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Weather: Mostly sunny. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then a chance of showers in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 80s. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear. A chance of showers in the evening. Lows around 70. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40 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:
General Election Early Voting is available today in Bunnell, Palm Coast and Flagler Beach from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at five locations. Any registered and qualified voter who is eligible to vote in a county-wide election may vote in person at any of the early voting site, regardless of assigned precinct. According to Florida law, every voter must present a Florida driver’s license, a Florida identification card or another form of acceptable picture and signature identification in order to vote. If you do not present the required identification or if your eligibility cannot be determined, you will only be permitted to vote a provisional ballot. Don’t forget your ID. A couple of secure drop boxes that Ron DeSantis and the GOP legislature haven’t yet banned (also known as Secure Ballot Intake Stations) are available at the entrance of the Elections Office and at any early voting site during voting hours. The locations are as follows:
- Flagler County Elections Supervisor’s Office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
- Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast.
- Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE.
- Palm Coast’s Southern Recreation Center, 1290 Belle Terre Parkway.
- Flagler Beach United Methodist Church, 1520 South Daytona Avenue, Flagler Beach.
See a sample ballot here. See the Live Interviews with all local candidates below.
Palm Coast Mayor Cornelia Manfre Mike Norris Palm Coast City Council Ty Miller, Dist. 1 Jeffrey Seib, Dist. 1 Ray Stevens, Dist. 3 Andrew Werner, Dist. 3 Backgrounders Manfre’s and Norris’s Final Clash Temper and Temperament at Tiger Bay Forum Stevens and Werner Sharpen Differences |
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
 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. |
Voltairomania: Of the 75,000 or so pages Voltaire wrote in his 83 years only about 150 are read today: Candide, the novella that follows the title characters from his expulsion from Eden to a final conclusion by way a few dozen reckonings with humanity at its worst. Every chapter is a Lisbon earthquake aftershock. He wrote the book in 1758, when he was 64 and only then settling in for his most productive and influential years in Geneva and Ferney (later to be renamed Ferney-Voltaire) on the French Swiss border, where he built a village of industry, what would today be known as an enterprise zone, or what Palm Coast wishes its Town Center had been. The final and most famous line of Candide, as he dismisses the by-then one-eyed philosopher Pangloss’s latest confabulations, is: “yes, but we must cultivate our garden.” Speculation, metaphysical or otherwise, is pointless. Even ideals are pointless, if we don’t tend to our backyard. Now: could the germ of that idea have been planted by one of Voltaire’s correspondents and admirers–Henry St. John, Viscount Bolinbroke, the Tory politician in England–who 34 years earlier had written Voltaire a long letter of advice on managing his talents and imagination? Bolinbroke had contrasted the needs of the mind with the needs of good land: “The more it rests, the more abundant the harvests become,” he said of land. Not so the mind, which “perishes through rest.” And: “a mind which is left too long fallow, is no longer cultivated with advantage.” Voltaire biographer and scholar Theodore Besterman (to whom is owed the definitive edition of Voltaire’s 50 volumes of letters) notes that “this important letter influenced voltaire’s immediate intellectual development,” but he also asked: “may we not also see in this agricultural homily one of the sources of Candide’s final conclusion?” A seed planted in a letter from June 27, 1724.
—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
For the full calendar, go here.
We may quote from the Zendavesta a wise and benevolent maxim, which compensates for many an absurdity. “He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers.”
–From Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).
Matt Stanton says
I hope early voters are paying attention to the rhetoric being spewed by the Republicans recently – an island of garbage is Puerto Rico, America is for Americans only. This is pure hate speech.
Much to the embarrassment of President Trump, Joe Rogan is now saying he wore an adult diaper during the Podcast
Pogo says
@Sign of the times
A diaper wearing a diaper…MAGA!
Ray W, says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for your exploration of the mind of Voltaire.
It has long been argued in academia that Voltaire, being one of the first to argue the question of whether God is the ship’s captain or the ship’s builder, bears some credit, though not all credit, for influencing our founding fathers’ decision to rebel against King George III.
