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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 90. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Monday Night: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 74. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
- 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 Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements here.
Notably: Dumb and dumber. Choose your poison as the United States joins the British Empire on the ash heap of debt. From Statista: According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, the latest version of the bill the president calls big and beautiful would add $3.3 trillion to the already ballooning federal debt. Compared to the version of the bill that was passed by the House on May 22, the Senate bill includes even steeper tax cuts, resulting in more than $800 billion in additional debt by 2034. The latest version of the landmark bill includes an extension of existing tax cuts plus new ones amounting to nearly $4.5 trillion over the next decade. The foregone tax revenue would partly be offset by deep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare and rollbacks of clean energy programs, but the funding gap remains too big for the taste of House Republicans, who had been adamant to limit the funding gap to $2.5 trillion over ten years. Exceeding that benchmark by such a wide margin, puts serious question marks over the bill’s prospects in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans cannot afford many defectors for the bill to pass before the July 4 deadline set by President Trump.
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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.
But for those who grew up, like me, in disaster-stricken countries, where the aspiration to progress, to development, to democracy, to dignity, was constantly hampered, lost opportunities are not just unfortunate events. History does not always offer catch-up sessions, and if we do not react at the right time in the right way, countries can find themselves destroyed, entire civilizations can sink into regression, countless populations end up bathed in despair, in resentment, in hatred of others and in self-hatred. By saying this, I am only describing a reality that I have contemplated with sadness since I opened my eyes to the world. Namely that in many regions of the planet, from Central Europe to Eastern Asia, including my native Levant, the damage caused by the treaties signed in the aftermath of the First War was massive, lasting and often impossible to repair.
–From Amin Maalouf’s The Labyrinth of the Lost (2023).
Pogo says
@Dear Amin
…look at the bright $ide:
Getting by in a desolate and heartless five-star wasteland
https://www.google.com/search?q=amin+maalouf+net+worth
James says
And now on a more positive note…
https://vegasinc.lasvegassun.com/news/2025/jul/07/students-in-henderson-building-tiny-homes-is-a-win/
… solutions, being done elsewhere of course.
Sherry says
OVER 71% of ICE Detainees have ZERO criminal record at all! Let’s waste “billions” of taxpayers’ money and contribute to the deficit to “Make America WHITE” again! Right Maga????
This from Robert Reich:
Friends,
Trump’s Big Ugly Bill delivers $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement.
This is on the scale of supplemental budgets passed by the United States when we enter war.
ICE will add 10,000 agents to the 20,000 already on the streets.
Its annual budget for detentions will skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the current fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year. That’s a 365 percent increase.
Funding for ICE detentions will exceed funding for the entire federal prison system.
When government capacity is built out this way, there’s always political and bureaucratic pressure to utilize such capacity. Supply creates its own demand.
“They pass that bill, we’re gonna have more money than we ever had to do immigration enforcement,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said recently, adding, “You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”
Which means that the number of people detained in ICE facilities — numbering 56,397 as of June 15 — will likely grow dramatically. A four-fold increase in the detention budget could mean a quarter of a million people locked up.
Don’t fall for the Trump regime’s lie that these people are criminals. As of now, 71.7 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record. Some have been hardworking members of their communities for decades.
Even before the huge increase in funding, Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents arrest 3,000 people a day.
That’s triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making between February and April.
Sherry says
Statistical data from the CATO Institute indicates less than 8% of ICE detainees had criminal records for violent crimes:
June 20, 2025 11:19AM
65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent NO Violent Convictions
By David J. Bier
New nonpublic data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicate that the government is primarily detaining individuals with no criminal convictions of any kind. Also, among those with criminal convictions, they are overwhelmingly not the violent offenses that ICE continuously uses to justify its deportation agenda. ICE has shared this data with people outside the agency, who shared the numbers with the Cato Institute.
As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes. The appendix table at the end of this post has data by detailed crime and broad crime categorization.
Government backed genocide says
The orange terror is switching back to domestic terror! How do you define economic terror? Starve a kid save a dollar, Murikkka!!
