Bullsugar explains it all for you

Did sugarcane growers flood the Everglades last week? Few reporters seemed curious about how much of the wildlife emergency in their headlines was preventable. No one asked what it cost to keep fields dry in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). Or how much water came off sugarcane fields. The answer--assuming 424,000 acres of sugarcane, and 15 inches of rain--is 173 billion gallons. Roughly the volume of polluted water that poisoned the Treasure Coast during 2016’s Toxic Summer discharges. Where did it go this time? Some went into the lake, of course. (SFWMD claimed the back-pumped water had been treated because it came from flow equalization basins… where sugar growers pumped it days or even hours before it went to the lake.) As a qualified engineer told Bullsugar.org, the phosphorus levels in that water exceeded 200 ppb - 5x the allowable limit for the lake, and 20x the allowable limit for the Everglades. That didn’t stop a massive amount of sugar runoff from going into the Everglades. How much? Enough to raise water levels south of the EAA to the point where animals drown or starve. Enough to pressure federal agencies into allowing water onto the nesting grounds of the endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow. The total drainage from sugarcane fields was more than ⅓ of the total capacity of all three Water Conservation Areas (WCAs), which combined are bigger than Rhode Island. Enough to pile almost an extra foot of water onto WCA-3A’s entire 915 square-mile area. Enough to flood this photo op (above) with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commissioner “Alligator” Ron Bergeron (left) who might otherwise have kept his shorts dry, while Executive Director Nick Wiley could have just worn boots. Should sugarcane growers have kept an extra foot of water on their fields to protect wildlife and human health? That’s debatable. The problem is that water management officials, despite having the explicit authority to order this, never mention the possibility. And no one asks them to. So it’s never debated. Should US Sugar's and Florida Crystals' $579 million sugarcane crop get bailed out at the expense of Florida's $9.7 billion fishing industry, $10.4 billion boating industry, or $89.1 billion tourism industry? No one asks. Our news media, politicians, taxpayers, and voters need to start asking. When a rainstorm prompts sugarcane growers to pump off hundreds of billions of gallons of pollution--enough to cover Delaware in 4 inches of water--triggering human health crises and wildlife die-offs so severe that Ron Bergeron warns, “there may be nothing left to save,” we need to question whether it’s worth it to protect this year’s sugar yield. Maybe we’ll decide it is. But right now, we don’t even ask. -Peter Girard Bullsugar.org http://www.bullsugar.org/ P.S. Bringing water policy out of the shadows helped Bullsugar.org supporters win the biggest clean water victory in years. If you can, please click here to make a donation to help us keep shedding light on how our public resources are managed.

Two Governments = Unbridled Growth. Guest Blog By Sidney Robinson

The land in question is outside the city of HUDSTEAD. Oh, no!

In one end of town, East Homestead, --- City Fathers, --- last week’s council meeting have given carte blanche to developers allowing 400 apartments/townhouses on 50 acres of pristine agricultural land and in the northwest part of town on the Avocado Krome boundary line, 296 St & 178 Ave, Dade County Gov, -- UMSA -- has an application to change the zoning -- agricultural to EU-M on 27 acres of avocado grove land.

Last week’s Redland Community Council’s hearing had neighbors of that section of town and Redland in an uproar with the county’s recommendation allowing 67 DENSELY PACKED homes on a very small parcel. The angry crowd of approximately 150, standing outside the government center over crowded auditorium, had their voices heard to five members of the CC 14 board. The chairman proceeded the meeting in spite of the large turn out and after three hours of testimony the outcome was for the applicant and the attorney to meet with the neighbors and community. ---Juan Mayol was the attorney and Persea, LLC, the developer. (This meeting should have been done weeks in advance of the hearing.)

It may have set well with all of the opposition had the developer asked for 1-acre--EU-1 zoning. Four laning Krome and a potential traffic bottleneck at Avocado Drive, this northwest part of Homestead, should stay very low density and have the agricultural, historic look it has had since the beginning. What has been stated above, we might ask, “Is the future of Homestead and South Dade following in unbridled growth?”


