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Weather: Showers likely with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then showers with thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. South winds around 5 mph, becoming east in the afternoon. Chance of rain 80 percent. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy in the evening, then becoming partly cloudy. A chance of thunderstorms. Showers, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. East winds around 5 mph, becoming southwest after midnight. Chance of rain 80 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: Prosecutors will argue a motion to deny Robert Detherow, 55, bond following his arrest on charges of aggravated battery on law enforcement and other charges after a six-hour standoff at his house on June 5. He’s being held on $34,000 bond. 1:30 p.m. before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins in Courtroom 401.
Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook here and the participation agreement here.
The Palm Coast Democratic Club holds its monthly meeting at noon at the Flagler Democratic Party Headquarters in City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214, Palm Coast. The June speaker is US Congressional Candidate James Stockton. Noon 32164. Stockton, running to represent Flagler County in Congress. He is the eldest son of a public school bus driver and a heavy equipment operator. He was raised in a home of morals and values based on the principle of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” All are welcome to attend and meet Stockton. This gathering is open to the public at no charge. No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 283-4883 for best directions or (561)-235-2065 for more information.
The Flagler Beach City Commission meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. Watch the meeting at the city’s YouTube channel here. Access meeting agenda and materials here. See a list of commission members and their email addresses here.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notably: “Heaven,” Jeffrey Burton Russel writes in his History of Heaven: The Singing Silence from a couple of decades ago, “is the state of being in which all are united in love with one another and with God. It is an agapé, a love feast. Whenever less than the whole world is loved, with all the creatures in it, whenever anyone or anything is excluded from love, the result is isolation and retreat from heaven. Heaven is the community of those whom God loves and who love God.” Which begs the question: Why do we not see the heavens as the true abyss?
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there.
–From Melville’s Moby Dick (1852).
Ray W. says
“Growing tomatoes the old way is better for the environment, Imperato believes. More fundamentally, ‘it is our way of life,’ he says. He speaks in the present tense. But in truth, this is no longer the way for most farmers, or for most of us. Ours is the life of the mall and highway; of supermarkets that favor sturdy but pallid mass-produced tomatoes picked early and packed in chambers suffused with ethylene gas to hasten ripening and coax out some approximation of red luster; of our triumphal march of industrialization and globalization, which ‘has flattened all tastes,’ Imperato says.
“Against such an inexorable array, it might appear that farmers like him and Abignale, working small plots of land with limited yields, are doomed idealists, clinging to a lost past and, implicitly, a lost cause. But while modernization has been aligned with the idea of transcending the limits of the local, ‘moving from a bewildering diversity of maps to a universally shared world’ that was broadly legible, administrable and ‘supracommunal,’ as the Russian American cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argues in “The Future of Nostalgia’ (2001), more and more we yearn ‘for the particular’ — the irreplaceable and irreplicable idiosyncrasies of person and place; the bright crunch of a taut tomato, say, eaten straight off the field and bursting its seams, a tomato grown in one place by one person at one time that could taste only like this, an earthy-sweet gush and then a lingering, steadying bitterness, reminding you that certain pleasures are worth whatever they cost, and that nothing will ever taste quite like this again. Boym points out that ‘tradition’ and ‘traitor’ share a Latin root, and ‘revolution’ contains within it the possibilities of both change and return. Nostalgia need not be inward looking, melancholy or purely commemorative, with the past glimpsed always at a distance; through the lens of displacement and loss; it can be active and vital, even radical, a salvage operation for the future.”
Ligaya Mishan, The New York Times Style Magazine, pg. 109 (May 19, 2024)
Pogo says
@FWIW
“… One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.”
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 124, The Needle
Ray W. says
Yet another general interest comment.
MarketWatch published a story earlier today about a World Bank report released on June 11th.
The 189-member economies that fall under the purview of the World Bank were estimated earlier this year to grow on average by 2.4% during 2024. The World Bank recast its forecast in the June 11th report, raising the anticipated average growth rate to 2.6%.
