To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Jr DaySunny. Highs in the mid 50s. Monday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 30s.
- 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:
Notably: Let us remember, on this Martin Luther King Day, that it is still forbidden to teach The 1619 Project in Florida schools, that it is forbidden to shelve the book on public library shelves, and that if a history or English or journalism teacher had the bright idea of inviting Nikole Hannah-Jones–a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the New York Times–to speak to a class, the teacher would likely be fired. Hannah-Jones edited 1619 and wrote the title essay that drew so much controversy. Actually, just a few lines drew the controversy–that the first Black slaves set foot on the North American continent in 1619, and that the American project from that time on was predicated on preserving, protecting and promulgating slavery. I am simplifying horribly, but that’s the gist. It’s an interpretation, like innumerable interpretations of history before or since. Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the closing of the American frontier was no less of an interpretation, and I’m not sure it was better sourced. Daniel Boortsin’s thesis that Americans were averse to conflict was a widely accepted interpretation of American history, and a ridiculously absurd one. But so it goes. History is a living document, like the Constitution. Every age puts its stamp on it, reinterprets, reconsiders. Hannah-Jones did no less. But because she cast a shadow on conventional interpretations of rah-rah colonialism for the greater good of mankind, she was banned, as were the dozen and a half writers and their essays in 1619, constituting as bracing a new and eye-opening American history as there’s been since… when? Richard Hofstadter, Barbara Tuchman (though I hesitate to include her in the same league as Hofstadter), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Vernon Parrington: those were historians you could sink your synapses into, argue with, brawl with, drink with (metaphorically), and be thankful they wrote. What have we had lately? Bans. And Florida schools have the gall to mark Martin Luther King Day.
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.
January 2026
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Stetson University Concert Choir in Concert with Orlando Philharmonic
Al-Anon Family Groups
Temple Beth Shalom Blessing of the Pets
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
This was not a surge of purposeless criminality, as many white observers claimed; it was a sustained revolt. Throughout American history, white mob violence had been understood as thoroughly political in nature. It was obvious to everyone concerned that white people frequently became enraged when their status or power was threatened, and that they were willing to maintain the racial order through violence—including burning buildings, looting homes, and attacking or lynching Black people. But when Black rebellions swept our nation, they were cast as deviant, criminal, and irrational. Hinton observes, “It was only when white people no longer appeared to be the driving force behind rioting in the nation’s cities, and when Black collective violence against exploitative and repressive institutions surfaced, that ‘riots’ came to be seen as purely criminal, and completely senseless, acts.”86 Some experts and politicians during that period did acknowledge that the desperate and unjust conditions in which millions of Black people lived were at least partly to blame for the uprisings, most notably the members of the Kerner Commission, which had been created by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the causes of highly destructive and deadly rioting that had occurred in Detroit and Newark in 1967. The commission’s initial report, released just weeks before King was killed, concluded that severe segregation, poverty, joblessness, lack of access to housing, lack of access to economic opportunities, and discrimination in the job market, combined with pervasive police violence and harassment, had created a tinderbox of rage and despair that would certainly result in more uprisings if drastic action was not taken. The report found that many white people were in denial about the true causes of Black uprisings, but Black people were not: “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
–From Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander’s “Fear,” in The 1619 Project, ed. Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021).
Pogo says
@Well said
… President Harris must be well pleased.
EC: File
Ray W. says
According to a Wall Street Journal story, recent findings from the internationally respected Kiel Institute for the World Economy match previously published studies by Yale- and Harvard-based economists, in that exporting nations pay little of the sums gathered from imposition of American tariffs.
The vast majority of tariffs, 96%, are paid by either importing entities or the consumers who buy from the importing entities. In other words, either the importing entities absorb the tariffs or they pass the tariff costs on to consumers.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I do not know how much of the money collected from American tariffs actually passes on to the average American consumer. I do not claim to be an economist. At best, I am a curious student. Yet from the information out in the public, it seems reasonable to me to conclude that tariffs bring to the Treasury a little less than $30 billion per month. In an economy that has a monthly GDP of roughly $2.5 trillion per month, tariffs of just under $30 billion equals a tariff total of somewhat more than 1% of GDP.
Every FlaglerLive reader ought to know by now that when I comment to the FlaglerLive community I seek to rely on competent and reliable data and opinions, i.e., the best information I can find.
My repeatedly stated commenting goals include one to oppose the vengeful among us who try to inflict harm on others for political gain and another to undermine the lies spread on the FlaglerLive site by the many liars and lie launderers among us who wander through life fooling themselves, again for political gain.
Ray W. says
According a Reuters story, an entity named the German Economic Institute published a paper on the dollar amount of investments by German companies in American firms and businesses dropped by 45% during the first eleven months of 2025, compared to the same time frame for 2024.
When comparing the average of the amount of German investment into American firms and businesses over the ten-year span between 2015 to 2024, the amount of German investment for the first eleven months of each year was down 24% during the first eleven months of 2025.
Make of this what you will.