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Weather: Sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Thursday Night: Partly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then mostly clear with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. 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:
Protection
Editorial Notebook: What we already knew before the bombing is now confirmed: Iran’s nuclear program was not significantly harmed. There was no fatal blow. Someone at the Pentagon who doesn’t have much respect for a lying felon as commander in chief leaked the preliminary intelligence report. The Times paraphrased: “The strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings, the officials said the early findings concluded. Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program had been delayed, but by less than six months. The report also said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material. Iran may have moved some of that to secret locations.” The LAPD’s original tweet was right after all to sympathize with the victims: they’re the only ones who have really paid a price. The bombing will do what it was certain to do. It will accelerate Iran’s race to build a weapon, since, with North Korea as proof, having a stockpile is the only insurance against attack, though not an insurance against first or retaliatory use. The common fear was that, American and Russian follies or errors and miscalculations aside, Pakistan and India would be next to fire nukes at each other. They almost have, twice, in 1993 and this year, both times talked off the ledge by negotiators (most notably James Baker in 1990). It’s now a surer bet that Israel and Iran, likely in that order, will be next to set off nukes, unless the United States or Israel decides that the bunker-busting fiasco being what it was. Dropping tactical nuclear weapons on nuclear sites should be next. Leave it to these two nations always to push the limits of the unconscionable.
—P.T.
Now this: MIT Prof Ted Postol & Lt Col Daniel Davis: The bunker buster myth:
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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 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
County Attorney Candidate Interviews
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
For the full calendar, go here.
“And at any moment their work can be brought to nothing by a few men armed with spades! How can we win such a war? What is the use of textbook military operations, sweeps and punitive raids into the enmy’s heartland, when we can be bled to death at home?”
–From J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).
Pogo says
@One homicidal ape
… declares other homicidal apes — are homicidal!
Ray W, says
The video clip on bunker busters reminded me of a story I recalled reading in Scientific American some 10 or 15 years ago.
In my memory of the article, a number of WWII German cities had been destroyed by bombing, for example Dresden; the cities had long since been rebuilt. But not all of the bombs that were dropped onto the cities had exploded as planned. Some of the bombs simply burrowed into the soil and lay inert, leaving only the entry holes behind them. In the chaos of war, no one had marked the location of the holes. People forgot about them. Then, the long-forgotten unexploded bombs began going off underneath new buildings erected over them.
What was the cause?
When American and British heavy bomber crews had dropped their bomb loads, some of the bombs had time-delayed detonators designed to go off a short-while after the bombs burrowed deep into the soil. An acid enclosed in glass would be released on impact; it would slowly dissolve a metal strip within the detonator. When the strip fully dissolved, the detonator would set off the explosive charge.
But the design required that the bomb come to rest in a downward-facing position so that the acid, via gravity, would contact the metal strip. What would happen if the bomb did not come to rest in a downward facing position? The released acid would not come into contact with the metal strip and the detonator would not set off the explosive charge as planned.
As it turned out, years and decades after the some of these bombs struck soil, they began going off underneath newly built homes and apartment complexes and other buildings.
German authorities began requiring searches for unexploded bombs before any new construction could begin. As they found unexploded bombs, the authorities realized that some of the bombs were facing upwards in the soil. Apparently, the noses of these bombs had deformed on impact in a way that caused the bombs to travel through the soil in a J-shaped path, with the nose of the bomb eventually facing upwards when it came to rest. The acid had been released from the glass enclosure as planned, but it never touched the detonator, as the bomb now faced upward instead of downward.
Nearly 70 years after the bombing, according to the article, bombs were still detonating underneath buildings, theoretically during vibrations caused by new construction.
So, I looked for new articles on the subject.
This past January, James Madison University published a short article after an 1,100 lb. bomb had been unearthed and defused in Cologne, Germany. WWII-era aerial photographs and other records are being used to locate the holes in the ground left by similar bombs. Some 2,000 tons of unexploded ordinance of all types are still found in Germany each year.
