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Weather: We’ve entered the dull part of weather season: Mostly cloudy. Highs in the upper 80s. Lows in the mid-60s.
- 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 City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. It’s a lengthy one: the council will have a look at a proposed YMCA in Town center, it will discuss the Palm Harbor Golf Club, the city’s 10-year capital improvement plan, and other issues. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 1 p.m. in an information workshop. 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 School Board meets at 6 p.m. in Board Chambers on the first floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here. The meeting is open to the public and includes public speaking segments.
Budgeting by Values: A Free, Virtual Class to Learn Budgeting Skills, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. every fourth Tuesday of the month organized by Flagler Cares and Truist Bank, and presented by Financial Inclusion Leader Vladimir Rodriguez. To sign up or get information, call 386/319-9483, text 386/986-0107, or email help@flaglercares.org.
Stetson University’s 2025 Holocaust Memorial Lecture, 7 p.m. in the Stetson Room, located inside the Carlton Student Union building on Stetson’s DeLand campus. The lecture features renowned historian and Holocaust Studies scholar Natalia Aleksiun. The event is free and open to the public, and will also be available virtually for those who RSVP via email, mpsepiol@stetson.edu.
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: Traffic is like time. It is relative. It is measured according to circumstance, not absolute value. A minute spent in traffic in Manhattan is the blink of an eye compared to a minute spent in traffic in Palm Coast. When my parents lived in Queens I’d drive from Chapel Hill or Beckley, W.Va., to visit them, crossing Manhattan at night, when it was empty. The way back would take me about an hour and a half to cross five or six miles, from Woodside, Queens, to the Jersey side of the Lincoln or Holland Tunnel. Doing so in that much time felt like a breeze. Anything longer would have seemed like a pain. In Palm Coast, a three-minute wait at an intersection–I have in mind the Royal Palms-Town Center Boulevard intersection–can seem insufferable. Why the difference? Aren’t we a bit prickly, a bit unreasonable? (Thomas Mann wrote an 800-page novel, “The Magic Mountain,” to explore the relativity of time that Einstein did in one phrase.) But do Manhattan traffic woes invalidate Palm Coast drivers’ irritations? Not at all. We are not in Manhattan. To compare the two is as absurd as justifying American renditions to Salvadoran dungeons by saying that Salvadorans and other shitholes do it all the time. The standard is not the lowest common denominator of irritation (or injustice). It is the standard we set, the standard we choose for ourselves in our neighborhood, our town (or our country). There’s a parable about this in the Gospel According to Peter somewhere (one of the apocryphal, therefore more authentic, ones) but I’m not up for Aramaic right now.
—P.T.
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In fact, our dying is more of a concern to those who survive us than to ourselves; for as a wise man once cleverly put it, as long as we are, death is not, and when death is, we are not.
–From Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924).
Sherry says
SUPPORT THE ACLU! trump’s “Unconstitutional”. . . deport anyone I don’t like, “NO DUE PROCESS” plan is getting legal push back!
This From “The Hill” 4/22/2025:
A federal judge in Colorado ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to provide Venezuelan migrants detained there 21 days notice before deporting them under the Alien Enemies Act.
The order only applies to migrants housed within the state, but it nonetheless deals a blow to the administration, which in some cases elsewhere was providing migrants 24 hours or less notice before seeking to remove them under a law it has used to transport migrants to a prison in El Salvador.
U.S. District Court Judge Charlotte Sweeney also ordered the Trump administration to provide the notice “in a language the individual understands.”
“Whatever due process may require in this context, it does not allow removing a person to a possible life sentence without trial, in a prison known for torture and other abuse, a mere 24 hours after providing an English-only notice form (not provided to any attorney) that gives no information about the person’s right to seek judicial review, much less the process or timeline for doing so,” the ACLU wrote.
“Nor, critically, did the notice tell individuals that although they are Venezuelan, they may be removed to El Salvador.”
Tim says
The orange guy is a total moron but he is also evil. Silencing dissenters, send Americans to overseas prisons without due process, defying courts, abusing power, personal profits first, cancel research, clear cut national forests, and on and on and on….. it’s the most unamerican classless conman that ever wielded so much power.
Ray W, says
The Associated Press reported today on the upcoming 2025 Shanghai auto show, writing that “some experts view this year’s show in the sprawling industrial outskirts of Shanghai as a tipping point. Three decades after Beijing set out to build a world-class auto industry, local manufacturers account for two-thirds of sales inside China, and a growing share of global exports.”
To gain access to the Chinese vehicle market, foreign legacy car makers like Ford, GM, Volvo and BMW entered into joint ventures with “state-owned” car companies. From these joint ventures, Chinese companies learned how to build cars that can compete on the world’s stage.
While Chinese car companies still lag behind global leading car companies in internal combustion engine technology, they now “can sell EVS at roughly the same price, while also solving the problems of range and fast charging.”
According to geopolitical analyst Yanmei Xie, quoted in Japan’s financial publication, Nikkei Asia, China has engaged in a “technological paradigm shift.” Instead of China’s EVs being part of a green revolution, its EVs are now a starting point to “technological and industrial dominance.”
The AP, relying of a report from the Chinese Association of Automobile Manufacturers, writes that 31.4 million cars, buses and trucks were sold in China in 2024, up 4.5% from 2023.
Gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicle sales were down in China, but EV sales of all kinds jumped 40% from 2023 to 2024.
Stefan Sielaff, Zeekr’s vice president of global design, told the AP that Chinese EV car companies do not carry the weight of legacy like far older car manufacturers do. Zeekr, founded in 2021, now sells cars in 80 markets, including Europe.
Mr. Sielaff asserted that, lacking legacy, companies such as the one he works for can “immediately react to market demand, to customer demand, and can deliver very, very fast. … We have done most of these cars in two years. From 0 to 100 in two years.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
If it is indeed true that the world is witnessing a “paradigm shift” in car manufacturing, that would prove Ford’s CEO correct when he said that all three American legacy carmakers blindly looked backward for years instead of looking forward into the future when they set out to make EVs. He said that all three car companies lost years of research and development from the mistake.
I will write this again and again. Ford’s CEO is on record as saying America’s car industry is 10 years behind China EV industry. This “paradigm shift”, if true, will leave American carmakers behind unless they endeavor with all their resources to catch up.
EVs are now cheaper to manufacture compared to ICE-powered vehicles. They are cheaper to sell, last longer, cost less to drive, cost less to insure, cost less to maintain, and cost less to repair. So, is it no longer an issue of going green? Is it an issue of who will control the personal transportation future? Simple capitalist thought had long mandated that whenever someone builds a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to her door.
Ford’s CEO said during an interview that were Chinese EVs allowed to enter right now the U.S. automobile marketplace without tariff protection, it would be an “extinction level event” for all three of the U.S. legacy automakers.
The newly designed and built mousetrap is set. Will America stupidly put its neck in the trap?
Pogo says
@Suicide is painless
Try it now
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+beautiful+clean+coal