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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 90s. Northwest winds around 5 mph, becoming east around 5 mph in the afternoon. Chance of rain 80 percent. Heat index values up to 108. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly in the evening. Lows in the mid 70s. South winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. Chance of rain 70 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]
St. Augustine Music Festival, a series of six free concerts held throughout two weekends in the historic Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine. The concerts take place Friday – Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with a different performance each evening. Doors open 30 minutes prior to showtime. 38 Cathedral Place, St. Augustine. 904-484-4960
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 qualify. |
Byblos: In V.S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, the late Nobel laureate’s 1981 surly, condescending account of his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in quest of a better understanding of Islam, which he insistently confuses with Islamic fundamentalism, to not say Islamists, he writes of a young man in Malaysia who complains about having left his village for city life. “Sometimes my wife feels that we should go back to the village, and I also feel the same. Not running away from the modern world, but trying to live a simpler, more meaningful life than coming to the city, where you have lots of waste and lots of things that is not real probably,” Naipaul quotes the man as saying, preserving the man’s syntax. “Village life–wouldn’t you say it is dull for most people?” Naipaul asks him. He replies: “”The village? It’s simple. It’s devoid of–what shall I say?– wastefulness. You shouldn’t waste. You don’t have to rush for things. My point about going back to the kampong is to stay with the community and not to run away from development. The society is well knit. If someone passed away there is an alarm in the kampong, where most of us would know who passed away and when he is going to be buried, what is the cause of death, and what happened to the next of kin–are they around? It’s not polluted in the village. Physical pollution, mental, social.” I happen to have been reading Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater at the same time. (We can read seventeen different articles in a single sitting from one newspaper–well, these days it takes three or four newspapers to add up to 17 articles, since newspapers have become so threadbare. Point being: why can;t we read 7 books simultaneously? Of course we can.) The coincidence that morning was too much. I’d had enough of Naipaul for the day. I turned to Roth. And within pages, arrived at his description of Manhattan as he returns to the city after many years in his isolated “village.” Roth writes: Sabbath “had missed the transformation of New York into a place utterly antagonistic to sanity and civil life, a city that by the 1990s had brought to perfection the art of killing the soul. If you had a living soul (and Sabbath no longer made such a claim for himself), it could die here in a thousand different ways at any hour of the day or night. And that was not to speak of unmetaphorical death, of citizens as prey, of everyone from the helpless elderly to the littlest of schoolchildren infected with fear, nothing in the whole city, not even the turbines of Con Ed, as mighty and galvanic as fear. New York was a city completely gone wrong, where nothing but the subway was subterranean anymore.” I thought the coincidence remarkable in itself, though we tend to find coincidences strange or somehow metaphysical, when, like Magritte’s pipe, all they are are coincidences: they are mathematically inevitable. But I also found Roth’s passage useful to deflate Naipaul’s, who would impose those assumptions he has about “the village” and “the city” through the eyes of his Malay man as if they were revealing of a Malay dichotomy, as if they were one more example of those Muslim’s backwardness (a point he likes to make), as if he was not reflecting a dichotomy that has nothing to do with Islam, or that particular Muslim he’s talking to, but with all sorts of perceptions of country and city life anywhere on the planet, even y some of the planet’s most advanced intellects–even by those intellects more advanced than Naipaul’s, as Roth’s, for all its narcissism and scabrous leaks, was.Â
—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
It’s Back! Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
The news told him nothing. The news was for people to talk about, and Sabbath, indifferent to the untransgressive run of normalized pursuits, did not wish to talk to people. He didn’t care who was at war with whom or where a plane had crashed or what had befallen Bangladesh. He did not even want to know who the president was of the United States. He’d rather fuck Drenka, he’d rather fuck anyone, than watch Tom Brokaw. His range of pleasures was narrow and never did extend to the evening news. Sabbath was reduced the way a sauce is reduced, boiled down by his burners, the better to concentrate his essence and be defiantly himself.
–From Philip Roth’s  Sabbath’s Theater (1995).
