Whoever came up with the slogan for Independent Health clearly didn’t watch any classic Star Trek, because the ways they retired “red shirts” on that show were horrifying…
By the way, if you haven’t yet read John Scalzi’s Redshirts, or better yet, listened to the audiobook version read by Wil Wheaton, do it!
With much secrecy, little notice, and almost no time slated for public feedback, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis announced a plan to put golf courses and pickleball courts in Florida’s state parks.
The state’s original plan was to hold public meetings on one day only — tomorrow, Tuesday, August 27th — where members of the public would have three minutes each to voice their opinions.
From the Tampa Bay Times:
Eric Draper, who served as the director of Florida’s state parks between 2017 and 2021, said it appears the state’s environmental agency is skirting the legal process and the parks system’s own internal operations manual for updating park management plans.
“This appears to be something that has been planned in secret, and it doesn’t appear to have involved the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are volunteers in the parks, the citizen support organizations, or the many people who have been involved in helping to create and develop Florida’s award-winning park system,” Draper said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times.
Before the environmental agency formally introduced its proposed changes, staff should have convened a citizens advisory committee made up of other state agencies and people who are working at state parks, Draper said. That advisory committee should have then met and held a public hearing.
The affected state parks would be:
| The park | The plan |
| Jonathan Dickinson State Park | Public golf courses and other facilities, including the removal of the Hobe Mountain Observation Tower, an existing park entrance, staff residences and more. |
| Anastasia State Park | A park lodge with 350-room capacity, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course. |
| Topsail Hill Preserve State Park | A park lodge with 350-room capacity, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course. |
| Grayton Beach State Park | Up to 10 cabins, a beach access restroom, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course. |
| Hillsborough River State Park | Up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course. |
| Honeymoon Island State Park | Up to four pickleball courts. |
| Oleta River State Park | Up to 10 cabins or glamping space, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course. |
| Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park | Up to four pickleball courts. |
| Camp Helen State Park | Up to 10 cabins or a glamping area. |
Find out more here:
That dispensing slot looks too small and too clean.
If you’re in Florida, you’re probably keeping an eye on Tropical Depression Four, which is likely to turn into Tropical Storm Debby by tomorrow. The reasons you’re able to do this are indicated by the logos at the upper corners of the map above:
As public services, both the NOAA and National Weather Service provide the public with weather forecasts and satellite observations, as well as announcements about major storms, hurricanes and tornadoes, heat waves, atmospheric rivers, and other extreme weather events. This information has been life-saving…
…and one of the goals in Project 2025 is to dismantle these vital services.
Project 2025 is a 900+ page document [PDF link] coordinated by the Heritage Foundation — an outrage factory that likes to pretend it’s a think tank — to reshape the U.S. government and consolidate power under the U.S. President should Donald Trump win the election in November.
As Wikipedia points out:
The Project asserts that the entire executive branch is under the direct control of the president under unitary executive theory. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees in order to replace them with people loyal to the president.
…the Project seeks to infuse the government and society with conservative Christian values. Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy. Legal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties.
As part of the plan to turn the government into a sea of employees who primary loyalty is to the President and not the people, Project 2025 proposes scrapping a lot of government services, including the NOAA and National Weather Service.
On page 664, it reads:
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.
On pages 674 and 675:
Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion
annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).NOAA consists of six main offices:
- The National Weather Service (NWS);
- The National Ocean Service (NOS);
- The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR);
- The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS)
- The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and
- The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.
Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.
NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.
If you want to know what happens when you privatize weather prediction, you need only look at AccuWeather, who are not only trying to turn weather forecasts from a public good into an artificially scarce one, but are also trying to profit by selling your location data, which it can get from your phone when you use an app that gets its information from AccuWeather — which gets some of its data for free from the NOAA!
Also, there’s what happened with that tornado in Oklahoma…
A lot of what’s wrong with Accuweather has been summarized quite nicely in this Reddit thread: Just a reminder that Accuweather is an awful company run by an awful man and should be boycotted.
In fact the Project 2025 plan to dismantle the NOAA is so cockamamie that even AccuWeather’s CEO has publicly stated that they categorically do not support that plan.
Of course, this is the sort of shenangans one must expect when ideology overrides science.
So as you make whatever preparations you need to make for the upcoming storm (here in our neck of the woods, I expect it’ll just be very heavy rain), take a moment to appreciate the work the NOAA does.