Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Trans Under Trump

    This is a good video to watch. In it Adam Conover hosts three of his friends who are transgender for a discussion about what it is like to have the government targeting them.

    The Trump administration is actively working to erase the existence of trans people through policy and legislation. But no law can erase the 1.6 million trans people living in America, nor the reality of their lives and experiences. These are real people facing real consequences—impacting their rights, safety, and livelihoods. This week, Adam sits down with his friends and fellow comedians Dylan McKeever, River Butcher, and Sammy Mowrey, who all happen to be trans, to talk about what it’s like to navigate this moment in America as a trans person.

    Adam Conover

    Trans Comedians Take On Trump’s America with Dylan McKeever, River Butcher, and Sammy Mowrey (Adam Conover – YouTube)

  • The House of Lowther

    This week’s thing I like is The House of Lowther, a comic by K. Lynn Smith that follows a woman who gets a job working at a home for people with special needs – things like being a werewolf or big foot. As a fan of her previous work, I’ve been reading and enjoying this story from the start.

    The House of Lowther

    K. Lynn Smith’s Patreon

  • The Free World is Gone

    In early 2017, less than two months into Donald Trump’s first term as president, I published a piece of speculative fiction. Set during a then-imaginary second Trump term, it depicts a nightmare scenario in which American troops abandon Europe, the pro-Russia Alternative for Germany wins 20 percent of the vote in a federal election, and Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

    My purpose in writing the story was to stir readers on both sides of the Atlantic out of their complacency regarding the parlous state of what used to be called the “Free World.” But it still didn’t prepare me for the series of events that began with Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference and ended with the humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Trump and Vance before TV cameras in the Oval Office. While many may view that two-week period as indistinguishable from the rest of the Trump era, future historians won’t: They’ll record it as marking an epochal shift in global politics potentially even more significant than the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It marked the end of an era — the era of the American-led liberal international order.

    James Kirchick

    Opinion: The ‘Free World’ Is Gone and There’s No Turning Back (Politico)

  • Signal Blunder

    Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”

    And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

    On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”

    Heather Cox Richardson

    March 24, 2025 (Letters from an American)

  • Immigration Stories

    There have been a lot of recent stories about the United States deciding to deny or revoke permission for foreigners to live, work, or just visit the nation. Our government’s behavior is a far cry from a nation that is supposed to cherish free speech and welcome the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

    The lack of criminal records does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with Tren de Aragua, the lack of specific information about each specific individual actually highlights the risk they pose.

    Robert Cerna, senior ICE official

    Aministration: ‘Many’ Venezuelans sent to El Salvador prison has no U.S. criminal record (Miami Herald)

    There was no explanation, no warning. He led me to a room, took my belongings from my hands and ordered me to put my hands against the wall. A woman immediately began patting me down. The commands came rapid-fire, one after another, too fast to process.

    They took my shoes and pulled out my shoelaces.

    “What are you doing? What is happening?” I asked.

    “You are being detained.”

    “I don’t understand. What does that mean? For how long?”

    “I don’t know.”

    That would be the response to nearly every question I would ask over the next two weeks: “I don’t know.”

    Jasmine Mooney

    I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped (The Guardian)

    My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

    Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

    Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.

    Mahmoud Khalil

    Mahmoud Khalil’s Letter from Detention in Full (Newsweek)

    Suri’s plight started March 17, when upon returning home following a Ramadan meal celebration, he was approached by masked federal agents who identified themselves as part of the Department of Homeland Security. They informed him that the government had revoked his visa.

    “He is here legally. There was no ongoing issue with his visa,” Eden B. Heilman,legal director of the ACLU of Virginia, told NPR.

    The agents quickly took him into custody in front of his wife, Heilman said. But there was never any real explanation to Suri or Saleh about where he was going, what was happening or why, Heilman says.

    Suri was never charged with any crime. But in just under 72 hours, he has been moved from one immigration center to the next, eventually landing in Louisiana where he is currently held. Both the speed and obscure nature of Suri’s arrest “is really alarming,” Heilman said.