I looked further and found the article that I recalled reading, which had been published in Smithsonian magazine in 2016, not Scientific American. Most of my memories were accurate, but the glass container containing acetone, an acid, did not break on impact. When the bomb dropped from the plane, a spinner vane operated by the passing air depressed a rod that broke the glass acetone container. And the metal strip was not metal; it was celluloid in construction and disc-like in shape. The celluloid discs restrained the firing pin until they dissolved. The more celluloid discs restraining the firing pin, the longer the time delay before explosion. Finally, I did not recall what the Smithsonian article detailed: a long-term effort by one man to put together WWII aerial reconnaissance photographic records from various sources to locate the old holes in the ground that were consistent with bomb strikes that had not resulted in an explosion.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
First, I have long argued that memories are malleable. The theory, as it was taught to me, is called “convergence wave” memory. Memories consist of multiple snippets that are stored in different regions of the brain. When we attempt to recall a memory, the different snippets converge and the memory forms. But not all snippets always converge at the same time. As such, it is important to check as best one can on the completeness or the accuracy of one’s memory.
There can be no doubt that there are those among us who recall the American economy as having been “destroyed” during the Biden years. Such commenters type the fallacy over and over again. In reality, what they remember never happened. The Biden years, for multiple reasons, saw the strongest economic recovery from the destruction caused by the pandemic among the developed nations. When President Trump took office, he inherited an economy that was “the envy of the world”, in the words of both The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. Whenever any FlaglerLive reader claims that former President Biden destroyed the American economy, is it best to argue that the commenter’s malleable memory is inaccurate? Or defective? There is a difference.
Second, what proof exists at this time that the bunker busting bombs dropped on the Iranian nuclear research facility at Fordow actually travelled in a straight line after impacting the rocky soil in the mountainous region? That they ended up where they were intended to end up?
What can FlaglerLive readers learn from this? Is it really important to check one’s sources for accuracy before you comment? Is there too great a risk of laundering someone else’s lies when you don’t check for accuracy prior to setting fingers to keys?
Pogo says
@Always timely
As stated
https://news.va.gov/140930/live-whole-health-278-dont-hold-a-grudge/
Ray W, says
Basing assumptions on the fact that just over 26% of all “short-haul” commercial flights involve travel distances of 270 nautical miles or less, Interesting Engineering reports that a British electric motor specialist, Helix, recently released a “white paper” on a theoretical electric-powered aircraft that carries a gas-powered engine to generate electricity solely during level flight.
The theoretical aircraft would use already existing technology, and it should consume as little as 10.3% of the fuel currently consumed by conventional aircraft engines for the same short-hop flights.
According to the reporter, conventional aircraft using fuel-powered engines devote 30% of aircraft operating costs to fuel, so any savings in fuel costs might prove to be significant.
The proposed converted aircraft requires three steps:
First, a hybrid-electric configuration would use on-board battery power for take-off and landing by way of two electric motors powering propellers: its gas-powered generator would only start during level flight in order to produce electricity to recharge the battery pack. Use of a single purpose designed liquid-fueled engine to generate electricity during flight permits additional overall weight savings by way of smaller on-board batteries. This first step alone reduces liquid fuel consumption by 74.3% compared to conventional aircraft.
Second, a new and more efficient version of electric motor is lighter by 162 kilograms per pair of motors. When coupled with a “geared motor configuration” (transmission), fuel consumption is cut by another 11.1%.
Third, instead of using “open propellers” that inherently have propeller tip energy losses, the plane would have “ducted fans” that enclose the propeller blades in a cylindrical housing (nacelle), all of which generates the same thrust while requiring 25% less power and produces far less noise, “which is critical for regional airports sensitive to sound.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
A relatively quiet and a nearly 90% more fuel-efficient aircraft with a travel range of 270 nautical miles that burns zero liquid fuel during take-offs and landings? What could be better than that for the communities surrounding the Flagler airport?