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Weather: A chance of showers before 11am, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms between 11am and 2pm, then showers and possibly a thunderstorm after 2pm. High near 90. Breezy, with a southeast wind 6 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 23 mph. Chance of precipitation is 80%. Wednesday Night: Showers and possibly a thunderstorm before 8pm. Low around 75. Chance of precipitation is 80%.
- 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:
In Court: trial week continues, with Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols presiding over the trial of Quinntavus Kwame Jordan, who faces a charge of armed robbery and the possibility of a 30-year prison sentence if convicted. 8:30 a.m., in Courtroom 401.
The Flagler County Contractor Review Board meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Staff liaison is Bo Snowden, Chief Building Official, who may be reached at (386) 313-4027. For agendas and details go here.
Flagler County Tourist Development Council meets at 9 a.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting at 9 a.m., first floor Conference Room, at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The Technical Review Committee (TRC) is a quality control committee that provides technical review of project plans. Staff Liaison is Gina Lemon, 386-313-4067.
The Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall.
Derek Barrs U.S. Senate Confirmation Hearing, 10 a.m. in Committee Hearing Room, in Room Russell 253, Russell Senate Office Building, 2 Constitution Ave NE, Washington, DC. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convenes a nominations hearing for modal administrators of the Department of Transportation. The nominees are Derek Barrs, currently a Flagler County School Board member, to be Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, Jonathan Morrison, of California, to be Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Paul Roberti, of Rhode Island, to be Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The live webcast of the confirmation hearing is available here.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at a private residence in Palm Coast every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at [email protected] for location and information.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
Notably: Researching recently the phyrically paradoxical phrase “celebration of life”–it is of more recent coinage than you might imagine, rising from the ashes of the 1950s–I came across this headline in the July 17, 1985 New York Times, page 14 : “A Celebration of Life on Site of First Atom Blast 40 Years Ago.” The story was datelined TRINITY SITE, and written the previous day from the place where Oppenheimer’s boys and a few women set off the first human (inhuman?) nuclear explosion in history in that New Mexico desert that until then had gone nameless, at least in white men’s atlases, but likely not in the obliterated memories of their predecessors. There had been a gathering at the Trinity site to mark the 40th anniversary of the explosion. The Army forbade demonstrations. Those were the heady days of the Reagan administration, when we were not a little scared shitless that he would make Trinity sites of all of us (less than a year before he’d joked about nuking the Soviet Union). But it allowed prayers, and on the first Saturday in October it allowed the Almogordo Chamber of Commerce to sponsor caravans of visitors “to the site to drum up publicity for the town.” That July 16 an ecumenical group gathered “at the spot where many people feel that man first put global death within his reach,” as Iver Peterson, the reporter, wrote. The Times, whose masthead was still 13 men to one woman, and she just a VP of “systems,” thrown in there like an errant subway token, had not yet learned to respect women’s majority share in civilizations. And anyway hadn’t Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s mistress, killed herself six months before the explosion? A thousand people had gathered at Trinity, some of them quoted: “I figured this bomb got me home two or three years sooner,” a veteran said. But why Trinity? “No one seemed to know why J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the bomb-building effort, chose that name,” Peterson wrote. Trinity is the Catholic doctrine about the nature of god–father, son and holy spirit. It’s given us some of the greatest icons in Byzantine history, one of which I still cherish from my childhood, though the concept seems to me a form of religious equivalent to burlesque–splendid so far as it goes, but let’s not massacre each other over it as we, alas, continue to do. The association of Trinity with the first atomic bomb blast is the continuation of that absurdity. Is that why the site bore the name? It so happened that Richard Rhodes–whose childhood had been more Trinity Site than trinity–answered that question the following year. He was in 1985 finishing The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won him the triple crown of American publishing–Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award. He relates the naming of the site in a 1962 letter to Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project for the Army. Groves thought Oppenheimer had picked the name because it’s often ascribed to rivers and peaks in the American West. “I did suggest it,” Oppenheimer wrote, “but not on [that] ground… Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation:
As West and East
In all flatt Maps–and I am one–are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.”
Rhodes goes on: “The poem was Donne’s ‘Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse,’ and among its subtleties it construes a complementarity that parallels the complementarity of the bomb that [Niels] Bohr had recently revealed to Oppenheimer. […] That dying leads to death but might also lead to resurrection–as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind–is one way the poem expresses the paradox.” Maybe. Though when I think of Trinity, my thoughts are more like the nuclear mushroom cloud’s approximation of a scrambled brain where too many synapses collide. I think of my childhood, my mother’s love of the Trinity, of the explosion, of the reaction of Kenneth Bainbridge, who directed the Trinity explosion, after the blast (“now we are all sons of bitches”), and of course my favorite, of Trinity, the character Terence Hill brought to life in a series of spaghetti westerns with Bud Spencer and Henry Fonda in the 1970s–“They Call Me Trinity,” “Trinity Is Still My Name,” and “My Name Is Nobody,” a movie that formed my thinking more than the Book of Job and the Psalms combined, not just because of the Ennio Morricone score, but for, among other synapses of Revelation, this one line Trinity pulls off in (I think) Henry Fonda’s Beauregard’s direction: “The secret of a long life is to try not to shorten it.” I doubt we can say that what began at Trinity is the very opposite of that spaghetti wisdom. Even more ironically, one of the scenes was shot on location at Acoma in New Mexico, the ancient pueblo atop a mesa overlooking a plain, some 160 miles from Trinity. Trinity is attending the funeral of an Indian chief, and Beauregard is looking for his brother, who Trinity finds in a grave.
—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.
August 2025
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Community Traffic Safety Team Meeting
Disaster Preparedness Expo
St. Johns River Water Management District Meeting
Flagler County School Board Workshop: Agenda Items
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
Flagler County Planning Board Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine Visits Palm Coast’s Oldest Sewer Plant
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
For the full calendar, go here.
