Categories
Florida The Current Situation The Good Fight

Support the whistleblower who exposed Florida’s secret plans for its state parks

The saying is doubly true for anyone who works under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “No good deed goes unpunished,” and wow, did James Gaddis get punished for his good deed.

Gaddis, pictured above, was the employee at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection who leaked the state’s rushed-under-cover-of-secrecy plans to build golf courses, hotels, pickleball courts, and more land developer-friendly conversions of Florida’s state parks, which are natural protected lands. His leaking of that information and the Florida government’s rushed timeline led to the outcry that led to the postponement of those plans.

Here’s what Gaddis told the Tampa Bay Times:

“It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” Gaddis said in an interview Monday morning. Gaddis said he was tasked with making the proposed conceptual land use maps that depicted the golf courses and other developments. Two proposals were especially egregious in his eyes: The Jonathan Dickinson State Park golf course, and the 350-room hotel at Anastasia State Park.

“This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat,” Gaddis said. He recalls his hand, hovering over a computer mouse, shaking with anger and frustration as he was told to rush his maps from senior leadership. “The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”

Unfortunately, doing the right thing sometimes means doing the career-limiting thing. For his heroic actions, he was fired. Here’s his dismissal notice:

While he was technically fired for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” it’s the rest of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection who are truly guilty of unbecoming conduct, for doing the exact opposite of what the Department is supposed to do.

Because the job market is tough out there, Gaddis has set up a GoFundMe to help him as he looks for new work. Because what he did was heroic, he’s surpassed the modest goal of $10,000, but don’t let that stop you from pitching in.

Thank you, James Gaddis, for taking the whistleblower risk and saving our state parks!

Recommended reading

Categories
America Editorial The Current Situation The Good Fight

Don’t vote with people who approvingly quote Hitler

Screenshots from the New York Times article “Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny”

This recent article in the New York Times [it’s a gift link, you’ll be able to read it without a subscription] is a good reminder of how easily people abandon their principle when they think it will help them “win.”

The problem with siding with fascists — or quoting them — in order to be on “the winning team” is that they start off with a big, welcoming “circle”in group” when they need you — and then recategorize you into one of their “out groups” when you’re no longer useful. Moms for Liberty is willing to ignore Trump’s (and by extension, the Republican Party’s) disdain for women if it means that gay and trans kids people go back to being closeted and shunned.

Maybe, they hope, what he consistently and unfailingly says about women and how he views and treats them won’t be part of how he’ll govern. But he’ll get rid of the rainbow flags and gender-neutral bathrooms!

Vector art depicting a fasces.
A fasces — a bundle of rods with an embedded axe.
Roman magistrates carried them as symbols of their power, and they were later used as emblems of authority in Mussolini’s Italy.
Creative Commons image — click to see the source.

Lest you think I’m throwing around the term fascist as hyperbole for “evil,” or at least “people whose ideas I don’t like,” I’m not. I’m using it as the adjective that describes people who’ve bought into palingentic ultranationalism, a phrase made of two ten-dollar words that can be boiled down to these three points:

Palingenetic ultranationalism: - The nation is of utmost importance - The people running the nation should be a narrowly defined “us” - “We” should rule because it’s more or less, our destiny
  1. My nation is of the utmost importance
  2. The people running the nation should be a narrowly-defined “us”
  3. “We” should rule because it’s more or less our destiny

But once again, the New York Times buried the lede! The real story is in the correction at the end of the article:

Correction in article: “A correction was made on Sept. 1, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that a local chapter of Moms for Liberty had accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler in a newsletter. The group, which later issued an apology, was aware that the quote was from Hitler when the newsletter was published.”

Don’t vote with people who approvingly quote Hitler.

Worth watching

White Fascism, a disturbing yet necessary video by Ian Danskin and part of his video series, The Alt-Right Playbook, explains the topic very well.

Categories
funny Geek

No, I DON’T want to “retire the redshirt way”

Billboard for Independent Health featuring one of their insurance agents in their trademark red shirt, with the headline "Retire the redshirt way."

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!

Categories
Florida The Current Situation The Good Fight

Florida’s bad plan for development in state parks

Art by V. Steiner. Click to see the source.

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.

Art by V. Steiner. Click to see the source.

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.

Art by Oona Watkins. Click to see the source.

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.

Art by Kelly Del Valle. Click to see the source.

The affected state parks would be:

The parkThe plan
Jonathan Dickinson State ParkPublic golf courses and other facilities, including the removal of the Hobe Mountain Observation Tower, an existing park entrance, staff residences and more.
Anastasia State ParkA park lodge with 350-room capacity, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course.
Topsail Hill Preserve State ParkA park lodge with 350-room capacity, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course.
Grayton Beach State ParkUp to 10 cabins, a beach access restroom, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course.
Hillsborough River State ParkUp to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course.
Honeymoon Island State ParkUp to four pickleball courts.
Oleta River State ParkUp to 10 cabins or glamping space, up to four pickleball courts, a disc golf course.
Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State ParkUp to four pickleball courts.
Camp Helen State ParkUp to 10 cabins or a glamping area.
Art by Spinster Abbot’s in St. Augustine. Click to see the source.

Find out more here:

Categories
Food funny

More like a SALMONELLA machine, amirite?

Man enjoying a plate of egg salad in a late 1960s/early 1970s office beside an egg salad machine.
Presumably generated image.

That dispensing slot looks too small and too clean.

Categories
funny Work

I’ve gotta admit it: that’s pretty risqué

Categories
America The Current Situation The Good Fight

A reminder about Project 2025 to people watching Tropical Storm Debby

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.

Recommended reading