In the spirit of the plaintive Rodney King inquiry “Can we all get along?” weather has brought us all together.
It was early Saturday morning that the National Weather Service took to X (still Twitter for most of us) to proclaim that this bureaucracy had put forth an active weather watch, warning or advisory in all 50 of these United States.
From Maine to Alaska, Hawaii to Florida, we all had weather to fear, or at least to respect.
This weather unanimity, as reported by The Epoch Times and linked on Zerohedge.com, is a triumph of sorts for the nanny state in its never-ending mission to save us from ourselves.
There was a time, when I was young, that the average individual didn’t need media or bureaucracy to educate them to dress warm when it was cold and windy. Moms did that.
Similarly, drivers didn’t need to be cautioned to slow down on snowy roads, people knew on their own to make sure outdoor pets had shelter during cold weather or water during warm, and somehow even before the advent of printed warnings on same, most people knew not to wrap plastic cleaning bags around their heads lest they suffocate themselves.
For the tiny minority that couldn’t grasp all this without many helping hands, think of it as the triumph of Social Darwinism.
The abundance of warnings is the same sort of no-kidding, superfluous stuff that leads many (not Rodney King) to ask who exactly benefits from Braille being part of the interaction method on DRIVE-THROUGH ATMS?
All this perceived need for elites to protect, warn and otherwise manage us, creates the need for a lot of social shepherds. And bureaucracy expands out of control to fill that void; able to do so because government revenues are thought to be infinite and therefore government efforts are not subject to economic discipline as defined by need for a good or service and value added by same.
In an interesting example noted by the Heritage Foundation and shared by Fox News, among others, Michigan not only rules the college football world, the Wolverines also are number one in DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) employees.
True, higher education is not direct government, but it suffers from the same inability to manage the purse strings as government, and counts on governmental handouts to customers (students) in the form of low-income grants, student aid, subsidized loans and government scholarships, not to mention outright gifts to schools from state governments.
In Pennsylvania we have state-related universities. An example of which is Penn State, in line to get $245 million or so from state taxpayers this year.
The University of Michigan was thought to have received $333 million or so from that state’s coffers this year. Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation reported that about $31 million will be spent on the U of Michigan DEI staff, which has swelled from 163 employees in 2021, then the highest in the nation, to 241 employees in 2023, still No. 1.
Back to weather, the National Weather Service has operated under the umbrella of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) since 1970 when NOAA was born. It’s unclear whether the acronym, pronounced Noah, was intended to invoke the Biblical figure who saved mankind from the great flood.
What is clear is that NOAA and its National Weather Service subsidiary want $6.8 billion in federal funding for 2024, up by about $450 million from the 2023 figure, to warn us not to stand outdoors naked when wind chills are below zero.
You can buy a lot of inanity for nearly $7 billion, even at today’s inflated prices. And that helps explain weather watches, warnings and advisories for all 50 states today.
Sam Ross Jr's site 