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Weather: A 40 percent chance of showers. Partly sunny, with a high near 80. Breezy. Monday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers. Partly cloudy, with a low around 66.
- 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 Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at City Hall, 2400 Commerce Parkway, Bunnell. Commissioners will discuss the possibility of having voting districts in the cityTo access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Notably: In light of the opening in a few weeks of the Nexus Center, the south-side public library that’s taken its beatings from a couple of philistines on the County Commission (as a fomer elected official put it to me recently), I thought this little bit from the Pasco County library director, Sean McGharvey, was timely:
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—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
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County School Board Information Workshop
Flagler County Affordable Housing Committee Meeting
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
Budgeting by Values: A Virtual Class to Learn Budgeting Skills
NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting
Flagler County School Board Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
Men of science, as I pointed out in my third lecture, could formerly work in isolation, as writers still can; Cavendish and Faraday and Mendel de-pended hardly at all upon institutions, and Darwin only in so far as the government enabled him to share the voyage of the Beagle. But this isolation is a thing of the past. Most research requires expensive apparatus; some kinds require the financing of expeditions to difficult regions. Without facilities provided by a government or a university, few men can achieve much in modern science. The conditions which determine who is to have access to such facilities are therefore of great importance. If only those are eligible who are considered orthodox in current controversies, scientific progress will soon cease, and will give way to a scholastic reign of authority such as stifled science throughout the Middle Ages.
–From Bertrand Russell’s Authority and the Individual (1949).
Dennis C Rathsam says
A free ballroom, anded to the Whitehouse can only be critizised by Jackasses & fools. Never in my life have I seen such petty crap coming from SCHUMER, & his fellow Democrats. It’s a sad day to see what their party has done to the American people. It’s pure insanity….Illegals vs Americans, tell me what planet did they come from?
Pogo says
@P.T.
100% A+
Thank you.
Your Public Library, always a great idea; use it — and support it.
https://www.hoopladigital.com/home
BillC says
Things will be hot hot hot at the all new Trump White House Ballroom and Casino. “It’s where the in crowd comes to play.”
Let’s all do the Trump dance!
https://apnews.com/video/trump-showcases-campaign-dance-moves-as-performers-welcome-him-to-malaysia-a02d511ca1e346959c357657e64efb08
Ray W. says
On October 24, 2025, Scientific American published an article devoted to whether the current form of the bird flu, once considered pandemic, is now properly considered endemic, meaning that it is here to stay and, if it is here to stay, what that might mean for our public health.
The title to the story is “Why Bird Flu is Surging Again — And What It Means for Public Health”
Because of the federal government shutdown, according to the reporter, some of her gathered data had to be collected from non-federal outlets, including state-level sources. Because federal researchers are out of work, there exists a less-coordinated response to the expanding outbreak of the bird flu.
According to my own reading, historically, on February 8, 2022, in an Indiana commercial flock, the first case of infection by a Highly Virulent Avian Influenza was diagnosed. All the literature I have seen on the subject holds that a mutation giving rise to this H5N1 bird flu originated in a wild bird flock.
Thus far in October, and not counting the millions culled in September, 50 poultry flocks located across the country, comprising over three million birds, have been slaughtered, after testing revealed infection by the H5N1 “subtype” of bird flu within the flocks.
Since September 1st, in Minnesota alone, 20 flocks have confirmed as infected by H5N1 influenza.
Said a University of Minnesota poultry veterinarian, Carol Cardona:
“We’re definitely having a bad year in Minnesota.”
In June, July, and August, each month witnessed fewer that one million birds culled.
There are two reasons for that low summer outbreak rate:
First, “hotter months”, wrote the reporter, “seem to quell the virus, and the weather is getting cooler.”
Rocio Crespo, a poultry veterinarian at North Carolina State University, told the reporter that “[t]he virus survives better in cold weather. … So we are going to have more outbreaks than we have seen in the summer.”
Second, according to the reporter, “avian influenza is widespread among wild birds, and many of those birds migrate south to warmer climes, carrying the virus with them.”
According to an Emory University virologist, Seema Lakdawala:
“We’ve resigned to this phase”, meaning the flu has become endemic and it will never go away. “Now, we have to figure out what we’re going to do next.”
But the real fear is whether this already highly virulent variant of the avian flu will mutate more easily into the human population.
The reporter wrote:
“The seasonal rise in avian influenza in poultry coincides with the beginning of human influenza season, raising scientist’s fears that these flu viruses could mingle, with potentially devastating consequences.
“Influenza viruses are prone to swapping their genetic material with each other — a process called reassortment. That’s one major reason that, every year, scientists develop a new flu vaccine to target the specific strains they expect to circulate most. If a bird flu virus gains a seasonal flu’s ability to easily infect humans, the result could be a novel pandemic disease — one to which people would have no existing immunity and that, scientists fear, would have an even higher mortality rate that COVID did during its initial emergence.
“Cow udders may offer one venue for such a hybrid virus to develop. But scientists also worry about coinfection in humans — events in which the same person is infected with both avian influenza and a seasonal flu virus at the same time.”
According to the Emory University virologist, “flu reassortment” is somewhat rare in humans, and many human coinfections of two different viruses, not just one, would have to happen. “Two viruses have to get inside of a single cell in your body of millions, billions of cells and replicate and make something new.”
Since 2022, only one of the 70 humans diagnosed with infection by the H5N1 bird flu died. That, according to the reporter, is a low incident rate of death.
Many of the 70 infected humans worked on dairy farms, among cows that had become infected with the bird flu. This means that bird flu has mutated in a way for it to more easily cross over into a mammalian population, but not yet more easily into humans.
From my own other readings, among bird populations, the death rate from infection is not 1 in 70; it is more than 19 out of 20 of those birds infected dying. Historically, whenever different strains of the bird flu pass into the human population, as many as 50% of the humans infected by those different strains die.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The Highly Virulent Avian Influenza virus known as H5N1 has from the beginning been directly responsible for high egg prices.
I keep hammering the case of the true reason for the spread of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza virus from migrating wild birds into commercial egg farms, over and over and over again, because several members of the professional lying class that sit atop one of our two political parties, including Vice President Vance, spread the lie that the Biden administration was directly responsible for last year’s rising egg prices just before last November’s federal election, and because several of the more gullibly stupid members of the FlaglerLive commenter class laundered that lie. What fools they all are.
From the steady drumbeat of lies emanating from that professional lying class, and from the steady drumbeat of lies laundered by the more gullibly stupid among us, should this Highly Virulent Avian Influenza, through “reassortment”, ever become easily transmissible into humans, complete with a high incidence of death among those infected, every FlaglerLive reader should accept in advance that the liars and lie launderers among us will shift into high gear. They will blame Democrats for a natural selection process that can occur within birds or cattle or humans whenever genetic material from two different viruses enters one cell at the same time.
The fact that widespread use of seasonal flu viruses that are rejected by the anti-vaxxers among us could lessen the likelihood of that reassortment process will be lost in the clamor.