Day 644 Monday October 22, 2018 937 Days to Go
I’ve just finished reading Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk,” which outlines the great problems our country faces especially with the advent of the Trump administration.
Basically, everything is for sale and nothing is being done. Weather data, which we have all paid for is being hidden from us so AcuWeather can sell it to us. The same is true for many other parts of the government. It’s a case of mission versus a buck. So what if the Weather Service has billions of dollars of assets we’ve all paid for? Why shouldn’t a private company be able to keep all that data an analysis for themselves? If people die who didn’t subscribe to their crappy forecasts it’s their own damn fault. They should have paid up.
The end of Lewis’ book examines the question as to why do people not heed warnings about the weather? He looked at tornadoes in Oklahoma. People didn’t heed warning for a number of reasons. One was anecdotal evidence and sayings. “The tornado always follows the river.” “They divide before they get to town.” etc.
Another reason was that “It hadn’t happened here.” Therefore it wouldn’t. Or “If I can just get home I’ll be safe.”
Another one was “Those TV broadcasters are always making it worse than it is.”
The Weather Service finally got some psychologists and sociologists on board to help them with message delivery. One of the Weather Service problems was they reported a lot of facts and figures but not the possible impact of what that meant. Or as Ron White would say, “It’s not that the wind is blowing. It’s what the wind is blowing.”
The Weather Service was trying to figure out if they could predict a tornado before it formed. So far they hadn’t been able to do so. One day they put out a slightly different forecast, which got the attention of a fellow in Elk City, Oklahoma. The Weather Service said there was a storm in the panhandle which looked bad. Something in what they said made this fellow look up and take notice. Maybe, it was just that it sounded different than before. He got in his truck crammed with all sorts of wether gear and drove out of town. He saw the storm coming. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to alarm people, but then he started reporting what he was seeing and the weather service was picking it up and telling him what they were seeing. It went back and forth. The sirens in town went off. The folks in town were told in no uncertain terms to take shelter. The town tornado shelter was packed. They had to put folks in the basement of the fire station. Only one life was lost and the storm had been huge, a killer.
Little did that guy know but this was the first time The Weather Service had tried out a new tornado prediction model. This guy listened to the Weather Service forecasting station. He said if they, the Weather Service, had a TV station everyone would watch that and not the crap from the TV stations.
But the Trump administration wants to end all that so someone can make a buck off of what we’ve already paid for. Fuck Trump.
937 Days to Go
PS Green Queen*
*Actually, part of “Duro-Verde” by Ed Paschke 1978 at VMFA
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