Prior to Voltaire, accepted religious doctrine held that God was the ship’s captain. God not only built the ship (the earth), but God directed all of the ship’s travels. Therefore, since God had always created kings to rule and protect mankind, then it was against God’s will to rebel against a king.
The rebels argued that God was the ship’s builder, but not the ship’s captain. To them, since God only built the ship, men could captain the ship by themselves, i.e., rule themselves without disobeying God’s will. As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to his nephew, Heaven’s greatest gift to mankind was the gift of reason that permitted mankind to think for itself, i.e., that men were permitted to rule themselves.
This was the great shift in religious doctrine that split the American colonists into Tories and rebels.
Without the strong convictions of this emerging 18th century religious belief, and it was a religious belief, we would never have successfully created our liberal democratic Constitutional republic. To Alexander Hamilton, who wrote the first of 85 Federalist Papers, the great question he posed in paragraph one was whether the American people could ever create a government based on reason and choice, as opposed to all other previous attempts at democratic government that had failed in the face of the vices of rule by accident of birth or rule by force.
My father’s generation, including he and his two brothers, all three of whom fought as combat airmen, lived at a time when to them God was their co-pilot, not their pilot. This conception followed the beliefs of our founding fathers. Pilots had the free will to direct their fight.
Ray W, says
Two academic economists wrote an opinion piece on the worldwide economic recovery from the pandemic published by The Hill.
Here are most of the points they raise:
“First, despite assertions that Biden-Harris policies caused the pandemic surge in inflation, U.S. prices have risen just a little more (19.9 percent) since the start of the administration than the average of other advanced countries, weighted by the size of their economies (17.6 percent). This largely reflects the same factors driving prices elsewhere — supply chain disruptions, rising global commodity prices, the pandemic shift in consumption from services to goods and fiscal stimulus.
“Second, as noted above, U.S. wages have kept up with prices, so that the real value of wages’ purchasing power has risen about 0.3 percent during the Biden-Harris administration — while that of the other advanced economies has fallen 3.3 percent.
“Third, the American unemployment rate has averaged 4.2 percent since the end of 2020, which is not only very low by historical standards, but below the 5.4 percent rate averaged by the other advanced economies. And this is despite the fact that many other countries subsidized employment to a much greater degree than America did, thereby limiting the rise in unemployment abroad during the pandemic recession. The relatively low U.S. unemployment rate also speaks to the continued dynamism and flexibility of the American labor market compared to in many foreign economies.
“Fourth, underlying the better tone of U.S. labor markets has been a strong expansion of the economy. Since the end of 2020, U.S. real GDP has risen 11.8 percent, compared to 8.3 percent in the other advanced economies. And this calculation obscures the fact that many economies had deeper pandemic recessions in 2020 than did the U.S. Measured from the end of 2019, U.S. real GDP has grown 10.7 percent, more than double the 4.6 percent rise in the other advanced economies.
“Fifth, underlying all these favorable factors, the S & P 500 has risen 52 percent since the end of 2020 compared with only 45 percent in the other economies.”
Make of this what you will. Me? The entire world endured significant economic losses.
The politically independent Fed responded to the economic crisis by injecting $3 trillion into the credit marketplace. At the same time, the Fed lowered lending rates to zero percent. We saw banks ready to borrow from the Fed at 0% and turn around to lend those trillions at historically low mortgage rates, sometimes as low as 2.7%. Seeing long-term opportunity, many bought homes at such low monthly payments that competition for available homes became fierce, driving up home prices.
At the same time of the Fed response, Congress approved $2.9 trillion in unfunded stimulus money that was signed into law by former President Trump. That money, according to one prominent economist, did not expand the economy; it limited to losses occasioned by the pandemic, estimated at $7.6 trillion.
After Biden took office, Congress passed another set of unfunded stimulus packages, totaling approximately $3 trillion, much of which has already been injected into the economy, but some remains unspent.
I suppose by now some FlaglerLive readers know of my position that both Trump and Biden are partially responsible for the inflation that peaked in 2022 and is largely down to the desired rate of 2%.
The Fed contributed to inflation, too, as did OPEC, and if the allegations against American shale oil producers are accurate, American energy companies gouged us all for profit, too.
