representatives agreed to suspend for 90 days 115% of the sky-high tariffs each had imposed on the other. This still leaves tariffs of 30% on Chinese goods to the US and 10% on US goods to China, plus a few other assorted tariffs that had been in existence earlier.

Trump had been bluffing that the US could withstand the pain that the high tariffs that were clearly causing, in his usual childish way.

Donald Trump on Wednesday acknowledged that his tariffs could result in fewer and costlier products in the United States, saying American kids might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls”, but he insisted China will suffer more from his trade war.

The US president has tried to reassure a nervous country that his tariffs will not provoke a recession, after a new government report showed the US economy shrank during the first three months of the year.
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“You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open,’” Trump said, offering a hypothetical. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”

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A story that will make your blood boil

Price gouging of US consumers by drug companies so that they can make enormous profits off patients so that they can pay their executive massive salaries and inflate their stock prices is a well-known scandal. Yet another example involves a drug known as Revlimid, marketed by a company Celgene to treat the bone cancer known as multiple myeloma.

When David Armstrong was diagnosed in 2023 with this disease, he began a quest to find out why a drug capsule taken daily that costs just 25 cents to make is sold for nearly $1,000. What he found is a tale of disgusting greed and cynicism by the people who run these companies, who kept raising the price over and over again, 26 times in all over the years, just because they can, uncaring about what it did to people desperately trying to live.

That steep tab has put the drug’s lifesaving potential out of reach for some cancer patients, who have been forced into debt or simply stopped taking the drug. The price also helps fuel our ballooning insurance premiums.

They also bought off doctors.
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Rümeysa Öztürk released but not safe from further harassment

Finally, after being kidnapped during daylight hours in a public street near Tufts University where she was a graduate student by masked unidentified people in unmarked cars who were later revealed to be ICE agents, and then quickly transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Rümeysa Öztürk was released today after 45 days in captivity. Her release had been ordered by a federal judge.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
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No surprise: Tourism industry is cratering

The horror stories about US immigration officers harassing visitors to the country keep piling up. It seems like they seek even the most trivial of reasons to give visitors a hard time. Take this example.

Two teenage girls from Germany were detained, arrested, and deported at an airport in Hawaii after immigration officials said it was suspicious they had not booked a hotel room.

Backpackers Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu from Auckland while undergoing a round-the-world trip. The duo planned to spend five weeks in Hawaii before moving onto California and Costa Rica for the next legs of their journey.

But despite having ESTA travel authorization, immigration officials accused them of attempting to enter the U.S. to work illegally, and they were placed in handcuffs and taken to a nearby detention center they later learned was a deportation facility.

Upon arrival, they were subjected to full-body scans, strip searches and forced to wear green prison jumpsuits, German outlet Ostee Zeitung reports. They were then placed in a holding facility with serious criminals, including an alleged murderer who had been locked up for 18 years, and were forced to spend the night in a freezing cold double cell.

“It was all like a fever dream,” Maria told the German outlet. “It was a shock; we didn’t expect it. We had already noticed a little bit about what was going on in the U.S. But at the time, we didn’t think it was happening to Germans. That was perhaps very naive. We felt so small and powerless.”

After a sleepless night in the freezing cell, the girls were woken early and escorted back to the airport in handcuffs. Upon arrival, they were forced to board a Hawaiian Airlines flight to Tokyo and were told they would receive their passports back once they arrived in Japan.

Included in their travel documents were interrogation transcripts signed by the girls, which “contained sentences we didn’t actually say,” said Charlotte after the ordeal. “They twisted it to make it seem as if we admitted that we wanted to work illegally in the US.”

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Just what we don’t need: another war

As if the ever-increasing cruelty and brutality of Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and the long-running war following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not creating enough misery in the world, we now have the possibility of yet another conflict, this time between India and Pakistan.

Those two countries have been having tensions along their border for a long time, fueled by the dispute over Kashmir. While the intensity has waxed and waned, it was usually limited to skirmishes between troops of these two countries patrolling the s0-called line of demarcation. But the most recent flare-up looks like the most serious in a long time, with an attack on Hindu tourists in Kashmir resulting in India launching a wave of missile attacks and Pakistan vowing to retaliate.
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Trumpism failed in Canada and again in Australia

The Labour party won the general election in Australia, roundly defeating the conservative coalition led by the Liberal party. While needing 76 seats to have a majority, Labour already has 85, with the coalition only 41. Various independent candidates have nine seats, with 16 yet undecided.

As in Canada, the conservatives hoped to win but Trump’s baleful influence effect seems to have sunk them in Australia too. Like in Canada, the Liberal party leader Peter Dutton lost his own long-held seat.

Dutton’s brand of hard-line conservatism, his support for controversial immigration policies – like sending asylum seekers to offshore detention centres – and his fierce criticism of China, all led to comparisons with US President Donald Trump.

It’s a likeness he has rejected but then the Coalition pursued policies that seemed to have been borrowed from the Trump administration.

Dutton said that if elected he would cut public sector jobs – more than 40,000 by some estimates. This reminded voters of billionaire Elon Musk’s Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has slashed US bureaucracy. Dutton later walked back the plan.

The Coalition even appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as shadow minister for government efficiency. And images of her wearing a cap with the words Maga – short for the popular Trump slogan, Make America Great Again – have became a key talking point.

None of this served Dutton well and he knew it. Towards the end of the campaign, he tried to shake off Trump’s shadow, and in the final leaders’ debate he repeatedly told the audience that he didn’t know Trump before attempting to answer questions on him.

“The Coalition will probably regret issuing messages that came across as supporting Trump and opposing the US Democrats,” said Frank Mols, a political science lecturer at the University of Queensland.

Trump is proving to be a millstone around the neck of any politician who embraces him.

In the US, these results and Trump’s own historically low approval ratings must be sending jitters through members of his party who have been unswervingly supportive of him. But we will not know until the mid term elections in November 2026 what the effect will be and a lot can happen in that time.

RFK Jr. is going to cause the death of us all

It should be no surprise that placing an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy nut in charge of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the science and public health agencies in the US, was going to do serious harm. And sure enough, he is wreaking havoc.

One of the more disturbing things he has done is cancel a long-running diabetes study that was looking at the effectiveness of a medication known as metformin. The group that got this medication was compared with another group that got a placebo and a third group that made lifestyle changes to meet health goals, such as to exercise more and lose weight.

The study found that, in people with prediabetes, metformin lowered the risk of diabetes by roughly a third; the life-style intervention cut the risk by more than half. Both components were so successful that the trial was stopped early.

But the The Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study had planned to continue the study to explore other important questions, using the participants that had been enrolled in the earlier phase.

How long do the health benefits last? How do blood-sugar levels affect the body and the brain over time? For more than a quarter of a century, Nathan and his colleagues tracked thousands of patients—which was itself a feat of logistical and scientific endurance.(Many doctors struggle to get their patients to attend annual physicals, let alone engage them for a study of this duration.)

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