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Weather: Showers likely. A slight chance of thunderstorms this afternoon. Highs around 80. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Tonight: Mostly cloudy. Showers likely with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the evening, then a chance of showers after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60 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:
Nobel Prize Week. Today: Medicine, announced at 5:30 a.m. Palm Coast time, 11:30 a.m. at the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Wallenbergsalen, Sweden, streamed live here or below:
In Court: Today is Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols’s first day as Flagler County’s felony judge. Starting at 1:30 p.m.
The Flagler County Commission meets at 9 a.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here. Meetings stream live on the Flagler County YouTube page.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. 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: Vance is comfortable with Trump’s brand of confidence-man dishonesty, whether it’s adding imaginary floors to towers, imagining record crowds at an inaugural, rewriting the passion of Christ as a stolen election or framing a confessional in–to borrow Tony Tulathimutte‘s phrase–the “fetish necklace of martyrdom.” If it advances the story, don’t just go with it. Make it the story. “I call it truthful hyperbole,” Trump wrote in his Deal. “It’s an innocent form of exaggeration–and a very effective form of promotion.” Vance uses the technique when he describes his childhood in “poverty” or identifies as a “hillbilly” though he grew up in middle class homes in an exurb of Cincinnati, when he gloms onto a few strands of Appalachian DNA as if it were his Mayflower, or when he frames his military service as “going to war” with the few and the proud in Iraq, though he was never in combat. To the extent that he spent any time in Iraq at all, he was a PR man giving reporters tours and occasionally playing soccer with voiceless natives. He spent the majority of his four years in public affairs assignments stateside, close enough for regular trips home to the exurb. (Vance’s criticism of Tim Walz’s military record is especially disingenuous.) Hillbilly Elegy is in that public affairs tradition. It is an extended advertisement to oneself with Vance almost as its exclusive subject but mostly free of turgid prose, which helped him seduce reviewers. It is not, as its problematic subtitle claims, “A memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” I don’t think you can justly claim to be writing about an entire culture based on your grandparent’s alternations between violence and tough love, your mother’s drug addiction, a brief stint as a cashier and another as a forklift operator, a few words about an aunt and a sister and lunch with “a sweet kid with a big heart and a quiet manner” called Brian. Yet those, plus two deceptively cited reports, are the sum total of Vance’s evidence. That’s what he distilled into culture-defining conclusions that led an impressionable New York Times reviewer to see him as “a fiercely astute social critic of the sort we desperately need right now.”
–From “Deconstructing J.D. Vance’s Fictions.”
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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
For the full calendar, go here.
More to the point, I am wondering what the two-job way of life would do to a person after a few months with zero days off. In my writing life I normally work seven days a week, but writing is ego food, totally self-supervised and intermittently produc tive of praise. Here, no one will notice my heroism on that Sat. urday’s shift. (I will later make a point of telling Linda about it and receive only a distracted nod.) If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?
I don’t know and I don’t intend to find out, but I can guess that one of the symptoms is a bad case of tunnel vision. Work fills the landscape; coworkers swell to the size of family members or serious foes. Slights loom large, and a reprimand can reverberate into the night.
—From Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001).
Cj says
Your local items are informative, but the political cartoons are not in good taste to say the least.
Pierre Tristam says
You are confusing the messenger with the subject, though to consider Trump in bad taste defies understatements.
Ray W, says
I have to wonder, Cj, whether you know that the campaign slogan of the National Socialist Party in Germany in 1932 was “Make Germany Great Again.” The party, for the first time, garnered enough votes from the populace to place its leader in a senior role in the executive branch of government. Hindenburg eventually resigned, elevating the leader to the top role in the executive branch. We all know the history from there.
Chip D says
From Snopes:
“Make Germany Great Again” was not a (campaign) slogan employed by Hitler, and Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler are far from the only politicians who promised to make their countries “great again.”
FlaPharmTech says
This political cartoon/ commentary is spot on. It’s supposed to make you think, perhaps make you uncomfortable. My mom was a child in Hitler’s Germany. She fancies “strong men”. She fancies trump. I’ve mentally drawn her allegiance, tho it makes me sick.
BillC says
@Cj In 2023, Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language used by the Nazis. This Monday Trump claimed that immigrants are predisposed to becoming murderers because they have “bad genes.” Trump has a racist track record. The cartoon is accurate. Pearl clutching won’t change the facts.
Tony Mack says
Says the guy who married two immigrants and who employs hundreds of immigrants at his “clubs.” Hypocritical, much?
