A1A South

ORLANDO, Fla. — A SeaWorld dolphin died after it collided with another dolphin during an aerial show trick performed in front of a crowd.

Officials said the dolphin, called Sharky, hit the other dolphin during a Sunday show at SeaWorld’s Discovery Cove. The accident was apparently a freak accident.

Sharky was a 30-year-old female dolphin that had performed the trick dozens of times, officials said.

Source:

While I have enjoyed the performances I’ve seen at aquariums in the past, I also uneasy that my going to the performances is what is keeping those animals in captivity, so I have discontinued going.

NEW SMYRNA BEACH, Fla. — Authorities say a third person has been bitten by a shark in as many days while surfing in the Atlantic Ocean off New Smyrna Beach.

Volusia County Beach Patrol spokesman Jack Driskell says 18-year-old David Alger was getting on his board when a shark clamped down on his left foot shortly before noon Monday.

The encounter left him with foot lacerations, which were treated at the scene before he drove himself to the hospital.

The rest of the story is at News4Jax.

WAYCROSS, GA (AP) — The most famous resident of Okefenokee Swamp Park — an alligator that attracted the stares of tourists for decades — will soon be immortalized nearly a year after his death.

The skeleton of Oscar is being assembled and will be put on display like a museum dinosaur. The 14-foot, 1,000-pound alligator had roamed the swamp from the time the park opened in 1946.

As his bones show, Oscar was a tough customer, surviving a shotgun blast to the face, at least three bullet wounds, broken bones and arthritis. By some estimates, the geezer gator was 95 to 100 years old when he died last summer.

The display also will include what park officials found in Oscar’s belly — including a plastic dog collar, a dog’s tag, a penny and the top section of a flagpole.

“Some people think he’s a statue,” a tour guide, Danny Rowe, said of Oscar in 1996. “I tell people he’s real, but I don’t get paid enough to show them he’s real.”

The Okefenokee is a 438,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Georgia that attracts 350,000 to 400,000 visitors a year. During the first years of the park’s operation, alligator wrestling was a popular attraction, park officials have said. That ended in the mid-1950s when, it is said, one of the gators rolled over on a park manager and broke the man’s arm.

Source: First Coast News

Well, I’d have liked to have seen the gator rasslin’, but it was before my time. The only close up view I want of ol’ Oscar is his skeleton. Them thangs grow real big out there. When one o’ them thangs passes the fishing boat and it appears to be longer than the fishing boat, I have a tendency to get a lil’ nervous.

I enjoy watching the Rogertrucker videos.

TAMPA - A trapper caught a nearly 8-foot alligator that authorities say attacked a man fishing golf balls out of a pond at a Tampa country club.

Trapper Julie Harter says she’s sure it was the alligator that attacked 62-year-old Dwight Monreal because it was the only alligator in the area.

Monreal was wading in a pond at the Tampa Palms Golf and Country Club Saturday afternoon when the alligator latched onto his left arm and tried to drag him underwater.

Authorities say he was able to wrestle himself free, but he was left with a dislocated shoulder and several puncture wounds where the animal bit him.

Source:

A pond in Florida generally has an alligator in it. Wading and swimming should only be done in gator-free ponds. If you aren’t sure whether or not the pond is gator free, remember that a pond in Florida generally has an alligator in it.

NEW SMYRNA BEACH - Authorities say two surfers were injured in shark attacks in New Smyrna Beach over the weekend.

Capt. Jack Driskell, with the Volusia County Beach Patrol, says a 24-year-old man stepped off his surfboard in chest deep water Sunday morning and his right calf was bitten. Driskell says the man was attacked by a shark. He adds that the injuries are not life or limb threatening.

On Saturday another man drove himself to the hospital after a shark bit his foot while he surfed in New Smyrna Beach.

Mark Pattison, 21, says he was in chest deep water when a shark bit his right foot. He told the beach patrol that the shark let go after he jumped off his board and hit it. Pattison underwent minor surgery for the bite.

Source: Sun-Sentinel.com

Sharks can lurk in shallow water. Beware. They don’t like to be kicked or stepped on.

Washington Policy Center reminds us of just how wrong past predictions of ecologic disaster, nay human extinction, have been in the past. So, why should we believe any of the chicken littles (The sky is falling! No, the earth is warming!) now?

Earth Day 2008: Predictions of Environmental Disaster Were Wrong

“By 1985…air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight
reaching the earth by one half” – Life magazine, January 1970

Seattle – Another Earth Day is upon us. This is a good time to look back at predictions made on the original Earth Day about environmental disasters that were about to hit the planet.

Most Earth Day predictions turned out to be stunningly wrong. In 1970, environmentalists said there would soon be a new ice age and massive deaths from air pollution. The New York Times foresaw the extinction of the human race. Widely-quoted biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted worldwide starvation by 1975. Documented examples are below.

