Was the Boston shutdown a cop-and-donut joke?

[Headline-related punchline at the end.] One reason behind my campaign [here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and most amusingly, here] to restore sanity to weather warnings and school cancellations is the tremendous cost these bureaucratic panic attacks impose on society. Every school cancellation begets a cascade of expensive waste: students missing school; taxpayers paying school employees not to work; parents losing work time to make last minute child-care arrangements; employers with missing or distracted workers; etc. Blogger Clark [NLN] at Popehat argues that Friday's unprecedented lockdown of commerce, transportation, and public events in Boston imposed a vastly greater cost with no...