The debate started by the shooting of Renee Good

Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent. The woman, a married mother of three including a 6 year old child, was clearly not posing any physical danger to the agents, but she was also doing her best to hinder and annoy them as best as she could. Crucially, she refused to stop her car when asked to do so. She also refused to allow the agents to board the vehicle. She was doing her best to protest and not to obey. At first she refused to leave when the officers told her to do so, but then drove away when they became aggresive. The orders appeared contradictory. One of the officers told her to stay and one to remain, while they forced her window open and were trying to board her car.

So what is the law? Does a private citizen have the obligation to obey orders coming from armed ICE agents? Do members of the general public have a sufficient understanding of ICE to be aware that they must obey orders? Or, are they free to act as they wish?

If, indeed, Renee Good broke the law by protesting and interfering with the work of the ICE agents, why is the US not taking any legal action against against the millions of people who, in response to Renee Good’s shooting are doing the same now? Why does the government not dare issue fines or whatever penalty they deem reasonable to these millions of people? Such penalties are vastly less than the death penalty delivered to Renee Good, and that is not justice.

Google’s AI, now the standard source of information, considered above the intellectual capacity of most people, says the following:

“U.S. citizens are generally not obliged to obey ICE orders because ICE's primary authority is over non-citizens, and citizens have full constitutional rights. “

Thus, as a American citizen, Renee Good did not break any law when she disobeyed the oder of the ICE officers and instead told him to take a walk. That officer had no authority over US citizens. He may take pictures, bring the matter to court, and the judge will probably not issue a fine or prison time for the actions of Mrs Good.

Knowing this, and, perhaps frustrated by his lack of power, the officer did what many frustrated med do — violence. To my mind, his actions are running on the same mind algorithms as a parent slapping an annoying child, or a man punching an annoying woman who taunts him the whole day about her rights and his inability to hit her. Of course, since most people who do this are not armed, most such events do not result permanent in harm. Some do, and, in those cases, the men are often prosecuted.

Women do this too, but, less often and due to their biology, women hitting men end up in court less frequently. Now, an agent or policeman is not allowed to act on feelings or personal impulses. Furthermore, an ICE agent, with no authority over US citizens cannot ask a citizen to do what he wants. He may summon the local police, who have such powers, but must not act violently and take matters in his own hands, with a gun.

Make no mistake. Renee Good was there to protest and hinder. She as doing her very best to prevent the ICE agents from doing their jobs. She used whistles to warn potential targets that the officers were trying to arrest with valid powers since they could arrest immigrants. But, when in the police, you can’t just shoot annoying people.

An argument was made that the officer’s past trauma from a different interaction with another person led him to fire his gun. An officer, however, should not fire his gun in a way that is influenced by his feelings, personal situations or past trauma.

The Trump administration took an unusual stance to protect their ICE agent. This, I don’t understand. Normally, the president should have used his right to stay silent on such matters, before an investigation is completed. Maybe state that the officer is innocent until proven guilty or something neutral and non-inflammatory. These are politically correct lies, which are widely used. Trump however, chose to tell the truth. That is, tell us what he believes. Or what he wants the investigation to conclude. That a woman who does not obey the orders of agents who may not be authorized to give such orders deserves to be shot dead on an American street.

In the same way a dictator who runs an oil rich country deserves to be taken from his bed and dragged in front of an American judge, so that the US can run his country and take back the American Oil that Venezuela appears to have stolen. Most notably, similar dictators, not plagued by oil wealth, are not affected. Because American interests come first. Justice is only served when it benefits the right kind of people, the system that supports them or something dark and fuzzy we do not understand.

So many things are happening, that no one thinks of Epstein anymore. The war in Ukraine also risks getting forgotten… Gaza has also not been mentioned for some time.

Two Gods ascend to heaven

Once upon a time, I received my diploma from the hands of the Gods. That particular God, David Baltimore just joined the others in the Heavens on Sept 6. He was the president of Caltech at the time of my graduation. The picture shows him handing my diploma.

Baltimore’s 1975 Nobel was for his research on the viral nature of cancer. He was only 37 when he received the award. The PAP-smears almost every woman has in the Western World are a consequence of his research as well as of earlier work of the Romanian Aurel Babeş and Greek-born American Georgios Papanikolaou.

