The Real Hurricane Katrina Memory

To those outside the US or even the South may see media do coverage on the ‘one year anniversary’ of Hurricane Katrina. The media coverage of that hurricane greatly impacted my local region and showed how a bunch of sheep people are.

The coverage of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans was atrociously bad with the ‘reports’ of rapes, sharks swimming down streets (how do these sharks appear from fresh water lakes?), massive gang violence, and so on. This did not stop those reporters from giving themselves awards. Doomsters LOVED the Katrina coverage as they held that as ‘proof’ that all society was collapsing (without mentioning New Orleans society had collapsed long, long before the hurricane).

With all this poor coverage, don’t you think people would go absolute bonkers when the next hurricane hit? Of course you do. And the next hurricane, Rita, a category 4 or 5, slammed into the gulf coast of Texas soon afterward.

I have never seen people turn into such sheep. Hurricanes are dangerous (I’ve gone through like five) but, depending on where you lived, you did not need to evacuate. The worst I expected was trees blown down and no electricity for a few days. But I live west of Houston. Despite that, everyone was evacuating when they didn’t need to. All the streets were clogged. People ran out of gas in the middle of the road due to sitting there. Some people were sitting, in one spot, for five to eight hours. Thanks to the horrible Katrina media coverage, the government officials in Houston and surrounding areas went into complete crisis mode. They didn’t want to be blamed like the Louisiana politicians were. A scared politician is a dangerous politician.

You don’t hear anything about hurricane Rita hitting Texas. Why should you? Nothing ended up happening. No disaster. The only disaster was on the road with all the sheep leaving (when most didn’t have to). This is occurring now in Florida. Floridians know their hurricanes but, thanks to this stupid Katrina coverage (and even stupider re-living year old bad coverage [which the same media won’t do to real disasters such as 9/11]), some in Florida are panicking over a tropical depression. A tropical depression, for you guys who don’t get hurricanes, is just a rain storm.

Needless to say, you don’t have to worry about old Pook becoming a sheep. When Rita was coming, everyone said, “LOL you are stupid Pook!” “Idiot! You will DIE!” (Yes, this person actually thought I was going to die. I didn’t even lose my electricity or a tree limb).

I’ll tell you what I do fear: tornadoes. You know when a hurricane is coming and can easily avoid and prepare for it. But tornadoes come out of nowhere and are highly unpredictable. They skip around and follow no clear path. Because of that, I’d rather live in Florida than in Kansas.

Did you know that around 800 people a day move to Florida? After the next census, Florida will have more electoral votes than New York. People who are moving to Florida appear to be coming from the Rust Belt, states such as Ohio.

“But Pook! Florida has all those hurricanes! Why would people want to move down there?”

It is because of those high taxes in areas like Ohio. Florida (and Texas too) has no state income tax making it very attractive for people. You can count on taxes being certain all the time, but hurricanes are a roll of the dice. Instead of bearing the certainty of taxes, people would rather take their chances with Nature.