    Jaclyn Diaz

    What we know about the case of detained Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri (NPR)

    A French scientist has been denied entry into the United States, apparently because the scientist had expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy, the French Education Ministry said on Thursday.

    “I learned with concern that a French researcher on assignment for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled,” Minister for Higher Education and Research Philippe Baptiste said in a statement to AFP.

    The measure was apparently taken because the scientist had expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy, he added, but did not elaborate.

    Reuters

    French scientist denied entry into the US, French government says (Reuters)

    More than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans had their temporary legal status revoked in the latest move by the Donald Trump administration to push his changes on immigration.

    The Department of Homeland Security announced the move Friday. Now, those who have lost their status could be in line for deportations in about a month.

    The order applies to about 532,000 people from the four countries who came to the United States since October 2022. They arrived with financial sponsors and were given two-year permits to live and work in the U.S.

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said they will lose their legal status on April 24, or 30 days after the publication of the notice in the Federal Register.

    Alex Land, Gisela Salomon

    DHS pulls legal status for 500,000 Cubans, Venezuelans and others in latest Trump immigration crackdown (The Independent)

    Let’s say you don’t like what the Trump administration is doing, or you don’t like Trump. You express these views on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

    You take a two-week vacation in France. When you try to return to the United States, U.S. immigration agents arrest you. They detain you in solitary confinement. They don’t let you contact your family. They don’t let you contact a lawyer. Then they send you to a brutal prison in El Salvador.

    But wait! You scream over and over. You can’t do this! I’m an American citizen!

    Your screams have no effect.

    Robert Reich

    If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you. (Robert Reich)

  • Can Elon Musk Colonize Mars?

    This first article is from just shy of a decade ago in 2016:

    In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars.

    In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people.

    …

    Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s.

    Nadia Drake

    Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s (National Geographic)

    Was there ever any chance for Elon Musk to achieve that goal? Here are two more recent articles that claim he never had a chance. The first addresses engineering problems with SpaceX’s Starship. The second looks at the feasibility of anyone actually living on Mars.

    This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.

    That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.

    Will Lockett

    Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning (Planet Earth & Beyond)

    Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.

    Albert Burneko

    Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars (Defector)

  • Ol’ Jackie and Hanse’s War

    If you don’t follow my gaming site, then this might be news. I submitted a short story and a BattleMech design to the Pirate Point fanzine. Its first issue was released earlier this week, and my entry about a jury-rigged Blackjack is in it. You can download the zine for free and read my entry plus a bunch of other short pieces of fan fiction set in the BattleTech universe.

    PIRATE POINT: Issue 1

    If you play BattleTech and want to try out the custom Blackjack, I shared a record sheet for it over on my gaming blog: Pirate Point #1 and Ol’ Jackie. You should also probably subscribe over there too if you like BattleTech.

  • The Parchment Barrier

    No document, however brilliantly conceived, can resist people who view its constraints and its needs as needling inconveniences, rather than sacred boundaries and responsibilities. Constitutional democracy is high-maintenance. It only works if the people who are meant to care, actually care – and express their investment through active stewardship. Not just when it’s convenient, not just when their side wins or loses, not just when they feel like it, but always.

    What the United States is witnessing now, what every democracy is facing in the middle of a global backslide, is the exposure of the constitutional system’s fundamental vulnerability: it cannot withstand the destructive pressure of a populace who have lost interest. Who have lost faith. Who no longer believe in the project itself. Who have simply stopped showing up.

    Joan Westenberg

    The Parchment Barrier (The Index)

  • My Career: Windows Phone

    Microsoft got into the mobile market early with Pocket PC devices. Launched in 2000, these were devices aimed at professionals who wanted mobile access to their work-related calendars and email. With dominance in enterprise software, Microsoft was well positioned to sell . Apple’s release of the iPhone in 2007 completely changed that market though.

    In order to compete with the iPhone, Microsoft decided to entirely rework Windows Mobile into Windows Phone. It would have a new touch-focused interface and an application model much closer to that offered by the iPhone.

