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Weather: Partly sunny. Highs around 80. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers after midnight. Lows in the mid 60s. South 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:
In Court: It’s pre-trial day in felony court, including a scheduled 1:30 p.m. pre-trial for Jermaine Williams, who faces a first-degree murder charge in the stabbing death of his wife Yolanda Williams, 50, in early August. The case is in the discovery phase.
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. The council has a long agenda, with items ranging from the expansion of the tennis center to council procedures. 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 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.
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. Board meeting documents are available here.
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.
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
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.
Notably: If my roof wasn’t slanted and if it hadn’t just been redone I might’ve danced on it to celebrate the fall of Bashar al-Assad, about whom I could not enough unprintable, unspeakable, unthinkable things, though no book of the dead will ever have the capacity to compile all the unspeakable, unprintable, unthinkable things he inflicted on his people. Not just him of course. Both Assads, starting with his father, Hafez, whose reign from 1971 to 2000 was Syria’s first reign of terror. Ask, as an example, the people of Hama, that not-quite Muslim equivalent of Philadelphia (the City of Brotherly Love). Hama (which means “fortress” in Arabic) is among Syria’s largest cities. I don’t know if it’s its second city after Damascus, but close. Hama was the city of the Muslim Brotherhood, and there brewed something of a rebellion in 1982. The Brotherhood was nothing to sing about. It was violent, unforgiving, terroristic. So here’s what Hafez did: he encircled the city with the Syrian Army, tanks especially, and bombarded it mercilessly. Leveled it. Massacred its inhabitants. 10,000 to 25,000 dead. Thomas Friedman has an excellent chapter on it in his From Beirut to Jerusalem, back when he was an excellent reporter (before he became a puffed up insufferable columnist). He called it “Hama Rules.” Then Hafez opened the city and invited reporters in so they could take pictures and write detailed accounts of the massacre. He wanted his enemies to know what he was made of. That’s the Assad whose army occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2000. Then came the son. No one had any illusions. He was as bloodthirsty as his father. More so, as it turned out, as he proved during the civil war that’s been raging there for 13 years. Lebanon’s poor 1.5 million Syrian refugees are surviving storytellers. The BBC places the death toll at half a million. So what now? We may dance over Assad’s fate. But to what end? Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of the rebels who overwhelmed Damascus this week, is an al-Qaeda graduate. If there is something worse than an Assad (Assad means “lion” in Arabic), he may well be it. At least the killing may stop. But it’s a good thing the roof is slanted. This is not the fall of a dictator. It’s a replacement.
—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.
June 2025
East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board Meeting
Flagler County Commission Evening Meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Food Truck Tuesday
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
Whatever mode Assad and Saddam are in, though, I am certain that they never fool themselves about the underlying tribe-like and autocratic natures of their societies. They always understand the difference between the mirage and the oasis, between the world and the word, between what men say they are and what they really are. They always know that when push comes to shove, when the modern veneer of nation-statehood is stripped away, it all still comes down to Hama Rules: Rule or die. One man triumphs, the others weep. The rest is just commentary. I am convinced that there is only one man in Israel Hafez Assad ever feared and that is Ariel Sharon, because Assad knew that Sharon, too, was ready to play by Hama Rules. Assad knew Sharon well; he saw him every morning when he looked in the mirror.
–From Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989).
Pogo says
@Meaning — what meaning?
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=bashar+al+assad+biography
Pogo says
@FTCD (From The Cool Down)
Scientists warn of ‘urgent need for action’ against bitcoin surge — here’s what’s happening
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/scientists-warn-of-urgent-need-for-action-against-bitcoin-surge-here-s-what-s-happening/ar-AA1vyMZZ?ocid=nl_article_link
Fiat currency issued by a government = bad.
Symbolic toy money depicted as gold coins by the grifters who tout it = the future my lad, the future.
Make of it what you will, then short it before the dawn.
Ray W, says
For a story headlined, “Economists have ‘really had it wrong’ about recession, market strategist said”, CNBC interviewed economist David Zervos, with Jefferies LLC, at CNBC’s Financial Advisor Summit.
“Two years ago … three out of four economists were saying we’re going into a recession. … They’ve really had it wrong,” he said, adding that inflation has dropped, and the economy remains in a state of growth.
The reporter wrote of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s praise for the American economy, which means to Powell that Fed policymakers now have an economic cushion that permits slow and cautious recalibration of policy.
Last week a regional Atlanta Fed report had the Fed’s preferred inflation measuring tool at 2.3% in October, year over year, and when stripped of the more volatile categories of food and energy prices, inflation at 2.8%, year over year. Fourth quarter GDP annualized growth was on track to a 3.3% figure, year over year.
Barbara Doran, CEO of BD8 Capital Partners, told Summit attendees that most indicators point to 2025 as continuing in a positive economic direction: “Economic growth is going to be healthy next year. … The prognosis is good.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I have argued that there is a difference between political hyperbole and economic truth.
