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Weather: A chance of showers before 11am, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms between 11am and 2pm, then showers and possibly a thunderstorm after 2pm. High near 90. Light north wind becoming northeast 5 to 10 mph in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 16 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. Thursday Night: Showers and possibly a thunderstorm before 8pm, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms after 8pm. Low around 76. Chance of precipitation is 80%.
- 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:
Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook here and the participation agreement here.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library, 11 to 11:30 a.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach. It’s where the wild things are: Hop on for stories and songs with Miss Doris.
Notably: I was looking for a picture to illustrate an upcoming Conversation piece on an Aristotelian take on leisure. The picture the Conversation was providing was a stock image of a woman gazing out with that wistful look of a stereotypical Rousseau at a natural setting, a bit of a cliché (incidentally, un cliché, the French word, also means “photograph”). I looked in my own image library and stumbled on that picture above, which I took in Death Valley a few years ago. We were driving by. I saw the scene. It was so absurd, so sublime, that we stopped and I asked the woman if I could take her picture. She gave permission. I did not want to intrude further so I didn’t ask what she was doing there, though the date of the picture hints at the occasion, as does the potted tree–a potted tree in Death Valley? It was Christmas Day. That was the Christmas Cheryl Luka and I were in Vegas for a chess tournament Luka had entered. We’d gone a few days early to take these trips to Death Valley and elsewhere, and to spend Christmas there. That scene proved one of the great gifts of that day’s particular drive, as Death Valley always is–a gift to the senses and to the soul, especially when it’s not 110 degrees. It was cold that morning by the salt flats, which from a certain angle shimmered like a billion Christmas lights under a sky so limpid it was almost crisp enough to make you wonder: what took Christ to choose Bethlehem when he could have cradled in Death Valley–preferably not in the cabin Charles Manson called home for a while: he was arrested in Death Valley–and probably spared us a great deal of trouble, billion-year-old geology being so much less finicky than hot shot Levantines born, in comparison, yesterday.
—P.T.
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
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
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
Overdose Awareness Day Walk Over Flagler Beach Bridge
For the full calendar, go here.
After about a mile the canyon opened out, and I could see farther. The sun lit the top of one ridge, and then slid to the next. I passed greenery — mesquite trees, scrubby willows — and thumb-shaped cacti poking from the canyon walls. In the crook of a switchback was a spring, upwelling and dark-tinted among creepers and weeds. After another few miles the day became hot. The sun, now overhead, filled the widened canyon with a fierce brightness unmarred by any shade. The silence remained vast. A raven glided over a ridge, and I thought of the Manson family members, some of them young women with babies, hiking up this track barefoot back in 1969. Then I began to think about 1969 in general, and what an unhinged year it was, and how the insane expression in Charles Manson’s eyes in that photograph of him on the cover of Life magazine seemed an apt image for that time. I had begun to give myself the creeps when I was distracted by the sound of an engine, and then by the sight of a bright-red ATV coming up the road. It stopped beside me, and its window rolled down. In it were Scott and Marv, businessmen from suburban Chicago, who were tooling around the desert in Marv’s high-tech, diesel-powered, tanklike, very expensive Hummer while their wives played blackjack in Vegas. They were looking for Manson’s hideout too. They had read about it in a guidebook. They offered me a ride, and I hopped in.
–From Ian Frazier’s “Desert Hideaway,” The Atlantic, February 2000.
Pogo says
Doom says
The new horse of the apocalypse should be “misinformation “
Pierre Tristam says
Damn right. Starting with IDF propaganda.
Sherry says
Right On Pierre! The horrific Netanyahu “Genocide” in Gaza is a human abomination! Netanyahu should be in jail, and then burn in hell!
BillC says
If anyone resembles Anton Chigurh from Old Country for Old Men it is Netanyahu.
Pogo says
@R. Porky Fine
… announces improved employment opportunities for his family and in-laws:
Duh glad tidings
https://fineforms.house.gov/news/email/show.aspx?ID=KXD5QN4I7LERQ
Ray W, says
It’s pretty clear that a number of FlaglerLive commenters lack the foundation of knowledge necessary for an understanding that the national inflation rate is not going down right now. I am not saying that inflation is rising, but the most recent month’s figure is not going down.
