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Weather: Partly sunny with a slight chance of thunderstorms. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then showers likely in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent. Tonight: Mostly cloudy with a slight chance of thunderstorms. A chance of showers in the evening, then showers likely after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. East 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:
In Court: John Cascone, the former local physician serving two years on probation after pleading to two battery charges in a 2023 case, is to appear before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols for a probation violation hearing at 1:30 p.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse.
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
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.
Readings: Last month Jonathan Lord, the director of emergency management in Flagler County, warned county commissioners not to expect too much from FEMA, the federal emergency management administration the current regime is wanting to gut. He did not speak about the undermining of the country’s weather and hurricane forecasting capabilities, what Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist and storm surge expert at an ABC affiliate in Miami called “A Hurricane Season Like No Other” in a piece for the Times last week: “But as we head into what NOAA forecasts will be another active Atlantic hurricane season, the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downsizing the agency, which houses the National Weather Service, the hurricane hunters and many other programs crucial to hurricane forecasters. Without the arsenal of tools from NOAA and its 6.3 billion observations sourced each day, the routinely detected hurricanes of today could become the deadly surprise hurricanes of tomorrow. […] With dozens of local forecast offices struggling to maintain 24/7 operations, NOAA put out a mayday on May 13 asking remaining staff members to temporarily vacate their posts to salvage what was left of the nation’s critical warning network. Nearly half of local forecast offices are critically understaffed, with a vacancy rate of 20 percent or higher, and several are going dark for part of the day, increasing the risk of weather going undetected and people going unprotected and unwarned. The staff reshuffling is just the latest move from an agency fighting for survival. […] Thirty years ago, forecasters couldn’t detect a hurricane until it formed, and once it formed, we were lucky to give two or three days’ notice that it might strike land. Today, our forecast models — developed, maintained and improved by NOAA scientists and their supercomputers — routinely and reliably predict hurricanes sometimes a week or more before the first puff of clouds. At two or three days out, we’re able to whittle hurricane forecasts to within a county or two. […] The irreparable harm the Trump administration is doing will imperil the nation’s longstanding weather warning network for hundreds of millions of Americans in the decades ahead. It’s only a matter of time before the next Milton is at our doorstep — but with our weather intelligence severely compromised, will we know it?”
—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.
June 2025
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Soul Fire, at Summer Sunset Concert
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday Blue Forum
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
For the full calendar, go here.
In hindsight, Reagan’s victory could appear inevitable. “The majority of Californians were ripe for a radically different type of Governor and immensely receptive to the personality, style and philosophy of Reagan,” Pat Brown reflected in 1970.5º But in 1965 few would have predicted that a washed-up actor who had never before held office, knew next to nothing about state government, and was widely viewed as an extremist could defeat a successful, two-term governor so decisively. Reagan’s rise was improbable–and could not be explained entirely by the support of the Kitchen Cabinet or the machinations of Spencer-Roberts. They were the producers and the directors, respectively, of the Reagan show. But he was the star–and the scriptwriter. He was elected because of his own pragmatism and personality. He made himself the right man at the right moment to take advantage of California–and the nation’s-shifting politics. In the process, he pioneered the white-backlash playbook that would be employed by Richard Nixon to win the White House in 1968 by using racially loaded but seemingly neutral language to appeal to what Nixon dubbed the “silent majority.” Many observers later would write that, in 1980, Reagan was implementing Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” but in truth Reagan himself had pioneered the strategy in 1966. “In retrospect,” wrote a California reporter in 1968, “1966 was clearly a dress rehearsal for the Presidential election of 1968.”
–From Max Boot’s Reagan (2024).
Pogo says
@P.T.
Update:
“A magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.”—Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend
https://www.amazon.com/Buckley-Life-Revolution-Changed-America/dp/0375502343
More is more:
The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump
William F. Buckley Jr. was the erudite heart of American conservatism. But the political vision that he helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195954/buckley-conservative-intellectual-laid-groundwork-trumphttps://newrepublic.com/article/195954/buckley-conservative-intellectual-laid-groundwork-trump
Pogo says
… Correction …
@P.T.
Update:
“A magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.”—Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend
https://www.amazon.com/Buckley-Life-Revolution-Changed-America/dp/0375502343
More is more:
The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump
William F. Buckley Jr. was the erudite heart of American conservatism. But the political vision that he helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.
https://newrepublic.com/article/195954/buckley-conservative-intellectual-laid-groundwork-trump
Ray W, says
During his March 4, 2025, speech to Congress, viewed by some 40 million people, President Trump devoted a portion of his comments to Social Security:
“We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors, and that our seniors and people that we love rely on. Believe it or not, government databases list … 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139, 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them.”
