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Weather: Showers and possibly a thunderstorm. High near 82. Windy, with an east wind 16 to 20 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%.
Saturday Night: Showers and possibly a thunderstorm. Low around 72. Breezy. 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:
The Creekside Music and Arts Festival, at Princess Place Preserve is postponed to February 7 and 8. See: “Creekside Music and Arts Festival Set for Weekend Is Postponed to February as Precaution Against Storms.”
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.
The Flagler Beach All Stars hold their monthly beach clean-up starting at 9 a.m. in front of the Flagler Beach pier. All volunteers welcome.
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone: Every first Saturday we invite new residents out to learn everything about Flagler County at Cornerstone Center, 608 E. Moody Blvd, Bunnell, 1 to 2:30 p.m. We have a great time going over dog friendly beaches and parks, local social clubs you can be a part of as well as local favorite restaurants.
‘Avenue Q,’ at City Repertory Theatre, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m., 160 Cypress Point Parkway (City Marketplace, Suite B207), Palm Coast. Celebrate CRT’s 15th season with the Tony Award-winning hit Avenue Q! This laugh-out-loud musical blends puppetry, pop culture, and catchy songs to explore adulthood, love, and finding purpose. Don’t miss this unforgettable, irreverent journey through the ups and downs of post-college life—CRT-style. Tickets are $32.70 for adults, $17.17 for students (including ticketing fees). Book here.
‘Nunsense,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre, Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m. except on Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets are $37.55 per person. Book here. Definitely “habit-forming”, this riotous show takes us through a fundraiser organized by the Little Sisters of Hoboken. They are trying to raise money to bury one of their sisters who was accidentally poisoned by the convent cook, Sister Julia (Child of God). Originating as a line of greeting cards, Goggin expanded the concept into a full musical that became the second-longest off-Broadway run in history.
‘Sweeney Todd’ at Athens Theatre, 124 North Florida Avenue, DeLand, Thursday, Friday and Saturday a 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets: Preferred $37 (Row A-F, Orchestra & CC-DD Center Balcony), Adult $32 – Senior $28, Student/Child $12. A $5.00 per ticket Processing charge is added to all purchases. Book here. Prepare for a dark journey through the sinister streets of Victorian London with Sweeney Todd. Follow the vengeful barber as he seeks justice, aided by the cunning Mrs. Lovett and her rather… unique meat-pie business. Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece weaves a twisted tale of love, revenge, and morality, brought to life by hauntingly beautiful music. Equal parts chilling and captivating, Sweeney Todd will leave you spellbound—and maybe a bit wary of your next shave…
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.
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: Americans for Prosperity, the paving company that built the road to American fascism, has an annual “Defending the American Dream” summit in Washington, a sort of AIPAC-like event where any right-wing or Republican candidate must pay tribute if the candidate is to expect to have any money. Funny. In 1978 Jimmy Carter held a tree-planting ceremony on the White House grounds, a cedar-planting eremony in honor of Lebanon. “This afternoon we are participating in a ceremony that has both enjoyable connotations and, I think, very strong historical and symbolic significance,” Carter said. “In the Bible, the Cedars of Lebanon are mentioned more than 60 times, and there are on the hills near Beirut trees that have been living there for more than 2,500 years, symbols of beauty and strength of an ancient and proud heritage and of the symbolism of peace and a commitment to historical development.” Another speaker atg the ceremony invoked the America dream: “This cedar, which is so much celebrated in Scripture, has become a symbol of strength and timelessness. Today this cedar, which provides so much inspiration to us as Americans, is a symbol of hope to free people everywhere. We plant this tree in the fertile soil of our land and hope that it takes root in its adopted country as did our forefathers. Let it be a constant reminder of their success in becoming part of the American dream. Let it be a constant remembrance of the traditional ties between the United States and Lebanon, and let it be a living memorial that righteousness and justice in the pursuit of human rights are indeed enduring virtues.” Then again, according to David Halbertsam’s Fifties, Poppy Cannon, a food writer of that period, wrote in 1953 that the can opener was the key to the American Dream. You see where this is going. It’s why, as Jim Cullen wrote in The American