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Weather: Sunny with a slight chance of showers in the morning, then partly sunny with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then partly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 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:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Palm Coast Historical Society Speaker Series: Bob Kealing On How the Beatles Rocked Florida, A free lecture, 1 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Join author Bob Kealing for a discussion on Good Day Sunshine State. Alongside the music stylings of J.J. Pattishall, Bob explores the musical and cultural impact of The Beatles in Florida, an important part of the revolution that helped make the “Fab Four” a worldwide phenomenon.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
Peps Art Walk, noon to 5 p.m. next to JT’s Seafood Shack, 5224 Oceanshore Blvd, Palm Coast. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
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.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 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. |
Musically: Philip Glass, the enigmatic master of hypnotically beautiful repetition, as nature’s sounds often are, as creation must always be from every corner of the universe and through its dark-mattered notes, may be an acquired taste. He’s the sort of musician who might get sneers of derision when you first hear him, especially if the ears are young, which is ironic when you consider that repetitiveness is the essence of pop–deadening, not always soulful or joyful repetition, either: have you ever paid attention to that noise they pipe out of Ikea ceilings and like-sounding department stores? It’s as if they want you out of there as soon as possible. I have no doubt it’s what they play to Guantanamo prisoners. But Glass: his name goes with the music. Once acquired, the taste is difficult to let go. I never thought I’d find myself seeking out Glass. Now I do. Is it him getting old, the mellowness of his older composition? Me getting old, though not nearly as old as him? He was born in 1937. He’s still at it. Here below is his superb Etude N. 8, a surprisingly sentimental bit that–with its joyful sorrow that says: yes, but, and still–I wouldn’t mind played at my funeral.
—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.
It would be simple if he knew who they were and he had a gun. Walk in and shoot them and walk out again. There, that’s done; now back to work. He could see himself doing it pointing the gun at three men in a cramped office full of nude photographs and pulling the trigger. It was funny he pictured Leo’s office. But he could also picture himself with a cannonball tennis serve and a flawless backhand, or the forty-five-year-old rookie hitting a fastball into the upper deck at Tiger Stadium. Picturing had nothing to do with doing it. Nor was killing a man in an FW-190 or a Messerschmitt at three hundred yards the same as looking in a man’s face and pulling the trigger. He told himself he would never be able to kill like that, coldly, impersonally. Still, he wished he had a gun. Just in case he was wrong.
–From Elmore Leonard’s Fifty-Two Pickup (1974).
Pogo says
@FWIW
Something else the Trump mob would like to destroy are the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Veterans Health Administration:
As stated
https://www.va.gov/
As stated
https://www.va.gov/healTh/
“…Nearly 70% of all U.S. physicians have trained at VA, and approximately 120,000 clinicians train at VA each year. Overseen by its Office of Academic Affiliations, VA educates health professions trainees across 60 health care disciplines at more than 1,000 VA health care facilities. Aug 26, 2024…”
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+physicians+trained+by+va
One example of VHA spending at work:
VA’s 3D printed boluses revolutionizing radiation therapy for Veterans
https://news.va.gov/134871/vas-3d-boluses-revolutionizing-radiation/
Learn more
https://www.google.com/search?q=bolus+radiotherapy
Trump and the GOP want to bring their Florida Man miracle to the whole world. All you have to do is bend over…
Ray W says
CNBC this morning took on the subject of immigrants stealing jobs from native-born workers.
Plenty of FlaglerLive commenters present to their fellow readers as having deeply held views on the matter. And, it seems, immigration is the central theme of one of our political parties during this election cycle.
But what do economists think?
Years ago, some three dozen economists, led by a Harvard economist, authored a “consensus paper” on the effects of the 1980 Mariel boatlift of some 125k Cubans on wages for South Florida workers. At least 60% of the Marielitos were high school dropouts. The findings were that for the least educated of the native-born South Florida workforce, wages dropped in the immediate aftermath by 10% to 30%.
A senior member of the Trump administration cited to the paper for grounds to attempt to limit types of legal immigration, particularly lower-skilled legal immigrants, prior to the election loss in 2020.
But a Nobel laureate-winning economist had earlier published his own study of the economic effects of the Mariel boatlift. He concluded that “the Mariel boatlift didn’t increase unemployment or negatively affect wages of ‘less-skilled’ non-Cuban or Cuban workers.”