I looked for a site that tracks the historical U.S. inflation rate. I found one that calls itself CPI INFLATION CALCULATOR. One of its links takes one to an annual inflation rate table dating from 1913.
In prior comments posted to FlaglerLive, I repeatedly base inflation figures dating from 1983, because that was the first year in over 15 years that saw a return to a more normal annual inflation rate. In 1980, inflation hit a high 0f 13.5% for the yer. 1981, the first year of the Reagan administration, saw an inflation rate of 10.3%. 1982 was 6.2%. The first year of a more normal inflation rate was 1983, at 3.2%.
That 15-year term of higher inflation from 1968 to 1982 spawned the term “stagflation”, as not only did higher than normal inflation rule during those years, but there also were on and off periods of declining job numbers.
Fed Chair Powell speaks of a span of years when the annual inflation rate was consistently below the nation’s GDP growth rate, a time when the American economy was powering its way out of a then-comparatively high debt to GDP ratio. That period of time started just after the Great Recession. From 2009 to 2016, the nation saw annual inflation rates of:
2009: -0.4%
2010: 1.6%
2011: 3.2%
2012: 2.1%
2013: 1.5%
2014: 1.6%
2015: 0.7%
2016: 0.2%
Coincidentally, that eight-year span was a time that a number of today’s FlaglerLive commenters insist that former President Obama was destroying the American economy.
President Trump’s first three years in office saw nearly as good a set of inflation numbers (2020 cannot be included because of the pandemic throwing everything out of kilter). His administration saw inflation figures of 2.1%, 1.9% and 2.3% from 2017-19.
After President Trump dumped $2.9 trillion into the demand side of the American economy, when the supply side was snarled with disruptions, inflation began to rise. When former President Biden dumped another $3 trillion into the demand side of the American economy, when the supply side was still working out the supply side snarls, inflation rose even faster. During that time, the Fed was injecting $3.0 trillion of credit into the lending side of the American economy, and the Fed was lowering the lending rate to zero. Predictably, inflation rose even faster.
In 2021, the annual inflation rate was 4.7%. In 2022, it jumped to 8.4%. In 2023, it fell back to 4.5%.
In 2024, the monthly inflation rate kept dropping, hitting a low of -0.1% in June. The monthly inflation rate saw a string of six straight months at 0.2% or less, starting in May. The more important annual inflation rate began dropping rapidly, from 3.3% year-over-year in May to 2.4% in September.
Between September and October of 2024, the Fed cut the lending rate by a full point. Predictably, the inflation rate began to rise. November saw a 0.3% rate rise and December saw a 0.4% rate rise. The annual inflation rate climbed back up to 3.0% from the 2.4% that it was at in September.
The Fed announced that it was going to pause future rate cuts.
In 2025, the inflation rate numbers have been pretty good, but June saw a monthly rate rise of 0.3%. Right now, for the 12 months leading through June, the year-over-year inflation rate sits at 2.7%, significantly above the Fed’s target rate of 2.0%. Remember, the good and less good months take 12 months to cycle through the annual inflation rate indicator.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
It seems fairly clear that when the year-over-year inflation rate had dropped to 2.4% in September 2024, and when the monthly inflation rate had dropped into a negative number in June 2024, the Fed responded by cutting rates three times in three months. The inflation rate almost immediately kicked up higher and the Fed has refrained ever since from cutting rates. Importantly, the Fed hasn’t raised rates, either.
Talking head after talking head claims that they have all the answers. Not me. For months now, I have cautioned against cutting rates. Too much noise from all across the economy. Some of the talking heads say Fed Chair Powell needs to step down, so Trump can replace him with a more pliable economist. Others say Powell needs to be fired, so Trump can replace him with a more pliable economist. Very few of these talking heads refer to the fact that the Fed does not alter lending rates unless a majority of the 12-member FOMC votes to alter the lending rates. Last month, two of the 12 members voted to lower lending rates. Replacing Powell with a more pliable economist would mean that three of the 12 members would then vote to lower lending rates, all other things being equal. What, then, is the advantage to replacing Fed Chair Powell? Where are the other four votes going to come from?