Dream, his “short history of an idea that shaped a nation” (2003), the American Dream “becomes a kind of lingua franca, an idiom that everyone–from corporate executive to hip-hop artists–can presumably understand.” But that’s because the idea has no definition. It is its own palimpsest. Or, as Potter Stewart might say, you know it when you see it. But is it still alive? Statista: “U.S. adults are losing faith in the American Dream. At least, that’s what a poll by ABC News and Ipsos says, conducted in early January 2024. Where an average of 50 percent of U.S. adults aged 18 and up said they believe the American dream still holds true in 2010, that figure had nearly halved to just 27 percent by last year. Meanwhile, 18 percent of respondents in 2024 said it never held true, up from just four percent in 2010. Young adults have seen the biggest drop in belief (-35 p.p.). Where 18 to 29 year olds had been the most hopeful about the idea that anyone can make it in America if they work hard enough, now the group has the highest share of nonbelievers, or at least skeptics. The age bracket of 30 to 64 year olds have become similarly disenchanted, while adults aged 65 and older were more likely to still believe the American dream holds true at 41 percent. According to the poll, around one in two U.S. adults today (52 percent) think that the American dream is a heyday of the past – that it once held true but no longer does.” Who can blame them? The myth deserves its eulogy.
—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.
October 2025
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
‘The 39 Steps,’ at the Daytona Playhouse
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
However variegated its applications-which include the freedom to commit as well as freedom from commitment-all notions of freedom rest on a sense of agency, the idea that individuals have control over the course of their lives. Agency, in turn, lies at the very core of the American Dream, the bedrock premise upon which all else depends. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, the Dream assumes that one can advance confidently in the direction of one’s dreams to live out an imagined life. One of the greatest ironies-perhaps the greatest-of the American Dream is that its foundations were laid by people who specifically rejected a belief that they did have control over their destinies. In its broadest sense, you might say that the narrative arc of this book begins with people who denied their efforts could affect their fates, moves through successors who later declared independence to get that chance, to heirs who elaborated a gospel of self-help promising they could shape their fates with effort, and ends with people who long to achieve dreams without having to make any effort at all. This is, of course, a simplification, in part because all these types have been around at every point in the last four hundred years. But such an encapsulation does suggest the changing tenor of national life, and suggests too the variety, quantitative as well as qualitative, that has marked the history of the American Dream. I hope it also suggests the role a sense of humility can play in grappling with an idea that seems to envelop us as unmistakably as the air we breathe.
–From the introduction to Jim Cullen’s The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003).
Barbara Revels says
The believe Creekside has been canceled.
R.S. says
Love the political caricature! That’s exactly how it came across to foreign diplomats.
Ray W. says
Based on a story published on August 15th, it appears that CATL’s new sodium-ion battery technology (about which I have already commented), which the company calls NAXTRA, has reached another manufacturing milestone, along with a story about one other set of battery improvements.
Here are some bullet points from the story:
– CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, recently completed a new sodium-ion (salt) battery assembly factory in Fujian province, China. The company is ramping up to full mass-production. BYD and Chery will be the first EV companies to offer the new NAXTRA battery to customers, as early as late this year.
– Sodium carbonate costs $200 per ton. Lithium carbonate costs $15,000 per ton. The NAXTRA battery uses no lithium in its manufacture.
– The batteries offer an energy storage capacity of between 120-160 Wh/kg, a figure comparable with current lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries.
– The NAXTRA batteries provide 500 kilometers (310 miles) of range and can be recharged 10,000 times.
– Even after 3.6 million miles of use, the NAXTRA salt batteries retain 85% of their original energy storage capacity.
– At temperatures as low as -30 degrees Celsius, the batteries retain 93% of their usable power.
– The manufacturing cost per kWh of energy storage is claimed to be $40, roughly 20% less than what it now costs to manufacture a comparable lithium-ferrous-phosphate (LFP) battery, though the cost to manufacture LFP batteries continues to drop.