Ray W. says
In a 2023 article titled, “Empty Office Buildings Are Being Turned Into Vertical Farms”, the Smithsonian Magazine arguably presages a worldwide shift to more and more indoor food production.
Significant areas of the country, at least during certain portions of the year, can be described as “food deserts.” Detroit comes to mind, as do many other “Rust Belt” cities. In winter, fresh food must be transported great distances, sometimes from as far away as Mexico and Central and South America.
Since the onset of the pandemic, office buildings all across the country have become hollowed out. According to the article, “office usage” in certain cities is roughly 50% of its pre-pandemic level. Across the nation, nearly 20% of office space sits empty. By 2030, it is thought possible that “more than 300 million square feet of U.S. office space could be obsolete.” This does not include empty warehouse space. Working from home, sometimes from new homes in far-away locales, office workers do not want to come back. Only so many offices are suitable for transformation into apartments, and it isn’t always a simple or cost-effective choice. The Smithsonian Magazine decided to investigate a different option.
In Calgary, a vertical farming operation transformed one empty floor of the Calgary Tower Center. The new farm produces tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, greens and other herbs and vegetables. Some crops are harvested 30 times per year. Its owner developed software that controls the entire operation. “Our system tells people what to do. I don’t need to know anything about growing strawberries. I just tell the system I’m growing strawberries and it sets the work up for me.”
With the Calgary Tower Center’s climate controlled and well-ventilated space, the new farm uses a “scalable installation model” driven by AI software to optimize utility of space and resources. The concept is called a “plug-and-play modular growth system.” Water demand can be as much as 95% less than outdoor farming of the same crops. Pesticide demand is reduced.
With the scalable software and an empty office building in Fargo, North Dakota within 10 miles of almost all the grocery stores that serve the city and suburbs, some entry-level entrepreneur is likely to be able to become price competitive with cucumbers grown in Costa Rica and shipped 2000 miles to Fargo in January. Pesticide-free lettuce grown in a climate-controlled environment and delivered three miles to a Fargo grocery store on a daily schedule just might be attractive to consumers. Good for the environment, too.
Ray W. says
Owned by USA Today, the News-Journal now contains in its Sunday edition a state-by-state set of news blurbs.
Here are a couple from last week’s paper.
West Virginia: “U.S. natural gas pipeline Mountain Valley Pipeline said it was preparing the $7.85 billion pipe from West Virginia to Virginia to operate, after receiving approval from a U.S. energy regulator.”
Long curious about the natural gas sector due to my elder daughter and her husband’s work with Mitsubishi’s Heavy Power division, I have been following the industry for about 15 years now.
A quick look at readily available sites reveals that the pipeline, when connected to the Trasco Pipeline that has long transported compressed natural gas from Corpus Christi to New York City, will add 2 billion cubic feet (bcfd) per day to the pipeline’s transport totals. Travelling from the West Virginia natural gas fields near western Pennsylvania to south central Virginia, the new pipeline will permit Maryland’s Cove Point liquefaction facility on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay to export more and more LNG to Europe and other points.
Berkshire Hathaway owns 75% of the Cove Point facility. Originally, the Cove Point operation was designed to import LNG into the country; it was called a regasification facility. For many years, the U.S. failed to extract enough domestic natural gas to meet its needs. With the Shale Revolution, domestic natural gas became so plentiful that the original owners modified the operation. No longer a regasification plant, it is now a liquefaction plant.
In 2007, immediately prior to the Shale Revolution, the U.S. was extracting a total of 5 bcfpd of natural gas. By 2022, that figure had increased 16-fold, to 80 bcfpd.
I know from years of reading that when the Shale Revolution began, some 30 American energy companies applied for permits to build LNG export facilities prior to 2010. Many never obtained permits. Some that did never obtained the financing necessary to build their projects. But eleven made it past permitting and financing to the construction phase.