Ray W, says
Business Insider reports that due to a lack of more modern ship repair capacity in the United States, the US Navy just hired a South Korean shipyard owned by HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co to start work in September on repairs to the USNS Alan Shepard, with the possibility of future cooperation between the Navy and other South Korean shipyards. The work should be completed by November.
This is not a first. A different South Korean shipyard recently worked on the USNS Yukon. The USNS Wally Schirra was also repaired in a South Korean shipyard.
The latest contract was let under a new American initiative, called MASGA, or Make American Shipbuilding Great Again. There is to be a $150 billion partnership between the Navy and South Korean shipbuilders. The deal, proposed by South Korean officials during recent tariff negotiations, will help South Korea build new shipyards, train workers, and assist with Navy ship maintenance. The Navy is on record as hoping that South Korean shipbuilders will invest in upgrades to U.S. shipyards.
According to the reporter, in 2024, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro visited a South Korean shipyard. He was impressed by what he saw. During the trip, “he encouraged South Korean companies to invest in commercial and naval shipbuilding facilities in the US, as many were ‘largely intact and dormant’ and ‘ripe for redevelopment.'”
Per the reporter, “[i]n the MASGA proposal, South Korea’s top shipbuilders — HD Hyundai, Hanwha Ocean, and Samsung Heavy Industries — agreed to cooperate on exploring how to bolster America’s industry.”
In America, wrote the reporter, “[t]here are backlogs in maintenance, and major shipbuilding programs have faced significant delays due to a range of factors, such as workforce issues, limited shipyard capacity, supply chain disruptions, and logistics and timeline problems.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
The Washington Post devoted an article to the history of the orange juice industry and the current state of American orange juice production.
20 years ago, Americans averaged drinking six gallons of OJ per year. Today, the figure has dropped by almost 50%. Meanwhile, over that same time period, American juice production has dropped by 92%. Two-thirds of the state’s orange grove acreage now longer grows oranges.
In that same 20-year timeframe, a bacterial disease carried by the Asian citrus psyllid, called citrus greening, a disease that can kill orange trees, was discovered; it has spread throughout the state.
More recently, a series of hurricanes have hit the state. 2024’s Hurricane Milton destroyed an estimated 20% of the orange crop. Droughts and flooding have had their own impacts on crop yield.
Ten years ago, a 16-oz container of OJ concentrate sold for $2.70. Now, the same container commands more than $4.50.
For decades, federal law defined orange juice as a liquid containing a minimum level of 10.5% dissolved solids (mostly sugars) content. The Food and Drug Administration recently redefined orange juice as requiring no less than 10% dissolved solids.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
According to Newsweek, two Oxford Economics economists prepared a report based on demographic trends for the future of the Chinese economy. The conclusions set out in the report “roughly align” is a working paper published last November by the International Monetary Fund.
Here are some bullet points from the report:
– In 2024, the birthrate of Chinese women dropped to an estimated 1.2 births per woman (replacement rate is considered 2.1 births per woman).
– “Output growth”, a measure different from GDP growth, measures “the maximum pace of expansion that can be achieved without triggering inflation;” it is expected to fall sharply over the coming decades, “because of a shrinking workforce and slowing productivity gains.”
– Output growth in China is expected to drop to just above 2% per year by the 2050s as the demographics of the society change.
– China’s “shrinking labor force” is expected to reduce output growth by 1% per year.
– China’s “old-age dependency ratio”, meaning the number of people 65 and older relative to the 15-64 working age population, was 21% in 2024, up 8% since 2013, when China’s working age population peaked. A continuing rise in the “old-age dependency ratio” will strain China’s social safety net, as more and more costs are placed on an ever-shrinking worker base. In time, China will join Japan and South Korea as a “super-aged society.”
– In a most-optimistic demographic scenario used in a study published by Chengdu University researchers, with an assumption that China’s fertility rate will, instead of continuing to fall, rise to 1.31 births per woman, the “old-age dependency ratio” will rise from today’s 21% to 36% by 2084. In the least optimistic scenario, more than half of China’s population will by 65 and above by the end of the century.
According to an American economics commentator:
“China’s dependency ratio in 2030 will still be as good as Japan’s at the height of its economic miracle. … Around 2050, things start to look worse. China’s big Millennial generation will begin to age out of the workforce, and no large young cohort will be coming up to replace them.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
CNN just published an article about Japan’s “precipitous” population decline.
