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.
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!
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:
My nation is of the utmost importance
The people running the nation should be a narrowly-defined “us”
“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:
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.
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.
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.
Public golf courses and other facilities, including the removal of the Hobe Mountain Observation Tower, an existing park entrance, staff residences and more.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Join or Die is a film about why you should join a club — and why the fate of America may depend on it. And I want to get it screened in Tampa — at the Tampa Theatre.
Here’s the trailer for the film:
Join or Die is a feature documentary about community in America, as viewed through the lens of political scientist Robert Putnam’s research and the ideas from his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. The thesis of Bowling Alone is that:
Social capital, community involvement, and civic engagement have been dropping in the U.S. since the 1950s, and
How we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures.
The title Bowling Alone comes from a friend of Putnam’s who owned a bowling alley. The friend remarked that while bowling was up, bowling leagues and bowling as a group activity had gone down.
The decline of bowling as a group activity mirrored other declines. As Putnam says in interviews featured in the film:
How many times last year did you go to church? Down. How many times did you go to a dinner party? Down. How many times last year did you go to a club meeting?
In barely a couple of decades, half of all the civic infrastructure in America had simply vanished. It’s equivalent to saying half of all the roads in America just disappeared!
Here are some “bowling alone” stats, taken from the site for Join or Die:
40% decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of Americans who attended even one public meeting on town or school affairs in the previous year
60% decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the amount of picnics Americans attended annually
50% decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of Americans who took any leadership role in any local organization
35% decline from the 1960s to the 2020s in religious congregation membership
50% decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of times Americans attended a from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of times Americans attended a club meeting the previous year
66% decline from the 1960s to the 2010s in union membership
Putnam’s research is all about what makes a society succeed or fail, and he puts forth the idea that it’s about the connections and trust that people make, and the sense of “duty of care” that arise from them. If you get together, get to know your neighbors, build trust not just within a group (“bonding”) but between groups (“bridging”), there better things are — and not just for individuals within the society, but the entire society itself.
Northern and central Italy had a society where people were more civic-minded and involved, where people took part in social gatherings and governance, with their social organization being flatter and high-trust. Their system was more democratic.
Southern Italy, on the other hand, was more hierarchical, with kings at the top, knights below them, and peasants below them. Their system was more autocratic.
(By the bye, the next time some crank tries to tell you that America isn’t supposed to be a democracy, remember that they’re envisioning a southern Italy-like scheme and that they won’t be the peasants in that setup.)
Putnam believes that for democracy to be successful there needs to be a level of mutual trust among the citizens and a more horizontal system of governing, all of which Northern and Central Italy has enjoyed. Putnam states in Making Democracy Work that civil society creates wealth, wealth does not create a civil society. The civic nature of Northern Italy and Central Italy dating back to medieval times has caused the region to be prosperous in modern times. Southern Italy, however, with its more feudal nature in medieval times has caused the region to be the origin of the Mafia and has created a less successful region. The Mafia’s hierarchical structure is very similar to Southern Italy’s feudal roots, according to Putnam.
Here’s the challenge: it’s not available on streaming platforms and it’s not being distributed in the way more mainstream films are. If you want to see it, you have to contact the filmmakers and ask them to host a screening in your community.
So I did just that. I even suggested that Tampa Theatre would be a great venue for it.
Getting a screening here in Tampa will take more than just my effort, and it may take some money. I’m going to need help with this one, and if you’re interested in helping, drop me a line!
