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Weather: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 92. Saturday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 8pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 74.
- 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:
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: He’s back! After a hiatus not of his choosing (that nightmare street construction that’s dragged on and on on South Central, in front of his law office, is to blame) Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley returns for his famous Saturday town hall, his 63rd since his election (63rd!) with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest. In this case, FlaglerLive’s usual way of snagging information (which apparently gets on Palm Coast Mayor Norris’s nerves) landed us the Town Hall agenda:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at its new location on South 2nd Street, right in front of City Hall., featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Flowers, bushes and hard to find plants. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Washington Oaks. Regular entrance fee applies: $4 per vehicle with one person aboard, $5 for vehicles with more than one person.
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: [email protected].
Peps Art Walk, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. every second and fourth Saturday, Beachfront Grille, 2444 South Oceanshore Boulevard, Flagler Beach. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Notably: I’ve been reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea again, though the word “again” is a bit–generous? Not the right word. Help me with the mot juste, the right word in this context. I did read it–devoured it, became it–about 48 years ago (the date I handwrote in the book is November 1977, must have been a birthday present) those paradisiacal afternoons in Hamlaya, our Lebanese mountain retreat, during the war. That’s the cover of the book, to the left. My actual book. But does that count anymore? I still have that wonderful Livre de Poche edition. It breaks my heart to hold it, because what I wrote on the inside flap also includes one of my mind-boggling and idiotic codes, “MM,” which I think means that it was a gift from my sweet mother. The book is in near-mint condition even though I read every page: I loathed breaking spines, and at the time I had not yet developed a mania for disfiguring books with my inane and insufferable annotations, which would earn me every firing squad from the Spanish Civil War to Pol Pot’s regime if anyone ever saw them. A decade and a half ago the Pleiade, that eighth wonder of the world, began publishing some of Verne’s works. The Pleiade is what the Library of America modeled itself after. It is France’s way of giving literature the monuments it deserves, but in ways that takes the monuments out of the museum and places them in readers’ hands, in sensual, irresistible ways. The books, uniform and impossibly gorgeous, can turn any illiterate into a zombified reader for 10 hours a day, which is what these things do to me when I hold them. The Pleiade (an imprint of Gallimard, the elite publishing house we can compare to Random House’s Knopf here) has put out five or six volumes or so of Jules Verne, each with two, three or four novels (he wrote about 80). Vingt mille lieues sous les mers appears alongside The Children of Captain Grant. Unlike my old Livre de Poche edition (pocketboook, in English), the Pleiade always gives the reader generous footnotes, introductions, notes on the text, basically a history of the novel in your hands. I find them helpful, and unobtrusive: you want to read them go to the back of the book. You don’t want to, keep reading. Anyway. The other morning I was reading the chapter where Nemo is preparing to take Aronnax on an undersea hunt. Aronnax is disbelieving and absorbed by the wonders of it, as always. Then Nemo tells him about his gun. And there, I realized to my own disbelief, was how the Taser–that electric stun gun cops love so much–was born. Here’s Gutenberg’s translation:
“But it seems to me that in this twilight, and in the midst of this
fluid, which is very dense compared with the atmosphere, shots could
not go far, nor easily prove mortal.”“Sir, on the contrary, with this gun every blow is mortal; and however
lightly the animal is touched, it falls as if struck by a thunderbolt.”“Why?”
“Because the balls sent by this gun are not ordinary balls, but little
cases of glass (invented by Leniebroek, an Austrian chemist), of which
I have a large supply. These glass cases are covered with a case of
steel, and weighted with a pellet of lead; they are real Leyden
bottles, into which the electricity is forced to a very high tension.
With the slightest shock they are discharged, and the animal, however
strong it may be, falls dead. I must tell you that these cases are size
number four, and that the charge for an ordinary gun would be ten.”“I will argue no longer,” I replied, rising from the table; “I have
nothing left me but to take my gun. At all events, I will go where you
go.”
—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.
August 2025
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
For the full calendar, go here.