– In 2009, Japan’s population was 126.6 million. After 16 straight years of decline, the population in 2024 was 120 million.
– In 2024, 687,689 births were recorded, the lowest number since 1968, against nearly 1.6 million deaths. In 2024 alone, Japan’s population declined by 908,574 native-born persons.
– Housing and childbirth subsidies, plus paternal parental leave, have not worked to increase the birthrate.
– Japan’s 15-64 working age population now is down to 59% of the total population, well below the worldwide average of 65%. The elderly, those over the age of 65, comprise nearly 30% of the overall population.
– Should, somehow, Japan reverse its 50-year history of fertility decline, it will take decades to better balance the now-unbalanced young-old ratio.
– A different solution would be for Japan to “welcome” more immigrants, something the ethnically homogenous society is not socially able to easily do. Current immigrants and mixed ethnicity Japanese nationals have long complained of xenophobia, racism and discrimination. But Japan is trying. Last year saw a 10% rise in the foreign-born, to 3.6 million people.
– “According to government models, last revised in 2023, “the pace of population decline is expected to slow down slightly” in 2070, after the native-born population figure drops by a further 30%.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Japan’s economy has stagnated in both wages and economic growth since the early 90’s, when what is now called the “lost decade” took place after the commercial real estate bubble in Tokyo burst in the late 1980s. Xenophobic Japan, long resistant to any form of immigration, can innovate, but innovation is but one part of GDP growth. For full GDP growth, a nation needs workforce growth. It is a simple as that. Japan has not had native-born population growth for decades and it shows.
Ray W, says
According to a Seeking Alpha story, Trinidad & Tobago is set to sign an agreement with Exxon Mobile to permit the company to explore seven “blocks” for oil and gas reserves in an “ultra-deepwater” (2k to 3k meters deep) area just northwest of Exxon Mobile’s successful exploration in the Stabroek block off the coast of Guyana that promises a ultimate yield of 11 billion barrels of oil.
Make of this what you will.
NJ says
The “GHOST”of Himmler is in the Heartless Soul of Bibi who will be arrested for his War Crimes! STOP the Shipment of America’s Weapon Systems NOW and there will be lasting PEACE in Gaza and Israel . Israel is NOT America’ Ally and they will )NEVER will be as long as they consider themselves as God’s Chosen People ( aka the “Master Race”)! But wait, didn’t someone in Germany in the mid 1930s talk about God’s Chosen People and the “RIGHT” of God’s Chosen People (Master Race) To CRUSH and DESTROY the” weaker tribes” of theWorld!
Ray W, says
Per a July 2nd release, St. Louis Fed researchers titled a report “Age Dependency Ratio: Older Dependents to Working Age Population for the United States”
In 1960, the ratio of the elderly (over age 64) to the working age population (15-64) was 14.74277 dependents per 100 workers.
In 1970, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 15.74353 dependents per 100 workers.
In 1980, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 16.64993 dependents per 100 workers.
In 1990, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 18.61002 dependents per 100 workers.
In 2000, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 18.28309 per 100 workers.
In 2010, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 19.04186 per 100 workers.
In 2020, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 24.52408 per 100 workers.
In 2024, the ratio of the elderly to the working age population was 27,69057 per 100 workers.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Is it reasonable for one to argue that America has a rapidly aging populace?
It is not secret that our native-born population has stagnated over the past five years, yet as more and more Baby Boomers retire out of the working age category, there are more and more of the elderly depending on fewer and fewer of the workers.
I know that it is politically popular in certain circles to believe that immigrants do not benefit our society, but the demographic truth is unalterable. We need immigrants today and we will continue to need them in the future if we want to grow our economy out of the debt that we have so unwisely accumulated and are so unwisely continuing to accumulate.
I argue the Fed Chair Powell is right, perhaps if only hopefully so, when he says that it is not too late for us to grow ourselves out of our debt problem, but there may soon come a time when our debt becomes “unsustainable.” If he is right, removing the young able immigrants living among us is exactly to opposite of what we need to do.
Yes, if an immigrant regardless of documentation commits a crime of moral turpitude, or a felony, or a crime of violence, remove them.