Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Two Bare Feet

    A lot of news I’ve been sharing here is unhappy and stressful, so I want to make an effort to share something I like each week. For this first post towards that goal, here’s one of my favorite songs: Two Bare Feet by Katie Melua. Enjoy!

  • Innovation is a Distraction

    We do absolutely know what we need to to to fight the climate crisis: Reduce carbon emissions radically. Which we have known for decades (I was taught about the “greenhouse effect” in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde). We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating as much meat, invest in cleaner energy sources and insulate houses, etc. We know.

    But it’s inconvenient. The solutions we know, we have researched, we have tested, are annoying. They force us to change our lives, force us to rethink our social and economic structures (Oh who would have thought: An economic system based on limitless growth and consumption would lead to bad outcomes. Let’s start a research project!). And who wants to do all that?

    Jürgen Geuter / tante

    Innovation is a distraction (Smashing Frames)

  • Protecting North Carolina’s Voter Rolls

    Established in 2012, ERIC offers a modern and common-sense approach to interstate voter registration maintenance. At its core, ERIC is a voluntary and bipartisan interstate collaborative that now includes 21 states and Washington, D.C. Together, member states agree to securely share and cross-reference voter registration data across state boundaries in order to identify and eliminate duplicates, deceased voters, and people who have moved from one state to another.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    Protecting North Carolina’s Voter Rolls (Carolina Forward)

  • When Creators are Disappointing

    It’s entirely up to you where you draw the line for yourself. It sucks to think that something into which you invested so much of yourself was created by a monster, and that you might then have to change your relationship with it. I know. But that relationship does change.

    Bryan Young

    Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling and the fall of beloved creators (Salt Lake City Weekly)

  • Who Owns the Streets?

    For the vast majority of civilization, the streets were a shared space for kids playing, bicycles, pedestrians, merchants and more. But by the 1920s there was a huge shift in how we use our public space, and that has major consequences on how we live today. So what happened then? And what happens now when cities rethink how we use our streets?

    Justine Underhill

    Who Owns the Streets? How Cars Took Over Our Shared Spaces (Justine Underhill)

  • How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

    Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

    Brett Murphy

    A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza (ProPublica)

  • OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

    It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.

    Jason Koebler

    OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us (404 Media)

  • Pardoning 1500 Insurrectionists Is An Insult To America

    It was, without hyperbole, an insurrection against this country. An attempted coup, a bona fide attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And it was the most violent attack on the Capitol since 1814. And yet, now re-elected President Trump has made a mockery of the attack on our country and our democracy by pardoning 1500 traitors involved and commuting the sentence of 14 others, including violent felons who attacked law enforcement officers on their way to invading the Capitol. President Trump is not a member of a party of law and order.

    Devin Stone, LegalEagle

    Pardoning 1500 Insurrectionists Is An Insult To America (LegalEagle)

  • A Radical Test of the Presidency’s Power

    Much about the initial memo from Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which has since been rescinded, was unclear — including the scope or duration of the “temporary” pause on “all federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities.” Most importantly, the memo identified no source of constitutional or legislative authority for the president to pause any, let alone all, domestic grant programs.

    But it is animated, at least implicitly, by a striking claim: Not only can the president freeze all funding amid a review, but he must also then be permitted to permanently eliminate items from appropriations statutes at a whim. It’s a move that threatens not only a radical curtailment of Congress’ authority but imperils the separation of American civil society from the partisan tides of the White House.

    And it goes far beyond what previous presidents have done during contentious displays of executive authority.

    Aziz Huq

    All Presidents Test the Limits of Their Authority. Trump Is Doing Something Far More Radical. (Politico)

  • The South Bank of the Rubicon

    The thing about points of no return, the reason we worry over them so much, is it’s rare to know where they are until they are some ways behind you.

    Ian Danskin

    The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon (Innuendo Studios)