Ray W, says
On July 19, 2021, CNBC published an article titled, “It’s official: The Covid recession lasted just two months., the shortest in U.S. history.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research is the agency to which is assigned the task of determining whether a recession has happened.
The NBER, in a 2021 press release, acknowledged that normally a recession lasts “more than a few months.”
The NBER went on.
“The recent downturn had different characteristics and dynamics than prior recessions. Nonetheless, the committee concluded that the unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warranted the designation of this episode as a recession, even though the downturn was briefer than earlier contractions.”
The second quarter of the “pandemic-scarred year” saw a “staggering 31.4% GDP plunge.” The third quarter “saw a massive snapback”, … after a “previously unheard of policy stimulus boosting output by 33.4%.”
“The NBER said it based its ruling as well on trends on both GDP and gross domestic income. Most economic indicators have returned to pre-Covid levels, though employment, arguably the most important one, has lagged. There are still 7.1 million fewer Americans at work now than they were in February 2020, before the pandemic began.”
Make of this what you will. Me? The NBER was right. The pandemic did trigger a 31.4% drop in GDP over a short period of time. From a number of my previous comments, we know that from jobs data, over 20 million workers filed applications for unemployment insurance over a few months during 2020. If not for Trump signing into law a $2 trillion unfunded stimulus package that was almost immediately injected into the economy, the recession could have been a lot worse. But 16 months after that initial stimulus legislation became law, 7.1 million fewer people were in the nation’s total workforce.
This is for the gullible FlaglerLive reader among us. We are economically far better off today than we were four years ago. 22 million people had sought unemployment benefits. We were emerging from the largest drop in GDP in history because, in part, the Senate had panicked and voted 96-0 to spend $2 trillion that we didn’t have.
To borrow a term that resonates with me, for the past three years or so, the most gullible of all FlaglerLive commenters have been engaging in “misinformation laundering”, whether knowingly s0 or not.
The Covid outbreak and ensuing shutdown dug the hole, not the Biden administration. Former President Trump helped us partially climb out the hole by authorizing $2 trillion is emergency spending. In December, Trump signed another $900 billion unfunded stimulus money package into law. Later, Congress voted another $3 trillion in unfunded stimulus money spending into law and Biden signed those packages, too.
Today, we are nearly fully out of hole, but not all the way.
Two years ago, a former Treasury head was on record as saying we would have to see 6% unemployment and another recession to fully recover from the pandemic turndown, i.e., the Fed policy of sharply raising lending rates would cause a “hard landing.” Today, some economists are predicting a 15% chance of recession, and the unemployment rate never saw a figure higher than 4.3%. 4.0% unemployment is considered full employment. Many economists now foresee the mythical “soft landing” that has never before happened in a circumstance of huge stimulus packages and sharp rises in lending rates.
Whenever Dennis C. Rathsam repeatedly writes about Biden being solely responsible for the response to the Covid-induced recession of March and April 2020, he is engaging in misinformation laundering. The professional lying class of one of our political parties claims that Biden is solely responsible for the economy. Dennis C. Rathsam picks up the lie and claims that Biden is solely responsible for the state of the economy. Others gullible enough to believe Mr. Rathsam take up the claim and attribute it source to him, and not to the professional lying class of one of our political parties. Voila! The lie fabricated by the professional lying class of one of our political parties suddenly becomes the tortured truth as said by Dennis C. Rathsam, i.e., he has laundered the original lie into his tortured truth.
Pogo says
@Americans have always been great
Nurses have simple solution for cancer patients
Accessing ports through shirts a source of frustration for patients
“…The idea for port shirts came from Casilda Valles, a nurse in the clinic. “One of our Veterans made a hole in his shirt to make access easier. I knew we had to come up with a plan,” Valles said. “During the first week, the list of Veterans needing the shirt grew from a few to over 20. I didn’t know how I was going to sew that many shirts.”…”
“…“Casilda and Mary sewed over 40 port shirts during their off time,” said Mugo. “The rest of us handled the logistics.”…”
“…Valles is no stranger to meeting obstacles head on and finding solutions. Originally from Puerto Rico, she came to the U.S. to work at VA, but due to a limited knowledge of English, she took a job as a nursing assistant in a retirement community so she could learn the language. She later reapplied to VA and has been with North Texas VA for 22 years…”
https://news.va.gov/135228/nurses-have-simple-solution-for-cancer-patients/
Ray W, says
Thank you, Pogo.