Trying to reason with hurricane season…
– Jimmy Buffet
I’ve previously written about Florida hurricanes in this forum, in which I explained that my home is protected from these storms by native-American Mojo. I also described silly media coverage.
We just experienced a redux of both.
As for the Mojo – it worked again! As I wrote in 2019, I live inland of the Kennedy Space Center which is located on Cape Canaveral jutting out into the Atlantic, and is the one location on the southeast US coast that never had a direct hit from a hurricane. I explained why.
There are a number of theories why Cape Canaveral has never had a direct hit. Most ‘experts’ espouse some variation of either geography creating a natural buffer because the shelf that extends out from the Cape under the ocean pushes them away, or the Gulf Stream off shore makes an eastward turn there which pulls hurricanes out to the warmer water. All these theories are based on science, but I prefer a non-scientific explanation.
The Cape was a sacred gathering place for local pre-Columbian native Americans throughout central Florida, and is still protected by their Mojo. Given a choice between an expert scientific explanation, and Mojo, I’ll take Mojo every time.
You’ve no doubt seen images of the destruction hurricane Ian caused on the west coast. The destruction in the worst affected areas matched what Andrew did to Florida in 1992, and Katrina to New Orleans in 2005. (More on Katrina vs Ian below.)
Ian also caused extensive flooding in the Orlando area 30 miles west of my home. Then the eye passed directly over us (and Cape Canaveral). But by the time it got here it had downgraded to a tropical storm, before moving into the Atlantic and regaining hurricane strength. So – thanks to the mojo – the perfect record of no direct hurricane hits to Cape Canaveral continues.
We had significant rain, which created a lake in my backyard that didn’t previously exist (and has since dissipated), but no flooding of our house or barn. When we built here, our topography was engineered specifically for this sort of event.
There was also a LOT of debris from the numerous trees on our property. I’m still in the process of cleaning that up, and awaiting the county to pick up the mountain of it I’ve piled at the roadside. But we had no damage to our structures. We never even lost power. So, thanks to the Mojo we were very fortunate. Others, including some whom I know on the west coast, weren’t.
Which brings us to the media coverage of Ian. In 2019, I described the hyperbolic media coverage of hurricanes this way: “the media are wetting themselves at the prospect of a catastrophic landfall which will provide countless hours of film footage”. They got their wish with Ian.
While our local media rightly focused on the human toll, and recovery, from this event, the national regime media couldn’t resist making it all about politics, whenever they thought there was an opportunity to criticize Governor DeSantis. Unfortunately for the corrupt media, but fortunately for victims of Ian, there was simply nothing to criticize — so the fake-news media defaulted to their usual modus operendi, “If we can’t dazzle the public with brilliant reportage, we’ll baffle them with BS!”
The recovery efforts from this storm are unlike any I’ve experienced. For example, the bridge to Pine Island was destroyed. It was replaced less than a week after Ian passed, and now the Sanibel Island causeway, also destroyed, is open.
Both islands had been completely cut of from the mainland.
Yet despite those (and other) extraordinary accomplishments under the direction of Governor DeSantis, compare the regime media coverage of him with that of the inept democrat mayor of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. At the time of Katrina, the media were fixated on blaming then-President Bush for failing to timely respond to that disaster, when in fact analysis of what occurred there revealed it was the failure of the New Orleans mayor to timely arrange for evacuation or to request federal assistance.
With Ian, the regime media are falling all over themselves trying to criticize Governor Desantis without even mentioning the current President — until Biden decided to belatedly show up at the scene, and make it about climate change. The hypocrisy couldn’t be more blatant.
The national regime media attack DeSantis relentlessly because he is so effective as a Republican leader — which is to be expected of a former Navy SEAL (who happens to also have a law degree). But their real issue is he’s such a threat to their propaganda.
Most of us here are ambivalent about him running for President in 2024 – because, while he’d be a great President, we don’t want to lose him as Governor!
If you are interested in helping those whose lives are most impacted by Ian, I recommend this organization, https://www.volunteerflorida.org/donatefdf/ . It’s being privately funded with a minimum of administrative overhead.