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Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today’s guest: Palm Coast City Council member Charles Gambaro, among others. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Notably: Harry Elmer Barnes is a problematic historian. As brilliant as he was in his younger years (he was born in 1889, died in 1968), age did not agree with him: he became a repulsive holocaust denier (if you can forgive the redundance, which grammarly, that latest of stupefying language tyrants, would have me change to redundancy; well, I refuse). But I have been reading his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, the first volume of which he published in 1937, before he soured (the last was published in 1965, post-sour: I’ll report on it in time). So far, through the pre-history of the Magdalenian wonders, the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, my own Phoenician ancestry, and now the early beginnings of Greece’s Cambrian explosion of intellect, he’s been what would anachronistically be called “woke” today. Take this wonderful insights as an example. We always conventionally refer to writing as an untrammeled good. Barnes reminds us: “Its great contributions, of course, have been accompanied by certain evils. Although it has enabled us to transmit culture from age to age, it has at the same time kept alive outworn notions and antiquated beliefs whose retarding influences might otherwise never have reached succeeding generations.” Who could possibly dispute that? The same applies to books, newspapers, social media, any media: quality is the exception, passability the rule, disproportionate infamy the often dominant exception. Along the same lines, I found this little excerpt heartening, ion light of our current dark ages. He was writing one of his little sum-ups of Greek civilization, as in the Greece of Pericles 2500 years ago, and underscoring the importance of secularism. Are you listening, Chief Justice Roberts? “Accepting this highly secular view of life, the Greek was in a position to speculate freely about human problems and social issues. He was able to discover what the ‘good life’ was really like. Such a humanistic outlook was an absolutely new thing in the world, and has remained, through ages of darkness, turmoil, tyranny, and defeat, a perpetual inspiration. It is the morning star lighting up the course of Europe’s subsequent chequered intellectual history.” It’s not quite the rhythm of the Psalms. But same idea. And yes, before romaticizing the Greeks too much, let ujs agree with Hendrick van Loon, and “let us not tumble into the very common error of depicting ancient Hellas as some sort of terrestrial paradise. Nor was the average Greek a paragon of all the virtues a noble hero, moving with Homeric dignity across the stage of history, spending his days in battling for freedom and democracy and burning his little midnight oil lamp, discussing some of the finer points of Plato’s most recent philosophical disquisitions with half a dozen assorted friends. There undoubtedly were a few men of such caliber during the age of Pericles, but they were the exceptions, as they always have been and always will be.” The exception. Always. Even today. Especially today. So what are we getting so incensed about Maga? It’s always been the norm. Always. Its steroidal era doesn’t make it exceptional. Just more putrid.
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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
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
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.
When he rises in the morning and clothes his body in textile garments, when he sits down to the breakfast table spread with spotless linen, set with vessels of glazed pottery and with drinking goblets of glass, when he puts forth his hand to any implement of metal on that table except aluminum, when he eats his morning roll or cereal and drinks his glass of milk, or perhaps eats his morning chop cut from the flesh of a domesticated animal, when he rolls downtown in a vehicle supported on wheels, when he enters his office building through a porticus supported on columns, when he sits down at his desk, spreads out a sheet of paper, grasps his pen, dips it in ink, puts a date, at the head of the sheet, writes a check or a promissory note, or dictates a lease or contract to his secretary, when he looks at his watch with the sixty-fold division of the circle on its face, in all these and in an infinite number of other commonplaces of life-things without which modern life could not go on for a single hour, the average man of today is using items of an inheritance which began to pass across the eastern Mediterranean from the Orient when Europe was discovered by civilization five thousand years ago.
–From Harry Elmer Barnes’s An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, vol. 1, From earliest times through the Middle Ages (1937).
Pogo says
@Welcome back
…it’s been a long while since I heard from you.
Sherry says
When Maga incessantly claims that only criminals are being detained by ICE, each of you needs to watch this video from the AP:
https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrest-california-surgery-center-c827038f1a40227dc05ab1c28b048035
NO warrant! NO ID! = an armed kidnapping!
Ray W, says
Hello Tristam and thank you for your musing about why the ancient Greek philosophers and authors and playwrights in their many differing stripes are so widely admired, remembered, taught, and studied in what we call the West today, when the many philosophers and authors and playwrights of the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Babylonians, civilizations ranging from the mountains above Teheran through to the Levant, and all the way on to the coasts of the Maghreb are more of an afterthought in places other than their surviving homes of the long-gone civilizations.
