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Weather: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Lows in the lower 70s. East winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 50 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 Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today: the winners of Tuesday’s election, and what’s next. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
The Flagler County Canvassing Board meets today at 10 a.m. and again at 2 p.m. at the Flagler County Supervisor of Elections office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The meeting is open to the public. The morning meeting will include a review of provisional and other problem ballots. The 2 p.m. meeting, assuming the board votes to go ahead with a recount, will include a full machine recount to determine the winner of two close races. See: “Ed Danko’s Chance of Flipping Result Is Remote as Provisional Ballots and Recount Steps Ahead Are Mapped Out.”
The Blue 24 Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month
 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: Who wouldn’t be awed by the rebuilding of the beach in Flagler Beach? Every time I visit to catch an update in pictures, every time I walk on that sand, onward and onward toward the surf, on space so many years undersea, I am amazed and not a little grateful. The beach has been as if lifted out of the sea (not as if: it has), and it lifts one’s spirit. It makes you happy, no matter the inevitable erosion ahead. What are we but human sands scattered for brief lives before erosion does its work on us? It doesn’t diminish the time we had. But I’m also shocked, increasingly shocked, but our cavalier acceptance of dredging as a shruggable norm. I don’t think it is. The United Nations doesn’t think it is. I doubt it will be around in a decade or two, at least in its strip-mining like form that it is carried out today, because it is nothing different from mountaintop removal or stripe-mining that we see in Appalachia and Wyoming. I’m repeating myself, but a line I read in Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything got me thinking about it all over again: “We are remarkably ignorant of the dynamics that rule life in the sea.”
—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.
Perhaps nothing speaks more clearly of our psychological remoteness from the ocean depths than that the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 was to study “the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes.” This wasn’t a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In fact, though it wasn’t much publicized, by 1957–58 the dumping of radioactive wastes had already been going on, with a certain appalling vigor, for over a decade. Since 1946, the United States had been ferrying fifty-five-gallon drums of radioactive gunk out to the Farallon Islands, some thirty miles off the California coast near San Francisco, where it simply threw them overboard. It was all quite extraordinarily sloppy. Most of the drums were exactly the sort you see rusting behind gas stations or standing outside factories, with no protective linings of any type. When they failed to sink, which was usually, Navy gunners riddled them with bullets to let water in (and, of course, plutonium, uranium, and strontium out). Before it was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites—almost fifty thousand of them in the Farallons alone. But the U.S. was by no means alone. Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and nearly all the nations of Europe.
–From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003).
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Ray W. says
Per the WSJ, at the Fed’s annual meeting, this year near Jackson Hole, Chairman Powell addressed his audience of economists and other experts thus:
“With an appropriate dialing back of policy restraint, there is good reason to think that the economy will get back to 2% inflation while maintaining a strong labor market.”
Since the Journal highlighted in its article the fact that the unemployment rate rose from 3.4% in April 2023 to 4.3% last month, the question occurs of why Chairman Powell would characterize the labor market as still strong? Perhaps the economic ideal of a 4% unemployment rate has something to do with his optimism. Anything below 4% is considered as causing an upward pressure on wages and inflation. But unemployment levels above 4% carry their own inefficiency risks.
The Journal offered its interpretation of the effect of the rise in lending rates.
“Central bankers raised interest rates aggressively in 2022 and 2023, determined to wrestle down the highest inflation in four decades. But the U.S. economy has defied expectations of a slowdown despite the elevated borrowing costs, and inflation came down while the labor market remained historically strong.”
Yes, FlaglerLive readers, even the conservative WSJ accepts the idea that the American economy has done something few expected; it has battled the inflation caused by profligate spending authorized by two Congresses and implemented by two presidential administrations. The Fed raised interest rates in the belief that inflation was worse than recession. Both are bad, but inflation is thought worse. Yet, the fabled soft landing remains possible. The independent Fed just might bring down inflation without our economy going into recession.
Not mentioned in the article, the most recent JOLTS report still has posted job openings above the record 8 million threshold; it was 8.184 million unfilled jobs in June. The next JOLTS report releases on September 17.