From this story it can be argued that two years ago, three quarters of economists saw the American economy suffering a hard landing, i.e., crashing into recession.
Standard economic theory has long held that when a national economy suffers a setback, the most effective response to limit the overall potential for economic damage is to pass legislation to create stimulus packages that are designed to stop the fall. The infusion of stimulus money is supposed to heat the economy. A heating economy commonly has the side effect of triggering inflation. If the trigger occurs and inflation rises, the Fed is to raise lending rates and adjust the amount of credit available for lending. The raised lending rates are to slow the economy, which leads to job losses and recession. This is what so many economists in 2022 expected to happen after the pandemic crash.
But no government had ever thrown nearly $9 trillion into a failing economy in the form of unfunded stimulus packages and increased availability of credit. Few predicted it would work.
What the economists predicted came to pass. Standard economic theory will be challenged and perhaps reassessed over the next few years. Our economy did not crash into recession. It has, instead, experienced the strongest sustained recovery from the pandemic recession of 2020 compared to all of the world’s developed economies. As the Wall Street Journal recently opined, and Chairman Powell echoed, President-elect Trump is about to inherit an economy that is the “envy of the world.”
The professional lying class of one of our two political parties has consistently attempted to deceive the public about the steadily recovering state of the U.S. economy. Many of the gullible among us listened to and came to believe the lies. All were wrong.
We should be thanking President-elect Trump for signing into law $2.9 trillion in unfunded stimulus money. We should be thanking President Biden for signing into law $3.0 trillion in unfunded stimulus money. We should be thanking Fed Chair Powell for injection $3 trillion into the credit marketplace and contemporaneously slowly lowering the lending rate to 0%, which two act combined to lower mortgage rate to 2.7%.
Millions of Americans locked in low fixed-rate long-term home mortgages to their economic advantage.
Had our trio of economic leaders done nothing, the alternative was a possibility of recession eventually crashing into a state of deflation which, if sustained, would lead to depression.
Now, perhaps the wisest economic option for our leaders would be to address the $8 trillion in national debt that accumulated during the four Trump years and the additional $8 trillion in national debt that was added under Biden’s watch. Economic wisdom suggests such a strategy. Now that the economy seems to have returned to the full health it enjoyed for the six years prior to the 2020 pandemic recession, perhaps political wisdom will evolve to suggest such a strategy.
Ray W, says
Two British research teams, EvoPhase and KwikFab, initially formed in 2023 to explore maximization of equipment in the food, pharmaceutical and chemical sectors, combined their efforts to build what they say is the world’s first AI software-designed urban wind turbine tailored to “unique wind conditions of a specific geographic area.
The teams named the prototype turbine the Birmingham Blade.
The geographic area around Birmingham has average wind speeds of 3.6 meters per second. Most conventional wind turbines need a minimum speed of 10 meters per second to operate.
Said Leonard Nicusan, CTO of EvoPhase: “We needed a turbine that could capture Birmingham’s relatively low wind speeds while managing turbulence caused by surrounding buildings. … The design also had to be compact and lightweight to suit rooftop installations.”
Mr. Nicusan explained the team’s reliance on AI software thus:
“Using AI was essential for breaking free from the long-standing biases that have influenced turbine designs for the past century. AI allowed us to explore design possibilities beyond the scope of traditional human experimentation. We were able to generate, test, and refine over 2,000 wind turbine designs in just a few weeks, significantly accelerating our development process and achieving what would have taken years and millions of pounds through convention methods. … Our evolutionary simulations have confirmed the Birmingham Blade is up to seven times more efficient than existing designs in Birmingham’s wind speed and urban environment. The final design is not just a prototype — it is a predictive solution that is ready for real-world use.”
EvoPhase’s AI-led evolutionary design process mimics natural selection. The process simultaneously optimizes different parameters, which limits or avoids traditional trade-offs between different performance factors.
The team is now working on blade designs tailored for the very different wind conditions in the region around Edinburgh.
Paul Jarvis, Managing Director for KwikFab, says the team “can take a complex design, and manufacture and ship a prototype for testing within weeks.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
These are not the windmills with long blades that we see high above the rural countryside. These are roughly 20-foot-high vertical blades that rotate a generator shaft affixed to a large base. The base can stand on its own on the ground or top a roofed building of any height.
Pogo says
@Uh-oh
As stated
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mother-bubbles-us-sucking-money-215345592.html
As originally stated
https://www.ft.com/content/49cca8d7-7b6e-47e3-a50c-9557d7c85fc0
I made my money by selling too soon.
— Bernard Baruch
https://www.google.com/search?q=Bernard+Baruch
Systems says
Great overview of today’s local events! The range of activities, from pre-trial court proceedings to community safety meetings, shows how active the area is. The weather updates are also very helpful, especially with the chance of showers later. Looking forward to more timely updates like this!