Ray W, says
Like so many other tragedies, the Kerr County flood catastrophe is already drawing the notice of people who would hope to make political hay at the expense of others. One rabbit trail involves a theory that there exists a government capacity to modify weather, and that somehow, the government this time chose Kerr, Texas, for flooding.
The following is derived from a Newsweek article.
Two days ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted to X the following statement:
“I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity. It will be a felony offense.”
In response, Matthew Cappucci wrote:
“It’s not a political statement for me as a Harvard-degreed atmospheric scientist to say that elected representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. She’d be equally qualified to fly a Boeing-737, practice nuclear medicine or train zebras.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I haven’t commented on the subject-matter of educability for some time.
Many, if not most, of our founding fathers were educated in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, a period of time dating from the last decade of the 16th century to the early two decades of the 18th century. The colonial American university system during this period was dominated by presidents who had been educated in the Scottish Enlightenment mold.
In academia, the latter period of this roughly 120-year period of philosophical eminence is known today as the Age of Reason. One of the most influential of these Scottish philosophers was Thomas Reid, whose theory on educability was first published in the early 1760s.
We know of his importance to the age because of court records. Whenever a person’s estate was submitted to probate, a detailed list of belongings was filed into the court record. Social historians long ago compiled from these court records a list of which books were in the libraries of American and British families. Thomas Reid’s book was widely owned throughout England and the colonies during the time of our nation’s founding.
His theory of educability was prominent in the teachings of the day; it is called Common Sense. While he was not the only proponent of Common Sense, he is thought to be one of the most prominent advocates of this form of thought.
His theory of educability is a straight-forward idea, but it revolutionized the philosophy of education.
Prior to the time of his contribution to philosophy, the accepted form of teaching was the “rote” method, in which method credibility was determined by one’s status in society. A king or a pope or a judge or a teacher could say that something was fact, and it had to be accepted as true, because the king’s or the pope’s or the judge’s or the teacher’s word was held to be beyond or above contestation. One’s status as a king or a pope or a judge or a teacher alone drove the expansion of knowledge.
Dr. Reid argued that one’s credibility was not a function of one’s status.
He argued that one’s credibility was a function of another person’s educability. To him, the philosophy of educability required the existence of two qualities in a person:
First was the idea of veracity, which can be defined as one’s ability to speak, know, and understand a subject-matter.
Just because a person proves that he or she understands the concrete mathematics of the multiplication tables does not also prove that the same person understands each, several, or all of the many different forms of abstract mathematics, such as linear algebra.
In other words, a person may possess the quality of the veracity necessary to speak, know, and understand why five times five equals twenty-five, but he may still be unable to possess the quality of the veracity to speak, know or understand the mathematical truths of three-dimensional calculus.
This idea of the quality of veracity posits that everyone can learn certain things on their own through their unique life’s experiences, but the capacity to learn other certain things requires a teacher. And in order for one to be able to learn from that teacher, a person must have the second of Dr. Reid’s two qualities of educability, and that is the quality of credulity.
Credulity can be defined as the capacity of an individual to believe that someone else possesses veracity about a particular subject-matter. Obviously, under Dr. Reid’s philosophy of educability, if someone is unable to form credulity for another person, then the other person will never be able to teach the former person. Through this lack of the quality of credulity, that person can be deemed uneducable on that subject-matter.
Perhaps just as obviously, in order for the abstract form of mathematics known as three-dimensional calculus to be created means that someone at some time had to have been the first to teach himself or herself at least a portion of that abstract form of mathematics and that he or she was then able to teach it to others. In the real world, very few people can teach themselves these forms of abstract mathematics without the help of teachers.
Here is how it all works.
When born, a child is naive’. That naivete’ means that the child is susceptible to believing anything that a trusted person says. Children believe in the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny due to this form of naivete’.
This all too human condition of naivete’ is at the heart of all destructive forms of politics. Every destructive politician seeks to exploit flaws in people’s capacity to form credulity too easily due to naivete’. Gaining credibility from such misguided giving of credulity is the goal. This is at the heart of all lie laundering. Persuading the gullible among us to believe in the many mistruths that are uttered by a professional lying class is the goal. The hope is that the mistruths will be laundered to others. This is the modus operandi of today’s politics.
