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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 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:
Many government offices are closed today in observance of Juneteenth. Courts are open.
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting, 6 p.m. in the main conference room at the GTMNERR Marineland, 9741 N Oceanshore Boulevard, St. Augustine. See the town’s website here.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
The Palm Coast Democratic Club holds an “After Dark” Recap Meeting (previous daytime business meeting) at 6 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month to accommodate working Democrats. We will meet at the Flagler Democratic Party Headquarters in City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214, Palm Coast. Hope you will join us. This gathering is open to the public at no charge. No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 283-4883 for best directions or (561)-235-2065 for more information.
Notably: It was Library of America Day a few days ago, the postman–who rang twice a couple of weeks ago: he was carrying books from France–bringing the second volume of Wendell Berry’s Port William Novels and Stories: The Postwar Years. I have not gotten as far into Berry yet to know what these Port Williams books are about, but they seem to be his Yoknapatawpha County. Instead of Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi based on the non-fictional Oxford), it’s Berry’s fictional Kentucky. The two novels in the second volume span the years of 1945 to 1978, those 50s, 60s and 70-s the French call les trente glorieuses, as in “the 30 glory years” of the post-war miracle. It wasn’t that much less glorious here, with those decades of equality and opportunity and tax sanity as we haven’t known since Reagan’s election. Berry published The Memory of Old Jack in 1974. The book is set in 1952. It’s an elegy by the protagonist on the last day of his life: “Distressingly few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply moving account of the final day in the long life of a remarkable human being,” went the Times review by James Frakes. “On this vibrant September day in 1952, Jack Beechum, 92 years old, relives in richly textured memory the highlights and dark stretches of his career as tobacco‐farmer, husband, father, lover, crusty mentor, man‐model, and archetypal friend in the small river community of Port William, Ky. While the present bustles around him in disjointed and confusing flashes, the “firm sequence of the past is fleshed out with vivid ritual‐like immediacy: “tracing the way by which he came here, into this final solitude of an old mind shaped and taught by years of which all the other rememberers are dead.” All the other rememberers are dead. When do we begin to see for what it is the solitude we’re left with by the death of those we loved–a bitter salve and encouragement toward the inevitable. Remembering, from 1988, about Andy Cartlett, who’s lost his right hand in a farming accident and ponders a fork in his road. The volume includes two dozen short stories. Even summarizing it here is like smelling something appetizing from afar and hungering for it, though the reading pile is a bit too gargantuan these days, lengthened by an earlier Berry.
—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.
July 2025
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
She had the fierce ideological integrity of her ambition. She had the closely ordered calm of her household and her ways. And Jack threatened both with his wildness, his love of ranging in the dark, which she did not feel or understand and so feared. She could not accompany him into the dark. She could not release herself into what she did not know and could not see or foresee. It was not so much that he violated her as that he asked her to violate herself: his rough hand reaching into her bodice, or insinuating itself upon the inside of her thigh, his eye that watched, first gaily and then fearfully, for her response to his hand—they asked her to be broken, to desire what she could not provide, to open herself to a completion of which she would be ever afterward a fragment. And so, though his hand went its way, though he sought the clefts and shelters of her flesh, though he entered her with the awe of a pilgrim, though he drove into her like the taker of a city, though the storm of his desire cast him ashore upon her at last, as meek and strengthless as a child asleep, yet there remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent. She offered him no welcome, afforded him no prepared ways. Each time he made his way to her, he came upon her as if by chance, a newcomer, blundering in the dark. He returned each time more fearfully, and at greater expense.
–From Wendell Berry’s Old Jack (1974).
Dennis C Rathsam says
The president sons are making the phone, not the president. More fake news….TRUMPS NOW POLLING OVER 50%!
Jim says
Just a small list….
-Earlier this year, Trump was pushing Tesla cars on the lawn of the White House. That same day, within hours of the White House’s makeover into a Tesla showroom, the New York Times revealed that Musk had decided to invest $100m in political groups working for Trump.
– The gift by the Qatari government of a $400m luxury jetliner to be repurposed as Air Force One. The Pentagon last month accepted possession of the plane, which will be transferred to Trump’s presidential library once he leaves office. (After the US government spends at least $100M to try to convert it.) It also shows Trump’s disdain for the US constitution, given the emoluments clause’s clear prohibition. Presidents are not allowed to accept high-value gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent.
-Trump used the months leading up to November’s election to test-run what has become a theme of his second presidency – pay-to-play. He invited oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and, as the Washington Post revealed, offered them a “deal” in which they would donate $1bn to his campaign and in return he would tear up profit-limiting environmental regulations once he was back in the White House. He kept his promise: on day one of his new administration he discharged a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions.
– Three months into the administration, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, launched an elite private members’ club named Executive Branch which commands a sign-in fee of a cool $500,000. Its attraction? Access to cabinet members and top Trump advisers.