It was just this sort of thinking that lay behind the Democratic-Republicans’ excitement over the undersea warfare inventions of Robert Fulton. Fulton, who spent two decades abroad between 1787 and 1806 mingling with radicals like Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, became convinced that submarines and torpedoes could revolutionize naval warfare. By being able to destroy warships “by means so new, so secret, and so incalculable,” submarines, said Fulton, would render conventional naval warfare impossible. Not knowing where the underwater attacks would come from, sailors would be demoralized and fleets would be “rendered worthless.” Without navies, nations, in particular Great Britain, would be compelled to liberalize their trade and practice the freedom of the seas that Americans had long advocated. This in turn would lead to the universal and perpetual peace that every enlightened person, but especially Americans, yearned for. Fulton built a prototype of a submarine and called it Nautilus . Although he knew his submarine was but an infant, he saw in it “an Infant hercules which at one grasp will Strangle the Serpents which poison and convulse the American Constitution.”23 Fulton returned to the United States eager to demonstrate his new invention. In 1807 he used one of his torpedoes, which were actually mines, to blow up a brig in New York Harbor, an experiment that Washington Irving’s Salmagundi mocked as the destruction of the British fleet in effigy. Nevertheless, the Republicans were excited. In a Fourth of July address in 1809 his friend and patron Joel Barlow declared that Fulton’s submarine project “carries in itself the eventual destruction of naval tyranny” and the possibility of freeing “mankind from the scourge of naval wars.”24 With this kind of support from a leading Republican intellectual and with the publication of his Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions in 1810, Fulton was invited to address the Congress and to conduct further tests of his underwater devices. The Republican Congress, despite its reputation for penny-pinching, even appropriated five thousand dollars to fund his experiments. Although Fulton had many doubters, especially in the navy and among the Federalists, Jefferson had nothing but praise for his devices. In April 1810 the former president told Fulton that he hoped that “the torpedo may go the whole length you expect of putting down navies.” Indeed, he wished the scheme to succeed “too much not to become an easy convert & to give it all my prayers & interest. . . . That the Tories should be against you is in character, because it will curtail the power of their idol, England.” Although most of Fulton’s torpedo experiments were unsuccessful, the Jeffersonian Republican dream of creating the conditions for a universal peace did not die.”
–From Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009).
Pogo says
@P.T.
“It’s not the end of the world at all,” he said. “It’s only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”
― Nevil Shute, On the Beach
“No, it wasn’t an accident, I didn’t say that. It was carefully planned, down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail. But it was a mistake.”
― John Paxton, On the Beach
“I’m glad we haven’t got newspapers now. It’s been much nicer without them.”
― Nevil Shute, On the Beach
Pogo says
@R.J. Matson (and FlaglerLive)
Your cartoon says it all. I nominate it for prominent display on the hull of Voyager III…
Explanation to the young
https://www.google.com/search?q=voyager+satellites
Ray W, says
Newsweek reports that housing prices are slowing across America.
Here are some bullet points from the article:
– The median home list price is $440,950, up 0.2% from 12 months ago.
– The median home selling price is $399,633, up 1.0% from a year ago.
– The total inventory of unsold listed homes is up 28.9% year-over-year.
– The total pending homes sales figure in down 1.6% from June of last year.
– 20.7% of all homes pending sale saw price reductions, the most for any June since 2016.
– The inventory of homes for sale is rising faster in the South and the West, and the time from listing to sale is also up in both regions. Average prices are lowering, too. In the Northeast and the Midwest, inventories are tight, and pricing remains high.
– The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 6.77%, down from 7.01% a year ago. As an aside, some months ago I looked up the average loan percentage rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage from 1983 to 2024, a 42-year span of time: 7.7%, as I recall, though it was likely slightly above 7.7% that I rounded down in my aging brain to 7.7%.
– Mortgage purchase applications are up 25% from a year ago.
– The mortgage delisting rate is up 47% over a year ago, but mortgage listings are also up 31.5% in that same time.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I recall the monthly News-Journal real estate articles from my young adult years during which years Volusia County median home prices stagnated; it lasted for more than a decade. I purchased a beachside bungalow that the seller had purchased some five years earlier at the same price and I worried whether I was paying too much. Years went by before I saw beachside home prices begin to rise.
Ray W, says
Newsweek reports that in 2003, an “executive coaching and hiring firm”, Vistage, began quarterly surveying small- and medium-sized business CEOs on their labor force plans for the coming 12 months. That’s 90 quarters of CEO survey data.
The survey results for the second quarter of 2025 were just released.
Of 1,537 CEO responses to the survey questions (to me a statistically significant number of responses), 42% of company leaders expect to increase their “employee headcount”, the lowest percentage ever gleaned from the responses. The first quarter response rate? 45%.
