Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Will Republicans Steal the North Carolina Supreme Court Election?

    The State Board of Elections’s final count shows Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent in the race, to be the winner, by a margin of 734 votes out of the more than 5.5 million ballots that were cast. But Judge Griffin, the North Carolina Republican Party and conservative election deniers have embarked on an extraordinary effort to wipe away that result, and throw out tens of thousands of ballots that were submitted by mail or in early voting.

    …

    On Tuesday, the State Supreme Court blocked state officials from certifying the outcome of the race. Later this month, pending the outcome of legal battles over whether the issue should be heard in state or federal courts, the North Carolina court could decide, in effect, whether a Democrat or a Republican will hold the seat.

    Eduardo Medina and Michael Wines

    In North Carolina, Republicans Try to Reverse a Supreme Court Election Loss (The New York Times)

    The Supreme Court of North Carolina has been asked to rule on a bizarre request from Jefferson Griffin, the losing Republican challenger for an Associate Justice seat on that same court. Last week, the Griffin campaign filed a request for the state’s highest court to toss out 60,000 votes, thus reversing the outcome of the election which Griffin lost. In doing so, Jefferson Griffin’s crusade against the voters of North Carolina is not only anti-democratic, but anathema to the rule of law.

    Simply put, this is a grim preview of North Carolina’s political future. Should Griffin’s request be granted, North Carolina’s already threadbare democracy could be irreparably torn. Overturning the will of the voters in a valid election is a major escalation from ordinary partisan politics, and should be roundly condemned across the political spectrum.

    Carolina Forward Research Staff

    A choice of democracy (Carolina Forward)

    Democracy Docket has an interview with Justice Allison Riggs about this situation that you can watch here:

    The GOP is Trying to Steal a North Carolina Supreme Court Seat (Democracy Docket)

    If you’re in North Carolina and want to check if your vote is one of the votes that Jefferson Griffin is trying to disqualify, Apex Council Member Terry Mahaffey has made a tool to allow you to check: https://terrymah.github.io/challenge/

  • Mantracks

    Every Folding Ideas video that I’ve watched has been a worthwhile use of time, and his latest one about fake fossils is no exception.

    Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils (Folding Ideas)

  • Ecology & Climate

    It was in the midst of this cross-disciplinary ferment that it occurred to him that the people talking about ecology and the people talking about climate were talking about the same thing. It was an observation he apparently mused on for over fifty years before presenting it formally, in 2022, with two other scientists, Debra Peters of the USDA and Dev Niyogi, University of Texas. His early observation appears now as: “When scientists focus on the physics of the Earth system, it has traditionally been called climate. In contrast, when scientists focus on the biological aspect of the Earth system, it is called ecology.”

    Rob Lewis

    Are Ecology and Climate the Same Thing? (The Climate According to Life)

  • The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before

    This is all to say that I’m of two minds about the legitimacy TikTok ban. China has cultivated a national surveillance apparatus so powerful and so efficient that it now exports city-scale surveillance packages to more than 52 nations around the world. Data inside a Chinese company is effectively also inside that national surveillance apparatus. So handing a live nationwide psychological profile on 150 million Americans to a Chinese-owned company is asking for trouble. But we also have shown such callous indifference to the privacy of Americans that specifically wringing our hands about TikTok while giving free rein to the rest of surveillance capitalism rings hollow to me.

    Jacob Ward

    The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before (The Rip Current)

  • A Second Gilded Age

    Now, more than a century later, America has entered a second Gilded Age.

    Monopolies are once again taking over vast swaths of the economy. So we must strengthen antitrust enforcement to bust up powerful companies.

    Now another generation of robber barons, exemplified by Elon Musk, is accumulating unprecedented money and power. So, once again, we must tax these exorbitant fortunes.

    Wealthy individuals and big corporations are once again paying off lawmakers, sending them billions to conduct their political campaigns, even giving luxurious gifts to Supreme Court justices. So we must protect our democracy from Big Money, just as we did before.

    As it was during the first Gilded Age, voter suppression is too often making it harder for people of color to participate in our democracy. So it’s once again critical to defend and expand voting rights.

    Working people are once again being exploited and abused, child labor is returning, unions are being busted, the poor are again living in unhealthy conditions, homelessness is on the rise, and the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is nearly as large as in the first Gilded Age.

    So once again we need to protect the rights of workers to organize, invest in social safety nets, and revive guardrails to protect against the abuses of great wealth and power.

    Robert Reich

    From the Robber Barons to Elon Musk: Will History Repeat Itself? (Robert Reich)

  • Ranked Choice Voting would be good for North Carolina

    Let’s talk about Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). It’s a voting system that’s making elections fairer for millions of Americans—nearly 20 million, in fact! But what’s so great about it? Here are a few key benefits:

    1. Winners need majority support: With RCV, winners have to get over 50% of the vote. That means they can’t just squeak by with a small slice of support.
    2. Better campaigning: Candidates can’t just play to their base—they have to appeal to more people. This means fewer nasty attack ads and more focus on real issues.
    3. No more “spoiler” candidates: Ever felt like voting for your favorite candidate might “waste” your vote or hurt your second choice? RCV fixes that. You rank your choices, and if your top pick doesn’t win, that candidate is eliminated, and your vote can still count for your next choice.  This enables broader discussion from a wider range of candidates.
    4. Saves money and increases turnout: RCV skips the need for costly runoffs, which often have low voter participation.
    Don Berryann & Lennie Friedman

    Ranked Choice Voting would be good for North Carolina (NC Newsline)

  • The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling

    Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.

    Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.

    Not now. Maybe not ever.

    Lisa Song

    Selling a Mirage: The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling Using Pyrolysis (ProPublica)

  • Elon Musk, the Right, and Wikipedia

    Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters.

    This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

    Molly White

    Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Citation Needed)

  • The LLMentalist Effect

    One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

    But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this and, if real, it would be completely unexplained.

    LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

    LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

    There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

    Baldur Bjarnason

    The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con (Out of the Software Crisis)

  • My Doctor Emailed Me Back

    Here we reach the crux of the matter and the source of the distrust many trans people have for the NHS. We tell them we are trans, we want to transition. But that information about who we are and what we want counts for nothing unless we also have their permission. The system denies that we are reliable bearers of fundamental truths about ourselves. Our lack of trust in that system is just the equal and opposite reaction: they don’t listen to us, so we don’t listen to them.

    Abigail Thorn

    My Doctor Emailed Me Back (Trans Writes)