Hurricane DeSantis

It's time to start naming storms after assholes

This image is from Idiots Elect Idiots, that I wrote in 2023. Recycling is good. Illustration by yours truly.

Hurricane Milton, which spun from a tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane with speed that stunned meteorologists, has crashed into Tampa, Florida, damage and loss of life to be determined. I have an elderly aunt just 40 miles north and six miles inland sheltering in place on the second floor of her apartment complex for retired people on limited incomes, and am concerned if her roof stayed in place and that piles of debris not yet hauled away from Helene just two weeks ago weren’t launched through her windows or sliding glass doors.

The rapidity of Milton’s emergence from a mere tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with 180mph winds in just 24 hours stunned meteorologists. John Morales, a broadcaster for NBC6 South Florida, was brought to near tears, video clip here.

“I apologize, this is just horrific...you know what’s driving that. I don’t need to tell you: global warming, climate change [are] leading to this.” — John Morales

Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor was appropriately blunt on CNN, stating:

“I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever, If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

So much for paradise.

Fed by an overheated Gulf with ocean surface temperatures of 31°C (88°F), Milton grew from a mere tropical depression to a Cat 5 hurricane in just three days from October 5 to October 8, the fastest ever in the Gulf of Mexico, and the third-fastest in the Atlantic after Wilma in 2005 and Felix in 2007.

So in honor of this great occasion, I would like to suggest renaming Milton after governor, climate change denier and cretin extraordinaire Ron DeSantis. Why? Because in addition to being a first order climate change denier he has proven to be a great man by supporting book bans, crushing women’s rights to bodily autonomy, assaulting higher education, promoting race and gender discrimination, and being a prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay prison, and therefore at least a witness if not enthusiastic participant (but who knows) to the illegal torture of prisoners made possible by suspension of human protections under the US Constitution and Geneva Conventions by draft dodger, war criminal and accomplished dolt George W. Bush.

Most pertinent to this article, Ron is a climate change denier with magical powers. By signing House Bill 1645 in May, which eliminates most references to climate change, he rejected not just weather, but the politicization of weather. Thanks to the gods. I mean, obviously weather is political. Good weather is Republican and bad weather is Democrat, those nattering nabobs of negativism.

Fuck you, Spiro.

“I can’t control the climate. I’m not doing mandates on any of that,” DeSantis said in 2022. Oops, you used the word “climate,” Ron. Yet, with the stroke of a pen, the mighty DeSantis rendered the powers of nature impotent, proving climate change isn’t real and beating down the agenda of wild-eyed environmentalists who clearly don’t want to make America great again.

"We're restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots," DeSantis posted on lunatic and Bond villain Elon Musk’s X, who controls two thirds of the world’s active satellites and launches three a day with the goal of 42,000 in orbit.

Still from Diamonds Are Forever, 1971. The last of the Sean Connery Bond films features a plot where the super villain, Blofeld, uses a laser armed satellite to threaten the world. Blofeld destroys nuclear arsenals in China, the Soviet Union and the US, then proposes an international auction for global nuclear supremacy. The plot of this movie is, of course, over the top, but maybe not so much considering both covert and hidden agendas in current world events, and failure to deal with existential threats. In particular, it begs the question of how much power should be in any one person’s hands?

Yes, this great man, a Harvard graduate after all, I dare not question, because only the best and brightest of us go to that school, right? With the sweep of a pen, The Great DeSantis rendered climate change fake news, a non-reality, a plot. You can be assured the images and stories of Hurricane Helene and now Milton, I mean DeSantis, are fake news, generated with AI by disgruntled pet eating Haitians, lesbians, gays, and trans people, not the real Americans who come in only the flavorless flavor of white bread and the absolute judgement of Christianity.

As a steadfast denier of climate change, the Sierra Club gives him an F, small-brained Ronny has earned this honor. Helene to Milton in just two weeks is akin to a boxer staggering around on his feet, destined to go down. The warnings have been growing ever larger and more frequent over the years. I can’t possibly list and describe them in this article, but vast swathes of land formerly benign, are quickly becoming not just undesirable, but uninhabitable. With these disasters, aside from direct deaths, people are displaced, and losing all they worked for, supply chains are disrupted or destroyed forever, and insurance rates increase to the point of unaffordability. These are the early symptoms of collapse from abusing the planet. The first results for those not directly physically impacted will be economic in the form of inflation the myopic Fed cannot control, and societal from lost jobs, increased homelessness, and a shrinking tax base needed to overcome these tragedies and provide for one and other. The Port of Tampa alone supports 80,000 jobs and amounts to $15.1 billion of economic activity.

We are witnessing degrowth, nature’s way. We’re going to degrow one way or another and learn to live with much less. One looks like Helene, Milton and the shocking fires of Australia in 2021, or the fires of Canada I wrote about in 2023. The other degrowth which I wrote about Degrowth: The Vision We Must Demand is at least planned, even if difficult, and a chance at a future after year 2100, a fifty-year-old concept that needs to be embraced now.

We’re out of time for demanding anything other than deep systemic change. EVs are not going to save us, a big, fat lie. Recycling is a sham. Carbon capture? Don’t make me rupture from laughter. Our bodies are filled with toxins, mine might come out. Oil is soon to be economically unextractable. Yeah, I wrote about that, in The End of Oil. A revolution is coming, either organized now by grassroots recognition, demand and unity, or later, by disorganized violence against each other in the last desperate thrashings of empty grocery store shelves and fighting your neighbor for a can of beans. Vote, then be prepared to march and protest. Boycott and strike. Get your money out of fossil fuel financing banks, list here. Our so-called leaders must be pushed hard at this late stage. Many of them need to be removed from office. We can easily see the future by contemplating the past. We are in end stage capitalism, and we peasants are always forced to rise up at some point. That point is now.