To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Partly sunny. A chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. South winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly in the evening. Lows in the mid 60s. East winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. Chance of rain 70 percent.
- 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 Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board meets at 10 a.m. every first Wednesday of the month at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For details about the city’s code enforcement regulations, go here.
The Flagler Beach Parks Ad Hoc Committee meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 105 S 2nd St, Flagler Beach. The Committee’s six members, appointed by the City Commission, provide recommendations related to the maintenance of existing parks and equipment and recommendations for new or replacement equipment and other duties as assigned by the City Commission.
Connecting to Palm Coast Expo, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, located at 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. The Palm Coast Citizens Academy Alumni Ambassadors are excited to host two more Connecting to Palm Coast Expo, a unique event designed to welcome and support new and recently settled residents. Attendees will find a variety of booths hosted by city departments, local civic organizations and clubs, and social services, each offering valuable resources and guidance to help new residents get acquainted with everything Palm Coast has to offer. Representatives from a range of city departments will be available to answer questions, while civic groups and clubs will provide information on how to get involved in the community.
Event Highlights:
• Informational booths from Palm Coast city departments
• Insights from local civic organizations and clubs
• Access to social services and other important community resources
• A welcoming atmosphere to meet fellow residents and city representatives
The Connecting to Palm Coast Expo is free to attend, and all are welcome. Whether you are brand-new to the area or looking to learn more about your community, this is an event you won’t want to miss!
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email atlanticcoastau@gmail.com or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at childrens@flaglercounty.gov
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at a private residence in Palm Coast every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at CAT9201@aol.com for location and information.
The Flagler County Republican Club holds its monthly meeting starting with a social hour at 5 and the business meeting at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. The club is the social arm of the Republican Party of Flagler County, which represents over 40,000 registered Republicans. Meetings are open to Republicans only.
Juxtapositions: Retif de la Bretonne is one of France’s great writers of the 18th century, a more enlightened, funnier, more realistic Rousseau who could bridge the chasm between Rousseau and Voltaire and see his way from the streets of Paris during the Revolution to the 19th century without losing too much hope for humanity. He wrote much too much, was known, simplistically, as a pornographer because a good deal of his writings included detailed descriptions of his sociological explorations of women (and because he wrote Mon calendrier, or My Calendar, a day-by-day account of his conquests), but was in fact one of the most astute analysts of French–and all–societies, human relationships, history and so on. In Monsieur Nicolas, his Remembrance of Things Past (it’s just as long but a lot more fun), a classic of French literature too little known this side of the Atlantic, he describes how, when he was about 10 and 11, in boarding school in paris, the three hours students gotto read on their own every evening were the highlight of his day. Note that he’s writing in 1793, when he’s much older, and not a happy man in Revolutionary, censoring Paris: ” The three hours or so of free and choiceful reading were for me a time I greatly desired! I thought about it in the morning, when I got up; as this happy moment approached, I palpitated with pleasure; when the hour arrived, I enjoyed myself, I found myself happy, as when reading The Good Shepherd, or seeing the tapestries of Saint-Mayeul; the vivacity of my imagination placed me at the site of my reading. It was these three hours of ecstasy that accustomed me to the house and made me cherish the stay, which I still remember with tenderness (it is at these same three hours that, since then, I have experienced the same palpitation of pleasure, seeing the canvas raised, at one of our three shows). What enjoyment remains for me today? What is the happy hour of the day? Alas! all are equal, and my heart now palpitates only with terror!….” There are strange coincidences in life, as we all know. They’re constant, because life itself is coincidental. It is the non-coincidental that should surprise us. The universe is never that neat. So within a day of reading this, I came across this passage in the Max Boot biography of Ronald Reagan, describing how Reaga’s father discovered him reading when he was just a few years old: “This was the beginning of a voracious, lifelong reading habit. ‘I can barely remember a time in my life when I didn’t know how to read,’ Ronald Reagan wrote years later, adding ‘I can’t think of greater torture than being isolated in a guest room or a hotel room without something to read.’ Like other American boys in this pre-broadcast and pre-internet age, he was enthralled by dime novels featuring fictional heroes such as the Yale athletic star Frank Merriwell; the Rover Boys; Tarzan, Lord of the Apes; and John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Young Dutch also spent a lot of time alone in the attic of one of the Reagans’ rented houses in Galesburg, studying a collection of ‘birds’ eggs and butterflies’ left by a previous occupant. He recalled being ‘fascinated’ by these objects, which became ‘gateways to the mysterious’ and ‘symbols of the out-of-doors.'” Of course Reagan never got past dime novels and Tarzan, and when he got older, it got much worse: he became a Reader’s Digest devotee, sealing his fate as a casual fascist. But I’d never imagined him to be a reader to start with. Someone missed a chance there.
—P.T.
View this profile on Instagram
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.
May 2025
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
Murder at Shivering Timbers Murder Mystery Dinner Show Fundraiser
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
By the time he became president, he would have no close friends aside from his wife, and he would be emotionally distant even from his own children. He would employ his natural affability and a steady supply of stories and jokes filed away in his photographic memory to keep the rest of the world at a safe, comfortable remove. “He would have made a hell of a good hermit,” said Stuart Spencer, the political consultant who guided Reagan’s rise to the governorship and presidency. “He was content to be alone,” agreed Ed Meese, “but he did like to be popular.” While Reagan was “unfailingly kind” to his staff, noted White House aide James Rosebush, “he was never really personal,” and “when you left his presence, you knew he wasn’t thinking about you-he wasn’t engaged in your life.” Even Nancy Reagan, her husband’s only true friend, would describe him as a “loner” who “often seems remote.” “There’s a wall around him,” she wrote perceptively. “He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.” That emotional enclosure began to be erected during his difficult childhood in the rural Illinois of the early twentieth century when, because of his family’s constant uprooting, he would come to believe that no friendship would last long.
