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Weather: Sunny. Showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely in the evening, then a chance of showers after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. Southwest 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 Palm Coast City Council meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
Flagler Beach’s Planning and Architectural Review Board meeting has been cancelled due to a lack of agenda items.
The Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board meets at 6 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The board consists of Carl Lilavois, Chair; Manuel Madaleno, Nealon Joseph, Gary Masten and Lyn Lafferty.
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.
Byblos: To get back to The Memory of Old Jack, last visited here last Saturday: The novel is what we call today a “celebration of life,” a phrase that did not exist when Berry wrote the novel (the New York Times’s first use of the phrase was in a 1960 headline over the review of a biography of the dancer Isadora Duncan, whose “Art Was a Dionysian Celebration of Life”), especially not with the meaning we ascribe it today–as a counterpoint to the inevitable, or a reversal to ancient Egyptian customs of mummifying death as a joyful continuation of life by other means. What faith there is in this book is in the land, not in the hereafter. Jack’s memory wants to memorialize, justify, excuse, confess, atone, settle a few scores. Like all celebrations of life it can be moving and terribly sad, which fits Berry’s elegiac tone, but also maudlin, a bit ridiculous, and at times cruel, as when he describes his daughter Clara and her husband, the rich banker Glad Pettit, whom he decides to refer to–to his face–as “Irwin.” There’s no hiding Jack’s didactic contempt for those and what he disapproves of. He wants to sell Pettit his farm to ensure its future. Pettit politely will have none of it. Cue the last judgment: “Glad was no longer the lean and muscular young man he had been when he married. He was fleshy now and somewhat stooped in the shoulders; he had been more weakened by the last fifteen years than Jack had been by the last fifty. But his superfluous weight, covered as it was by a tailored suit, set off by his graying hair, a diamond ring, and an excellent cigar, somehow made him look richer, more substantial, more dignified than ever. As his consort, Clara had become plump and opulent. Though she was still pretty, her looks had somehow become merely decorative. She had made of herself a sort of portable occasion for the ostentatious gifts of her husband, a sort of bodiless apparition in fine clothes—useless, so far as Jack could tell, for either work or love.” The prose is rich, the polemic richer, the author’s meanness richest. These are value judgments: Pettit made it rich in the city. Jack doesn’t like him for it and makes his daughter pay. (to refer to Clara as her husband’s “consort” and “plump and opulent” in the same sentence reminded me of Updike’s description in “Wife-Wooing” of the “sad yellow” between the wife’s breasts, of her “drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge.” These are value judgments. He is not kinder to Ruth, though he’s not to blame. His courtship is ardent and sincere. He thinks his love is, too. But we are to understand–we’re told, not shown–that Jack has a violent side, and that Ruth wants to remake him in her family’s image. He was “accustomed to an exciting manhood,” he had been “a dancer, a drinker, a wencher, a fighter,” all of which Ruth mummifies in a marriage based “on the condition that he become better than he was.” “And so when he became her suitor and then her husband, Jack did not exactly occupy a vacancy; he usurped the place of some well-educated young minister or lawyer or doctor whose face and name were perhaps not yet known to the mother and daughter but whose place had nevertheless been appointed. It was this hypothetical and shadowy figure that she held up to Jack as a standard.”
—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
Tourist Development Council Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
One-Stop Help Night on Range of Social, Medical and Legal Services at Flagler Cares
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Concert Series
For the full calendar, go here.
… the times of planting and harvest, when he teamed with neighbors, he worked alone. His solitude assured that his work would have the coherence of his character.
–From Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack (1974).
Jan says
Is the Flagler County Board of County Commissioners Workshop and Special Meeting still scheduled for Wednesday, July 2nd at 9 a.m.?
An important one for library lovers!
Thanks!
Pogo says
@As was said
“As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
“Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.”
― Erica Jong
Sherry says
On the trump and musk lack of human empathy by Robert Reich:
Friends,
During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan some months ago, Elon Musk revealed the core of the ideology animating the richest person in the world.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Musk said, adding that liberals and progressives are “exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk continued. Empathy has been “weaponized.”
Musk is now officially out of Trump world but his DOGE lives on. It has already destroyed almost every empathic part of the U.S. government.
Musk disdains social insurance such as Social Security, which he calls a “Ponzi scheme.”