Sidney Robinson
Redland

HERE IS MY  QUESTION:

Since Juan Mayol is only lobbying for these entities, who really owns the land (Persea did not show up in a sunbiz search) and I don't see them below, could it be Century???:

CENTURY HOMEBUILDERS GROUP, LLC	06/08/2017	NONE	Active
COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH SERVICES	05/30/2017	NONE	Active
ORION-DNK, LLC	05/26/2017	NONE	Active
STILES CORPORATION	05/04/2017	NONE	Active
PAN AMERICAN COMPANIES, INC	04/12/2017	NONE	Active
GROVE BLUFF, LLC	04/07/2017	NONE	Active
WAWA, INC	04/05/2017	NONE	Active
MICHAEL S. NEVEL, TRUSTEE	03/16/2017	NONE	Active
HAMMOCKS LENNAR LLC	11/23/2016	NONE	Active
HOMESTAR OF WEST DADE INC	11/04/2016	NONE	Active

Crandon Beach Sucks - Where I Spent 4th of July and I Want My Parking Money Back! By Geniusofdespair

The first two photos are the same view. The first photo is the actual beach yesterday. Two is the file photo from google. Don't trust the file photos.

Photo number three is the water. I don't mind weeds mind you but the further out I went the higher the weeds were. They almost made it to the surface of the shallow water. So that is why no one is in the water in the photos. Weeds!  "Kids were saying, mommy the water is dirty." When I went out really far, where the weeds stopped, almost to the motorboat zone, the water was cloudy. Yes, I had a mask so I could see what was up.

I used to windsurf here. It was never this bad. What the hell happened to Crandon, our premiere County Park? It sucks. Haulover park is 100 times better than this.

And the water was a rusty orange down on the other side of the sandbar when I walked to the end of the beach. It looked like an algae bloom to me.

A man came up to me and said, "I don't remember Crandon being this way. What happened to the beach? They aren't maintaining it." There were plenty of county workers up and down in motorized equipment, I don't know what they were doing. Why are they shoving all the weeds and sand together into mud. Why not remove the weeds?

I want the $7 back that I paid to park here. I got robbed by the County.  We then went to Virginia Key CITY OWNED BEACH, 10 times better. We could swim and the water wasn't cloudy. The people were having way more fun. At Crandon the people stayed a little while and left.

Realty

Once- now this photo is obsolete

What lurks in the water, thigh high weeds.

Looking in the opposite direction. The pink color is really on the sand.

The Presidency has been Hijacked. By Charles M. Blow

4th of July, a time to be patriotic...this is patriotic to me.

Charles M. Blow

The Hijacked American Presidency

Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth.

There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to evaluate the severity of every offense, trying to give each an individual grade on the scale of absurdity. Trump himself is the offense. Everything that springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him, every legislator who defends him, is an offense. Every partisan who uses him — against all he or she has ever claimed to champion — to advance a political agenda and, in so doing, places party over country, is an offense.

We must remind ourselves that Trump’s very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness.

The presidency has been hijacked.

Last week, after a growing list of states publicly refused to hand over sensitive voter information to Trump’s ironic and quixotic election integrity commission, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders blasted the pushback as a “political stunt.”

But his words shouldn’t have shocked. His tweet was just another pebble on a mountain of vulgarities. This act of coarseness was in fact an act of continuity. Trump was being Trump: the grossest of the gross, a profanity against propriety.

This latest episode is simply part of a body of work demonstrating the man’s utter contempt for decency. We all know what it will add up to: nothing.

Republicans have bound themselves up with Trump. His fate is their fate. They have surrendered any moral authority to which they once laid claim — rightly or not. If Trump goes down, they all do.

It’s all quite odd, this moral impotence, this cowering before the belligerent, would-be king. A madman and his legislative minions are holding America hostage.

There are no new words to express it; there is no new and novel way to catalog it. It is what it is and has been from day one: The most extraordinary and profound electoral mistake America has made in our lifetimes and possibly ever.