Perhaps, Barnes was right in theorizing that the Greeks really did stand apart by way of their secular wanderings of the mind.
I have argued a number of times on FlaglerLive that what is amazing about the happenstance of the preservation of the great works of Greek antiquity is that had just one generation in a span of more than 100 generations deemed the writings of the ancient Greeks unworthy of preservation, then those many writings that we have today would have simply disappeared out of memory.
But each and every one of those so many succeeding generations deemed the writings important enough to save, generation after generation, for as much as almost 3000 years. We aren’t talking about writings carved into the stone of the walls of Egyptian temples or chiseled onto the numerous stelae standing throughout the once-Babylonian countryside. We are talking about writings left to us on parchment, yet complete works of Thucydides, Heradotus, and the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the plays by Aeschylus and Aristophanes survive.
Carvings in stone must be destroyed to be lost to antiquity; they survive the passage of time regardless of neglect. But parchment must be actively preserved; else it decays to dust.
I benefitted from an annotated college textbook devoted to the three plays of Agamemnon, known as the Oresteia. While I knew of the Oresteia from class lectures and assigned readings, it wasn’t until a few years after my graduation from law school that I pulled it off a bookshelf and read it slowly and methodically, line by line, checking each annotation for guidance.
The law of justice, as opposed to the law of vengeance, a.k.a, the ancient Greek law of the debt of blood vengeance, came alive in my mind.
As a prosecutor at the time, I came to better understood the wife-beater for what he was, the racist for what he was.
As a child of parents involved in the civil rights movement, I came to better understand why an undercover wildlife officer who had infiltrated the Klan would report back that the Klan had debated and decided that not only my father needed to be assassinated, but my mother needed to be murdered, and my siblings, and me, too, all because my father in his role as the elected State Attorney for the Seventh Judicial District had chosen to bypass the grand jury system of the day that had repeatedly exonerated so many Klansmen; he directly charged by sworn Information those many Klansmen who had blocked both sides of a U.S. 1 bridge just north of St. Augustine and beat with clubs and whipped with chains a dozen or so black fishermen in the middle of the night.
For that decision, the vengeful among us all who will never go away discussed and then decided that my family needed to die.
There is a reason why I oppose the then Flagler Republican office holder who in January 2021 took to the radio to ask listeners just when would it be time to begin beheading Democrats.
This local Republican leader remains the personification today of what James Madison called the “pestilential” partisan member of faction. Madison recognized that there could be such a thing as a virtuous partisan member of faction, who could put the country above party. But he knew that the pestilential among us could only be controlled by the many checks and balances written into the Constitution.
As an aside, has the pestilential partisan Flagler County Republican former office holder ever apologized for his musings? Has he ever sought to engage in any form of restorative justice? Is he unrepentant still for his murderous thoughts and imaginings?
Prior to January 2021, though I had long been visiting the FlaglerLive site, I had seldom, if ever, posted comments. After this expression of imagined murderous thought, I decided to begin openly opposing people like him, I decided to openly oppose the pestilential among us.
The pestilential among us existed at the time of the ancient Greeks; they existed at the time of our nation’s founding; they existed at the time of the racial crisis in St. Augustine in that hot summer of 1964, and the pestilential among us exist today.
The pestilential among us take many forms, but the hate is the same as the hate of the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greek law of the debt of blood vengeance is no different from the hate expressed by our Republican president, who promised that he would be our “retribution” and that he would “crush vermin”; is no different from the promise by our Republican governor, who stated on the campaign trail that, if elected president, he would on his first day in office begin “slitting throats”; is no different from the statement from a Republican U.S. Senator that if a motorist were to be delayed on a bridge by protestors, he should exit his vehicle and throw them from the bridge; is no different from the statement by a North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate who at a political rally said that “some people need killing”; is no different from a statement by an Arizona Republican state-wide candidate who told her followers at a rally that when leaving their homes to vote they needed to strap on the armor of God and strap on a “Glock”, knowing that a prominent Arizona Democratic congresswoman had been shot in the head by an assassin and murderer of others while wielding a Glock.