David Baltimore was the only Nobel Prize winner I worked for who had already received the award before I met him. Of the 5 Nobel Prize winners I worked with two lost their lives in the past few weeks. The other was Rai Weiss. He died on August 25 this year. Rai was 92. He had shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for LIGO with two of my PhD advisors: Kip S. Thorne and Barry Barish. Rai was born in Berlin and moved to America to escape the Nazis. I also started Physics in Berlin and was emboldened to move to America by the German government giving me a deportation order due to visa issues. Sure, it was far less threatening than Rai’s. He almost made it to the 10 year anniversary of gravitational wave detection.

My two PhD advisors are still fighting for gravitational wave astronomy today, each in their own way. They both give seminars and rally the press to get the momentum to allow current gravitational wave detectors to continue and be upgraded. Barry C. Barish was my formal PhD advisor. If I count my thesis as a joint publication, I was one of his very, very few students.

Kip was my God as a child, and among us, PhD students at Caltech, at times, we used to call him God. A dozen or so years later, the Nobel Committed agreed. Kip was my main reason for going to Caltech. A meeting with Kip at a LISA meeting at AEI, where I was a German diploma student was the decisive factor in my admission to Caltech. He took the time to speak for hours to a student who had read his books and was brave enough to suggest corrections, and even discuss some of his own theories. Today my paper with Kip (and only me and Kip!) is part of my contribution to gravitational waves astronomy.

Later, I wrote a second paper on the mirrors aiming LIGO's main laser, which was the first cornerstone in Andrew Lundgren’s career in gravitational waves — his first LIGO paper. I was finishing graduate school at the time, and the paper was under my supervision. It built on the mirror research I had done earlier with Kip. Andy went on to be the first senior scientist to see the first event with LIGO, which is the most important in the history of the machine and which was honored with the 2018 Nobel.

Another contribution is a set of gravitational waves lectures. They are still the World’s most famous course on gravitational waves online (https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/). This set of movies I initiated, and built together with Kip and Yanbei Chen was a turning point in Kip’s career. We used to talk about what he would do in his old age when his mind will no longer be so sharp. After these movies, he decided against waiting, and moved to work at Holywood. With me and with his many other students, he did reality. We played with black holes, gravitational wave detectors — the exciting bits of the reality that bend space and slow down time, in their full mathematical beauty.

After me, came Chris Nolan who did fiction in Interstellar and history in Oppenheimer. Kip served as executive producer for Interstellar and advisor on Oppenheimer, both heavy Hollywood hits to the tune of half a billion each. Oppenheimer was Nolan’s most nominated film, with 7 Oscars won. Interstellar didn’t do bad either.

The time I did the movies with Kip was my only break in my employment with David Politzer, another nobel prize winner. I quit working for a Nobel Prize winner only to take a job with another, where I could make an original contribution to the work underlying the prize. H. David Politzer shared the 2004 Nobel Prize with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.

Of all my employers, he has the longest tenure. I was his assistant (TA) for Physis 1 for half a decade. In my whole life, I never worked for anyone else for a longer time. The work that led to his Nobel Prize was completed before my birth. I will never forget the countless office hours we spent together, often just me and David, as the students had better things to do, and perhaps more important people to learn from.

Everything dope, including the pope

On the second of May, Donald Trump posted a picture of himself as pope (AI generated, of course). At the time, I brushed it aside as a bad joke.

Pope Francis received J D Vance the day before he died. This is one of the last pictures we have of Francis alive.

Today, May 8, the world learned of Robert Francis following pope Francis as Pope Leo XIV. He was greeted by major news outlets including the guardian, CBS news and some others, and with the catch phrase in my title.

Did Trump know something? This is the first American Citizen pope. Second American pope, if we count Pope Francis’ South American origin. Is an American pope a good thing for Trump? A victory of sorts? Sure, no one would ever think that Trump would reinvent himself as committed to lifelong celibacy and accede to the throne in Vatican. Was the picture an allusion to the American pope to come? Did Trump know? Or, did he guess? A good educated guess? Is he the fool who spoke the truth with this picture?