We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
–J. Robert Oppenheimer after the Trinity explosion, July 16, 1945, quoted in Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986).
Pogo says
@FWIW
And sleep — “…perchance to dream…”
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+importance+of+rest
Pogo says
@Keeping us out of war…
Revealed: Trump has launched as many air strikes in five months as Biden did in four years
Despite pledging not to engage in conflict overseas, the US president has sharply escalated attacks
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/07/16/trump-airstrike-tally-matches-biden-four-year-total/
The neutron bomb evolved?
https://www.google.com/search?q=projected+deaths+from+destruction+of+usaid
Ray W, says
The Cool Down reports that Autocar, Sweden’s Authority for Social Protection and Preparedness, published a study of vehicle fires. On average, 3,400 vehicle fires occur each year in Sweden. Of those many fires, 1.5% involve hybrid EVs and 0.4% involved BEVs. The rest involve cars with ICE powerplants.
To that end, the Cool Down then focused much of the rest of its article on a new polyurethane coating system (“Polyresyst EV5005”) for EV batteries that its manufacturer, Huntsman, a global chemicals company, claims will reduce the chance of EV battery fires prompted by shorts in EV battery cells that lead to “thermal runaway” and eventually fire.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I struggle with the mathematics of the Autocar study. If, as a hypothetical, only 20% of Sweden’s car fleet were to be EV battery powered, I would expect before even reading the study that the incident rate of EV fires should be lower than that for gas-powered vehicles. And, if most of the EVs in Sweden are relatively new when compared to the average age of gas-powered cars and trucks, that too could skew the statistics. Nonetheless, if fewer than 2% of all vehicle fires can be said to have come from EVs, that remains an impressively low number.
Ray W, says
The Australian mining company, BHP, described in a Reuters article as a “top global miner”, just signed exploratory agreements with CATL and BYD to develop batteries and fast-charging systems to power “heavy” mining equipment and mining transport equipment such as locomotives.
BYD, with its FinDreams Battery, will focus on powering the mining equipment and vehicles and CATL will focus on energy storage systems and battery recycling options.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
Macrotrends has a site devoted to historical mortgage rates. I chose the link to 30-year fixed-rate mortgages:
In 1981, the year Ronald Reagan’s first administration began, the average mortgage rate was 16.61%
In 1985, the year Reagan began his second administration, it was 12.41%.
In 1989, the year George H. W. began his administration, it was 10.33%.
In 1993, the year Bill Clinton began his first administration, it was 7.32%.
In 1997, the year Clinton began his second administration, it was 7.59%.
In 2001, the year George W. Bush began his first administration, it was 6.97%.
In 2005, the year Bush began his second administration, it was 5.86%.
In 2009, the year Barack Obama began his first administration, it was 5.04%.
In 2013, the year Obama began his second administration, it was 3.98%.
In 2017, the year Donald Trump began his initial term in office, it was 3.99%.
In 2021, the year Joe Biden began his administration, it was 2.97%.
Final 2025 average figures, for obvious reasons, do not yet exist, but the partial figure is 6.80%.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I argue that if one chooses to live in a perfect or bad world, then the perfect 30-year fixed-rate mortgage occurred in 2021, when it was at an average of 2.97%, and that any mortgage with a rate higher than 3% is bad.
If one lives in a good/better/best, bad/worse/worst world, then based on historical data dating from the Reagan era just about anything around 7% is average. That means 6% is better than average, 5% is good, 4% is better than good, and 3% is best of all. Likewise, 8% is worse than average, 9% is bad, 10% is worse than bad, and 11% is worst of all.
Oy, vey!
Ray W, says
According to recent research on Florida average housing prices, as published in a Newsweek story, there are markets throughout Florida that are experiencing significant year-over-year price drops.
For example, the Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island region saw average housing prices drop over 12 months by 19.2% to $767,800.
The North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton region saw average housing prices drop over 12 months by 9.9% to $475,000.
The Sebastion-Vero Beach area saw a drop of 10.2% to $386,190.
The Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent area saw a drop of 1.5% to $330,000.
The Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach area saw a drop of 3.3% to $353,000.
There are several other regions that saw average housing price drops over the past 12 months, but Flagler County was not one of them.
According to Dr. Brad O’Connor, chief economist for Florida Realtors:
“There is a clear divergence from last year’s price levels starting to emerge. … Still, prices remain in the neighborhood of where they’ve been since early 2022 and are 54 percent above where they were at this time in 2020.”
Some regions saw average home prices increasing over the past 12 months. For example, the Gainesville area saw an increase of 6.6% to $376,000.
The reporter referred to an overheating “buying frenzy” that occurred during the pandemic. Now, the inventory of homes listed for sale is back above the pre-pandemic level.
According to Redfin, the reporter writes, June home sales in Florida overall are down 4.1% over June of last year, and the number of listings that have had price drops is up to 31.6%, 0.3% up over last year.
Said Tim Weisheyer, 2025 Florida Realtors President:
“Back in 2021, homes were flying off the market in under 10 days, often closing before the end of the month and never showing up in monthly inventory reports. Today, many are taking 40 days or more to go under contract, which means they’re counted in one or even two months of inventory data. … So, while it may look like inventory is rising sharply, it’s more about slower turnover than a flood of new listings.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
The Jerusalem Post is reporting that for the past three days unidentified terrorist groups have been launching bomb-laden drones capable of dropping their explosives onto oil facilities located in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Crude oil production in the region has been disrupted to a level of 140,000 to 150,000 barrels per day, down from a recent average of 285,000 barrels per day.
No casualties were reported.
Make of this what you will.