Harris Telemacher is Steve Martin’s “wacky weatherman” in his 1991 movie L.A. Story. He’s a weatherman in L.A., naturally. It turns out L.A. isn’t the most scintillating place to report the weather. Telemacher’s weather reports consist mainly of slapping sun stickers all over the map to report the consistently sunny skies. His existence as a weatherman is empty, reporting the same thing every day to an audience that doesn’t care.

Our own Department of Wacky Homeland Security reports today that, surprise!, the national threat advisory is elevated, or “Yellow.” The DHS homepage displays that little box up there. In a bit of confusion or perhaps negligence (no!), the press release notes that the threat advisory is for “flights” while the homepage reports the threat advisory only as a general threat level. At any rate, we’ve been subject to this chromatic obsenity for a while now. It plays out the same way: yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow. Why not lop off those green and blue bars? At this point what security officer is going to make the case publicly that the threat level is “low”?

Clearly no one at DHS has studied monetary policy, and why would they? We’re stuck in threat level inflation, and I think it’s fair to say that every rational person has adjusted his threat level expectations. We’re used to it now. We’ve seen little change but longer lines at the airport for the ever more complicated security theater. If anyone was paying attention to this ridiculous schema before I don’t think they are now.