    The Silverlight code base ended up being chosen as the basis for applications on Windows Phone. Some of the Silverlight team supported that effort for the Windows Phone 7 release. Then with Silverlight’s wind down as browser plugins became obsolete, I moved over to working on the Windows Phone development platform for Windows Phone 8 in late 2011.

    For Windows Phone 8, the big challenge was a move from being based on Windows CE to Windows NT. This brought in a lot of OS capabilities, but it also had the potential to break a lot of things. My work for the release ended up being documenting the places where app developers had taken dependencies on the ordering of events on Windows Phone 7 and then adding code to the platform so that those events would be guaranteed to have the same ordering when the apps ran on Windows Phone 8. It wasn’t particularly exciting work, but it was critical to maintaining compatibility with the existing Windows Phone app catalog.

    After Windows Phone 8 shipped, I changed roles for the Windows Phone 8.1 release. I moved from being a individual contributor to being a team lead, and I left the app platform team for the team responsible for the phone browser’s user interface. My team’s goal was to make Internet Explorer on Windows Phone feel modern. We implemented support for having more than 6 open tabs, for gesture navigation, roaming favorites and history across Windows devices, and autocomplete for the address bar. I had been an acting lead for a while during Windows Phone 8, but this was my first time officially being a manager. I thought my team was great, and we accomplished a lot for the release.

    Across this time, Windows Phone was a fun project to work on and a product that I was proud of. It had a lot of innovative features like live tiles, jump lists, kids corner, and more. Unfortunately, it was also struggling in the market. By the time Microsoft shifted from an enterprise focus to a consumer focus for smartphones, iPhone and Android were both already in the market. This meant that for app developers, it would be a third mobile OS to support. Then missteps in the move from earlier phone projects, Windows Mobile and Kin, as well as not allowing devices to update from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 caused frustrations amongst mobile operators, fans, app developers, and device manufacturers.

    There had also been a problem with the organization of Microsoft’s operating system teams. When the Windows 8 project started, one of its goals was to support tablets and compete with the iPad. Unfortunately, upper management on the Windows side decided that aligning with the Windows Phone application model would only hold Windows back, so they built an entirely different application model than what the Windows Phone team had been using since the release of Windows Phone 7. This meant that applications written for Windows Phone wouldn’t run on Windows tablets and vice-versa. This set the company on a path where the development platforms and app stores for both Windows and Windows Phone were weaker offerings than they otherwise could have been.

    After the relative failure of Windows 8 and 8.1 to draw fans or app developers and the continuing struggles of Windows Phone to build market share, Microsoft decided to merge the Windows and Windows Phone projects into a single team for Windows 10. The idea was that a unified platform would improve the odds of success for both, but a lot of ground had already been lost over the years of them pursuing their own directions. The idea of a unified Windows platform offered some hope internally, and at the time, I was happy to see the teams merging together.

    When the reorganization happened in 2014, I, along with most of my reports from the phone browser team, moved to a new team that was tasked with building a browser app for Windows and Windows Phone. My next career post will cover my time on that team.

  • DEI: Imperfect but Meaningful

    Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, wrote a good piece on how corporate DEI programs are imperfect, but that the core ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are nevertheless important.

    An inclusive culture is one that sets as many people as possible up to soar and succeed, not just the narrow subset of folks who come pre-baked with all of life’s opportunities and advantages. When you get better at supporting folks and building a culture that foregrounds growth and learning, this both raises the bar for outcomes for everyone, and broadens the talent base you can draw from.

    …

    That’s inclusion. That’s how you build a real fucking meritocracy. You start with “do not tolerate the things that kneecap your employees in their pursuit of excellence”, and ESPECIALLY not the things that subject them to the compounding tax of being targeted for who they are. In life as in finance, it’s the compound interest that kills you, more than the occasional expensive purchase.

    …

    Anyone who talks a big game about merit, but doesn’t grapple with how to identify or counteract the effects of bias in the system, doesn’t really care about merit at all. What they actually want is what Ijeoma Oluo calls “entitlement masquerading as meritocracy” (“Mediocre”).

    Charity Majors

    Corporate “DEI” is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals (charity.wtf)