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Weather: Partly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Tonight: Mostly cloudy in the evening, then becoming partly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the mid 70s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40 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:
Felony court is not in session this week.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets in workshop at 5 p.m. with Surfside Estates to discuss revisions to the mobile home code, and at 6 p.m. in regular session at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings 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: Our march of folly in ratios. We forget that it was Barack Obama who signed off on the “biggest nuclear arms buildup since the cold war” as Forbes reported in 2015: “Obama has backed investment in new nuclear delivery systems, upgraded warheads, resilient command networks, and industrial sites for fabricating nuclear hardware that, when added to the expense of maintaining the existing arsenal, will cost $348 billion between 2015 and 2024. At least, that’s what the Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year. If the Obama plan continues to be funded by his successors, it will be the biggest U.S. buildup of nuclear arms since Ronald Reagan left the White House.” The buildup got little public attention, little interest. It’s ongoing. From Statista, which did not place its summary in the context Forbes proviodes: “Global spending on nuclear weapons rose by 13.4 percent in 2023. As a newly released report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) shows, the United States instigated the largest proportional annual increase with a rise of almost 18 percent, closely followed by the United Kingdom with 17.1 percent. In terms of spending, the U.S. had the largest outlay last year by some margin: $51.5 billion, compared to the second highest total of $11.9 billion in China. The total global spend equated to an estimated $91.4 billion, the equivalent of $173,884 every minute. 2023 wasn’t a freak year, either, but rather the continuation of a trend. From 2019 to 2023, global spending rose by 34 percent. As reported by ICAN, a cumulative $387 billion was spent to build and maintain nuclear weapons over this five year period.”
—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
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
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.
A third principle would be respect for God or nature, or whatever one chooses to call the universal dust that made, or became, us. We need to remember that neither as individuals nor as a species have we created ourselves. And we need to remember that our swollen power is not a power to create but only a power to destroy. We can kill all human beings and close down the source of all future human beings, but we cannot create even one human being, much less create those terrestrial conditions which now permit us and other forms of life to live. Even our power of destruction is hardly our own. As a fundamental property of matter, nuclear energy was nature’s creation, and was only discovered by us. (What is truly our own is the knowledge that has enabled us to exploit this energy.) With respect to creation, things still stand as they have always stood, with extra-human powers performing the miracle, and human beings receiving the fruits. Our modest role is not to create but only to preserve ourselves. The alternative is to surrender ourselves to absolute and eternal darkness: a darkness in which no nation, no society, no ideology, no civilization will remain; in which never again will a child be born; in which never again Will human beings appear on the earth, and there will be no one to remember that they ever did.
–From Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982).
Ray W. says
I suppose that the world might have stopped until the November election. On the other hand, from Sunday’s News-Journal collections of state-by-state blurbs comes the following:
Wyoming: “While artificial intelligence has proven powerful yet flawed, a mayoral candidate in Wyoming has decided to delegate all legislative decisions to a chatbot if he wins the primary in August and the general election in November. Victor Miller, 42, from Cheyenne, filed the necessary paperwork and paid $25 to run for mayor in Wyoming’s capital.”
Make of this blurb what you will, FlaglerLive readers. Is it really possible that AI-driven chatbots could provide better governing decisions on the municipal or county or school board level? Or should Cheyenne raise its qualifying fee far above the current $25 level?
Michigan: “Newly released wastewater surveillance data suggests Michigan is a national hotspot for the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that’s infecting poultry, dairy cows and other mammals across the U.S., and has also been identified in three farmworkers — two in Michigan.”
Viral pathogenicity has been defined as having seven steps.
1. Transmission from a host with an infection to a second host.
2. Entry of the virus into the body.
3. Local replication in susceptible cells.
4. Dissemination and spread to secondary tissues and target organs.
5. Secondary replication in susceptible cells.
6. Shedding of the virus into the environment.
7. Onward transmission to a third host.
As I understand the Michigan blurb, a form of bird flu has spread throughout the nation, infecting poultry. It seems possible that egg prices will soon rise, should egg producers all across the country have to start killing entire flocks of chickens to stop the spread of the virus.
But the virus is capable of transmission to dairy cows and other mammals. This is worrisome. I have read other articles that indicate that dairy farmers are suffering significant losses across the nation due to avian flu.
If statistically relevant levels of this particular form of avian flu virus can be detected in wastewater, that suggests that either farms with poultry or dairy cows or other mammals are discharging animal wastewater into public wastewater systems, which seems highly unlikely to me, or that wild bird droppings are getting into wastewater collection systems via runoff into sewer systems, or that the viral particles are being cast out in urine or fecal matter from humans, or a combination of the three possibilities.
Influenza is endemic, not pandemic; it never fully goes away. The many different forms of influenza virus commonly mutate which is why it is so hard to develop a highly successful vaccine against the flu. The potential of widespread damage to humans occurs a form of the virus (avian, pig, simian, and on and on) mutates in a way that makes that particular strain especially virulent in humans. The Michigan blurb does describe the virus as “highly pathogenic.”
The fact that this form of bird flu has been detected in wastewater systems throughout the entire state of Michigan, yet found in only three humans, coupled with the fact that it is also widespread across the nation in flocks of chickens and herds of dairy cows, suggests the possibility that it is also somewhat widespread in the human population but so mild in effect on humans that few people go to doctors to be diagnosed with bird flu.