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Weather: A chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall in the afternoon. Highs around 90. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Heat index values up to 106. Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers likely with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the evening, then a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms after midnight. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall in the evening. Lows in the mid 70s. East winds 5 to 10 mph. 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 Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Public Safety Coordinating Council meets at 8:45 a.m. at the Emergency Operations Center in Bunnell, 1769 E. Moody Blvd., Bldg. 3, Bunnell. The council, chaired by Sheriff Rick Staly, is a statutorily required panel that assembles law enforcement, judicial, social services and local government representatives to discuss public safety and direct related grants to the appropriate agencies. The council meets roughly quarterly.
The Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board meets at 10 a.m. every first Wednesday of the month at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For details about the city’s code enforcement regulations, go here.
The Flagler County Commission holds the first of two public hearings to approve its budget and next year’s property tax rate, at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, 5 p.m.
A Flagler County Commission Workshop is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The commission will discuss the issues at Bulow RV Park, where in January–the last time the commission held a workshop on this very subject–residents were saying they were being unfairly evicted.
The Flagler Beach Parks Ad Hoc Committee meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 105 S 2nd St, Flagler Beach. The Committee’s six members, appointed by the City Commission, provide recommendations related to the maintenance of existing parks and equipment and recommendations for new or replacement equipment and other duties as assigned by the City Commission.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 1 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
“An Evening with Shaun Tomson” 5 p.m. at the News-Journal Center, 221 N. Beach Street in Daytona Beach. World champion surfer, documentarian and best-selling author Shaun Tomson will be the keynote speaker. The event includes a showing of the classic 2008 surf film “Bustin’ Down the Door.” Tomson, whose book “The Code: The Power of ‘I Will’” explores faith, courage, creativity and determination, has become an in-demand motivational speaker. He will speak in advance of the film and will take part in a Q&A after the showing.
The Flagler County Republican Club holds its monthly meeting starting with a social hour at 5 and the business meeting at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. The club is the social arm of the Republican Party of Flagler County, which represents over 40,000 registered Republicans. Meetings are open to Republicans only.
 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: Last week I covered U.S. Rep Mike Waltz’s second visit to Flagler Beach in a couple of months, the first for the groundbreaking of the beach renourishment project, the second for its almost-conclusion. It was surreal. Everyone pretended that Waltz was a friend of the environment, a friend of beach renourishment, a friend of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Here were county commissioners begging him for more support to extend the renourishment boundaries north, to battle erosion caused by rising seas and climate change. Here was the Flagler Beach city manager, standing on the old pier, describing to him how the new pier will rise 27 feet above sea level, obviously to compensate for rising seas and climate change, though the manager didn’t add that last part. Out of courtesy maybe. Because we were all pretending. Here were 1.3 million cubic yards of sand just dredged and dump on 3.2 miles of beach, beneath Waltz’s feet, to make up for two decades of erosion due to rising seas and climate change. And here he was taking a selfie video with it all in the background. I don’t know what he said. But we all know what he said at the Republican National Convention a few months ago: “Drill, baby, drill,” deriding renewables and saying how we will “flood the world with clean, cheap American oil and gas. Drill baby drill.” Clean oil. I never heard of that one. “Flood the world” was a nice touch, too, a Freudian acknowledgement that that’s exactly what that sort of recklessness would do. Flood 10 percent of the world’s surface area, its coasts, out of existence by 2100, ours among them. You can see his three-minute speech in full below.
—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.
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Carlos M. Cruz
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
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 truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead. And the climate system we have been observing for the last several years, the one that has battered the planet again and again, is not our bleak future in preview. It would be more precise to say that it is a product of our recent climate past, already passing behind us into a dustbin of environmental nostalgia. There is no longer any such thing as a “natural disaster,” but not only will things get worse; technically speaking, they have already gotten worse. Even if, miraculously, humans immediately ceased emitting carbon, we’d still be due for some additional warming from just the stuff we’ve put into the air already. And of course, with global emissions still increasing, we’re very far from zeroing out on carbon, and therefore very far from stalling climate change. The devastation we are now seeing all around us is a beyond-best-case scenario for the future of warming and all the climate disasters it will bring.
–From avid Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019).
Pogo says
@FlaglerLive
Thank you.
Ray W. says
The Washington Post, under the headline, “Trump appears to have misled Gold Star families on troop deaths in Afghanistan”, fact-checked his statement: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they took over that disaster.”
According to the Post, during the last 18 months of the Trump administration, from July 20, 2019, to January 20, 2021, 12 American soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan, per Pentagon figures.
