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Weather: Mostly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then partly sunny with showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Some thunderstorms may produce gusty winds and heavy rainfall in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly in the evening. Some thunderstorms may produce gusty winds and heavy rainfall in the evening. Lows in the upper 60s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. 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 Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, 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.
Protect Your Mother Beach Clean-Up in Flagler Beach, organized by Matanzas High School students and featuring MHS and Flagler Palm Coast High School bands, from 9 to 12, gathering at Veterans Park.
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: AAUWFlagler1984@gmail.com.
Peps Art Walk, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. every second and fourth Saturday, Beachfront Grille, 2444 South Oceanshore Boulevard, Flagler Beach. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Flowers, bushes and hard to find plants. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Washington Oaks. Regular entrance fee applies: $4 per vehicle with one person aboard, $5 for vehicles with more than one person.
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre: Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., City Repertory Theatre, 160 Cypress Point Parkway (City Marketplace, Suite B207), Palm Coast. Tickets are $25 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time. Get ready for Shakespeare like you’ve never heard—or seen—before! RockabillieWillie mashes up scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo & Juliet, and Henry V with a jukebox of rockabilly hits. Musical numbers like “Willie and the Hand Jive,” “Love and Marriage,” and Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy” are reimagined to playfully clash and complement Shakespearean drama. Adapted by John Sbordone, RockabillieWillie is dedicated to the proposition that “All’s well that ends.” Don’t miss this fun, fast-paced ride through the Bard’s greatest hits! See Rick de Yampert’s preview: “City Repertory Theatre Untames Shakespeare, Doo-Wop and R&B with “RockabillieWillie.”
Murder at Shivering Timbers Murder Mystery Dinner Show Fundraiser, 6 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Step into a world of mystery, laughter, and adventure with our captivating murder mystery play, Murder at Shivering Timbers! Hosted as a fundraiser, this enchanting evening promises not only thrilling entertainment but also an opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the lives of our local foster and displaced children. Tickets are $55 to $60. Book here.
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.
Notably: Flagler Beach Commission Chair James Sherman and City Manager Dale Martin Thursday evening spoke the city’s condolences for the death of Travis Sundell, owner of SunBros Cafe since 2021 in the heart of the city. He was 49. The city has rallied. “I think the community response was very indicative of what this community is really about,” Martin said. Restaurants have been collecting donations for their colleagues at SunBros. Above, the donation bucket at the Anchor, next to Staphanie Raffo, the most amazing bartender in the world bartender in the world: it is there that Cheryl and I medicate with Stephanie’s martinis on more challenging days. We should count the blessings of our still-beating hearts. If you are inclined to make a donation to the Sundell family and its business, you can go here or here.
—P.T.
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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 Library Board of Trustees
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Community Traffic Safety Team Meeting
St. Johns River Water Management District Meeting
Flagler County School Board Workshop: Agenda Items
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
Flagler County Planning Board Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
“The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man’s experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people’s lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together.”
–From Robert Louis Stevenson in “Aes Triplex.”.
Dennis C Rathsam says
As I watch you make fun of the newly installed Pope, using yet another cartoon in bad taste! Shows the world how low the democrats can go. After 4 years of failure, THIER message remains the same. HATE LIES & COVER UPS! Its all coming out now…. BIDENS presidency was a scam. Book after book, & the soon to be releast transcripts of Bidens testimony to the court. KA$H will uncover, who was really running the USA in the last year of Bidens disaster. And will expose all the bullshit, the jackass party does not want you to see. All their lies are dying, with the real truth! So as TRUMP continues to do what the American people elected him to do, FINNALLY the border is closed! Deportation is a reality. Unemployement is down, along with a economy ready to bust out! TRUMP,S tariffs are all benefiting the USA. A little pain, for a lifetime of gain, TRUMP told us every step of the way! He didnt hide in the basement… He,s on LIVE TV, explaining his ideas. Cleaning up the mess of his demented predicessor.Democrats, are now an embarrassment, no leader, no plan, only radical fools, & socialists hell bent on the killing of Capitalism!
Pogo says
Amen.
c says
Drinking and posting don’t mix.
Just sayin’
Father Bill Hanagan says
@ DCR — I can’t believe Biden posted a picture of trump dressed as the pope .. truly obscene.
Sherry says
Since many of the Maga persuasion do not understand sarcasm or satire:
6 days ago — The White House posted an AI-generated image of President Donald Trump dressed as the pope on X, sparking both backlash and glee.
Ray W, says
Nearly six months ago, I posted a comment derived from a Brandeis University study of elderly people and their greater capacity to transform things they know to be lies into things that they believe to be truths. The publication starts as follows:
“What happens when older adults lie?
A new study suggests that in as little as 45 minutes they can come to believe it’s the truth.”
The study had a simple process.
Ask each participant in two groups, either young or old, to answer 102 questions about what they did or did not do the previous day, such as: Did you use a fork to eat lunch, or did you press snooze on your alarm clock?
Then, ask each subject to knowingly lie about 51 of their answers and also to tell the truth about the other 51 answers.