According to the Journal, the preferred Fed inflation gauge has inflation at 2.5% and falling. Interpreting Chairman Powell’s comments, the Journal uses the phrase “soft landing” as a predicted economic reality.
Chairman Powell also informed his audience of current thinking on policy:
“We do not seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions. … The time has come for policy to adjust.”
Does every FlaglerLive reader accept the idea that the independent Fed, unmoved by political fervor or pressure, is mandated by statute to adjust, i.e., manipulate, economic conditions as it sees necessary to achieve its two-fold mandate: maximize job creation and manage the overall economy?
Is it fair to interpret Chairman Powell’s comments as a support for the possibility that the strongest economy in the world has reached an important economic balance where lowering of interest rates might help achieve the desired soft landing?
No one can question that the pandemic upended the entire world’s economic stability. The economy crashed. We had 22 million Americans out of work four years ago.
The gullible among us think we were better off then than we are now.
We injected trillions into the failing economy on an emergency basis, much more than ever has been tried before, and we got an overheated economy for our efforts. Inflation set in. The Fed combated it by repeatedly raising lending rates. Its goal was to cool down the overheated economy. which action carried its own risk of recession. Somehow, the overheated economy has cooled without recession, and it is time, per Chairman Powell, to lower lending rates.
Make of this what you will. Me? I think the recent annual August 12-month jobs added report was exactly what Chairman Powell was looking for. The downward revision of jobs added by 818k jobs over 12 months (68k average per month) means that the less sophisticated monthly BLS jobs reports were overly optimistic, just as they were in 2018 when the August 12-months jobs added report revised downward the monthly jobs reports by 500k jobs.
So why use the monthly jobs reports? They are statistically volatile and less accurate. To me, the monthly BLS jobs reports provide valuable snapshots of the job market, but the statistical modeling utilized for those reports uses smaller sample sizes. The emphasis should be the fact that the reports are “snapshots” and nothing more. Each of the monthly jobs reports has a category revising, or updating, the data in previous month’s report, as additional received data supplements the already interpreted data. In this way, a monthly jobs report is deemed preliminary and the next month’s revision is considered more accurate.
For that matter, the annual 12-month report that is released each August is considered preliminary, too. The final and more complete report will be released next February. The annual reports utilize a far more comprehensive statistical model than does the monthly report. Almost every year, the annual report revises up or down the monthly reports, often significantly so.
In summary, the several different jobs reports are designed to get preliminary data out to decision-makers as quickly as possible. It is accepted that the preliminary reports will be revised, but if the Fed waits too long to get what it needs, it might act too slowly to a rapidly changing economy. In fact, economists now debate whether the Fed waited too long to raise lending rates back in 2022. Had the Fed acted sooner, some say, inflation would never have reached the 9% threshold. How does one balance such decisions? Rely on volatile and less accurate monthly reports or wait for less volatile and more accurate annual reports. Act too soon and one can damage the economy one way. Act too late and one can damage the economy another way.
Oy, vey!
Ed P says
Ray W,
A solid summary.
My only question is why the Harris/Walz ticket won’t own or even acknowledge the Biden/Harris portion of inflation? Is the American public so uniformed they will believe price gouging caused high grocery prices How do they explain high interest rates?.
Someone in the administration formulated the denial format.
The knee jerk reaction of shutting down the economy and all the mistakes made surrounding Covid should be admitted. Nothing like Covid 19 had occurred in several generations and it was uncharted territory. There wasn’t any knowing what was right or wrong, and the fear of inaction may have caused uncontrollable panic.
Patrice O’neal-Cumia says
Why do you keep showcasing this man’s comics? He may be on the right side of history, but I recall he made Raphael Warnock and now…Kamala Harris… look like Black caricatures… very upsetting. My wife’s son is Black.
vance hoffman says
How this cartoon passes as anything other than left wing propaganda is beyond me. I remember when papers weren’t this easy to see through. The slant is getting nauseating and predictable. I wish for a day of real journalism without the profound bypasses.