If you take the 18 months before the 13 soldiers lost their lives in a suicide bombing at an airport gate by an ISIS-K member (not a Taliban member) who had been released among several thousand other ISIS-K members from custody by the Taliban shortly before the attack, then former President Trump was telling the truth. During the last 11 months of the Trump administration and the first seven months of the Biden administration, zero American soldiers died in Afghanistan.
The Post gave former President Trump claim two Pinocchio’s.
The Post included the agreement with the Taliban and referred to several different comments by Trump prior to the suicide bombing:
“In March 2020, Trump approved an agreement with the Taliban (not the Afghan government at the time) for all U.S. forces to leave the country by May 1, 2021. He sealed the deal with a phone conversation with Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political office in Qatar. ‘We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence,’ Trump told reporters at the time. ‘They’d like to cease violence also.’
“Despite abandoning many of Trump’s policies, Biden honored this one, just stretching out the departure by a few months in 2021.
“Trump even celebrated Biden’s decision to stick with the withdrawal. ‘Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible,’ he said in a written statement after Biden announced he would continue the departure set in motion by Trump.
“At a political rally on June 26 that year, weeks before the collapse of the Afghan government, Trump bragged that he had made it difficult for Biden to change course. ‘I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. They couldn’t stop the process,’ he said. ‘Twenty-one years is enough, don’t we think? Twenty-one years. They [the Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.'”
The Post concluded:
“Trump has a basis for citing 18 months without a death from hostile action in Afghanistan. The period of relative quiet began with his deal with the Taliban. A case can be made that the seeds of the collapse of the Afghan government — and the chaotic withdrawal of Americans that accompanied it — stemmed from the same deal.
“But Trump errs in suggesting — as in the TikTok with the Gold Star families gathered in Arlington — that those 18 months took place entirely during his presidency. He earns two Pinocchios.”
Make of this what you will.
“
Ray W. says
According to the Department of Labor, the August 3, 2024, four-week rolling average number of initial claims for unemployment insurance, triggered by layoffs and separations, was 234,000 for that week.
Four years ago, the four-week rolling average for August 1, 2020, was 1,044,000 applicants.
Yes, a four-week average of those applying for unemployment insurance each week was over one million people per week four years ago.
On March 28, 2020, the pandemic-induced mass layoffs and firings resulted in a peak application rate per week at a four-week average of 5,946,000 applicants each week.
While one-week applications are an important measurement of economic activity, the four-week average is considered less volatile and more worthy of consideration.
Since 1967, the average number of weekly applicants for unemployment insurance is still around 365,000 per week.
The JOLTS report for July has the number of unfilled posted job openings at below 8 million (7.763 million), a number unseen for the past 3 1/2 years. The preliminary number for June of just under 8.2 million was revised down to just under 8 million. Prior to the pandemic, the American economy had never seen a JOLTS number over 8 million. This means the jobs market is softening in the manner sought by the independent Fed.
A better-balanced economy can be a good thing. A 2% inflation rate is considered ideal. A 1.0 posted jobs opening number compared to the number of unemployed persons is considered ideal. Now that the JOLTS number is below 8 million again, the number when compared to the unemployed is almost 1.0 (1.07). In March 2022, the ratio between job vacancies and the unemployed was at 2.0, an unhealthy ratio. At that time, there were 12.182 million unfilled posted job openings.
To the gullible among us who believe we were better off four years ago than we are today: we weren’t.
Make of this what you will. Me? Today’s American economy remains stronger than nearly every other economy in the world. The monthly jobs added data comes out later this week. Again, the initial monthly jobs data report is considered “preliminary.” One part of the new report will “revise” last month’s preliminary report, because additional data comes in during the interim. The revised report is considered more accurate than the preliminary report. Sometimes, more jobs were actually added. Other months? The preliminary number is revised down.
As of September 1st, the percentage gain or loss of the Dow for the last seven presidents during their first 43 months in office is as follows:
Clinton: 69.7%.
Obama: 63.6%.
Trump: 43.1%.
GHW Bush: 39.1%.
Biden: 38.6%.
Reagan: 29.3%.
GW Bush: -6.6%.
Yes, the Dow dropped by 600 points yesterday, just as it dropped by a larger value on August third. Less than a month later, the Dow was breaking record highs again. It is the extreme volatility of the daily stock market values, based on fears and avarice, that make daily comparisons virtually useless. If the monthly jobs added data is down, which is what the politically independent Fed is looking for, the market might rise. Who knows? The guessing based on preliminary data will begin again, just as it does every single day.