-Not to be outdone by his own son, Trump himself has followed the same playbook at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In March, he began inviting business leaders to dine with him in group settings at $1m a seat. Prefer something more intimate? No problem. One-on-one meetings are also available, yours for $5m.
-The Trump family’s dive into the world of crypto. Shortly before the inauguration, they launched personal lines of meme coins, $Trump and $Melania. Then they issued a new cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, known as a stablecoin. Taken together the two crypto ventures from the family of a sitting president amount to “one of the worst and most shocking conflicts of interest in our nation’s history”. Trump bragged on the campaign trail that he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet”. Since his election victory, Trump has used his presidential status and executive power to boost not only the general standing of crypto but also his personal stake within it. One of his early executive orders created a “strategic bitcoin reserve” designed to bolster the industry. At the same time, he eviscerated basic regulatory controls, halted federal crypto-related lawsuits and disbanded a taskforce trained to hunt down crypto criminals.
Of course, this isn’t all but you get the point. Never have we had a president(?) who so blatantly ignores all the rules, laws and ethics (he has no idea what that is) and greedily lines his pockets using the power of the US government to keep the “donors” lined up.
I can’t wait to read the defenses that MAGA will write telling me that I’m all wrong and Trump is just being “Trump”.
Pogo says
Sherry says
OK Maga. . . can we please here about Hunter and Burisma yet again, or what about Hunter’s laptop? What, nothing to say? Thought so. . .
Skibum says
The trump grift continues. Just another in a very long history of scheming and scamming people out of their own hard earned money in order to make money for themselves without any remorse for their prior misdeeds and scams. Even the Kardashian klan, as reprehensible as those fools are, don’t even come close to the scheming, unethical, immoral and contemptuous trump tribe of despots. Anyone stupid enough, knowing the trump history of scamming people but still willing to buy anything this idiot or his imbecilic sons are selling, deserves what they get because they are not victims… they are volunteers!
Laurel says
Dennis: Do you never tire of making excuses and covering for the guy? Y’all went apeshit over Hunter Biden’s $50k, and punished Ukraine, though HB was not in office, but never, ever said boo about Jarod Kushner and Ivonka Trump’s $2billon from the Saudis, though they did have very high ranking positions in the Presidential cabinet. Please explain that away.
T polling 50%? I find that hard to believe, even from Fox Entertainment. Please refer us to your data site.
Sherry says
As usual dennis, you are absolutely WRONG! trump is still polling well below 50% in the vast majority of polls. . . take a look:
https://www.realclearpolling.com/latest-polls
Robjr says
@Dennis C Rathsam says
The latest trump news, I mean Fox News polls.
https://www.foxnews.com/official-polls/fox-news-poll-first-100-days-president-trumps-second-term
Overall approval of Trump’s job performance comes in at 44%, down 5 points from 49% approval in March. That’s lower than the approval of Joe Biden (54%), Barack Obama (62%), and George W. Bush (63%) at the 100-day mark in their presidencies. It’s also lower by 1 point compared to Trump’s 45% approval at this point eight years ago.
James says
Came across some fascinating reading the other day (while researching a somewhat unrelated matter of personal interest) regarding the EMP created by nuclear explosions.
Most interesting and strangely topical… considering all the talk of a defense shield lately… was the information regarding HEMP. That’s the high altitude electromagnetic pulse created from a nuclear explosion in near earth atmosphere.
Long story short, it really makes the “Golden Dome” project sound like a foolish idea… and a waste of money.
Choose peace.
Just an opinion.
Tony says
Trump made millions just selling bibles to his low intelligence base !!!! And tens of millions on all the other made in china junk !! One of the morons who bought one of his watches complained that there was no t on the face of the watch that he paid $600 for !!!
Ed P says
And still the Democrats have nothing but criticism as a platform.
A cohesive alternative plan is necessary. Theatrical resistance has proven useless.
Once the Democratic Party begins to work for the country and returns to being the adults, then and only then will they regain their sea legs and become effective. Transparent/phony resistance is ineffective.
It’s not Fox, nor Trump. It’s you. If Trump cobbles together wins on the border, the economy, and world peace, unless the Dems are part of the solution it will take multiple election cycles to regain a foothold.
Sherry says
@ Laurel . . This will definitely interest you! On dangerous Thiel from Robert Reich:
Friends,
Draw a circle around all the assets in America now devoted to Artificial Intelligence.
Draw a second circle around all the assets devoted to the U.S. military.
A third around all assets being devoted to helping the Trump regime collect and compile personal information on millions of Americans.
And a fourth circle around the parts of Silicon Valley dedicated to turning the United States away from a democracy into a libertarian dictatorship led by tech bros.
Where do the four circles intersect?
At a corporation called Palantir Technologies and a man named Peter Thiel.
In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a “palantir” is a seeing stone that can be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality. During the War of the Ring, a palantir falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive.
