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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 91. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Friday Night: Showers and thunderstorms likely before 8pm. Mostly clear, with a low around 75. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
- 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 Florida Ethics Commission meets at 8:30 a.m. in the third-floor Courtroom, First District Court of Appeal, 2000 Drayton Drive, Tallahassee. Except for the closed-door session, the meetings are generally live on the Florida Channel. The meeting includes a determination on the ethics opinion Flagler County School Board member Lauren Ramirez requested. See: “Flagler School Board’s Lauren Ramirez Challenges Ethics Commission’s Pending Restrictions on Her Private Business” and “Ethics Opinion Recommends Restricting Flagler School Board’s Lauren Ramirez’s Business Activities in Schools.”
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today’s guest: Palm Coast City Council member Ty Miller. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
Americana: The Great Plains, starting with the cornfields of Illinois and Iowa, the rolling hills of Western Kansas, the Pacific immensity of Montana, have always seemed to me the most heart-lifting part of the country, a return to the solitary treks of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as the mind wanders from nowhere to windmills and back. I don’t know why, or couldn’t precisely explain why, I feel so touched (so much at home) in the Great Plains, the way Ian Frazier or John Steinbeck could, though they liked them for their own reasons. I like them–love them–because of their dullness, though I had to find my feelings best explained in the words of the great Yussuf, the philosopher lost to history but for Casanova immortalizing him in his memoirs. He’d met Yussuf on his first or second trip to Istanbul. They spoke of everything, then they spoke of happiness, and great plains: Yussuf said: “The happiest of men is not the most voluptuous, but the one who knows how to choose the greatest pleasures; and the greatest pleasures, I repeat, can only be those which, not stirring the passions, increase the peace of the soul. — These are the pleasures you call pure [Casanova says]. –Such is the view of a vast meadow entirely covered with grass. The green color so highly recommended by our divine prophet strikes my sight, and in that moment I feel my spirit swimming in such a delicious calm that it seems to me that I am approaching the author of nature. I feel the same peace, an equal calm, when I sit on the bank of a river, and I see the running water passing before me without ever hiding from my sight, and without its continual movement making it less clear. It represents to me the image of my life, and the tranquility that I desire for it to reach, like the water that I contemplate, the end that I do not see, and which can only be at the end of its course.”
—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
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
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
For the full calendar, go here.
The next passage in my journey is a love affair. I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it. Once, when I raptured in a violet glow given off by the Queen of the World, my father asked me why, and I thought he was crazy not to see. Of course I know now she was a mouse-haired, freckle-nosed, scabby-kneed little girl with a voice like a bat and the loving kindness of a gila monster, but then she lighted up the landscape and me. It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans. Here for the first time I heard a definite regional accent unaffected by TV-ese, a slow-paced warm speech. It seemed to me that the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana. Its people did not seem afraid of shadows in a John Birch Society sense. The calm of the mountains and the rolling grasslands had got into the inhabitants. It was hunting season when I drove through the state. The men I talked to seemed to me not moved to a riot of seasonal slaughter but simply to be going out to kill edible meat. Again my attitude may be informed by love, but it seemed to me that the towns were places to live in rather than nervous hives. People had time to pause in their occupations to undertake the passing art of neighborliness.
–From Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley (1962).
Pogo says
@P.T.
Now you’re talking — wonderful. Thank you.
Also, we made it to the start of Friday.
Laurel says
Ghislaine Maxwell said she believes Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.
As Ray W says, make of it what you will.
Ray W, says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam. for your sharing of the immortalized musings of Yussuf, whose thoughts would have been lost to history but for another person’s musings set to page.
Ray W, says
In a story headlined with the title: “Vladimir Putin desperation clear as Ukraine war impact prompts ‘1M Indians’ call”, The Daily Express reports of a statement given to reporters by the head of the Ural Chamber of Commerce, Andrey Besedin, in which statement he reported that a new Consulate General is opening in Yekaterinburg to aid in processing into Russia one million new Indian “specialists” by the end of the year, so that they can work in Russia, including the Sverdlovsk region.
Besedin said that “[a]s far as I know, by the end of the year, one million specialists from India will come to Russia, including the Sverdlovsk region.”
According to the reporter, a Russian demographer, Alexei Raksha, just announced that the Russian birthrate in the first quarter of 2025 had dropped to a low not seen in more than two centuries. Based on “preliminary data from registry offices”, some 293,000 to 294,000 births occurred across Russia during that quarter.
That low birth number, in light of a casualty count in the Ukraine thought by a number of sources to be in excess of one million men, killed or wounded, on top of “a surge of departures” from Russia, highlights an economic truth that Russia now faces a long-term demographic problem.
According to the reporter, “Russia is now grappling to secure sufficient workers to maintain its wartime economy.”
The reporter wrote that “Russian enterprises will be required to recruit the equivalent of two million employees annually over the coming five years to occupy both newly established roles and openings left by those retiring.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There exists in this country an economic truth that an economy grows better when it has access to an ample amount of labor. There are many other factors at work in a healthy economy, but there is a reason why Congress, when creating the Fed over a century ago, put in writing a mandate that the Fed, before all else, must maintain “price stability” and “full employment” in the American economy. These dual mandates, and nothing else, anchor the Fed’s statutory duty.
There also exists in this country a fever dream of political fantasy that removing workers from a strong economy that has continuously and steadily grown since the sudden and unanticipated ravages of the pandemic lost its grip, will make the economy even stronger. Economics don’t work that way. It may take time, perhaps a long time, but removing immigrants from this country when we still need them will be shown to be a fool’s errand.