But we all learn as we age and grow into maturity. Most of us develop the capacity of skepticism. In time, some of us form so little skepticism that they retain the naivete’ necessary to believe too much without questioning the source. Others become so skeptical that they believe nothing except what they already know.
To Dr. Reid, both states of mind mean that the person has allowed themselves to become uneducable. Believing too much or too little means we cannot learn, either from our own experiences or from the knowledge gained by others.
As an aside, I have long argued that a measure of naivete’ and another measure of skepticism is necessary in all good marriages. I cannot imagine a total skeptic’s questioning of every motive of a spouse at every moment in a marriage without that form of total skepticism damaging or destroying the marriage, i.e. it takes a measure of naivete’ to trust another person.
So here is the problem.
Whenever anyone forms credulity for another person, thereby giving credibility to the other person, the other person achieves a measure of mastery over the credulous person’s mind. What happens if someone errs by forming credulity for the wrong person, by forming credulity for one who lacks the capacity to teach, or even worse, what if one forms credulity for someone else who intends to mislead or to deceive or to harm?
What happens if the person who is forming the credulity for someone else lacks the veracity to speak, know and understand the many truths of the subject-matter that he seeks from the other! I argue that such a person would be susceptible to being duped by a malicious person who seeks to mislead for personal gain.
This is why I place so much importance on my being a curious student. I accept that I cannot learn all on my own.
This is why I place so much importance on the necessity of intellectual rigor on the process of learning.
This is why I place so much emphasis on the three forms of reason that were taught to many of our founding fathers in the universities of the day.
Both inductive and deductive logic provide only one answer to the exclusion of all other possible answers, and that legal reasoning, often known as argumentation, provide a framework in which the least bad or the best option can be chosen from a number of possible options.
To our founders, common sense was a process; it wasn’t a result. If common sense is a process, then one has to engage in the act of determining the meaning of common sense, over and over and over again. If common sense is a result, then someone else can tell us the meaning of common sense and we don’t have to go through the process for ourselves.
This is the problem of Dennis C. Rathsam’s repeated display of his reasoning process. Since in his mind all Democrats are bad, even the worst Republican idea is automatically better than any good Democratic idea. Someone else tells him the meaning of common sense; he has abdicated the use of common sense. He lives in a perfect or bad world. By this deeply flawed form of reasoning, he purposely chooses, over and over and over again, to make himself uneducable.
In his naivete’, he believes anything told to him by members of the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties, and he is more than willing to launder any of those lies to others without question.
For an example of the reliance of the professional lying class on this type of thinking, when asked by a reporter about staffing levels of the National Weather Service and any possible impact therefrom on timely flood warnings, our president immediately said that it was a Biden issue. Only a dupe would fall for that line.
In reality, there is every possibility that the NWS did everything right in issuing warnings and watches, and that staffing was not an issue at all; we just don’t know yet.
Ray W, says
CBS NEWS is reporting that letters have been sent to the Japanese and Korean government leaders informing them that the tariffs freeze currently set to expire on July 9th will be delayed and that tariffs of all goods will be increased by 25% on August 1st. Any raise in tariff rates on U.S. goods announced by Japan or Korea will be reciprocated by the U.S. by a matching increase in tariff rates.
Government leaders in Myanmar and Laos will soon receive similar letters advising a rise in tariffs on goods to 40%.
South Africa will get a 30% duty rate, and Malaysia and Kazakhstan will get 25% rates.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Announce tariffs on Mexico and Canada, then delay imposition.
Announce an across-the-board tariff on China, and when China reciprocates, raise the tariffs to 145%. Then announce a deal with China and reduce the tariffs to 30% for three months.
Announce a Liberation Day tariff spread on multiple countries, then delay imposition until July 9th.
Announce a deal with the UK on a limited number of items, then raise tariffs on steel and aluminum on Canada and the UK.
Announce new tariffs on seven countries but also delay the July 9th day of imposition on the original Liberation Day tariffs to August 1st.
Who knows how it will turn out? On paper, the tariffs are nearly unprecedented in scope and size, but since the tariffs have seldom been in place for long due to pauses, no business owner could ever predict where tariffs will be in a week, or a month, or a year.