According to a recent EIA publication, there are three partially completed liquefaction projects designed to export LNG. Another one, near Philadelphia, was paused, depending on future export needs. The three plants in the works are expected to add 4 bcfpd to existing export capacity. Seven liquefaction plants have opened since 2016, when the first plant started liquifying natural gas in Louisiana. Not all of the seven have completely built out, so their export capacity is expected grow. Since 2016, U.S. LNG exports rose from zero to 11 bcfpd in 2022. Today, the U.S. is the world’s largest LNG exporter. The EIA predicts that U.S. LNG exports may grow to as much as 25 bcfpd by 2027. Our decades long trade deficit is obviously improved when we export more and more LNG.
The USA Today news blurb for New Jersey reads: “Immigrant workers participate in New Jersey’s labor force at a higher rate than native-born workers, according to a report from Stockton University.”
This one presents a couple of curiosities.
Does the report include undocumented immigrants, based on Customs data? I don’t know, but a report referring to the generic “immigrant workers” would seem likely to include all types of immigrant workers, such as those who have become naturalized Americans, plus those who are here on different types of visas, plus those who are legally able to work while awaiting asylum hearings, plus those who are undocumented, including those who have been here for years and perhaps even decades.
Does the report reflect that there are now more immigrant workers in New Jersey than native-born workers, or does it mean that the labor participation rate is higher than that for native-born workers?
Finally, the New Mexico news blurb: “Oil and gas generated more than $15 billion in income for New Mexico in the last fiscal year, according to a state economic report presented to lawmakers during a meeting in Carlsbad.”
I checked. Governer Grisham signed into law last March the state budget for fiscal year 2024-2025. The amount? $12.8 billion.
Read literally, this suggests that New Mexico is bringing in more in income from oil and gas than its entire state budget. Again, the blurb seems vague. Does that mean taxes, only? Or does it mean direct income from royalties? Does it mean that New Mexico workers were paid that amount to participate in the extraction of the oil and gas from New Mexico fields, separate from lease payments to landholders who lease land to energy companies? But if this is the total that flows into state coffers from energy extraction, then, Wow!
Ray W. says
In the third of 10 comments on the recessions I have lived through, between December 1969 through November 1970, the American economy experienced a relatively mild recession. Because the costs of prosecuting the Viet Nam War were escalating and the effects of LBJ’s Great Society welfare legislation, this recession is referred to as “The Guns and Butter Recession.”
To me, this one seems obvious. If unfunded pandemic stimulus money can overheat an economy and then trigger inflation, so too can increasing spending on military and welfare. This is what happened in the late 60s. Because the expenditures were not accompanied by tax increases, the ratio of the deficit to GDP rose from 1.1% to 2.9%. Inflation, steady at 3.1% in 1967, ramped up to an average of 5.3% over the 12 months of 1970.
The Fed increased the lending rate from 5% in March 1968 to more than 9% by August 1969. The Fed called this “monetary tightening”, a term that is still in use today. The government also engaged in “fiscal tightening”, which is the process of cutting spending in selected other areas to partially compensate for the increases in military and welfare spending.
Unemployment rose to a high of 6.1% in December 1970. GDP declined by 0.6% during the eleven-month long recession.
To me, this one barely fits the definition of a recession. Yes, the unemployment rate rose more than slightly, but GDP barely budged downward over eleven months.
The National Bureau of Economic Research offers one of several definitions of recession that I found: “[A] significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than two quarters which is six months, normally visible in real gross domestic product (GDP), real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale retail sales.”
A number of FlaglerLive commenters have insisted that we have been in recession for a significant portion of the prior 40 months, because GDP growth did drop over a term of two quarters. That reading of the overall economy was incorrect.
Unemployment figures never rose over the last 40 months. Indeed, most of the articles characterize the American job market over the last 40 months as “strong.” As one can read from the above definition, recession requires more than just a drop in GDP growth. In the Guns and Butter Recession, GDP did drop, but only barely. Unemployment rose more than a little. That seems to be the reason this period is defined as a recessionary period.
Rosalie says
Why publish a cartoon about the debate four days past the event?
This causes me to wonder if you are truly a news agency, or a schill for someone’s agenda.
Pierre Tristam says
Sometimes on Mondays we’re on Biden Standard Time.
James says
They took Pierre out back at that Tiger Bay “Meet and Greet” and worked him over.