Just yesterday, I listened to a news clip about your congressman, Randy Fine, promising to file a bill that would allow motorists to run over protesters without criminal sanction, dubbing the bill the “thump, thump” bill.
That ancient Greek law of the debt of blood vengeance? It never fully went away. It will never fully go away.
The ancient Greek law of the debt of blood vengeance still lives in the hearts of the Armenians of Yerevan and the Azerbaijanis of Nagorno-Karabakh; it lives in the mountains around Sarajevo; it still lives in the hills above Beirut’s seashore; it still lives in the Jewish settler towns and villages in the West Bank; it still lives in Gaza. After thousands of years of killing, each side simply wants to be left alone by the world so as to better be able to thrash each other.
2500 years ago, the ancient Greeks understood the horrors attending to the law of the debt of blood vengeance and the necessity of the law of justice, yet many among us today cannot understand the need for justice.
Again, Mr. Tristam, thank you.
Luigi says
Cut millions of people off food and healthcare assistance to give more money to billionaires! Murikkka! Where we will gladly starve a child for another dollar for Elon! What 500 million tax free in campaign contributions for 5 billion in government contracts! Smells like a felony!
Ray W, says
I spotted an interesting perspective on the EU’s economy in Fortune.
Speaking at a Dublin event hosted by Ireland’s government, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, warned that the nations of Europe are in a “competitive crisis.”
10 to 15 years ago, the EU produced 90% of the GDP produced by the U.S. Today, the percentage has dropped to 65% of our GDP.
To Dimon, the EU economy had become less competitive: “You’re losing”, he said, though during his speech he praised Ireland’s relative “open economy, business-friendly policies, and strong education system.”
He urged his audience to “build a truly unified market that works seamlessly across all industries.”
Focusing on transatlantic cooperation, the CEO stated:
“America First is fine as long as it isn’t America alone.”
He called for a quick resolution for a new EU-U.S. tariff structure, opining that escalating trade barriers could lead to significant negative effects. While many are not expecting new U.S. “rate hikes”, he thinks that there is a 40% to 50% chance of hikes due to “inflationary pressures from tariffs, migration policies, and persistent budget deficits.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Two things.
First, for decades Europe has been struggling with birth rates significantly lower than those in the U.S. and the European birth rate continues to drop. Lacking enough native-born workers, the EU economies struggle to grow, because GDP growth depends on two factors. Output gain per worker due to increases in efficiencies and output gain due to more workers. Japan and Korea face the same problem. China, too, is seeing an imbalance in its demographics as the worker pool ages.
If we were ever to stop growing our worker base, we too will see productivity gains hobbled for the same reason as the European economies have been hobbled: not enough new young workers.
Second, over the past 10 to 15 years, America has seen a consistent addition to the labor pool due to immigration rates being somewhat above the norm. Since GDP growth is dependent in part in having more and more workers, of course the American economy has outstripped that for the whole of Europe. Since February of 2020, the number of American workers earning paychecks has grown by 17 million workers to just under 160 million people, even though the number of native-born workers in the labor pool has flatlined. We have long needed immigrants in their millions to rebuild our pandemic-shattered economy.
Sherry says
More wisdom from Adam Kinziger . . . his take on the dangerously demented MTG and Maga members who follow her down the rabbit hole of “Lost Marbles Land” (my coined phrase):
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Weather Conspiracy and The GOP’s Descent Into Delusion
As Texans drown, Greene pushes “weather manipulation” bills—proof that fringe theories now drive Republican politics.
Adam Kinzinger
Jul 11
With the death toll now exceeding 100, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene offered a bizarre and disturbing response to the catastrophic flash flooding that struck Texas on the Fourth of July. As search crews recovered bodies from the wreckage, Greene took to social media to push a long-debunked conspiracy theory about weather manipulation.
“I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purposes of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight,” she posted. She claimed the law would “end the deadly and dangerous practice of weather modification and geoengineering.”
Greene’s response to this human tragedy was not just tone-deaf—it was utterly divorced from reality. And the fact that it came from a sitting member of Congress makes it all the more grotesque. Her post is part of a disturbing trend within the Republican Party, where conspiracy theories no longer live on the fringe—they’ve become policy proposals.
