Category: America

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:

• NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• The National Weather Service

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.

Recommended reading

• The Atlantic, July 16, 2024: The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports
• Florida Phoenix, July 25, 2024: Project 2025 is a bad bet for Florida’s future
• Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2024: Project 2025 plan calls for demolition of NOAA and National Weather Service
• Orlando Sentinel, July 28, 2024: Who needs NOAA when you’ve got Project 2025?
• Midland Daily News, August 1, 2024: Bad things happen when ideology replaces expertise

According to the American Library Association, last year books bans and attempted book bans hit “the highest levels ever documented,” and Florida “led” the nation in the push to either remove or restrict access to certain books.

To counter this, Firestorm Books, who describe themselves as a radical bookstore co-operative & community event space in Asheville, NC, is giving away 22,500 books rescued from the public schools in Florida’s Duval County (Jacksonville and surrounding areas).

You can request from two different sets of books aimed at different age groups:

• Six picture books for kids age 4 – 8
• Six chapter books for kids age 8 – 12

Find out more and request your free books here!

What sort of books were banned?

For starters, there’s Grace Lin’s Dim Sum for Everyone:

It was banned because Florida has a ban on the discussion of race in schools. DeSantis is such a snowflake.

Another book banned in Duval County: Sonia Sotomayor: I’ll Be the Judge of That!:

This is particularly strange because this is a book about a current Supreme Court Justice. One gets the feeling that no such challenge would ever be issued against a book about a laughably less-qualified judge like Amy Coney Barrett.

Here’s another banned book: Nya’s Long Walk:

Here’s what the book’s about:

Young Nya takes little sister Akeer along on the two-hour walk to fetch water for the family. But Akeer becomes too ill to walk, and Nya faces the impossible: her sister and the full water vessel together are too heavy to carry.

As she struggles, she discovers that if she manages to take one step, then another, she can reach home and Mama’s care.

Bold, impressionistic paintings by Caldecott and Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brian Pinkney evoke the dry, barren landscape and the tenderness between the two sisters.

An afterword discusses the process of providing clean water in South Sudan to reduce waterborne illness.

You get one guess as to why this book was banned.

Sam! is about a transgender boy and his family, so of course it got banned:

Want to know more about the books that have been banned from schools and libraries in Florida? Here’s a list compiled by PEN America.