Musk’s former buddy Donald Trump presumably agrees with him. As do many Republicans, including Joni (“Well, we all are going to die”) Ernst and Mitch (“They’ll get over it”) McConnell.
Trump’s Republicans are now raiding Medicaid and food stamps to make way for a giant tax cut mostly for the rich. No empathy bug there.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is grabbing people off the streets and from courthouses without warrants and putting them in detention centers.
The number of immigrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000. The result is overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and enormous pain for affected families and communities.
It’s the opposite of empathy — treating people as if they aren’t human, as if they’re the “other.”
Both Musk and Trump are experts in taking selfish advantage of everything, anything, and anybody. Both have altered government programs and regulations to reap personal financial gain. Both have been quick to fire people. Both demand loyalty to themselves but have no loyalty to anything or anyone besides themselves.
They’ve got it all wrong. Empathy is a necessary precondition for a society.
Without empathy, we’d be living in a social Darwinist jungle animated only by selfish individuals pursuing selfish needs, like Musk and Trump.
If everyone behaved like Musk and Trump, we’d have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us if they could. Much of our time and attention would be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from other Musks and Trumps.
Without a shared sense of empathy and responsibility, we would have to assume that everyone — including legislators, judges, regulators, and police — was acting selfishly, making and enforcing laws for their own benefit.
In a world populated by people like Musk and Trump, we couldn’t trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service. Internet-based “reputational ratings” would be of little value because raters would be easily bribed.
Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims, as, in part, it has.
We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications. We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not to feed us tainted food, lawyers not to hoodwink us.
A society depends on people trusting that most others in society will have a modicum of empathy for others rather than take advantage of them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating, while civic distrust can corrode the very foundations of a society.
Polls tell us that many of today’s Americans worry that the nation is losing its national identity. Yet the core of that identity has never been the whiteness of our skin, the uniformity of our ethnicity, or the commonality of our birthplace.
Our core identity as Americans — the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us — consists of the ideals we share and the obligations we hold in common. We are tied together by these empathic meanings and duties. Our loyalties and attachments, guided by empathy, define who we are.
If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing the ties that bind us together, our collective empathy.
Musk and Trump typify what has gone wrong. Their most damaging legacies may be the erosion of the trust and empathy on which our society — any society — depends.
FlaglerLive says
Yes it is.
Laurel says
Sherry: I guess if a person is a sociopath, empathy is foreign to them. Easy to ignore. Just something that gets in their way, like nature is to a developer.
Musk thinks Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.” Actually, it is a means, not only to help keep seniors out of poverty, but to keep the money flowing. Seniors get the check they’ve paid into for decades, and they go out to dinner, tipping the younger generation. They buy stuff, like food, garden items, pay the roofer, pay the rent or mortgage, pay the plumber, pay the doctor, buy a car, etc., all creating jobs, and the money is recirculated into society. They aren’t stuffing it into a mattress, they are spending it. For a “genius,” Musk is dense.
Musk thinks we need more population, like eight billion is not enough. What for? A true Ponzi scheme. He produced 14 children, and he thinks we should do the same. But, a lack of empathy stops feeding those children. If society feeds, clothes and educates children, they, too, become producers in society. They work. They pay taxes. They contribute. So, take away their food? Make an impoverished society? How does that help? This current administration has no clue how the economy works.
The thing I cannot figure out, and have asked many times without an answer, is why wear a cross, around the neck, if the wearer thinks that helping out their fellow citizens is something to destroy, and to pass that much needed aid onto those who don’t need it, not even a little bit. How is that Christian? Is it phony? Is it mean spirited? Is it ignorance? I mean, did Jesus say do not feed the children, feed the wealthy? What are they teaching in churches these days? Is it over the minute a parishioner steps out the door? Is it taught that empathy is overrated? I would think not.
I have seen no empathy in Trump. I have seen no empathy in DeSantis. I have seen no empathy in Vance. I have seen no empathy in Steven Miller or Steve Bannon. I have seen no empathy in the current Presidential Cabinet. I have seen no empathy in Project 2025, and I am struggling to see empathy in the current Republican Party. I hope they can find it themselves.
Sherry says
Thanks Laurel. . . couldn’t agree more. . . except to say it’s now the Maga Party, not the Republican party at all.