Michael Clemens, a George Mason University professor of economics who studies the economic effects of migration, disputes the finding that a sudden large influx of immigrants into a community depresses wages for the lesser-educated native-born laborer.
“‘Sudden surges of immigration obviously affect the ability of native workers to find and take jobs on a given afternoon,’ Clemens said.
“But immigrants ‘also create jobs,’ Clemens said. ‘A large preponderance of evidence is the job creation effect overwhelms the competitive effect, even in the short term.”
Make of this what you will. Me? For years, American businesses have been creating jobs in numbers that mystify economists. Many economists originally predicted that we would be in recession by now. Now, a significant majority think we will not go into recession and that we are on the cusp of a “soft landing”.
How did this happen?
According to a chart maintained by Macrotrends, the number of births per 1000 people (all people, not just women) dropped from 14,182 per thousand in 2000 to 13,945 per thousand in 2005 to 13.305 per thousand in 2010 to 12.314 per thousand in 2015 to 11.990 per thousand in 2020 (pandemic year) to 12.009 per thousand in 2024. In 1988, the rate was 15.654 per thousand, the highest rate over the past 44 years.
The American economy keeps growing, it keeps adding jobs, yet American women are having fewer and fewer babies on average. Native born women’s birthrate dropped below replacement rate in 2007 and that rate, too, keeps dropping. But the size of the American labor force keeps rising; it is roughly 29 million workers higher in non-farm laborers than it was in 2009.
Where are all of the new workers coming from if American women reproduce at a rate lower than replacement levels? How can former President Trump claim that his economy was the strongest in history if it wasn’t built on the backs of immigrant workers?
Back to the issue of immigrants taking jobs from the native born.
Is it possible that “[n]ative U.S. workers and immigrants, even those with similar educational backgrounds, tend to complement each other via their skills, making each more productive and in essence jointly creating each other’s jobs[?]” Professor Clemens says this is an economic reality.
There is a concept known as “occupational upgrading” that applies to native born workers who initially compete with immigrants. Over time, American workers are pushed by the competition to obtain higher paying jobs. Research by UCal-Davis shows that from 2000 to 2019, less-educated native workers were pushed into higher paying jobs that raised their pay on average by a “significant” 1.7% to 2.6%.
So, what is the overall impact now by large numbers of immigrants entering the country?
One idea is that if the job marketplace were static, meaning unchanging, then, yes, each new worker would be competing with an American worker for a job. But the job marketplace is not static. Again, our economy has added 29 million laborers to the overall labor pool over the past fifteen years.
“Immigrants take jobs but they also create new ones by spending in local economies and by starting new businesses, economists said. One 2020 research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found immigrants are 80% more likely to become entrepreneurs than native workers.”
And there is also the consideration of GDP growth. According to the Congressional Budget Office, “[a] recent surge in immigrants to the U.S. is expected to add $8.9 trillion (or 3.2%) to the nation’s GDP over the next decade[.]” According to Professor Clemens, “[t]hat’s enormous. … That creates jobs, that raises pay, that is an increase in the size and complexity of the U.S. economy.”
The large inflow of immigrants over the past two years “helped cool an overheated labor market”, wrote Elior Cohen, an economist for the Kansas City Regional Federal Reserve Bank, last May.
To me, it seems obvious.
We can have a stagnant economy, with little future of significant expansion, by stopping immigration at our border and deporting untold millions of immigrants. Japan has had a set of relatively strict immigration regulations for decades. Their national birthrate dropped below replacement rate years before ours did. They have been in economic stagnation for the past 30 years, with blips of growth followed by more and more stagnation.
Or we can seek to facilitate a growing, thriving, expanding economy by inviting immigrants into the country to start new businesses, create new jobs, inject new money into the economy, just as we have always done before this, at least until one of our political parties decided to shift the argument away from the economist view in the hope that persuading the gullible among us of their political fantasy world would help them achieve political power.
And we should not forget that one of the reasons for independence listed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III had cut off much of the immigration into the colonies. Jefferson argued at the time that America needed more immigrants and that we should rebel against the king in order to attract more immigrants into the country.
Go ahead, read the full Declaration for yourself.