– The second of the battery types is called the Freevoy Dual-Power battery, which comes in three types of battery chemistries, with each dual chemistry combination providing its own engineering answer to a different yet common battery problem. These batteries combine separate battery chemistries to take advantage of the best characteristics of each unique chemistry:
1. CATL’s Sodium-LFP design combines salt’s cold weather advantages with LFP’s slightly greater range.
2. CATL makes an LFP-LFP Dual Power battery that enables faster charging and greater range, said to near 600 miles per charge.
3. A third dual power battery chemistry combines NCM (liquid-state lithium-ion)-LFP/NCM-NCM Dual Power chemistries into a battery that provides a fast charging rate and an additional power discharge when the battery reserve is depleted even at lower temperatures, and with an even longer range said to approach 1000 miles per charge.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Ford’s CEO continues to sound the alarm about how far American legacy car companies are falling behind the Chinese car companies. He repeatedly talks of how Ford’s leadership team looked backwards for several years, before he ordered a complete about-face.
Many writers assert that gas engine and transmission manufacturing costs are comparable to battery and motor manufacturing costs when battery costs hit the $100 per kilowatt-hour of energy storage. If that is true, then if the new sodium-ion batteries can be built at a cost $40 per kW-hour, then battery manufacturing costs are significantly less expensive than gas engine manufacturing costs.
Some experts assert that battery-powered cars were more popular than gas-powered cars up to around 1900. At that time, development of gas-powered cars began to outstrip development of battery-powered cars. We are seeing the reverse coming to the fore today.
There are people who look backwards. Others live in the present. The future is reserved for those CEOs and engineers who can see the possibilities on offer and act upon them.
Nearly 20 years ago, far-sighted American university researchers developed and patented LFP batteries. An American factory was built to manufacture the batteries, but backwards-looking car executives could not see their future. The battery factory failed and the patents were sold to a Chinese company for pennies on the dollar. LFP battery chemistries were improved by Chinese engineers to the extent that American car companies are now paying Chinese manufacturers to make their EV batteries for them.
American engineers and researchers knew about the potential of sodium-ion batteries, but did nothing in that sphere of research and development. Chinese companies took advantage of our indifference. American car companies may soon be paying Chinese companies for these salt batteries.
Battery manufacturing costs keep dropping. Reliably keeps improving. Charging times keep falling. Range keeps rising. Recharge cycles keep expanding. Does any FlaglerLive reader think it reasonable to believe that these advances will suddenly stop?
Right now, CATL is early in the process of selling a salt battery that can recharge 10,000 times before its energy retention rate drops to 85% of its original rate. Even at a maximum of 310 miles per charge when new, CATL’s salt batteries can be expected to last up to and perhaps more than 2.5 million miles.
The latest gas-powered engines convert 42% of the energy contained in gasoline into usable power. The best of the many coal-powered electricity plants around the world converts almost 47% of the energy in the coal they consume into usable power. Experimental gas turbines power plants convert under ideal conditions more than 66% of the energy in natural gas into usable power. The latest generation of electric motors convert 98% of the electricity they use into usable power.
Twenty years ago, solar panels were unable to convert much more that 10% of the sun’s energy into usable power. Now, it is common for solar panels to convert 20% of the sun’s energy into usable power. There are prototype solar panels (with limited lifespan) that convert 34% of the sun’s energy into usable power.
This is the future. What is possible in today’s EVs was simply impossible five years ago. Billions and billions of dollars are being spent to improve EVs. There is no reason to believe that EV enhancements will suddenly stop.
Is it reasonable to argue that the future belongs to EVs and not to gas-powered vehicles? Is it reasonable to argue that a great transition is underway all over the world? Is it reasonable to argue that the wealth of the automobile industry will flow to those who best foretell the future?
Ray W. says
Curious, I looked up the government mileage rating for Ford’s Mach-E: 101 MPG-e! The Mach-E GT has a rating of 90 MPG-e.
Ray W. says
I have to admit I am confused.
The BBC reports that an “Alien Medicaid eligibility” provision in current law that is to take effect in October 2026 will provide Medicaid coverage to lawfully admitted permanent immigrant residents. Those covered will be victims of trafficking, victims of domestic violence and “lawfully present refugees”, plus a few other minor categories of lawful immigrants.