Ray W, says
Per Seeking Alpha, the Cypriot government just announced the sixth discovery of natural gas reserve deposits off its southern and southwestern coasts in the last 14 years.
The latest discovery, named the Pegasus-1, is below a seafloor some 6,300 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean, but no estimate of quantity was released.
Just over six years ago, the Glaucus-1 well site was found, with an estimated reserve quantity of 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Glaucus-2 well was found in 2022, but no extractable quantity has been released.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
Yesterday, when appearing on a news show, Secretary Scott Bessent told a reporter that many nations never contacted the U.S. to engage in tariff negotiations. If I understand what he said accurately (it was a bit scrambled), 100 letters will be going out telling the leaders of each of the countries what their tariff rates on goods will be on August 1.
On another point, the Canadian government just announced the departure of the first ever cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has departed a British Columbian port by tanker, destined for South Korea. One draw for the decision is that natural gas prices for Asian delivery are 30% to 50% higher than that for gas sent to America.
According to a Washington Examiner reporter, Canada is trying to pivot away from dependence on the U.S. market for export of its surplus natural gas. In 2023, Canada exported 45% of its natural gas to the U.S., with much of the gas originating in the province of Alberta.
Said Prime Minister Mark Carney, “Canada has what the world needs. … By turning aspiration into action, Canada can become the world’s leading energy superpower.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
A report by The Hill quotes Putin as telling an audience during last month’s “plenary session of the Petersburg International Economic Forum that “wherever the foot of a Russian soldier steps is ours.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There are a number of gullible commenters on the FlaglerLive site who defend Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. Many are the reasons they employ. What fools they are. His is the language of empire.
Ray W, says
In what presents on its face as a partially poorly researched article, an AUTOPOST reporter writes that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “has signaled its intent to cull the majority of the 120-plus EV brands currently operating, leaving only about 20 core companies standing. This move aims to eliminate companies that have relied heavily on subsidies and refocus the industry around a select few with strong technological and financial foundations.”
The part of the article I disagree with is that devoted to the existence of some 6 million new units that have yet to be sold; he wrote that they are “languishing in factories and warehouses.” Since the total size of the Chinese marketplace last year was just over 30 million vehicles, that would mean a nearly 20% supply of unsold new cars, or well over two months’ worth. All my adult life, I have read repeatedly about how American car companies keep close watch on how to maintain an adequate reserve of new cars. The ideal rate differs by model and maker, but a 90-day reserve of unsold new vehicles is quite common. Using this rate as a template, it would be entirely normal to have a 6 million large supply of unsold new cars.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
For years, I have commented to FlaglerLive readers that the Chinese car making industry has entered into a winnowing phase similar to that experienced by the Japanese motorcycle industry in the 1950s.
About a decade after WWII, as many as 150 Japanese manufacturers were competing for a tiny yet growing Japanese appetite for new motorcycles. Bankruptcies by motorcycle manufacturers commonly felled banks that lost the money loaned to the manufacturers. Families who invested in failing dealerships lost everything. People placing deposits for future deliveries lost their deposits.
The Japanese government responded by sponsoring five motorcycle races; it invited every producer to enter their products. The five most successful manufacturers received government grants to upgrade their operations. The others withered on the vine.
The five winning brands? Bridgestone, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha. Bridgestone went on to sell motorcycles into the 70s, but it eventually pivoted and is now one of the world’s largest tire makers.
I still hold to the Ford CEO’s position, expressed some eight months ago, when he said that the Chinese NEV industry is having its own disruptive Model T moment.
Some industry observers believe that the Chinese marketplace will end up with as few as seven surviving EV automakers by 2030.
Who knows?
Ray W, says
Reuters reports that Japanese trade negotiators, after three months of negotiations, spoke “in-depth” over the phone with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick this past Wednesday and Saturday in an effort to avert higher tariffs.
As an aside, in another comment, I noted that Japan’s prime minister was receiving a letter advising of a new tariff level of 25%, beginning on August 1, thereby delaying the imposition of the paused Liberation Day tariffs on July 9th.
