Scott Boehmer

Category: Politics

  • Cuts Threaten Climate Modeling

    Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAA’s work extends deep into the heart of the American economy — businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity — and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the country’s safety, competitiveness and national security.

    Abrahm Lustgarten

    White House Proposal Could Gut Climate Modeling the World Depends On (ProPublica)

  • Brendan Carr’s FCC

    In less than 100 days the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been converted from a media and telecom watchdog into a bizarre, rights-trampling grievance machine built for one purpose: to coddle and protect the ego of President Donald J. Trump.

    Karl Bode

    Brendan Carr’s FCC is an anti-consumer, rights-trampling harassment machine (The Verge)

  • The Bathroom Bill is Back

    House Bill 2 is unquestionably one of the most infamous pieces of legislation in North Carolina state history. Passed by a Republican supermajority in less than 12 hours, HB 2 mandated that transgender individuals use the bathroom that matches the biological sex listed on their birth certificate, regardless of their gender identity.

    The law was widely criticized as discriminatory, unnecessary and cruel; its passage cost North Carolina billions of dollars and thousands of lost jobs; led to travel bans against North Carolina and an NCAA boycott; and made the state into a laughingstock of the nation. The fallout from the bill led to a partial (and for some, begrudging) repeal by moderate Republican lawmakers working with Democrats.

    It’s easy to forget, but even then-candidate Donald Trump criticized the bill: “You leave it the way it is… There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble.”

    Yet as the MAGA movement has embraced more and more extremely conservative politics, many Republican politicians today feel none of the regret their predecessors did nine years ago. Enter SB 516, a bathroom bill even more aggressive, cruel, and poorly planned than HB 2.

    Miles Kirkpatrick

    The Bathroom Bill is Back (Carolina Forward)

  • We Need To Talk About ICE

    A video from Kat Abughazaleh about the government’s usage of ICE as an intimidation tool without regard for due process.

    We Need To Talk About ICE (Kat Abughazaleh – YouTube)

  • Email Servers and Signal

    I thought this was a good look at how Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal differs from the email server that Hillary Clinton used while Secretary of State. The video is notably before more recent news stories about how Hegseth was also sharing military information in other Signal chats including his family members.

    Signal War Plans v.s. Hillary’s Emails (LegalEagle – YouTube)

    Hegseth had a second Signal chat where he shared details of Yemen strike (AP)

  • 20 Lessons on Tyranny

    A video of John Lithgow reading the 20 lessons about tyranny from Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

    20 Lessons on Tyranny: by Timothy Snyder / read by John Lithgow (PoliticsGirl – YouTube)

  • Conservative Seniors & Survivorship Bias

    One of the abiding realities of our political era is a major generational split anchored on the right by disproportionately conservative seniors and on the left by disproportionately progressive millennials and post-millennials. This is often thought of as a perfectly natural, even inevitable, phenomenon: Young people are adventurous, open to new ways of thinking, and not terribly invested in the status quo, while old folks have time-tested views, assets they want to protect, and a growing fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.

    …

    But it is important to note that some generational disjunctions in political behavior are driven by demography. It’s well understood that millennials are significantly more diverse than prior generations. But there is something else driving the relative homogeneity of seniors: Poorer people are often hobbled by chronic illness, and succumb to premature death.

    Ed Kilgore

    Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors (New York Magazine)

  • Does Upzoning Destroy Property Values?

    There is a ton of confusion–and a fair amount of debate–over what happens to property values when you upzone. Does allowing more housing through upzoning drive prices down or does it drive up housing costs? It’s a question with some strong opinions on both sides. We dive into the latest research.

    Justine Underhill

    Does upzoning destroy property values? (YouTube – Justine Underhill)

  • Crypto Crime Is Legal

    A Monday night memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, citing Trump’s crypto executive orders, has dismantled the Department of Justice’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) and directed the agency’s Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to “cease cryptocurrency enforcement”. The memo also directs prosecutors to “not charge regulatory violations in cases involving digital assets including but not limited to unlicensed money transmitting…, violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, unregistered securities offering violations, unregistered broker-dealer violations, and other violations of registration requirements under the Commodity Exchange Act” unless they have specific knowledge that the defendant knowingly and willfully violated a specific requirement — erecting a major barrier to prosecuting such cases.

    Molly White

    Crypto crime is legal (Citation Needed)

  • Let’s Rewrite the Whole Thing

    I’ve worked as a software engineer for close to two decades. Re-implementing a complex system in a new programming language is a hard problem. Trying to make such a change rapidly rather than taking your time to isolate and convert it in small chunks is asking for trouble.

    The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

    Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

    Makena Kelly

    DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse (WIRED)