Weather: Mostly cloudy in the morning, then becoming partly sunny. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms. Breezy with highs in the lower 90s. Southwest winds 15 to 25 mph. Gusts up to 40 mph, decreasing to 30 mph in the afternoon. Chance of rain 20 percent. Friday Night: Partly cloudy in the evening, then becoming mostly clear. Lows in the mid 70s. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph, diminishing to around 5 mph after midnight.
- 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:
Note: Flagler County schools and St. Johns County schools remain closed today. Volusia County schools are open.
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, David welcomes Palm Coast City Council member Ed Danko, who opposes the city’s proposed referendum on lifting borrowing limits. 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.
Fall Horticultural Workshops at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE., 6:30 p.m on Tuesdays, 10 a.m. on Fridays. Join master gardeners from the UF/IFAS Agricultural Extension Office for these workshops that cover a variety of horticultural topics. $10 a workshop.
Town Hall with Palm Coast Council Member Theresa Pontieri, scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Southern Recreation Center, has been postponed.
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.
Jesus Christ Superstar at City Rep Theatre, 160 Cypress Point Parkway (City Marketplace, Suite B207), Palm Coast, $7:30 p.m. except on Sundays, when at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 for adults, $15 for students. Book here. One of the great rock musicals of all time takes us on a spiritual, emotional and provocative journey that enthralls, edifies and invigorates us. With an all female cast, the CRT production explores these compelling themes from a different perspective. The ride of a lifetime.
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. |
In the museums: I used to think that the “torture museum” was a single place somewhere in Europe, probably in Amsterdam or Brussells or some slightly less major tourist destination–the sort of city that wishes it were Prague or Paris but lacks that urban mixture of overwhelming history, architectural mass and urban sublimity that makes Paris paris. So they open quirky museums, like museums of torture. Turns out these things are everywhere. “The largest interactive Medieval Torture Museum in the U.S. is now in Chicago,” for example. A $30 experience, free for kids under 10 as long as they’re accompanied by an (obviously disturbed) adult. One of its pitches: “The Medieval Torture Museum gives people the opportunity to see some of these torture devices up-close, in a more direct way, although you don’t have to worry, it might be an interactive experience, but no one will be hurt.” There’s the The Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg, Germany. The Tower of London exhibits its own lurid history of torture and execution. There’s the Gravensteen Castle and Torture Museum in gent, Belgium, where you can see a replica of waterboarding obviously long predating Americans’ uses of it during the occupation of the Philippines, or during the Bush administration. A little tease: “Under medieval law people had to confess before they could be found guilty, so unsurprisingly torture played an important role at the castle. The dungeon ‘torture chambers’ were host to a whole load of horrifying methods of extracting confession, now on show on the second level of the castle.” Carcassone in France has the Inquisition Museum. I looked for more recent torture museums, Googled for one at the Pentagon, at Bulow Plantation, at Maralago, in Texas: not much luck but for a “Museum of Cruelty” in Todd Mission, Texas, which may no longer be open. Finally I turned to Wikipedia, where I should have started: Even St. Augustine appears to have a “Medieval Torture Museum,” now franchised. But again: these places seem to cast a blind eye on American torture, though we have such a rich history of it. Sometimes it has a different name. To wit: see the video.
—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
For the full calendar, go here.
The secret of torture, like the secret of French cuisine, is that nothing is unthinkable. The human body is like a foodstuff, to be grilled, pounded, filleted. Every opening exists to be stuffed, all flesh to be carved off the bone. You take an ordinary wheel, a heavy wooden wheel with spokes. You lay the victim on the ground with blocks of wood at strategic points under his shoul-ders, legs, and arms. You use the wheel to break every bone in his body. Next you tie his body onto the wheel. With all its bones broken, it will be pliable. However, the victim will not be dead. If you want to kill him, you hoist the wheel aloft on the end of a pole and leave him to starve. Who would have thought to do this with a man and a wheel? But, then, who would have thought to take the disgusting snail, force it to render its ooze, stuff it in its own shell with garlic butter, bake it, and eat it?
–From Phyllis Rose, “Tools of Torture” the Atlantic, Oct. 1986.
Ray W says
After fact-checking a recent Trump-Vance political ad, Post editors gave the ad Three Pinocchios.
The ad advances a claim based on an article published late last year in The Economist. The gist of the article? The Sahm Rule, long used as a predictor of inflation, was purportedly close to applying to the economy.
The ad used this quote from the article: “America May Soon Be in a Recession.”
The Sahm Rule is simple. Average the unemployment rate over the past three months. If the average is one-half a percentage point above the lowest unemployment rate spanning the last 12 months, then a recession may be imminent.
