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Weather:
- 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 Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board meets at 10 a.m. every first Wednesday of the month at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For details about the city’s code enforcement regulations, go here.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
The Flagler Beach Parks Ad Hoc Committee meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 105 S 2nd St, Flagler Beach. The Committee’s six members, appointed by the City Commission, provide recommendations related to the maintenance of existing parks and equipment and recommendations for new or replacement equipment and other duties as assigned by the City Commission.
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 1 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
The Flagler County Republican Club holds its monthly meeting starting with a social hour at 5 and the business meeting at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. The club is the social arm of the Republican Party of Flagler County, which represents over 40,000 registered Republicans. Meetings are open to Republicans only.
Notably: Some years ago with the publication of her Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich, by then past her mid-70s, which is to say approaching 80 (she was 77), essentially said fuck it all to doctors and check-ups and letting nurses palpate what remained of her breasts (she had survived cancer) and MRIs and the rest of it. There comes a point in life when it’s really useless, when it becomes a bit sick to play cat and mouse with sickness. Roughly after 65, no one should care what they drink, what they eat, what they shoot up. Or at least 70, if we’re to stay in line with Social Security’s actuaries. Do drugs. Get drunk. Get fat. Drink coffee all day. Why the hell not? As we age, out of fear of living fewer years, we end up turning into anchorites, and so living less every day even as we live longer. It’s perversely self-absorbed and self-defeating, giving death the laugh first and last: we are living dead. Late last year the medical police state produced one of those studies to end all studies on drinking, revealing that no, there are no benefits to that one wine drink a day, no benefits at all, and plenty of dangers instead. Revealing that, really, the safest thing to do is not to drink, since any drink is dangerous, though to be realistic, the drunko police state came down on limiting drinks to some ridiculously low level. Tell that to Bacchus. We should cut out salt, butter, Crumble cookies and coffee, too. But what for? Life is lethal. Meanwhile, live.
—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.
Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler County Republican Club Meeting
Flagler Beach Parks Ad Hoc Committee
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Flagler Beach City Commission Workshop on Beach-Management Plan
‘The Drowsy Chaperone,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday Blue Forum
For the full calendar, go here.
During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For 1 have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping. worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man: I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby, I knew that ten or twelve thousand miles driving a track, alone and unattended, over every kind of road, would be hard work, but to me it represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man. And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway. I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living. I am very fortunate in having a wife who likes being a woman, which means that she likes men, not elderly babies Although this last foundation for the journey was never dise cussed, I am sure she understood it.”
–From John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962).
Whathehck? says
What an appropriate cartoon. I feel so much better now that the old senile in charge of the United States of America told us: “The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over”. He didn’t even get it nor did the sycophants !
Pogo says
@Does grandpa hear me when I talk to him?
Elsewhere, an insane dictator, with the welfare and survival of all human beings clasped in his claws, announces that the days of unelected bureaucrats are over; a golden age of total obedience to insane tyrants and unelected insane plutocrats and plundering murderers have arrived in the mouth of a golden swine.
Thomas says
He and his side kick are destroying the USA brick by brick. Witnessed him praising Putin says it all.
Ray W, says
Sometimes the only thing you can do for a politician is to stand back and watch as he drowns in his own spit.
On the other hand, ADP released its monthly jobs added report, this time for the month of February. CNBC covered the report in an article today. The statistically different monthly BLS report is due for release on Friday. Expectations set the BLS figure at 170,000 jobs added and an unemployment rate for February of 4.0%.
While the private jobs added figure came in at 77,000 new jobs, it was below the anticipated 148,000 new jobs, and down from the upwardly revised January jobs added figure of 186,000. ADP’s upwardly revised January report differed significantly from the January BLS report of 111,000 jobs added.
The sector that “lumps together trade, transportation and utility jobs saw a loss of 33,000 positions during February. This sector is expected to be the most impacted by tariffs.
Leisure and hospitality jumped by 41,000 positions and professional and business services added 47,000 jobs. Construction increased by 25,000, as did financial activates.
Annual pay rose by 4.7% in February.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I try to refrain from excessive reaction to weekly or monthly reports, as they are too volatile to derive from them a reasonably valid conclusion. Then again that is their purpose. They are to give glimpses of insights but not understanding. Longer-term reports offer more reliable data.
Every month, ADP releases a preliminary estimate and then refines it the following month. BLS releases its own monthly estimate, which it, too, refines the next month and refines again the month after that, as better and more comprehensive data is gathered.