It is reported that congressional Republicans want to cut that future funding.
It is reported that congressional Democrats are holding out for an extension of that source of funding, among other holdouts to extend other sources of health care funding for millions of naturalized and native-born Americans.
A Kaiser Family Foundation study predicts that 1.4 million documented immigrants will lose ACA coverage under the provisions of the Big Beautiful Bill, should Republicans prevail in the shutdown.
It seems pretty clear to me.
Republican leaders seek to reign in certain types of health care funding and Democratic leaders seek to extend those sources of funding. Since the two parties cannot agree on this point, the government has been shut down. Each party claims that the other other party is responsible for the shutdown.
As for the undocumented, according to the reporter, the only healthcare benefits they can receive under current law come from a 1986 Act that authorizes payments to hospitals for ER care, regardless of a patient’s immigration status. The story carries no mention of any effort to cut funding for the 1986 Act.
So why are both President Trump and Vice President Vance on record as saying that Democrats are shutting down the federal government in order to provide healthcare benefits for the undocumented?
This argument makes no sense to me.
If it is illegal under current law to provide healthcare benefits to the undocumented, except when they present to emergency rooms, and if congressional Democrats are asking that existing healthcare funding be extended to immigrants who lawfully reside in the country, alongside requests to extend healthcare benefits to Americans, then it seems stupid to me for anyone to lie about it. Unless Democratic legislative leaders have filed bills seeking to expand medical coverage for the undocumented, then they can’t be shutting down the government for that reason. Such easily proven lies beg credulity for those who lie about it.
Maybe someone can point out whether one or more Democratic-sponsored proposals to add legislation to cover the undocumented exist that the reporter missed.
My longstanding point remains unchanged. If someone has to lie in order to support a position, it seems reasonable to conclude that the liar’s position is too weak to be carried by the truth.
Ray W. says
Business Insider reports that earlier this week, Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, commented during a podcast interview that he is trying to reinvent Ford’s manufacturing processes to cut waste by adopting a Japanese manufacturing process he learned when working for Toyota called “Gemba”, also known in Japanese as “genchi genbutsu”. Translated these terms mean “go and see with your own eyes.”
Mr. Farley explained:
“Before you make a big decision, … you have to go and see the real problem — where the waste is.”
As an example, Mr. Farley talked of Ford redesigning a Mustang Mach-E wiring loom, also known as a wiring harness, in order to save 70 pounds of wiring weight for each car. Ford was aware that Tesla’s Model Y had a wiring loom that saved that much weight. So, Ford’s leadership went to the engineers and to the assembly lines to see where the weight could be saved. Saving 70 pounds meant a $200 savings per Mach-E, because the car could get by with a smaller battery.
Likewise, Ford designers learned that the Tesla Model Y used one-third of the fasteners that Ford’s engineers had designed into the Mach-E. Ford, at Mr. Farley’s insistence, sought an “elegantly” simple redesign to reduce the number of fasteners it would use in the Mach-E, despite resistance from Ford’s designers and engineers.
Such design differences motivated Mr. Farley to overrule his designers and engineers and change the way Ford’s Mach-E was built, but only after he had personally reviewed the manufacturing processes. He said: “I can’t put the company’s future at risk by making people happy. I have to do the right thing.”
Ray W. says
I hope this interests baseball fans.
An Interesting Engineering story holds that aerodynamic principles behind curve balls, known as the Magnus effect, can be applied to seagoing freighters to save as much as 12% on fuel needs.
The Magnus effect holds that a spinning baseball means that faster side of the baseball as it travels to the plate will create a high pressure zone and the slower side of the baseball will experience a low pressure zone. These two forces make a baseball move in flight.
So engineers designed spinning “rotor sails” standing 35 meters tall, with a 16 foot diameter. Four such rotors were fitted to the deck of a freighter. The rotors can be tilted to aid onloading and offloading of freight.
The involved freighter will service a Brazilian mining company by traveling a standard route between Brazil and China.