In the past week, President Trump has accused the Japanese government of both refusing to buy U.S.-grown rice and of engaging in “unfair” automobile trade.
The Reuters reporter wrote that the Japanese government had permitted the import of a record amount American-grown rice amidst record high home rice prices.
Noting that Japan was the largest investor in the United States, Japan’s Prime Minister stated that “he was determined to protect his country’s national interests.”
Make of this what you will.
Sherry says
ICE is now the Extremely Expensive GESTAPO!
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Masked, unidentified agents have been “systematically” cornering brown-skinned people in a show of force across Southern California, tackling those who attempt to leave, arresting them without probable cause and then placing them in “dungeon-like” conditions without access to lawyers, a federal lawsuit alleges.
The report continues:
The lawsuit filed Wednesday by immigrant rights groups against the Trump administration describes the region as “under siege” by agents, some dressed in military-style clothing and carrying out “indiscriminate immigration raids flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners.” It seeks to block the administration’s “ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law” during immigration raids in the L.A. area.
And if things have not been horrifying enough, DHS is about to morph into an even more monstrous operation that will bring America that much closer to a police state. Under the morally repugnant reconciliation bill, taxpayers will be spending “$170 billion for immigration- and border enforcement-related funding provisions.” That includes $45B (a 265% increase in ICE’s detention budget) and “$29.9 billion toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations, increasing ICE’s annual budget three-fold.”
Laurel says
Ray W.: Rote, such as the multiplication table has its place.
Years ago, I bartended in a small, neighborhood bar. Since bartenders play a role in entertainment, I had, what I thought, was a fun, little trick. First, you write down the word “carrot” on a napkin, and fold it up. Then you tell the “victim” you can read their mind. Start by asking the person “What is 3 x 7?” and they say “21.” Then, “What is 7 x 3”? They say “21.” “What is 21 divided by 7?’ “3.” What is 21 divided by 3?” “7.” All this is asked very quickly. Then ask “name a vegetable” and nine times out of 10 they will say “carrot.” Then, you show them what you wrote down. Mind reading!
So, I confronted three bar patrons with this *trick.*
What is 3 x 7?
They didn’t know.
So, I said 3 x 7 is 21.
What is 7 x 3?
They didn’t know.
So, I said if 3 x 7 is 21, then 7 x 3 is 21.
What is 21 divided by 3?
They didn’t know.
I threw away the napkin with “carrot” written on it.
These were adult Americans. Too sad. We’re too easily steered.
On another day, an Englishman said “beetroot.” Too funny, but he wasn’t wrong.
Ray W, says
Thank you, Laurel, for your insight into Americans when observed in the wild.
Sherry says
This is what happens when trump appoints a complete “Whack a Doodle” :
WASHINGTON (AP) — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.
He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.
“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.
But an Associated Press review of Mom’s Meals menu, including the ingredients and nutrition labels, shows that the company’s offerings are the type of heat-and-eat, ultra-processed foods that Kennedy routinely criticizes for making people sick.
The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.
Laurel says
Well, at least rote is one hurdle.
Not only are there those who are uneducable, there are others determined to dumb down the rest, or at least, enough of them to matter. I am very concerned where we are going.
I’m an old gal. I don’t think I would handle all this authoritarian bs well, at all, if I was younger. Though, disturbingly, George Carlin was right about “They own you” several years ago. It’s so difficult to believe that kind of take over could happen in this particular country. Not us! I think that those who blindly support this administration, still can’t believe it can happen here, so they call it “hyperbole” or “bluster.”
It can.
Skibum says
Ray W., thanks for reminding all of us how “smart” smarty pants MTG really is. She is a self-appointed neuro-scientist, climate scientist, and probably an astrophysicist as well. In her next attempt at federal legislation, I hope she puts forth a proposed bill to make it a felony for any boater to sail out in the ocean so far that they might fall off the edge.
Sherry says
Hi Skibum. . . I’m thinking that MTG along with Noem, Hegseth, Kennedy, and many others in the trump administration, along with millions of their supporters, have already fallen of that edge. They now reside in the land of lost marbles. . . LOL!
Not so funny for the rest of us through because we are forced to deal with the results of their looney tune thought processes and demented actions.