If you’re not steeped in internet rabbit holes, you might miss the signals in Greene’s statement. But to those fluent in paranoia, phrases like “weather manipulation” and “geoengineering” are dog whistles. They refer to fringe beliefs that scientists, shadowy elites, or the government are secretly tampering with the weather—causing natural disasters and manipulating climate patterns for nefarious purposes.
Conspiracy theories thrive in times of uncertainty and fear. They offer simple, emotionally satisfying answers to complex problems. Some influencers promote them for clicks. Politicians promote them for money and power.
In this case, Greene tapped into old fears about contrails—the vapor trails left by high-altitude jets. Conspiracy theorists claim these trails are really “chemtrails,” containing chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere for secret experiments or population control. The villains? Take your pick: the federal government, global elites, Big Agriculture, or some vague and sinister “them.”
This isn’t Greene’s first brush with conspiratorial nonsense. She has previously suggested that “space lasers” started California wildfires and promoted antisemitic claims about “Zionist supremacists” encouraging Muslim immigration.
And she’s far from alone. Republican figures increasingly dabble in the absurd while pretending to just “ask questions.” But in doing so, they signal tacit approval of the worst ideas circulating online. Donald Trump himself did this repeatedly—most notably when he winked at the QAnon movement, which promotes delusional theories about satanic pedophile rings and deep-state plots. In 2022, he even posted a photo of himself wearing a QAnon lapel pin.
More recently, Trump has taken policy advice from far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has claimed that Kamala Harris isn’t truly Black and that George Soros’s son called for Trump’s assassination. She also flirted with 9/11 trutherism, implying that the attacks may have been orchestrated or allowed by the U.S. government. In 2024, she joined Trump at a 9/11 memorial event.
These ideas don’t stay on fringe forums—they migrate into political discourse. Claims about “crisis actors” after mass shootings and “body doubles” for President Biden may sound laughable, but they’re now widely believed in certain right-wing circles. And when conspiracy thinking finds an ally in power, the results are dangerous.
Take the case of Jeffrey Epstein. After his 2019 suicide in federal custody, conspiracy theorists claimed he was murdered to protect high-profile pedophiles. When Attorney General Pam Bondi—appointed by Trump in a second term hypothetical here—vowed to “investigate,” many Trump supporters were convinced she would expose a vast cover-up. But Bondi recently admitted her investigation found Epstein died by suicide and that the existence of a client list, is murkey at best. That didn’t stop the outrage from Trump’s base, which had already constructed an elaborate fantasy around the case.
Of course, no conspiracy theory has done more damage than the Big Lie about the 2020 election. Despite dozens of investigations, recounts, and court rulings affirming Joe Biden’s victory, Trump and his allies continue to insist the election was stolen. That lie fueled the January 6 insurrection, and today, many GOP leaders still refuse to say the election was legitimate. Whether they believe it or not is beside the point—they know it keeps them in Trump’s good graces and aligned with the MAGA base. A 2024 poll found that only 31% of Republicans accept Biden as the rightful winner.
Right-wing media outlets fuel the fire. Fox News has pushed election lies and COVID conspiracies. Joe Rogan has hosted antisemitic conspiracy theorists and speculated that federal agents may have instigated violence on January 6. Before Rogan, it was Alex Jones—the Infowars founder whose lies about Sandy Hook earned him a billion-dollar defamation judgment—who captivated millions with his blend of paranoia and performative rage.
With such an enormous echo chamber in place, conspiracy theories are now political currency. For politicians like Greene, they serve as ready-made talking points to inflame the base, vilify enemies, and raise cash. One week it’s Epstein. The next, it’s chemtrails. Or the “deep state.” Or a stolen election.
And now? “Fake flooding.” After Greene’s weather manipulation post, GOP congressional candidate Kandiss Taylor—already known for claiming the Earth is flat—escalated things further. “Fake weather causes real tragedy. That’s murder,” she wrote. “Pray. Prepare. Question the narrative.”
There was a time—not so long ago—when mainstream Republicans would have rolled their eyes at this nonsense. But those Republicans are being replaced by primary challengers who embrace it. This is how a once-proud party radicalizes itself into oblivion.
The lesson is simple: Ignoring the madness doesn’t make it go away. We have to fight it—clearly, publicly, and unapologetically. Because left unchecked, this kind of thinking isn’t just stupid or embarrassing—it’s dangerous.