On this Earth Day 2008, new predictions will again be made about looming environmental disasters about to strike our planet. If past experience is any guide, most of these predictions are wrong. People concerned about our planet’s future should be wary of statements from activists and other interested groups, so we stay focused on real environmental concerns, and don’t waste time on fearsome predictions that will never happen.

• “…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.

• By 1995, “…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.

• Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “…the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born,” Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

• The world will be “…eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,” Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

• “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.

• “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970.

• “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…” Life magazine, January 1970.

• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• “…air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.

• Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years.

• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

• “By the year 2000…the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine,” Peter Gunter, North Texas State University, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.

Our purpose on Earth Day 2008 is not simply to point out how often environmental activists have been wrong, but to learn from the mistakes made during past Earth Days. Learning from the past will give us a better understanding of our world and the threats that face it.

By being skeptical about routine portents of doom, we can stay focused on the real threats that face our planet, and on the reasonable and achievable actions we as a society can take to meet them.

I can’t say I’ve noticed significant local warming. Sure, the 70s were cold, then the temperatures rose back to normal, but the orange groves still haven’t been replanted as far north as they used to be despite global warming hysteria. I still can’t grow good peaches or apples (too warm) or avocados, bananas, or citrus (too cold). It seems to me that after 30-odd years of “global” warming, I should at least be able to have an orange grove and avocados but noooooooo.

You should check out Watts Up with That? as he has been visiting the weather stations that we get our “official” temperatures from. It is amazing that people have built the whole “we’re all gonna dieeeeeeee!” scenario of global warming from such bad data.

Southernism is taking over our national dialogue. Maybe it’s time for the North to secede from the Union.

This is a whiny complaint about how the damn southernors aren’t following the “leadership” of their self-described culturally elite superiors, to wit:

The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. We must endure “lapel-pin politics” that elevates the shallowest sort of faux jingoism over who’s got a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan. We have re-imported creationism into our political dialogue (in the form of “intelligent design”). Hillary Clinton panders shamelessly to Roman Catholics, who have allied with Southern Protestant evangelicals on questions of morality, with anti-abortionism serving as the main bridge. Barack Obama seems to be so leery of being identified as an urban Northern liberal that he’s running away from the most obvious explanation of his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers: after Obama graduated from college he became an inner-city organizer in Chicago, and they were natural allies for someone in a situation like that. We routinely demonize organizations like the United Nations that we desperately need and which are critical to missions like nation-building in Afghanistan. On foreign policy, the realism and internationalism of the Eastern elitist tradition once kept the Southern-frontier warrior culture and Wilsonian messianism in check. Now the latter two, in toxic combination, have taken over our national dialogue, and the Easterners are running for the hills.

Well, allow this southernor of coarsened sensibilities to retort: F*** you, momma’s boy, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Hat tip: Reaganite at Gulf Coast Pundit. While he may not have been born a son of the south, he came home as quick as he could.

In rural west-central Florida, County Line Road defines the border between Polk and Hardee counties. On the south side, the Hardee landscape is typical Florida heartland: Drought-browned pasture stretches mile after mile, dotted by grazing cows, lonely palms and scrub-oak trees. To the north, the view into Polk County is a jarring contrast: Mile after mile of strip-mined earth in shades of gray, with not a tree or other living thing on the horizon. That moonscape to the north is the South Fort Meade Mine, a phosphate operation owned by the most powerful company that most Floridians have never heard of: Minnesota-based Mosaic Co. The $6-billion fertilizer company is one of only three phosphate firms left in Florida from the 100 that operated during the industry’s heyday in the early 20th century. Formed in 2004 by a merger of Cargill Crop Nutrition and IMC Global (Cargill remains 65% owner), it controls more than 300,000 acres of the state.

Mosaic is the biggest phosphate supplier in the world, and the soaring demand for fertilizer has sent its sales and profits skyrocketing. Mosaic’s share price jumped 345% last year, making it the fastest-rising U.S. large-cap stock.

Florida’s sandy soils are key to that success. The company gets 100% of its phosphate from the state — nearly 10 million tons a year. That amounts to more than half the phosphate sold in the U.S. and 16% of the global market, more than double any competitor’s share.

But the industry is entering its endgame in Florida. After more than a century of mining, Florida’s phosphate deposits are running out. Almost all the remaining mineable reserves in the state are found to the south and west of County Line Road. As the industry’s biggest power player, Mosaic is leading a drive to push mining farther into southwest Florida. But, urbanization and environmental concerns mean mining isn’t as easy as it was when phosphate was a top-three Florida industry that expanded pretty much as it pleased.

For the industry, the question is whether the end of mining comes sooner or later. “Florida is out of business in terms of phosphate by 2040,” says G. Michael Lloyd Jr., research director of the Florida Institute of Phosphate Research. “Mosaic is the final big player. If Mosaic can’t get permission to mine southwest Florida, it will be over sooner.”

Read the rest of the story at Florida Trend.