At the conclusion of a story published earlier this morning about the Social Security claim quoted above, the Washington Post concluded that:
“DOGE and the White House have never admitted that the original claims about Social Security payments being made to people above the age of 120 were wrong. Interestingly, while Trump echoed Musk’s claims several times before his speech to Congress, he hasn’t repeated them since. He didn’t even mention Social Security in his news conference last Friday when Musk left government service. It’s rare for Trump to drop a compelling claim like this, so it’s possible he now realizes it was bunk.
“Yet within the echo chamber of the pro-Trump universe, a problem that never existed now has been fixed.”
The Post reporter asserted that Trump’s numbers about those listed in Social Security databases were accurate and false at the same time.
Why?
“Social Security databases rely on COBOL, a nearly 70-year-old computer programming language, and COBOL doesn’t have a standardized way to store dates. So a default date, such as 1875, was chosen for people lacking birth information. But when Musk’s team entered Social Security’s systems, they were shocked to find people listed in the system with absurd ages because of limitations of an old programming language.”
The reporter also wrote:
“… [S]ince 2015, the Social Security Administration has automated the termination of benefits to people once they reach age 115 — and no American has ever lived to be 120 years old. Moreover, a 2023 report from the administration’s inspector general found that the vast majority of beneficiaries who lacked a birth date had died.”
According to the reporter, even though an inspector general had recommended to the Social Security Administration in 2023 that the default age-recording system be cleaned up, the recommendation was rejected because “correcting records for non-beneficiaries would divert resources from work necessary to administer and manage its programs.” Doing so, the SSA claimed, “would have limited or no benefit to the administration of SSA programs, and would be costly to implement.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Just because the Social Security Administration began in 2015 to remove people from its database when they reached the age of 115 doesn’t prove that the SSA also was going further back into its database to remove people who reached the age of 115 in, say 2005. This might completely explain why there can be so many people in the databases who are 140 years old when DOGE, knowing nothing of the software default subroutine first looked. The truth was that the arbitrarily overaged were never automatically purged prior to the 2015 effort to begin purging recipients when they reached the age of 115. But that doesn’t prove that anyone older than 115 is still getting benefits. When someone who is receiving benefits dies, the death records are sent to SSA and his or her account is closed, regardless of their default age, just as it has been done since the creation of the SSA.
In summary, if it is true that the 70-year-old software used by Social Security Administration to maintain files on individuals has a programming deficiency in how it is to classify age records (it is), and if it is true that for that entire time frame in which the software has been used the agency has applied a fictitious arbitrary default date, e.g., 1875, for each person who applies for Social Security while lacking birth date documentation (it is), then of course there should be millions of people in the SSA database whose birth dates were arbitrarily set due to a lack of birth records when the application was processed.
There seems to be little doubt that this programming anomaly about the arbitrarily setting of birth dates by a default subroutine has been known for a long time, and that the Social Security Administration long ago chose to ignore the issue, both because of cost limitations and because of time limitations.
No, no one actually over the age of 120 was receiving benefits because of software deficiencies. Actual fraud is an issue unrelated to the issue of a software deficiency.
Yes, a much younger class of beneficiaries (those who lacked birth records when they applied for benefits who are still living), whose ages had been increased by a default subroutine, were and are receiving money from the SSA, as they should be receiving money.
And, yes, the Trump administration has taken the time and spent the money to update the arbitrarily selected age records, so that no one arbitrarily listed as now being over the age of 120 is now receiving benefits, absent evidence of fraud unrelated to the software deficiency.
How have members of the professional lying class at the top of one of our two parties responded to the software change?
Senator Tim Scott wrote:
“No more 300-year-olds getting Social Security checks because of Elon Musk. Thank God President Trump had the wisdom to put Elon Musk in place.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson posted on X:
“Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team have done INCREDIBLE work exposing waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government — from the insanity of USAID’s spending to finding over 12 million people on Social Security who were over 120 years old.”
Make no mistake, FlaglerLive readers, no one suddenly “found” 12 million people over the age of 120 on the Social Security database, because for 70 years the agency has known of the existence of a COBOL programming deficiency that required the use of default birth years, such as 1875, whenever an applicant lacked proper birth records. Indeed, in 2023, an effort was made to resolve the issue, but the effort was rejected due to cost and time concerns.
This is how the professional lying class at the top of one of our two political parties works. Find a long-known programming issue that can be exploited for political gain. Then lie about the issue in hopes that the gullibly stupid among us will accept the lie and then launder it to others. Then claim to have “fixed” the issue. Then take credit for removing 12 million over-aged people from the records.
As Edwin R. Murrow asserted:
“American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.”