The different methodology between the two agencies, one private and the other public, is easy to explain.
ADP is the nation’s largest payroll service provider. In this capacity, it has access to the number of people who are on its clients’ payrolls, regardless of whether the employees receive a paycheck. The ADP jobs added report is based on the payroll numbers that its customers report to it.
The BLS monthly jobs report is derived from a week-long survey each month of the number of employees who receive a paycheck for the week during the survey period. If a hurricane smashes through the mountainous region of North Carolina immediately before or during the survey week, it stands to reason that many regional workers who are on the ADP-surveyed payrolls may not receive BLS-surveyed paychecks for that week. By the next month, businesses will have reopened during that month’s survey week and employees will once again be earing paychecks. They were on payrolls during both months, but they didn’t receive a paycheck for one of the months.
Different methodology leads to different results, but both reports are statistically accurate and, therefore, reliably correct.
Again, relying on weekly or monthly economic reports may provide misleading insights because the data is too volatile. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge is year-over-year PCE and core PCE increases or decreases, but monthly reports are not ignored; they are just less important in the Fed’s decision-making process.
Ray W, says
According to a February 16, 2025, Politico story, not an editorial, the U.S. Department of Agriculture overseas a National Animal Health Laboratory Network (NAHLN) program guiding 58 laboratory facilities, which collectively comprise the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians.
The NAHLN employs 14 people to perform its important roles of managing data, ensuring that labs all over the country are using the same tests and following the same protocols so as to accurately and effectively track animal diseases, i.e., making sure the left hand is doing what the right hand is doing, as well as managing the employees of the 58 specialized laboratories and of responding to outbreaks of animal diseases, including the most recent outbreak of the bird flu in 2022.
Since 2022, 166 million poultry birds have been slaughtered, with 30 million in the 30 days before article publication. Most of birds were egg-laying hens, domestic chickens raised for meat, plus domestic ducks and turkeys have been slaughtered.
As an example of its importance, yet another (the third in a series) variant of the H5N1 avian influenza virus was detected in cattle in Arizona by federal employees of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). Bird flu that crosses into other animals is called a “spillover event.” A majority of California’s beef herds have been infected and cattle in 12 other states have been infected, too.
The reporter surmises that the emergence of a new variant means that the 2022 version of the avian flu is still changing, and that the flue is not yet contained.
So, what is the issue driving the article?
The Friday before the article’s publication, heads of each of the 59 agency facilities that study and react to outbreaks of animal diseases received notification that the coordinating NAHLN agency would see 25% of its staff being fired.
The director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory said that the firings would slow testing efforts and “other responses to the H5N1 outbreak.” He added: “They’re the front line of surveillance for the entire outbreak. … They’re already underwater and they are constantly short-staffed, so if you take all the probationary staff out, you’ll take out the capacity to do the work.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I have already commented about the stupidity of cutting government positions that save more money than they cost in pay and benefits.
Can the question be asked? If we fire some of the very people who comprise the front line of the government response to combatting the spread of the avian flu, among other animal diseases, a virus that has already cost the government over $2 billion during the Biden administration, and a reported $1 billion in new costs under the Trump administration, just how stupid are the leaders of our new administration?
Cutting an already understaffed agency that is directly responsible for the tracking and responses to the spread of expensive animal diseases should strike everyone as the height of stupidity!
Who knows when the Republicans will admit that they will be the ones directly responsible for the persistence of the bird flu across the country should it not soon be brought under control?
The Biden administration can’t be blamed, even though the more stupidly gullible FlaglerLive commenters continue to do just that. The Biden administration developed prototype bird flu vaccines. The Trump administration promises to continue to develop the vaccines. The Biden administration sent scientists and field inspectors to 150 egg farms that had suffered outbreaks and suggested sanitary improvements for each farm. Only one of the 150 farms has since experienced a recurrent outbreak. The Trump administration promises to continue the effort. The Biden administration spent $2 billion to offset losses from the slaughters, so that the farmers could more rapidly make the sanitary improvements and restock their flocks. The Trump administration promises to continue the effort, and it has allocated another $1 billion to support the various efforts.
I have repeatedly read that this version of the avian influenza virus is highly virulent, in other words, it is highly transmissible among birds, more so than the avian influenza virus involved in the 2015 outbreak. And it is not only crossing into cattle, but it is being found in humans, with one person dying thus far.
Should the avian flu virus mutate yet again into a version of flu that more easily crosses into humans, we could soon have another pandemic on our hands.