13% of the surveyed CEOs anticipate trimming their employee numbers over the next 12 months, the same percentage as that from the first quarter of 2025. While the trim rate remained the same as it was in the first quarter, a Vista spokesperson told the reporter that the 13% trim rate was a number seen only during the pandemic and during recessions.
17% of respondents said that business conditions had improved over the last 12 months, whereas half of the CEOs said conditions had worsened.
69% answered that “trade and tariff policies” have negatively impacted their company’s business, “either directly or indirectly.” 49% plan to increase prices during the third quarter of 2025.
From the data collected over the past 22-and-a-half years, Vistage has developed what it calls a “CEO Confidence Index.”
At the close of the fourth quarter of 2024, the index was 100.8. By the end of this year’s first quarter, the index sat at 78.5; it now is down to 77.2.
The reporter pointed out that the survey returns took place prior the July release of the monthly jobs report, a report that reflected an unexpectedly strong paychecks added number of 147,000 new jobs in June, with a concurring drop in the unemployment rate to 4.1% from 4.2%.
Quoting from an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, Cory Stahl, the reporter wrote:
“The U.S. job market continues to largely stand tall and sturdy, even as headwinds mount — but it may be a tent increasingly held up by fewer poles.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I continue to urge patience. Yes, it may be so that economic headwinds are mounting. Yes, snippets of conversations from an increasing number of economists holding that an economic downturn is coming continue to be heard, but nothing concrete can be determined from these still tiny voices.
The economy remains positive, just as it has for the past two or so years. A quarterly GDP downturn, seen in the light of businesses preordering goods prior to Liberation Day, accounts for that dip. Month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year, monthly job gains continue to surprise. Since near the end of 2010, the country has seen economic reports of job gains each and every month except for the two months of job losses that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic. That’s more than 175 months of job gains to two months of job losses. At no time in the history of government job gains statistics has there been such a positive stretch of job gains.
As an aside, and I concede that I have referred to this before, I have fond memories of a once common family happening. Having two boys, each had the duty once a week of taking the trash to the curb for pick up the next day.
Each week, I would remind each son. My younger son, when reminded, would immediately get up from what he was doing. Almost always, he would first walk over to pet one of the family dogs. Sometimes, he would then take out the trash. Sometimes he would not. Those times that he did not take out the trash, he would eventually stop petting the dog and return to what he had been doing.
I began joking that while I had said take out the trash, Robert had heard pet the dog.
I considered, and still consider, his hearing something other than what was said a perfectly human condition; it was in no way a character flaw. Perhaps it was an oppositional streak, but not to the level of an oppositional disorder and certainly not to the level of an oppositional defiant disorder.
And besides, the dog receiving the petting liked the attention.
So, it has come to the point that whenever I read about or hear of the claims of yet another member of the professional lying class that sits at the top of one of our two political parties that Biden had destroyed the American economy, I think of the many economic reports over the past few years proving that the economy was getting stronger.
Is it possible that the professional liars were seeing the same reports of a strengthening economy as I was, but they were hearing that the economy was getting weaker? Is it something as simple as a human propensity to hear what one wants to hear, even if it isn’t the truth?
Or is it an intentional act of lying to say that Biden is destroying a provable strengthening of the American economy?
Yes, I know that the modus operandi of all professional liars is to hope that their followers will internalize and then launder their lies. Perhaps to a professional liar, an intentional decision to lie is a better explanation of why the liars are lying, but there remains the possibility that the liars suffer from an oppositional streak.
Either way, as soon as certain FlaglerLive commenters like JimboXYZ and Dennis C. Rathsam read about or hear of the lies, whether intentional or opposition streak-induced, they followers begin laundering the lies on this comment page, over and over again.
Eggs? Prices went up because of a virulent outbreak of wild bird flu caused the slaughter of millions upon millions of egg-laying hens, plus a measure of distributional profiteering. Virologists reported that bird flu caused egg prices to rise. Maybe the professional liars heard bird flu and intentionally decided to lie. Maybe they misheard bird flu, but thought they heard pet the dog. Either way, they said that “Biden did it.” Either way, it was a lie, but the lies needed to be laundered. And launder the lies their followers did.
Gasoline prices at the pump? OPEC+ cuts output and crude oil prices begin to rise. Industry publications report that gas prices are up due to a supply shortage of crude oil. Maybe the professional liars read the reports and decided to intentionally lie. Maybe they read the reports but thought they heard pet the dog. Either way, they said that “Biden did it.” Either way, it was a lie, but the lies needed to be laundered. And launder the lies their followers did.
Oy, vey!