Palantir Technologies bears a striking similarity. It sells an AI-based data platform that allows its users — among them, military and law enforcement agencies — to analyze personal data, including social media profiles, personal information, and physical characteristics. These are used to identify and surveil individuals.
In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all agencies and departments of the federal government to share data on Americans. To get the job done, Trump chose Palantir Technologies.
Palantir is now busily combining personal data on every American gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and Internal Revenue Service, including their bank account numbers and medical claims.
Will the Trump regime use this emerging super database to advance Trump’s political agenda, find and detain immigrants, and punish critics? Will it make it easier for Trump to spy on and target his ever-growing list of enemies and other Americans? We’ll soon find out.
Thirteen former Palantir employees signed a letter this month urging the corporation to stop its endeavors with Trump. Linda Xia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was not with the company’s technology but with how the Trump administration intended to use it. “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse,” she said.
Palantir’s work on such a project could be “dangerous,” Representative Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, told the Semafor news site. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”
On Monday, a group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Palantir, asking for answers about huge government contracts the company got. The lawmakers are worried that Palantir is helping make a super database of American’s private information.
Behind their worry lie several people who are behind Palantir’s selection for the project, starting with Elon Musk.
Palantir’s selection was driven by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir, who still holds a major stake in it.
Thiel has worked closely with Musk, who devoted a quarter of a billion dollars to getting Trump reelected and then, as head of DOGE, helped eviscerate swaths of the government without congressional authority.
Thiel also mentored JD Vance, who worked for Thiel at one of his venture funds. Thiel subsequently bankrolled Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Thiel introduced Vance to Trump and later helped convinced Trump to name Vance his vice president.
Thiel also mentored billionaire David Sacks, who also worked with Thiel at PayPal. As a student at Stanford University, Sacks wrote for the Stanford Review, the right-wing student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate there in 1987. Sacks is now Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.”
The CEO of Palantir is Alex Karp, who said on an earnings call earlier this year that the company wants “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”
Palantir recently disclosed that Karp received $6.8 billion in “compensation actually paid” in 2024 (you read that right) — making him the second-highest paid chief executive of a publicly traded company in the United States (behind Musk).
A former generation of wealthy U.S. conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions.
But this group — Thiel, Musk, Sacks, Karp, and Vance, among others — doesn’t seem to want to conserve much of anything, at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.
As Thiel has written:
“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Hello?
If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy.
Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.
When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.
If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel abuses of political power — as Trump, Musk, Thiel, Karp, and other oligarchs have put on full display — which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.
The danger inherent in Palantir’s AI-powered super database on all Americans is connected to the vast wealth and power of those associated with the corporation, and their apparent disdain for democratic institutions.
Last Saturday, had you walked to the end of Trump’s military-birthday parade and gazed above Trump’s reviewing stand, you’d have seen on a giant video board an advertisement for Palantir — one of the chief sponsors of the event.
Tolkien’s palantir fell under the control of Sauron. Thiel’s Palantir is falling under the control of Trump. How this story ends is up to all of us.
Laurel says
Sherry: It’s interesting to read this now. I woke up this morning, thinking about Vance, which I rarely do. I thought, what if Trump died, or became incapacitated (he is 79, and three of our old friends passed away already just this year alone), Vance would take over. Clearly, Vance is not qualified, nor is he smart enough to be in charge of the U.S.A.. However, as you pointed out, he was groomed by Thiel. He is Thiel’s boy, and put in place by Thiel.
I believe that Trump is not that smart, good at marketing, but not that smart. Since he is so extremely egocentric, he is very easy to manipulate. The real people taking over this country are possibly the ones Reich has mentioned. They let Trump play, boost his ego, make millions off his made in China toys, and in turn, they get whatever they want, such as our personal data. This is a gamble, for them, as Trump is known to do some stupid things, like tell the enemy his plans to possibly bomb them (his two week deadlines, and his moronic cabinet and their texts) even though he one said to never tell your enemy your plans.
The maga crowd is easy to manipulate as well. Take away history, science, education and bombard them with supposed threats by others, and they are yours…or actually, Trump’s. Continue to dumb down America, get rid of the intelligentsia, and the system is completely owned by the oligarchs. Mission accomplished, on what was once the most difficult country to overtake due to its diversity, and freedoms such as speech and the independent reporting outlets (unfortunately, attacked by those whose consciences have been ignored, if they had any to begin with).
So, Trump is not the threat. The people who manipulate him are, and are the biggest threat this country has seen to date. Sadly, the supporters only see what they are told to see, and stand behind it with a vengeance. Must cannot answer questions about the current administration policies, but are sure God put Trump in place. Works beautifully for the oligarchs.
No, Trump is not our retribution, we are his, and the gift to those who seek to change our country into something our founding fathers fought against. They (oligarchs) never had it so good. For some, all the money in the world just isn’t enough. Power is the goal.
Sherry Epley says
@ Laurel. . . couldn’t agree more!