Drought caused crop shortages across the Midwest two years straight to the extent that American ranchers culled their heads so much that the total head count one month last year was the lowest on record since 1951.
War in the Ukraine interrupted grain exports both from Russia and the Ukraine and sanctions restricted exports of Russian oil and natural gas.
All in all, I stand by my position that Trudenomics and Trudenflation are the most accurate terms for our nation’s response to the economic cataclysm of the pandemic. Each of two presidents merits plaudits and each of the two shares blame.
And my argument remains that ours is the strongest economy in the world. We are better off now economically than we were four years ago.
Ray W, says
Hello, FlaglerLive readers. More good news on the economy.
The monthly BLS JOLTS report, per CNN, which contains data collected through September 30, came out this morning. Three more economic reports drop through the week.
The JOLTS report tracks layoffs, quits, hires, and most importantly, the unfilled total posted job openings figure, on a monthly basis. Revisions up and down occur monthly, too, as more or better data comes in.
For comparison purposes, when the Fed was repeatedly raising lending rates from late 2021 through much of 2022, the unfilled total posted job openings figure topped 12 million for a month in 2022. That meant that business owners just couldn’t find the workers they needed. Again, for comparison purposes, prior to the pandemic the unfilled total posted job openings figure had never been above 8 million. It jumped above 8 million shortly after the pandemic and stayed above 8 million for about three years before finally dropping below that threshold two months ago.
One of the main announced justifications listed by the Fed for raising lending rates was to cool down the overheated jobs market. Today’s figure of 7.4 million unfilled total posted job openings was described by Eugenio Aleman, chief economist for Raymond James thus: “I think the normalization of the labor market has continued to progress.”
To me, “normalization” is an important term. Many economists argue that a healthy unfilled total posted job openings figure matches one for one with the total number of unemployed, a number that will come out later this week. Ideally, if there are 7.4 million posted job openings, the number of unemployed should be around that number. Too many unfilled jobs and pressure on employers to raise wages can push up inflation.
Of interest was the focus by economists on the impact of the Boeing strike that started in September and the aftereffects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton on jobs figures. “The ongoing Boeing strike and Hurricanes Helene and Milton are expected to heavily distort jobs data starting with the month of October.”
“[E]conomists are expecting that October’s job gains will be around 120,000 — half of what was seen in September (which was surprisingly strong), FactSet estimates show.” Me? If the jobs added figure for October comes in weak, expect the Trump campaign to crow about the weak numbers without admitting that Boeing workers are on strike and that the impacts of Hurricanes Helene and Milton are still ricocheting throughout the workforce.
As an aside, about six months ago, Senator Scott issued a press release conflating jobs added from one report with hours worked from another report; he claimed that the number of part-time workers had shot up in March. The part-time workers statistic is drawn from a report that tracks the number of full-time workers and part-time workers. That report is compiled from data collected during the second full work week of each month.
I then read the fine print of the report. One explanatory clause below the report explained that if a major storm hits the U.S. during the second week of the month, the number of part-time workers may go up because some people won’t work a full work week if a large number of businesses are closed if only for a day because of the storms.
The threshold for part-time work is 35 hours per week or less. So, I checked weather records. Sure enough, a major storm swept across much of the nation during that week, with multiple tornados, heavy rains, and snow fall.
If someone loses as little as one day of work during the studied week, they suddenly become part-time workers for that month, even if they normally work a 40-hour week.
Senator Scott took the weather-impacted rise in part-time employment that month and conflated it with the jobs added report. He claimed that most of the jobs added for the month of March were part-time jobs. They weren’t, but what does that matter to the “pestilential” partisan member of faction.
Back to the JOLTS report.
The number of hires rose from 5.44 million in August to 5.56 million in September.
Layoffs jumped from 1.67 million in August to 1.83 million in September.
“[T]he rates of hires and layoffs as a percentage of overall employment remain within the levels seen during the solid employment expansion period in the decade before the pandemic,” per the CNN reporter.
Quits, described as a “closely watched” figure, dropped to 1.9 million. “Outside of 2020, that’s the lowest quits rate since the summer of 2015, BLS data shows.”
