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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the upper 60s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph.
- 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:
In Court: A status hearing is scheduled in the case of Tyrese Patterson, who is among the several defendants in the murder case involving victim Noah Smith , 16, a bystander gunned down in Bunnel in 2022. The hearing is at 8:30 a.m. before Circuit Judge Dawn Powell at the Flagler County courthouse, Courtroom 401. See: “On Eve of Trial, Tyrese Patterson Pleads to Murdering Noah Smith, 16, and Faces Up to 50 Years in Prison.”
The Palm Coast City Council meets in meeting at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. It is the last meeting of the current council before those elected in November take over on Nov. 19. The council will again consider whether to approve a proposal to have larger developers devote a minimal portion of their project cost to public art, and will consider a proposal by its drainage committee to declare a certain amount of city-owned dirt as surplus property, enabling it to be donated to residents, at 5 cubic yards a pop, to help reduce drainage issues on their lots. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Community Traffic Safety Team led by Flagler County Commissioner Andy Dance meets at 9 a.m. in the third-floor Commissioner Conference Room at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. You may also join virtually by computer, mobile app or room device. Click here to join the meeting. Meeting ID: 276 236 998 121 Passcode: CyEKoW [Download Teams | Join on the web]
The Flagler County School Board meets at 3 p.m. in workshop to go over the items on its upcoming school board meeting two weeks hence. The board meets in the training room on the third floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The board is holding a farewell ceremony for Colleen Conklin as she ends 24 years of service on the board. Board meeting documents are available here.
Veteran Resource Fair at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast, 4 to 6 p.m. The Veteran Resource Fair is an opportunity to meet with community partners that support veterans and their families. A veteran is anyone who has served in the U.S. Military (it is not determined by length of service time, if the veteran was in a war, or if they were injured while serving). This is a free event open to the public. Learn about VA benefits and enroll the same day. Meet other veteran run organizations. Free giveaways.
Event Participants:
Flagler County Veterans Services
VA represenative- to enroll veterans for benefits and medical services
Leo C. Chase Jr. VA Clinic – St. Augustine
Steven A. Cohen Military Family Clinic
Wounded Warrior Project
Flagler Cares
Flagler Humane Society
VA program- Whole Health rep
Wekiva Springs Center
UF Brain Wellness Center
Florida Legal Services, Inc.
Disabled American Veterans – Chapter 86
VFW Post 8696
Guitars For Vets
CareerSource Flagler Volusia
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
The Flagler County Planning Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. See board documents, including agendas and background materials, here. Watch the meeting or past meetings here.
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.
The St. Johns River Water Management District Governing Board holds its regular monthly meeting at its Palatka headquarters. The public is invited to attend and to offer in-person comment on Board agenda items. Note: meeting start times vary from month to month. Check here to verify the time. A livestream will also be available for members of the public to observe the meeting online. Governing Board Room, 4049 Reid St., Palatka. Click this link to access the streaming broadcast. The live video feed begins approximately five minutes before the scheduled meeting time. Meeting agendas are available online 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: As depressing as it may sometimes feel to be living in America’s end days, it can also be occasionally paradisiacal. I had one of those flashy moments. Thanks to an app, I’m half-sorry to say. I read from time to time, and from time to time I come across presumptuous writers who still think the whole world reads every language under the sun and doesn’t need translations. You know the kind: writers who drop this or that word or sentence in French or, worse, Latin and German. They want to show off their Mann-hood, if not their cunnilingual dexterity. Drives me nuts. I knew there’d be an app to end the misery. Not just a laborious one that would have you type something only to spit it out, but an image app that would somehow translate the image. I found a few costly ones. Then I found Google’s translate app. And there it was. The elegance. The simplicity. I had a page open with text I could read, then this pair of Horace verses, in Latin. After cussing out the editor (Theodore Besterman, the Voltaire biographer who edited his letters but who was also known the scholarly world over as a prig), I used the app, and the thing just gave me an immediate image of the page itself, translated in whatever language I wanted. I set it to go from Latin to English. It left everything else in the original. Here was Horace, fairly well translated into English–well enough to catch more than the gist and (wonder of wonders) some of the poetry. It was as if Adlai Stevenson had won the Nov. 5 election. Ahead of time. I danced a little jig in my chair and thought: the sun will come out. (All this happened before dawn in my P-Section paradise.) And yes. The app has every imaginable language. Except maybe Aramaic. Still, I can finally read Cormac McCarthy, that bastard whose every other line is Spanish, and all the Enlightenment’s Latin-nuts under Horace’s unchanging sun. Is this what Steven Pinker means when he claims that we are so incredibly lucky to be living in the age we’re living in, all slouches to fascism aside? Maybe. I’m still in denial about Nov. 5. But I’ll take the app’s small, good thing, to quote (in English) the tragic Carver story.
—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.
Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skid mark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can’t own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition, one that Julian has somehow either mastered or never experienced, which explains why he’s so easygoing, and why, to him, the world is so tractable, why all seems fixable with talk. What’s inside Julian is smooth and fragrant, his desires desirable, and so his words are gift wrap, sometimes sloppy but always appreciated. Whereas if Kant ever relaxes his vigilance, allows his own sick and malign requirements to escape through the candor of voice or touch, they could never be recontained. Plus, there’s this inkling, with Julian’s soigné friends and ambiguous employment and the Dartmouth diploma that he never mentions but hangs framed on his bedroom wall, that wealth is part of it, somehow. And/or race. The power that all this confers on Julian can’t be roleplayed away.