Monitor the brain activity of each subject via electroencephalography (EEG), both for young (18-24) and older (60-92) subjects, so as to study their brain wave patterns as they knowingly tell the 51 lies and knowingly tell the 51 truths, to set a baseline.
Both age groups produced brainwaves that differed during their lie-telling from the brainwaves they produced during their truth-telling.
Once the baseline brainwaves were established, the researchers had the subjects wait 45 minutes. Each participant was again asked to answer each of the 102 questions, only this time they were told to answer each question truthfully, while their brainwaves were again monitored.
Some of the participants did not provide the original truthful answers the second time they were tested. Instead, they repeated some or many of the original 51 lies they were told to perform, only this time their brainwaves when they repeated the lies were consistent with truthful answers.
At the heart of the study was the question: Was it possible for a person to knowingly lie about 51 things that they said they did the day before and within 45 minute to transform some or many of their knowing lies into beliefs that their knowing lies were now the truth?
The more elderly group was more likely to later reproduce lies as truths. In other words, what they did after the passage of a short period of time was transform comparatively more of their intentional lies into truths, compared to the younger group of subjects.
According to one of the researchers:
“Older adults have more difficulty distinguishing between what’s real and not real.” The researcher added that the findings “suggest that telling a falsehood scrambles older people’s memory so they have a harder time recalling what really happened, in effect giving greater credence to the lie. … Once they’ve committed to a lie, it’s going to alter whether they remember doing something.”
One finding was that “the EEG data revealed that lying engaged the brain processes responsible for working memory. According to [the researcher], this finding suggests a lie can embed itself into memory and come to feel as real as the truth. … Lying alters memory. … It creates a new memory for something that didn’t happen.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
This study supports an argument that all people can come to believe as lies what were once known as truths, and that older people are more easily prone to transforming a known truth into a perceived lie.
This is consistent with other studies and presentations I have experienced over the decades that I practiced both prosecution and criminal defense. I have often consulted with psychiatrists and neuropsychiatrists, psychologists and neuropsychologist, and physicians over my decades of practicing law.
I have commented on this before.
Perhaps decades ago, I attended a conference during which one of the presenters spoke of a “convergence-wave” aspect to human memory. Colors, she said, were stored in one area of the brain. Shapes, including geometric shapes, in another region of the brain. Sounds, smells, tastes, each stored in different regions. Locations, too. When a memory is sought, impulses from each of the different facets converge into one area, where the memory is collected and accessed.
Since memory is nothing more than the deposit of an electro-chemical impulse into each of the certain centers of the brain, she argued, all it takes to wipe out a deposited memory is to overwrite some or all of the original electro-chemical impulses with new electro-chemical impulses.
At the time, the presenter argued that when a trusted person tells someone that an event happened in a pattern different from the way that the person remembers it, then the hearer will immediately overwrite the original memory with the trusted person’s account, because the person trusts the other person’s account more than their own memory. The original electro-chemically induced memory will then be gone, in full or in part.
One example of this entirely human capacity to rewrite the electro-chemical impulses that comprise memory occurred after President Kennedy was assassinated.
The original 1960 presidential election was at the time the closest in history.
Within a few months, a poll was taken asking participants whether they had voted for Kennedy. Half of the population should have said yes. Slightly less than two-thirds of the respondents recalled voting for Kennedy.
The conclusion reached in that study wasn’t that some of the participants had to have been lying. Rather, the import was that the polled individuals really believed that they had voted for him, i.e., their remembrances had changed.
This is a thought-exercise.
No one can argue that the pandemic of 2020-2021 did not occur, just as no one can argue against the fact that the effect of the pandemic was worldwide economic upheaval.
No one can argue that Congress did not immediately pass a bill giving President Trump $2 trillion to inject mostly into the demand side of the damaged American economy.
Eight months later, Congress passed another bill giving President Trump another $900 billion to inject into the demand side of the American economy.
I have read one economist’s argument that a number of other smaller spending bills were passed that totaled another $3 trillion for President Trump to inject into the demand side of American economy. Whether six trillion or three trillion, no one can argue that the sums are insignificant.
After he won the 2020 election, former President Biden was given a total of another $3 trillion by Congress to inject into the economy on both the supply and demand sides of the American economy.
No one can dispute that the Fed, in response to the pandemic, enlarged the quantity of available credit for lending by banks by another $3 trillion and that it also lowered the lending rate to zero.
No one can argue that injecting that much money and credit into the pandemic-damaged economy did not have substantial effects on the recovery.
Given the fact that the pandemic is responsible for the original damage to the American economy, and given the fact that two different Congresses and two different presidents and one Fed chair were the ones sharing responsible for the government’s response to the economic damage, is it reasonable to argue that anyone who now claims that Biden is solely responsible for all of the economic damage has had their electro-chemical impulses that were originally deposited into their memory of what actually happened to the American economy during and after the pandemic overwritten by an untrustworthy source?
Is this perhaps one possible way to explain the inner workings of lie laundering among the gullible among us?
Ray W, says
Russia’s Federal Statistics Service reports that potato prices are up 49% from January 1, 2025, through April 28, 2025. Year-over-year, potato prices are up 173%.