–From Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024).
Pogo says
@Elsewhere
… away from the psychoanalytic couch; and the floating gardens of the plantations, hammocks, and bays of Elysium:
58 crypto wallets have made millions on Trump’s meme coin. 764,000 have lost money, data shows
Published Tue, May 6 20255:08 PM EDTUpdated Tue, May 6 20255:16 PM EDT
MacKenzie Sigalos
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/06/trump-meme-coin-crypto.html
Pogo says
@How sweet it is — enjoy
Ray W, says
Hydrogen fuel is viewed by many as a clean fuel of the future, as its exhaust is water vapor, provided inexpensive ways to produce it can be found. But ramping up production of hydrogen at scale has been a commercial challenge thus far.
Splitting hydrogen atoms away from water requires energy, which offsets much of the economic advantages of hydrogen power.
Splitting hydrogen atoms away from natural gas (methane is a molecule comprised of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms) is also energy intensive, but in a different way.
From an Interesting Engineering article posted a number of months ago, “traditional thermal methane cracking processes” require heating methane to 900 degrees Centigrade, at which temperature the methane is exposed to an iron-nickel composite catalyzer. The resulting chemical cracking process yields what is called “turquoise hydrogen”, plus solid carbon, a substance that has limited commercial applications.
Researchers affiliated with the Korea Institue of Energy Research (KIER) experimented with a “nickel-cobalt composite catalyst” (8% nickel/2% cobalt, plus iron) that comparably increased hydrogen yield by more than 50% at the lower temperature of 600 degrees Celsius. And the carbon yield is not entirely solid carbon; it also produces higher value “carbon nanotubes”, which have greater commercial utility, such as in the manufacture of electrode materials for use in solar cell and battery production.
As the carbon nanotubes deposit on the catalyzer, the catalyzer’s “active phase” lasts for only 150 minutes, but under the traditional process, the active phase is only 90 minutes.
One of the researchers commented:
“This study marks a significant milestone, enabling simultaneous hydrogen and carbon nanotube production, thus achieving economic efficiency and productivity.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
A breakthrough by government supported researchers in a catalyzing process that produces significantly more hydrogen at a significantly lower temperature using a catalyzer that lasts significantly longer, with the side benefit of a significant amount of commercially viable carbon nanotubes! Win, win, win, win!
We are in an age of incredible engineering advances. In 2006, the American shale oil industry was a niche player in a worldwide energy marketplace. At the end of 2008, as a nation, America extracted barely more than 5 million barrels of oil per day.
An American chemist approached privately-owned energy company after energy company, pitching the idea of them investing in research for new type of fracking fluid. He was rebuffed by all, until the Department of Energy granted him research funds; he soon patented a new fracking fluid that transformed the shale oil industry.
This chemical breakthrough, coupled with a contemporaneous breakthrough in 3-D seismic imaging that permitted drillers to guide their horizontal bores into the most productive shale rock formations, set off what is now called the Shale Revolution in the American oil exploration industry.
What was once a five-million-barrel-per-day industry nearly doubled during the Obama years, and it kept rising during the Trump years, and it kept rising during the Biden years, topping off at over 13.5 million barrels per day in December of 2024. It is holding steady at 13.4 million barrels of oil per day. It may go down or up, depending on world pricing levels, but the days of Drill! Baby! Drill! may be coming to an end.
Why do I type this? Fracking simply costs more than does extracting crude oil from underground pools of oil. American energy companies long ago picked the low-hanging fruit from its underground pooled supplies of oil; its best access to oil reserves today is from shale rock formations. Saudi oil is in huge reservoirs of underground pooled oil. Industry estimated are that Saudi oil can be extracted at a cost of roughly $8 per barrel. Permian Basin shale oil costs somewhere between $25 to $30 per barrel to extract. $60 per barrel oil prices hurt Saudi oil producer profits, but not nearly as much as it hurts shale oil producer profits.
Let’s face facts. If an American energy company can pay Guyana for permission to drill into a previously unexplored deep-water reservoir of pooled oil at an expected cost far lower than that for onshore Texas shale rock exploration, it will choose to drill off the coast of Guyana before it even considers expanding shale oil exploration in the Permian Basin.
And that isn’t all. Extraction costs from drilling differ from transportation costs. I have watched a documentary on how oil from offshore Brazilian wells pumps directly into an anchored supertanker. Another supertanker docks alongside the anchored ship and takes on the oil nearly directly from the well. I understand that the Guyana oil rig can transfer oil directly from the well to an oil supertanker, too. An oil well explored in the Permian basin will produce oil that must be transferred into a pipeline that brings the oil hundreds of miles to Houston where it is then transferred to an oil supertanker.
As an aside, perhaps about a week ago Mr. Tristam posted a segment on worldwide year-over-year increases in national weapons expenditures. Guyana led the list by percentage of increase, though not necessarily by quantum of increase.
For decades, Guyana and Venezuela coexisted as neighbors without too much strife. Oil exploration successfully occurred off the coast of Guyana near its border with Venezuela. Suddenly, Venezuela claimed the field belongs to Venezuela; it is threatening Guyana with armed incursion and annexation. The area has historically belonged to Venezuela, the Venezuelans now claim.
This simmering South American situation, of course, raises the wisdom, or lack of wisdom, that comes from appeasing any country that desires the resources of their neighbors.