Make of this what you will. Me? More positive economic data on top of even more older positive economic data. We are ever closer and closer to a normal and healthy economy. We have not been destroyed.
We are better off economically than we were four years ago.
I have been commenting for years on the huge stimulus packages passed by two Congresses and signed into law by two presidents. $6.9 trillion was committed to offsetting the harm inflicted on the world’s economy by the pandemic.
I didn’t realize in the beginning that the Fed was injecting another $3 trillion into the credit aspect of our national economy nor did I fully understand the impact of the Fed reducing lending rates to zero and the effect that would have on people who wanted to lock in mortgage rates as low as 2.7% and the skyrocketing inflation that would occur when too many people sought too few homes.
I repeatedly wondered what would happen if we injected so much unfunded stimulus money into a recession economy. No one knew what exactly would happen because this had never been done on this scale before.
At first the outlook was grim. Most economists were predicting a “hard landing” recession at the beginning of the stimulus injections, because the Fed raising lending rates would send the labor market into a spiral of high unemployment figures and a resulting fall in GDP growth.
In time, some economists began forecasting a “soft landing,” meaning no recession but only slight GDP growth.
Now, very few economists think recession is in our near future and that there might not be any landing at all. These economists predict that we are going to transition into a fully healthy economy, without ever having high unemployment and without ever having negative or consistently low GDP growth.
Ray W, says
This past Sunday, former President Trump nearly packed the 20,000 seat Madison Square Gardens for his rally.
Almost immediately a picture of a packed city street circulated online, accompanied by comments that people were lined up three hours before the venue opened.
Fact checkers examined the photo. It matched with a photo taken in Ireland in 2011 when former President Obama spoke in Dublin before visiting his great, great, great, grandfather’s village of Moneygall, prior to his emigrating to America.
This is what happens when misinformation and disinformation laundering occurs so that a candidate can later claim that huge crowds waited in the street for hours to attend his rally. It was online. Therefore, it must be true.
Haitians must be eating cats and dog in Springfield, Ohio, because JD Vance says that unnamed people were saying so on Facebook.
Ray W, says
The L.A. Times reports that U.S. District Judge Mark Walker extended his October 18th temporary restraining order barring the state Department of Health from continuing to threaten by letter criminal prosecution of outlets that carry an ad of Caroline Wilson’s account of her doctor’s refusal to treat her terminal brain cancer if she didn’t seek a medical abortion of her second fetus to save her life.
Without the medical abortion, Ms. Wilson would have died before birth.
The extension, per the judge, will allow for more time to decide whether to issue a permanent injunction.
The state Department of Health declared the ad “false” and “dangerous” after being challenged. Judge Walker rejected that argument: “The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false.'”
He went on to write: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
As an aside, the article went to a second subject:
“Four state agencies have set aside millions of dollars in public funds to create their own commercials railing against the abortion measure and another constitutional amendment that would legalize recreational marijuana use in the state — a move that critics say violates a state law that bars government officials from using their public office for electioneering.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
Reuters reports that Chevron started extraction of oil from its Anchor asset. The Gulf of Mexico site promises as much as 5 billion barrels of oil (enough to supply the world’s needs for 50 days) from a reservoir located at a depth of 34,000 feet. The equipment used is designed to withstand 20,000 pounds per square inch of water pressure.
In 2025, BP plans to begin its own high-pressure drilling in the Kaskida field, which contains an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil (100 days of worldwide suupply).
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued new rules for such deepwater drilling efforts.
Make of this what you will. Me? I commented on these developments a couple of months ago.
I probably didn’t need to comment again, but for the claim made by a FlaglerLive commenter so many months ago that the U.S. was sitting on 300 years’ worth of worldwide oil supply, when we only knew of 50 years of U.S. supply.
It may very well be that the commenter was right, and that we really are sitting on that much oil, but we don’t know where the oil is right now and even if we could find it, we may not have the technology to get at it.
If we are struggling to find 150 days’ worth of worldwide supply of crude oil at depths of 34,000 feet in the Gulf using gear that is at the cutting edge of technology, I find it hard to imagine we can find another 290 years’ worth of oil in accessible places.