–From Tony Tulathimutte’s “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” in Rejection (2024).
Pogo says
@FlaglerLive
Thank you for today’s cartoon. While it is on point, I would add: once again, the majority of people chose to eat shit instead. The calamity unfolding now is far beyond the experience and imagination of those who are creating it — and those who chose it.
Soylent Green IS people.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Soylent+Green
And so it went
Ray W, says
Cadillac recently announced that its partnership with CATL, a large battery manufacturer, is paying off.
Cadillac intends to release a lithium-ion-phosphate (LFP) battery next year that can fully recharge its battery in 10 minutes. An industry standard designation for recharge times uses “C” as its symbol. Thus, a 2C battery fully recharges 30 minutes. A battery that fully recharges in four hours is .25C. The CATL battery is a 6C battery. It can add a 200 km (124 miles) charge in five minutes.
CATL calls the battery design a “Second-Generation Graphite Fast Iron Ring Technology.” The design incorporates “multi-layer electrode sheets” to reduce charge-discharge times and increase both energy density and cycle stability.
GM already uses its Ultium battery platform in its U.S. EVs. This new battery will be designated as an “upgraded Ultium Battery line.”
Make of this what you will.
Me? The professional lying class of one of our two major political parties persuaded the gullible among us to reject adoption of EV technology, including battery technology. We willingly ceded the EV and battery sectors to China long ago.
When Ford’s CEO tells a European podcaster that he drove a Chinese EV during an extended trip to China and then had one shipped to the U.S. for him to drive for another six months, that says something. When he then says that he doesn’t want to stop driving it, and that American car makers are years behind the Chinese EV auto industry, that is an entirely different statement.
I have repeatedly commented on the new Dodge Ramcharger EREV that is to be introduced next year; it has an all-electric 630 HP drivetrain and a range of 690 miles and no transmission. Yes, Chevrolet’s Volt used EREV technology in limited production. It looks like the Ramcharger will be America’s first mass-production EV truck, six years after the EREV concept was introduced into China’s personal vehicle market.
EREV stands for extended range electric vehicle. BEV means battery-only electric vehicle. PHEV means plug-in electric vehicle. EREV’s are categorized as PHEVs, but they differ from other PHEVs in that the gasoline engine powers a generator only; it lacks a drivetrain.
According to Wired, Li Auto introduced the first EREV into the Chinese marketplace in 2019. That year, EREVs captured 1% of the PHEV market, which is separate from the BEV market. In 2023, EREVs held 28% of the PHEV sector, and 9% of the total Chinese EV market.
To understand the growing size of the EV industry in China, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) recently published October manufacturing figures. Including 524k total EV export sales of all types, the total EV sales for the month were 1.43 million units, up 11.1 over September. Though it is misleading because of the ever-increasing growth in manufacturing totals, annualized October sales (monthly sales times 12) yields a 16,160,000 overall annualized EV sales figure. Who knows what next year’s figures will be.
The total Chinese EV yearly production figure through October is up 49.6% over the same time span for 2023.
Ray W, says
I looked for more information about newly released EREV products.
BYD, one of China’s largest EV manufacturers, recently created a new brand dedicated to off-road EVs. The new subsidiary has released its Leopard 5 model. A Leopard 3 and Leopard 8 will soon be added to the lineup.
The 2024 Leopard 5 is comparable to a Toyota Land Cruiser (base MSRP, per KBB, of $57,900) and the Jeep Wrangler Sahara (base MSRP, per KBB, of $51,090).
Since both the U.S. and the EU recently imposed tariffs on Chinese EV imports, we are not likely to import the Leopard 5, but Great Britain is no longer part of the EU. I found an article from a British publication that estimates that the Leopard 5 will soon be exported there, with an expected MSRP of around EU43,ooo ($45,700).
The Leopard 5 PHEV has a total battery plus internal combustion engine (ICE) range of 1200 kilometers (746 miles).
It travels 125 kilometers (78 miles) on its lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery before the battery depletes enough to require starting its 1.5-liter turbocharged ICE that produces 184 HP, enough to generate the electricity needed to keep the battery charged and the drive wheels turning (an EREV engine does not have a transmission). The battery range means that most daily drives will not involve starting the ICE.
The LGP battery recharges fully in 16-20 minutes on a fast charger. On a 220-volt home charger, 4-5 hours does the trick.
With an 80-liter (22 (+) gallon) gas tank, that means the Leopard 5 with its 670 HP dual-electric motor system can travel 1075 kilometers (668 miles) on a tank of gasoline, which rounds down to 30 mpg highway. 0-62 mph time is 4.8 seconds.
The Jeep Wrangler Sahara with its 270 HP base engine is rated at 22 mpg highway. 0-60 with an automatic transmission take 6.8 seconds.
The Toyota Land Cruiser with its 326 HP base engine is rated at 25 mpg highway. 0-60 takes 7.7 seconds.
Make of this what you will.
Me? A less expensive, more powerful, faster, more fuel-efficient off-road capable EREV just might be a great value to those who seek less pollutive personal transportation.
Ford’s CEO recently stated in a podcast interview that American car manufacturers are years behind the Chinese automobile industry. An argument can be made that he is right.