But the Economist article contained the proviso that the “post-pandemic economy made the rule less relevant.”
And Claudia Sahm, the former Federal Reserve economist who developed the rule, had published in July her opinion that “[a] recession is not imminent, even though the Sahm rule is close to triggering.”
Make of this what you will. Me? Claiming that America may be heading toward recession when nearly every economist in the nation says otherwise is disingenuous, at best. Basing the false claim on a rule that the author of the rule says is not happening seems like a blatant political effort to misinform and disinform the gullible amongst us.
But I found some really good economic language in the article, which is titled: “Trump campaign ad is stuck in an economic time warp”
“Inflation, as measured by the year-over-year percentage change in the consumer price index, spiked to a 9 percent annual rate in June 2022. That was the highest level in 43 years. But that was also two years ago. Inflation, as of August, has fallen to 2.53 percent. That’s similar to the inflation rate (2.49 percent) in January 2020, when Trump was president and before the pandemic.”
Yes, FlaglerLive readers, we are now a smidgeon away from where we were prior to the pandemic, so far as inflation is concerned. You know, back when Trump says we had the best ever economy, ever!
The quote continues.
“Moreover, pinning the blame just on President Joe Biden and Harris is misplaced. Inflation initially rose because of the pandemic-related shocks: increased consumer demand as the coronavirus pandemic eased, and an inability to meet this demand because of supply chain issues, as companies had reduced production when consumers hunkered down during the pandemic. Inflation climbed everywhere — with many peer countries doing worse than the United States — because of pandemic related shocks that rippled across the globe.
“An influential paper written by Olivier J. Blanchard, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and Ben S. Bernanke, former chair of the Federal Reserve, pinned the blame for inflation on the pandemic. But they also concluded that inflation stayed high because of low interest rates and the impact of stimulus programs passed under both Trump and Biden that put dollars in people’s pockets and spurred some of that demand. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, passed in early 2021, might have especially fueled spending — as some economists, including Blanchard, warned at the time it would.
“The final event that pushed inflation to 9 percent was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which sent energy prices skyrocketing.”
Yes, my theory of Trudenflation has been validated by two internationally recognized economists. Yes, both presidents are responsible for a portion of the rise in prices over the past four years.
Ray W says
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index, favored by Fed Reserve lending rate setters, dropped today.
The Times reports:
“Inflation cooled in August, the latest sign of progress in the Federal Reserve’s yearslong fight to bring rapid price increases under control.
“The Personal Consumption Expenditures Index climbed 2.2 percent from a year earlier, data released Friday showed. That is down from 2.5 percent in July and slightly softer than economist forecasts. It was the slowest annual inflation reading since early 2021.
“After stripping out volatile food and fuel prices for a better sense of the underlying inflation trend, a ‘core’ price index was a bit more stubborn on an annual basis. The core measure came in at 2.7 percent, up from 2.6 percent previously and in line with what economists had expected. But comparing prices month to month, core inflation slowed to a modest 0.1 percent in August.
“Altogether, the report offers further proof that price increases are swiftly fading.
Already, that has allowed the Fed to begin to lower interest rates from a more than two-decade high of 5.3 percent. After raising borrowing costs sharply and then holding them at a high level to slow the economy and weigh down inflation, officials voted last week to cut rates by a larger-than-usual half percentage point. Policymakers also signaled that more rate cuts are coming, as long as inflation continues to fade.
“‘It’s exactly the kind of evidence they want to see,’ Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, said of Friday’s report, adding that the fresh data ‘clears the runway’ for the Fed to lower interest rates relatively quickly.”
Ray W says
The Dow ended the day at a new record high. That is the 32nd time this year that the Dow ended a day with a new record high.
We are, economically, better off today than we were four years ago. No doubt about it.
Ray W says
Researchers at Nagoya University, working in collaboration with Aisin Chemical Company, recently announced the successful development of a “hydrogen-bonded styrenic thermoplastic elastomer that is 22 times stronger than “traditional epoxy-based adhesives.”
The new adhesive adds a rubber-like flexibility to the adhesive, meaning that in an impact or sudden other stress, metals and plastics that are bonded together in the manufacturing process will be less likely to come apart or fracture. “Structural adhesives with high strength and durability are essential in the assembly of automobiles, aircraft, and buildings.”
The new adhesive is expected to allow for “stronger, more flexible adhesives capable of bonding dissimilar materials in lightweight multi-material vehicle designs.”
Make of this what you will. Me? A lighter, more resilient, and stronger car promises improved fuel mileage and better safety. This thinking applies to spacecraft ans boats, among many other applications.