“Stronger-than-expected growth in the United States — the world’s biggest economy — accounted for 80% of the World Bank’s upgraded outlook. The agency now expects the U.S. economy to expand 2.5% in 2024, the same as in 2023 but up sharply from the 1.6% the bank had predicted in January.”
“‘U.S. growth is exceptional,’ Ayhan Kose, the bank’s deputy chief economist told the Associated Press ahead of the release date of its latest Global Economic Prospects report.”
Per the report, some individual nations are expected to grow more slowly than average. “The World Bank expects Japan’s economic growth, hobbled by sluggish consumer spending and flagging exports, to slow to 0.7% this year from 1.9% in 2023.”
Here’s my take, for what it’s worth. Since the mid-90s, Japan’s economy has been in the doldrums. It’s native birth rate began dropping long before our own began to drop below replacement rate in 2007. With its severe restrictions on immigration, Japan just cannot seem to make its economy grow.
Yes, productivity gains can offset some of Japan’s falling workforce population, but you cannot build a vibrant growing economy on productivity growth alone. Not when you are consistently losing workers to reduced birthrates and retirement.
Japan needs more young workers, but the nation cannot see fit to allow outsiders in. Retirees are filling some of the shortages by working into their 80’s and beyond, but sons and daughters are abandoning homes given to them by their dying parents. No one else is there to live in the homes and they can’t be rented to non-existent workers. As I commented to FlaglerLive readers many weeks ago, some 900,000 homes sit empty in Japan.
Conversely, economist after economist, when asked, say that our economy is the brightest of several bright spots among the world’s economies. We let millions of immigrants into the country, and it appears reasonable to argue that our business owners have snapped up all they can hire. Job growth remains exceptionally strong, with 272k new jobs added last month and millions of newly created jobs have been added during each of the past three years. Yet we still have over 8 million unfilled posted job openings. Never in the history of the U.S. economy prior to the pandemic have we had 8 million unfilled posted job openings. For the past 40 months, the number has been above 8 million each and every month. We keep adding high numbers of jobs each month, we keep hiring millions of new workers, yet we can’t drive down the unfilled posted job openings numbers to a normal rate. As I posted earlier this week, the number of native-born American workers in the most-watched age group (25 to 54) dropped by 770k over the last four years. Thank goodness for the millions of immigrants that have crossed our borders. Without those millions of extra workers, we likely would be in recession right now instead of having an exceptionally strong economy. They are producing goods and services. They are earning money. They are spending money.
Remember, there is a difference between a political fact and an economic fact. One is designed to garner votes; it is not designed to be true. The other is designed to reflect for good or ill the state of our economy. Right now, “exceptional” seems to be the economic fact.
Thank you, former President Trump, for signing into law $2.9 trillion in unfunded stimulus money. Thank you, President Biden, for signing into law $3.0 trillion in unfunded stimulus money.
This unprecedented release into a rapidly cooling economy of between $4 and $5 trillion thus far of the $5.9 trillion in funds approved by bipartisan Congresses just might have saved us from recession and perhaps even depression.
We might even slide into a normal economy without even a soft landing.
Yes, the artificial injection of so much money into our economy has triggered unprecedented rises in overall debt, which I have come to believe is almost certainly unsustainable in the long-term, and perhaps even destructive, but if we were in depression right now, who knows the level of misery that would be visited on the vast majority of us all in the long-term.
I understand that the no-longer conservative Republican Party has to claim that we are in economic free-fall right now. They want to be elected later on this year. Republicans are lying to us when they claim that Biden alone is responsible for inflation. Democrats are lying to us when they claim Bidenomics has saved our economy from collapse. According to polls, 67% of self-identified Republicans believe our economy is weak, that we were better off four years ago than we are today. Some of them are FlaglerLive commenters.
Me? Trudenomics has temporarily saved the day from the economic devastation that loomed upon the entire world at the onset of the pandemic. Trudenomics is not perfect, but certainly it has not been bad thus far.