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Weather: Showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80 percent. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy. Showers with thunderstorms likely in the evening, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. South winds around 5 mph. 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:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
The St. Augustine Music Festival, a series of free concerts in the historic Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine. The concerts take place Friday to Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with a different performance each evening. 38 Cathedral Place, St. Augustine. 904-342-5175 www.staugustinemusicfestival.org.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
 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 quality. |
Notably: The American pathology of “exceptionalism” extends to Amricans’ insistence that they are trailblazers in all things, good and bad, so that even as we deplore the aberrance of Donald Trump, we imagine him unique to America’s ability to shock outside the box. The presumption relies on an amnesiac, or nonexistent, relationship with history, which humbles us every time we look. One example: France’s Philip IV in 1303 was at war with Boniface VIII, the pope. It wasn’t unusual, as kings and popes warred frequently for supremacy. Popes could excommunicate kings and emperors and did so with metronomic regularity. Kings couldn’t excommunicate popes. But they could go Trump on them, as Philip did on Boniface, calling him “a heretic, a murderer, a sodomite, and a devil worshiper,” according to the Medieval historian Philip Daileader. Philip or some mercenaries who thought they were acting on his behalf (the Proud Boys of the day, going Gretchen Whitmer on Boniface) eventually had Boniface captured, but only for two days: they couldn’t agree on what to do with him next. Dante was no fan of Boniface, but he criticized Philip for daring to have a pope so mistreated. Boniface died a month later, supposedly of shock. Philip whipped out the “sodomite” slur on the Templars, too, when he went after them a bit later, aided by the cowed, post-Boniface papacy, putting them all on sham trials, torturing them and burning them so he could grasp their riches. The papacy happily blew on the flames, leading Wyclif to say that “To get rid of such a demon [meaning the papacy] would not harm the Church, but would be useful to it.” Not that the Templars, who did to Arabs for a couple of centuries nothing different than what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for the past 70 years, have much to their credit. But Philip’s treatment of them was one of the great crimes of history. A side note: George W. Bush’s zany “unitary executive theory,” an authoritarian, nearly despotic interpretation of executive power (we forget what a thuggish Mussolini Bush and Cheney could be, viewed through Trump’s prism) could be said to have its origin in Boniface VIII’s identical Unam sanctam papal bull of 1302, which places the Catholic church supreme above all else on earth, “and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, […] Therefore, of the one and only Church there is one body and one head, not two heads like a monster,” and so on and so forth. That amnesiac impulse has us longing for the Bush years from time to time, but that, too, is a pathology proper to every successively disastrous presidency in this road-to-perdition America.
—P.T.
Now this: A symposium on the Unitary Executive Theory hosted by the Proto-Fascist Federalist Society:
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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.
A1A Super Scenic 150 Mile Garage Sale
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler County Public Library Book Club
Jake’s Women, By Neil Simon, at City Rep Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
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
Jake’s Women, By Neil Simon, at City Rep Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
To these accumulated honors, the policy of Augustus soon added the splendid as well as important dignities of supreme pontiff, and of censor. By the former he acquired the management of the religion, and by the latter a legal inspection over the manners and fortunes, of the Roman people. If so many distinct and independent powers did not exactly unite with each other, the complaisance of the senate was prepared to supply every deficiency by the most ample and extraordinary concessions. The emperors, as the first ministers of the republic, were exempted from the obligation and penalty of many inconvenient laws: they were authorized to convoke the senate, to make several motions in the same day, to recommend candidates for the honors of the state, to enlarge the bounds of the city, to employ the revenue at their discretion, to declare peace and war, to ratify treaties; and by a most comprehensive clause, they were empowered to execute whatsoever they should judge advantageous to the empire, and agreeable to the majesty of things private or public, human of divine.
—From Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (1776). .
Ray W. says
More on the subject of the good things that government does, despite the claims of the gullible amongst us.
Researchers under the banner of the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, recently announced in Nature Communications (2024) that today’s relatively expensive and energy intensive method by which oxygen inhering in titanium ore is removed to make pure titanium metal may soon be resigned to history’s trash bin. If too much oxygen remains in refined titanium after processing, it is nearly worthless as a metal.
Titanium ore, the world’s ninth-most abundant element in the earth’s crust, if refined using the researchers’ newly discovered method of using yttrium metal and yttrium trifluoride, a rare earth metal, suddenly becomes much less expensive to produce pure titanium. Yes, yttrium is a rare earth. Thus, it is expensive in its own right, but the yttrium can be recycled and reused, reducing its cost share in the process. The resulting titanium metal is nearly free of oxygen.
