To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Sunny, with a high near 80. North wind 7 to 10 mph, with gusts as high as 16 mph. Monday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 66.
- 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 Flagler County Library Board of Trustees meets at 4 p.m. at the Nexus Center and again at 4:30 p.m. at the Emergency Operations Center.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, where the City Commission is holding its meetings until it is able to occupy its own City Hall on Commerce Parkway in 2025. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
Notably: Last Friday we got a painful email from Clay Jones, our favorite cartoonist, unimaginably more painful though it must’ve been to write it: “Unfortunately, this week I had a stroke and my right side is partially paralyzed. This means the streak is over and I have to relearn how to use my hand and my voice. Please bear with me until I figure this out. I appreciate everyone’s love and concern. I will see you when I see you.” The most iconoclastic cartoonist of the age of Trump–our tongue-wagging, sippy-cupped Aristophanes–has been silenced after all. Our world isn’t the same. Might as well silence Borowitz (“After promising on Truth Social that the gathering would be “wild,” on Friday Donald J. Trump summoned angry supporters to a rally outside the headquarters of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Urging his irate loyalists to “stop the steal,” Trump declared, “If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, you’ve got to fight like hell”) or Jon Stewart, though Stewart’s conventional sanctimony trips him up more often than not. Since we started subscribing exactly two years ago, and long before that apparently, he’s not missed a single day of producing at least one cartoon (he produces additional ones on demand, for an extra fee), a daily blog that can run on as long or longer than the average FlaglerLive article), and videos showing his page go from blank to bang, sometimes in 30 seconds. It was and I hope will again, maybe more along a Johnny Carson schedule, be an impossibly furious pace, and it’s taken its toll. There’s no imagining what hell he’s in. He’s asked for no emails, no communications, though he’s gotten some 600 comments in reply to his announcement on his Facebook page. He can’t reply, and he’d justly and Clayfully shit on any thoughts, prayers or rooting-for-you bullshit from us healthy (or at least healthier, functioning) fuckers. We can support him by continuing to run Clay from the archives (most of his cartoons never saw light of day in our pages) and maintaining our subscriptions (to Claytoons and Substack) on his timetable: until further notice. Other than that, we love you Clay.
—P.T.
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.
November 2025
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Sheriff Staly 50th Year Celebration
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Flagler Beach Planning and Architectural Review Board
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry Evening Hours
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
Not long after Mencken arrived at Mrs. Lohrfinck’s house, he suddenly began babbling incoherently. Astonished, she called Dr. Benjamin Baker, who arrived within minutes, put Mencken into his car, and took him straight to Johns Hopkins. Since August was out, he telephoned Gertrude to tell her the news, and she kept calling Hollins Street until August returned at eleven. August drove immediately to the hospital, but none of the interns on duty had any idea where his brother was. Then he ran into Baker, who brought him to Mencken’s room. According to August, the doctor told him, “Your brother has got a massive hemorrhage. He can’t conceivably live until morning. He was practically dead on arrival. That’s the way he would have wanted it to be.” Baker later denied that he had said any such thing to August, but there is no question about what he told Alfred Knopf, who called the next day to ask about Mencken’s condition: “Mr. Mencken has suffered a stroke, and I am sorry to say he is recovering from it.”
–From Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002).
Pogo says
@As stated
Why Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/why-western-executives-who-visit-china-are-coming-back-terrified/ar-AA1OjJec?ocid=nl_article_link
“History is a vast early warning system.”
– Norman Cousins
https://www.google.com/search?q=Norman+Cousins
Annette says
I worked with Clay in Fredericksburg. My heart aches for him. He did keep an insane schedule. He’s a cool dude.
Ray W. says
Hello Pogo!
The MSN story about western executives returning “terrified” for their futures is an important one for all FlaglerLive readers to consider.
Thank you.
Ray W. says
A news outlet that I have never read before, Oil Price US, reports that tankers filled with crude oil have become so numerous that there is too little storage space for them to offload their oil into land-based tanks.
As background, crude oil contained in tankers is measured by two metrics. The first metric measures those tankers that are currently in motion. The second is tankers that are anchored with oil inside, as if to serve as a floating storage tank.