Yes, if an immigrant commits what the law considers a serious crime, a crime of moral turpitude, a crime of malice, deport them. But removing those immigrants who by their actions have established them to be honest, hard-working, moral people of value to their community just because they long ago committed a minor misdemeanor named “improper entry”, a misdemeanor that is considered neither immoral nor malicious is a mistake.
In less than a year, according to accepted economic parameters, just to maintain labor equilibrium, our nation’s need for new workers has dropped from around 150,000 per month to 70,000 per month. What that means for future GDP growth is as of yet undetermined.
Fed Chair Powell is on record as stating that it remains possible for the American economy to grow its way out of the current debt problem, but his idea of growth relies on a long-term and consistently high GDP rate that is above the inflation rate, plus an effort to bring the deficit under control.
Any policy that undermines Powell’s narrow path toward emergence from the shadow of our debt?
Ray W, says
Reuters reports that BYD, which began exporting vehicles into Pakistan this past March, will open a jointly owned assembly plant in Pakistan, near Karachi, with deliveries available by July or August of next year. BYD’s partner, Mega Motor Company, is a subsidiary of the Pakistan utility company, Hub Power.
Assembly plants differ from manufacturing plants in that most of the components and parts of a vehicle are manufactured elsewhere and shipped or transported to the plant for final assembly. Aircraft manufacturers have been using this process for decades. A Boeing airliner might have a cockpit manufactured in France that is shipped for final assembly in Seattle. During WWII, Liberty ships were built in this manner. An engine room might be built in Illinois and when completed be shipped by barge down the Mississippi to New Orleans where the engine room would be loaded on a freighter and shipped via the Panama Canal to its final assembly point in Los Angeles.
Assembly capacity for the plant is planned at 25,000 units per year.
Sales are to be limited to Pakistan, but if sufficient demand arises, the plant can be expanded for export to neighboring countries that utilize right-hand drive vehicles.
Said Danish Khalik, vice president of sales and strategy at BYD Pakistan: “We do not foresee excess capacity in our system as demand in Pakistan will catch up.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Thailand, Pakistan, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Hungary, and in perhaps other countries, BYD is building or expanding EV factories all over the world.
Everywhere BYD goes, legacy automakers soon see a loss of market share.
But in America, Chinese EVs carry a 100% tariff, which is in reality an embargo, not a tariff.
I perceive the wisdom of tariffs whenever they are sharply focused on a narrow sector of the economy.
In the early 80s, almost wrecked by years of neglect by its owner, AFM, Harley management bought the company out of AMF control, but they needed time to finish developing its new “Evolution” engine. The Reagan administration imposed a three-year 25% tariff on all Japanese-made motorcycles that displaced more that 700cc’s. I don’t remember if the tariff applied to BMW or other European or British motorcycle makers.
To me, this narrowly tailored and short-term tariff accomplished exactly what was intended, i.e., sufficient time for Harley to transition to a new engine for its products. Harley emerged stronger than it was and it prospered for decades.
On the other hand, in the 60s, after European countries blocked export of American chicken products into their countries, the U.S. government imposed what today is known as the “chicken tax.” For some 60 years now, all foreign made pickup trucks have had what was in the beginning a retaliatory tariff of 25%. This chicken tax has been perhaps the greatest engine for profit for the American Big Three carmakers, as they can sell trucks at a far higher price than they could had the tariff ended after a few years.
Economists know that a well-crafted tariff policy can have benefits and detractions that, on the whole, work. But the opposite can be true, too.
This is why I am cautious in how I characterize the Trump administration’s tariff policy. It changes far too often, promising this, delaying that and retracting whatever. No business owner can predict with any certainty what will happen in the long term.
Trends are emerging, but political obfuscation distorts the economic picture.
The definition of trade deal has changed. It used to be that trade deals took years to negotiate, involving hundreds of thousands of products, with individualized product quotas and tariffs. NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, and others took years before they were ready for signatures. Today, a trade deal is nothing more than a unilateral announcement by letter of one blanket tariff rate on an entire country’s exports.
Ray W, says
Electrek reports that for the first time BYD is accepting preorders for a $12,000 budget vehicle in a foreign country, in this instance Indonesia.
The Atto 1 comes with a 30.08 kWh “Blade” lithium-ferrous-phosphate battery, good for up to 185 miles of travel; it is comparable in size to the Kia Picanto or the Toyota Yaris.
BYD projects growth in total Indonesian sales of 500,000 units per year by 2030, including sales of its other EV models.
EV market share in Indonesia has doubled since 2022 to 10%. Toyota plans to open an EV factory in Indonesia before the end of this year.
Make of this what you will.
Sherry says
Is this what you voted for Maga. . . really. . . cruelly punishing little leaguers?
This from Politico:
A Venezuelan Little League baseball team will not be allowed to participate in a championship tournament because the team was denied travel visas to the U.S.
Little League International said on Friday the Cacique Mara Little League team from Maracaibo, Venezuela will not participate in the Senior League Baseball World Series in South Carolina this year, despite qualifying for the tournament, after being unable to obtain visas.
Venezuela is among the countries the Trump administration has placed restrictions on travel to the U.S.
The tournament, which starts Saturday, features 13- to 16-year-old baseball players from the U.S. and around the world competing in Easley, South Carolina.
Little League International called the news “extremely disappointing, especially to these young athletes” in a statement to POLITICO.
A White House spokesperson directed a request for comment to the State Department. Representatives for the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Little League International said the Santa Maria de Aguayo Little League team from Victoria, Mexico, who finished in second place in the Latin America qualifiers behind the Venezuelan team, will replace them.