The Russian government has waived its 5% import duty and raised its import quota ceiling to 150,000 tons of potatoes to offset the rise, yet the rise continues.
Russia’s Agriculture Minister said:
“We expect potato prices to start falling. In July, we’ll begin harvesting our early crops, plus we’ve got ongoing imports from Egypt and Uzbekistan.”
Make of this what you will.
Me? It is approaching a year now since I began offering comments to FlaglerLive readers about how the Russian economy is slowing down, largely due to so many young male workers fleeing the country to avoid being called into service in the Ukraine, due to so many young male workers who have died and been wounded after being sent to the Ukraine, and due to a mass expulsion of immigrations after a deadly bombing in Russia that was blamed on immigrant terrorists.
When last I checked, the Russian unemployment rate was down to 2.1%, territory that many economists call inflationary because numbers that low put upward pressure on wages. The official Russian inflation rate is over 10%, but some Russian economists say unofficial inflation is at or near 20%. The central bank’s lending rate has been steady at 21% for more than six months, but it seems to have had little effect on inflation.
Four years ago, the general consensus among economists who studied the Russian economy was that Putin had set aside $350 billion in reserve in different accounts to fund the war. Nearly all of that money has been exhausted.
None of this means that the Russian economy is destined to collapse. But story after story reflects a belief that Russian military manufacturing cannot keep pace with Russian equipment losses in the Ukraine.
But with international crude oil prices headed towards perhaps as low as $50 per barrel, what with OPEC+ announcing several months ago that it would ramp up production by over 100,000 barrels a day, starting in April, and then announcing in April that OPEC+ would ramp up production by another over 400,000 barrels per day every month, starting in May.
Should OPEC+ stick to its announced increases, Russian oil income should drop like a stone. Oil is the main factor in the overall Russian economy. If hard foreign currency reserves fully deplete, the question will be how Russia can purchase food on top of military supplies from foreign countries.
Ray W, says
Reuters reports that “energy services firm Baker Hughes” announced that the number of operating oil and gas drilling rigs continues to drop.
Here are a few bullet points from the article:
– For the week ending May 9, the total operating oil and gas rig count was 578, down six from the previous week.
– For the year, total operating oil and gas rigs are down 4%, or 25 rigs.
– During the 2024-year, total operating rig count dropped by 5%.
– During the 2023-year, total operating rig count dropped by 20%.
– Over the past several years, energy firms have focused on boosting shareholder returns and paying down debts, rather that funding exploration.
– In 2024, according to the EIA, crude oil production in the U.S. averaged a record 13.2 million barrels per day.
– Natural gas production hit a record average of 103.6 billion cubic feet per day in 2023, before dropping to an average of 103.2 billion cubic feet per day in 2024.
– Due to concerns over rising OPEC+ crude oil output and tariff-induced uncertainty, permit applications to drill for oil or gas in Texas dropped to a four-year low in April. The 570 permit applications in Texas was the lowest since February 2021, when America was still in the middle of the pandemic. March permit applications totaled 795, so permit applications dropped by 225 in one month.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Brazil is increasing its crude oil production, as is Guyana and Kazakhstan. OPEC+ increased oil production by just over 100,000 barrels per day during April, and it says it intends to add to that increase another more than 400,000 barrels per day starting this month.
For four years, OPEC+ has intentionally curbed its production by as much as 7 million barrels per day, though the number has been lower in recent years, allowing U.S. energy companies to reap record profits.
Now that uncertainty around the world due to tariffs has lowered future expectations of oil demand, and with multiple nations increasing oil supply, many analysts now predict crude oil prices as low as $50 per barrel.
Many American oil companies report a break-even drilling price point of $65 per barrel.
If it is true that oil prices will drop to $50 per barrel, then should anyone expect American oil companies to drill at a losing price point?
Ed P says
Ray W,
Hence why the media does what it does….none of them can be labeled “truth tellers”
Most of them are your liar launder. If they opt to ignore an issue, decide erroneously that it’s not real or relevant, when it later proves to be both, is that liar laundering?
Or just an “honest” mistake?
It’s nearly impossible to peel back enough layers of the onion to find the truth. I’m fascinated how the truth these days has 2 distinct versions, based on which side of the isle one resides.
Sherry says
MORE ON TRUMP’S BITCOIN CORRUPTION and Press Room BS:
Don’t Call it a Kickback
Karoline Leavitt’s “the president’s crypto ventures abide by all conflict of interest laws” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by her shirt.
It sure looks like brazen self-dealing corruption, the dinner President Trump is planning to have later this month with the top purchasers of his “official $TRUMP token.” The memecoin’s price jumped 50 percent when the dinner was announced two weeks ago, pumping millions into the portfolios of the president and his associates, who own 80 percent of the coin’s supply. But you never know—maybe there’s a reasonable explanation?
If there is, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t bother to try to conjure it during yesterday’s White House briefing. When I asked her why the president had planned the dinner, she had only this to say:
Look, the president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws. The president has been incredibly transparent with his own personal financial obligations throughout the years. The president is a successful businessman and I think frankly it’s one of the many reasons that people reelected him back to this office.
More here.