It is no secret that the original form of the bat flu virus crossed into humans about 15 years ago, but the Chinese government and medical community contained Sars-Cov-1; it never spread in humans beyond the Wuhan region of China. Once eradicated in humans, it hasn’t been seen since, though it may still survive in the wild bat population. While some assert that Sars-Cov-2 was genetically manipulated in the Wuhan Lab from preserved Sars-Cov-1 virus samples, the most likely scientific explanation remains that the virus remained at large in the wild bat population until it mutated into an even more virulent form of the disease.
Sherry says
CHAIN SAWS ARE NOT TOYS! Just another “chainsaw” slip up from the trump administration:
NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration on Tuesday published a list of more than 440 federal properties it had identified to close or sell, including the FBI headquarters and the main Department of Justice building, after deeming them “not core to government operations.”
Hours later, however, the administration issued a revised list with only 320 entries — none in Washington, D.C. And by Wednesday morning, the list was gone entirely. “Non-core property list (Coming soon)” the page read.
The General Services Administration, which published the lists, did not immediately respond to questions about the changes or why the properties that had been listed had been removed.
The initial list had included some of the country’s most recognizable buildings, along with courthouses, offices and even parking garage and spanned nearly every state. In Washington, D.C., it included the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which serves as FBI headquarters, the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, the Old Post Office building, where President Donald Trump once ran a hotel, and the American Red Cross headquarters. The headquarters of numerous agencies, including Department of Labor and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, were listed as well.
Ray W, says
This commented is directed to the more gullibly stupid of the FlaglerLive commenters who claim that the Ukraine must submit to Russian aggression in order to stop the killing.
One, Russia, invaded to steal land and wealth. The other, the Ukrainian people, fight for life for themselves and their families and for freedom. There is a difference between the two objectives.
One set out to murder and for plunder; it was never about NATO expansion. The other is defending their homes and families. One kidnaps children, murders surrendering Ukrainian soldiers, and murders and rapes civilians at will. The other captures Russian soldiers and swaps them for their own people.
As I have repeatedly commented, the Russians have already lost the war. Only the killing remains to be finished before the Russians are driven from Ukrainian soil.
For about six years, the severely outmatched and poor American Continental Army held off a far superior British Army until the Americans ultimately triumphed. Our ancestors begged and pleaded for economic and military aid. The Dutch and, more importantly, the French, eventually came through. Was the war already won at Fort Ticonderoga, when a much larger and better equipped British force surrendered to a rag-tag American army? Did only the killing remain to be done before the British surrendered at Yorktown? Was the British economy broken by the unexpected expense of a long-term transatlantic war?
America has suddenly lost its way. We are Ukraine’s ally by treaty. We promised to come to their aid should they ever be attacked in exchange for the Ukraine surrendering its nuclear stockpile of weapons.
We have, in a few short weeks, transformed ourselves from a trusted ally to a distrusted street thug bent on extortion. Give us your rare earths or we abandon you to the Russians, we say.
Reporting has it that our government just announced the cessation of the incredibly important sharing of military intelligence with the Ukrainian forces.
Only the gullibly stupid among us think that appeasing Russians will work.
When Putin was elected in 2000, Russia had not yet lost the first Chechnyan War. It took several years for Russia to lose a war that it started, but it lost. It paused and regrouped and then started the second Chechnyan War, which it won. It paused and regrouped and then invaded former Soviet Georgia, annexing most of Georgia’s land. It paused and regrouped and then invaded the Ukraine, taking Crimea and portions of east Ukraine. It paused and regrouped and then reattacked the Ukraine.
Just what is it that the gullibly stupid do not understand? Stopping the war without defeating Russia will allow it to pause and regroup yet again. Russia will not stop until it is defeated. Yes, Russia was once defeated by the Chechnyan people, but the Soviet army had fallen in disrepair and dysfunction.
Putin spent 20 years setting aside a reported $350 billion into various “wealth” funds, a huge sum for Russia, to better prepare for the conquest or destruction of the Ukraine. Its economy and military must be broken and its government soundly defeated, or it will not stop until the Soviet Empire is restored.
Either we defeat them now or we defeat them in Moldova, or Transnistria, or Romania, or Poland, or Latvia, or Estonia, or Lithuania, or Slovakia, or Bulgaria or Finland.
Or we exit NATO and leave Europe to its fate.
But make no mistake. Russian killing of its neighbors will not stop.