According to Toru H. Okabe, lead author of the study: “We use an innovative technology based on rare-earth metals that removes oxygen from titanium to 0.02% on a per-mass basis.” Mr. Okabe also stated: “We’re excited by the versatility of our protocol. … The lack of intermediate compounds and straightforward procedures will facilitate adoption in industry.”
According to the author of the article, “even titanium scrap that contains large amounts of oxygen can be processed in this manner.”
Titanium resists chemical degradation (corrosion) and is strong and light in weight relative to other metals. The traditional refining method for titanium uses significant amounts of energy to remove the oxygen from the ore. Lower energy usage, less expensive, equally pure. Win, win, win.
One drawback is that some of the yttrium, up to 1% by mass, combines with the titanium during processing. Yttrium “influences the mechanical and chemical properties of titanium alloy.” That is a problem to be resolved by other research.
There seems to a never-ending flow of technological breakthroughs. The world’s universities are heavily engaged in the research.
For example, Stanford University researchers, in conjunction with a NASA research team, announced a year or two ago that they had solved the “dendrite” problem that had plagued solid-state lithium metal batteries. Another example of government doing things better.
Late last year, a Chinese automobile manufacturer, Nio, rolled out the world’s first solid-state battery-powered car. The battery is lighter, more energy-dense, recharges faster, discharges faster and has a range of over 650 miles than its comparable liquid-state battery. Nio designed the battery to fit into its older cars if owners wish to upgrade. Initial production costs are higher than that for liquid-state lithium batteries, but the costs are expected to drop below current liquid-state battery costs levels.
One of my major commenting themes is that I believe that no one of us, alone, is smart enough, sufficiently experienced enough, to solve the indescribably myriad number of problems faced by today’s society. Daily, I fall short of the ideal, but I remain ever curious.
A decentralized world of research, both at the industry level and the university level, can solve many of society’s problems, but never all, because we keep dreaming up new problems.
The human imagination, however, needs guidance. One of the central maxims of the philosophy of science is that the human mind can form more hypotheses than can ever be tested. I accept that maxim.
Letting people like JimboXYZ define the boundaries of scientific research would be disastrous for us all; he is capable of restraining some of his thoughts, but far too often the wheels fall off. He is too lazy on occasion and publishes worthless comments far too often for any of us to rely on his obvious gifts. He can’t even seem to grasp the idea that a bipartisan House and Senate passed $2.9 trillion in unfunded stimulus money and then-President Trump signed the two bills into law prior to President Biden taking office.
Since any administration would have immediately become bound by law to implement the expenditure of this Trump-approved vast sum of stimulus money, it didn’t matter who won the 2020 election, because the side effects had been already set in motion.
Trump knew. The House knew. The Senate knew. A cooling economy was expected to be artificially heated. The artificially heated economy was expected to trigger inflation. And it happened as expected.
Had the pandemic-savaged economy not been artificially stimulated, we might have dropped into a deflationary economy. The fear of possible, perhaps probable, immediate depression was far greater than the fear of temporary future inflation. They had to do what they did. The only argument was over the size of the unfunded stimulus packages.
The artificially overheated economy and its resulting inflation caused the Fed to raise lending rates, both to manage the overheated economy and to drive down inflation. That, too, is working as expected. 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates were expected to rise. Housing starts rose with all the money being pumped into the economy. With rising lending rates, housing starts were expected to drop.
More and more economists embrace the argument that we are headed for a “soft landing.” The economy is strong, perhaps too strong. The job market is strong, perhaps too strong. The Fed hasn’t raised lending rates in a year, but it hasn’t lowered them, either.
Over and over again, Fed leaders (there are 10 regional Feds) state that their efforts are working and that we are steadily reaching preset goals. Unemployment rates are holding steady. Job creation rates have dropped, but not enough. Posted unfilled job openings numbers have dropped, but not enough. Core PCI inflation (0.0% in May) is far below the 2.0% goal, but it is not yet enough, because Fed leaders aim for several months in a row, not just one month; one month is too volatile, too short a term. The 12-month rolling average inflation rate resumed its steady drop towards 2.0%.
Economists have long known of a direct causal link between unfunded stimulus spending and subsequent inflation. Yet the 2020 House and Senate passed into law the largest ($2.9 trillion) stimulus packages in history (at least until Biden signed into law a total of $3.0 trillion in unfunded stimulus money). They knew of the risks and did it anyway.
Therefore, a supportable argument can be made that the 2020 House and Senate and then-President Trump are each directly responsible for the remnants of inflation that we all experience today. Biden, too, is seemingly equally responsible. Hence, the term Trudenflation. I know the term is less evocative than “Turducken.” If I could think of a better term, a more evocative term, than Trudenflation, I would use it.
Oy, vey!