The choice of name is also surprizing: the new pope will be known as Leo XIV. The first thing that comes to mind is what the previous Pope Leo did. Leo XIII is famous for advertising cocaine, at the time known as a Vin Mariani, and sold by reputable chemists. Sure, Cocaine was a revolutionary drug, and not necessarily always a bad thing. It is the precursor or painkillers we use today usually called xxxx-ine (novocaine, lidocaine, etc).

Later, it was Coca Cola that put cocaine on every sucker’s table, after the US prohibition on alcohol forced the soft drink company to eliminate red wine from the original recipe. People were addicted to alcohol and exposed to Coca-Cola’s revolutionarily refreshing mix of red wine, cocaine and caffeine (from the kola nut). When American Prohibition banned alcohol, CocaCola provided a way for alcohol addicts to satisfy some of their cravings and bridge onto a new, legal addictive substance.

And yet, it is likely Coca Cola in its modern version with only caffeine and sugar is responsible for more loss of life than the old cocaine powered drink. Today’s Coca Cola promotes obesity through its weakly addictive sugar, and may cause more loss of life than its earlier versions as its mild effect is felt by vastly more people.

Last, but not least, I want to remind our readers that pope Leo the XIII was known for his support of education, science and astronomy, and in particular for re-estabilishing the Vatican Observatory in its modern form. He also fought for the right of workers, and for fair and safe working conditions.

Pope Leo XIV, welcome! I hope you will make the world a better place!

I shall raise a glass of whatever drink you come up with!

As for me, I shall continue serving the Church of Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Charles Darwin and others. I wonder how mighty the Catholic Church might have been if it had recognized them as saints instead of bestowing the honor only on others.

Interpreting the oval office scene

The world has recently witnessed remarkable scenes in the Oval Office. Donald Trump did a spectacular U-turn in American policy, apparently turning away from Europe and against Ukraine and promoting lines that appear to come straight from Putin’s propaganda. He may be a comical character despised by many, but his administration is not made of stupid people. We should not forget that in all Trump’s elections he got vastly more votes for the dollar than the competition. Trump also had the intellectual upper ground in the Corona situation (ignore the virus, and minimize economic impact). In light of this, I tried hard to find a logical justification for the perplexing scenes we have seen in the Oval Office, and here’s the best I can come with.

War with China?

China’s economy is the same size as the US. China is currently the only competitor to the US in the space of Artificial Intelligence. DeepSeek can rival with Open AI or any other American outfit. An alliance between Russian and China, the core nations of BRICS, would be very dangerous to the US. Together, Russia and China would have the largest land area, the largest economy, largest population, largest army and, arguably, largest nuclear arsenal of any nation or alliance in the world. Also, both Russian and China are dictatorships, and, therefore, more fit for war than democracies. Both place little value on human life, enabling them to lose a large number of soldiers without problems for the regime.

The war in Ukraine has, so far, brought Russia and China closer. This is very dangerous for the US and current world order. The Chinese cities, population as well as economic and military targets are relatively undefended and vulnerable to both Russian and American attacks. Russia is however able to hit China with nuclear weapons easier than the US. Thus, having Putin on his side can be seen as important for Trump, and not without reason. In exchange for support against China, Trump could give Putin not only Ukraine, but also the rest of Europe. The Trump administration finds it easiest to give away what's not theirs to give.

Consequences for Ukraine and for Russia.

In the current war, Ukraine has relied heavily on US support. Following the Oval Office argument, that support has stopped. It might have stopped anyway, as Trump is averse to spurning money on the matter and friendly towards Putin. There are however a lot of American weapons system in Ukraine. These systems are governed by agreements that protect Russia. Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine was not allowed to to strike deep inside Russia, and was heavily limited in its choice of targets. With American relations broken and American support gone, Ukraine may now be free to strike anything in Russia with the remaining US weapons. This could open to possibility of powerful bombs landing in large cities, with serious loss of Russian life. Economic, military and nuclear sites can also be hit. Symbolic places like the Red Square or Putin’s Palace on the Black Sea made famous by Alexey Navalny can also be targeted.

Sure, Russia would respond, perhaps starting a deadlier phase of World War III. Unfortunately, it does not seem like war is coming to an end. It should given the climate problems it causes, but the leaders of the world seem less reasonable than ever before. WWIII is what Trump warned us about, and, indeed, it is my opinion that World War III is ongoing and won’t stop anytime soon.