As of recently, data reveals the existence of some 1.2 billion barrels of crude oil in motion around the globe, excluding the sum of crude oil in anchored tankers. The 1.2 billion barrels are the most in motion since 2016.
According to the author, this suggests that owners of tankers filled with crude oil are searching for any port that will take some or all of the oil: “This picture suggests that most of the oil at sea is being taken from one place to another, looking for buyers rather than being transported from seller to buyer after a deal has already been made. It suggests, ultimately, that demand for oil is falling way short of supply.”
According to a Reuters story, only China, among all other nations, is building new onshore crude oil storage tanks, with 11 new sites set to open in 2025 and 2026. Between 2020 and 2024, China added between 180 and 190 million barrels of crude oil storage capacity. The 11 new sites will add another 169 million barrels of capacity.
The Oil Price US asks the question why China would be adding so much onshore storage capacity over time when it seems likely that crude oil prices are going to continue to drop?
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I have repeatedly read that so many EVs are being sold in China that demand for crude oil in that nation may already have peaked, and that demand is expected to begin dropping by significant amounts each year from now on.
So why is China expanding crude oil storage capacity?
A few years ago, one of the more gullibly stupid FlaglerLive commenters among us tried to defend the need for coal-fired power plants by arguing that China was continuing to build new coal-fired power plants. If they were doing it, so should we.
I responded by arguing that China, with one of the world’s greatest reserves of coal and home to an efficient rail transport grid, but with very few exploitable natural gas and crude oil resources, had announced to the world’s its intent on being militarily ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.
China had already seen the sanctions imposed by Western democracies on Russian natural gas and crude oil exports in response the that nation’s invasion of the Ukraine.
If I were the Chinese, I argued, knowing of my energy weaknesses, I would diversify as much as possible my nation’s energy grid. If too many of my nation’s electricity plants are powered by natural gas, a resource that I lacked, I would build as many coal-fired plants as I could, for use to be used should an embargo on exports of natural gas and crude oil to my country be imposed in response to my invasion of Taiwan.
Looking back on that argument, I now realize that I would also take steps to decentralize my national electricity grid by building as many solar farms as possible and by building as many windmills as possible. Lacking substantial exploitable crude oil reserves, I would expand my nation’s storage capacity for crude oil, even though I know that I am going to be needing less and less crude oil.
All this would occur if I planned to invade Taiwan, damn the consequences.
And, of course, if I headed an administration in the United States that was smart enough to understand what might happen in a conflict with China, I would decentralize my nation’s electrical grid by building as many solar and wind farms as possible, complete with battery backup. I would persuade Congress to pass an infrastructure bill designed to better enable me to accomplish that critical need. I would fund university research into that sector of the overall national energy policy.
Ray W. says
According to an Interesting Engineering story, China has just launched its first working dual 200-meter tall tower solar-thermal plant in the Gobi Desert.
A total of 27 thousand mirrors reflect and focus sunlight on each of the two towers, with one set of mirrors acting in the morning and the other set in the afternoon. A medium in each tower heats up to as much as 570 degrees Celsius, storing the sun’s energy for later use in driving steam-powered turbines to produce electricity. This dual-tower concept is claimed to offer a 25% gain in efficiency compared to single tower solar-thermal plants.
Given the region’s more than three thousand hours of sunlight per year, the Gobi offers an excellent location for solar-thermal plants.
Currently, China operates 21 commercial solar-thermal power plants, with another 30 under construction. Together with solar and wind farms recently constructed in the region, the Gobi will produce enough electricity to power half a million homes.
Make of this what you will.
Jim says
@Pogo says, that article on China is terrifying! Thanks for putting it out there.
Good thing our government is concentrating on getting rid of illegals, putting tariffs on everyone, alienating our allies, putting troops in our cities, setting up to implement the Alien Insurrection Act and distracting our military from our external enemies to an imaginary witch hunt within! China may end up running everything without ever firing a shot.
Look at the potential issues with China and then tell me we’ve got the right president to deal with it….