We must say without ceasing, and without growing weary by the redundancy, that what we are witnessing is not normal and cannot go unchallenged. We must reaffirm our commitment to resistance. We must always remember that although individual Americans made the choice to vote affirmatively for him or actively withhold their support from his opponent, those decisions were influenced, in ways we cannot calculate, by Russian interference in our election, designed to privilege Trump.


We must remember that we now have a president exerting power to which he may only have access because a foreign power hostile to our interests wanted him installed. We must remember that he has not only praised that foreign power, he has proven mysteriously averse to condemning it or even acknowledging its meddling.

We must remember that there are multiple investigations ongoing about the degree of that interference in our election — including a criminal investigation — and that those investigations are not constrained to collusion and are far from fake news. These investigations are deadly serious, are about protecting the integrity of our elections and the sovereignty of our country and are about a genuine quest for truth and desire for justice.

Every action by this administration is an effort to push forward the appearance of normality, to squelch scrutiny, to diminish the authority and credibility of the ongoing investigations.

Last week, after a growing list of states publicly refused to hand over sensitive voter information to Trump’s ironic and quixotic election integrity commission, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders blasted the pushback as a “political stunt.”

But in fact the commission itself is the political stunt. The committee is searching for an illegal voting problem that doesn’t exist. Trump simply lied when he said that he would have won the popular vote were it not for millions of illegal votes. And then he established this bogus commission — using taxpayer money — to search for a truth that doesn’t exist, to try to prove right a lie that he should never have told.

This commission is classic Trump projection: There is a real problem with the integrity of our last election because the Russians helped power his win, but rather than deal with that very real attack on this country, he is instead tilting at windmills concerning in-person voter fraud.

Last week, CNN reported:

“The Trump administration has taken no public steps to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. Multiple senior administration officials said there are few signs the president is devoting his time or attention to the ongoing election-related cyber threat from Russia.”

Donald Trump is depending on people’s fatigue. He is banking on your becoming overwhelmed by his never-ending antics. He is counting on his capacity to wear down the resistance by sheer force.

We must be adamant that that will never come to pass. Trump is an abomination, and a cancer on the country, and none of us can rest until he is no longer holding the reins of power.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.

Drilling Down On The Costs Of Climate Change ... by gimleteye

The American South Will Bear The Worst Of Climate Change's Costs, The Atlantic

World Food Security Risks Growing, Chatham House Says, BBC

"5 Shades of Climate Denial in Trump White House", Inside Climate News

The problem with risk assessment for climate change is that there is no precedent within recorded history of massive climate instability.

This fact is otherwise experienced by restive Americans as a visceral anxiety, and very much part of the phenomenon that delivered Donald Trump to the White House last November.

Close the borders. Circle the wagons. Winter is coming.

As I've written before, there are no climate change deniers in the GOP leadership. (Not even Marco Rubio, who persists in a public position of denialism.) They are powerful insiders convinced that climate change is a useful tool to consolidate power and wealth. Exactly what is happening in America today. (Read "10 GOP Commandments on Climate Change, here.)

Human Bones Found Scattered in Palmetto Bay Park, Could They be MY MISSING Mr. Lee? By Geniusofdespair

As a reader reminded me in a list of comments on my post on Vice Mayor John Dubois:

I have "a low IQ", I am "crazy", "asethetically challenged", "uneducated", etc. and they even included "Mr. Lee" in their tirade about me.

Mr. Lee must have also believed the above assessment of me as a miserable, stupid person as he decided to take a powder. I have not seen Mr. Lee in quite some time. I am beginning to believe he might be the human remains found in Palmetto Bay. Let me bare my soul on my Mr. Lee: boo hoo. Good riddance.

I want our country back ... by gimleteye

On October 17, 2016 I published "A Letter to Millenials and Independents", concluding:

“We are strong enough to survive Donald Trump”, the magical thinking goes. We were young once, too, survived the 2000 election, and say to you in 2016: don't go down that road again."

Well, we are down that road. On Twitter, I've been posting a simple phrase, "I want our country back." Follow me @gimleteyemiami