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Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high near 78. North wind 8 to 10 mph, with gusts as high as 15 mph. Monday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 68.
- 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: A pre-trial hearing on several motions is scheduled at 9 a.m. before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols in the case of Jermaine Williams, 52, who faces the death penalty for the stabbing death of his wife, Yolonda Williams, in the driveway of the couple’s Bunnell house in August 2024.
The three-member East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board meets at 10 a.m. at District Headquarters, 210 Airport Executive Drive, Palm Coast. Agendas are available here. District staff, commissioners and email addresses are here. The meetings are open to the public.
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting: The city’s committee, appointed by the City Council to propose revisions to the city charter, meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 160 Lake Ave. The committee is made up of Patrick Miller, Ramon Marrero, Perry Mitrano, Michael Martin and Donald O’Brien. The meeting is moderated by Georgette Dumont, an independent moderator and the Director of the Master of Public Administration program at the University of North Florida. The meeting is open to the public and includes a public-comment segment.
The Flagler County Commission meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here.
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.
Diary: The other evening while I was covering the Flagler County Cultural Council’s annual meeting I was taking pictures not far from John Sbordone, the force behind City Repertory Theatre, when I saw his lips and heard them say to Leann Pennington, the county commissioner, that I looked old. It was mildly shocking to hear, but true. I have been looking at myself in mirrors like Cynthia Ozick when, as she wrote in The New Yorker in 1992 (she was 64 then, three years older than me now, and she is 97 now, still living in New York) “I am taken by surprise at the sight of a striding woman with white hair: she is still wearing the bangs of her late youth, but there are shocking pockets and trenches in her face; she has a preposterous dewlap; she is no one I can recognize.” I daily now as if in a Somme or Verdun of my own wade in pockets and trenches in my face. I didn’t know what dewlap means. I looked it up: “a fold or flap of skin on the neck of some animals.” I am the animal. It’s not just the face. “I pulled up my T-shirt and considered my stomach, finding again that I could no longer identify it as my own; it didn’t belong to the man I felt I was. I didn’t have what it took to get rid of it, for while I told myself at least several times a day that I needed to lose weight, start running and swimming, it never got to the stage where I actually did anything about it. The question therefore was whether I could turn it into something positive.” That’s from Knausgaard’s Morning Star, which I picked up the other day. I can’t say that I need to start running or swimming. I spend 350 minutes a week on the exercise bike at high intensity (the bike is rigged to my computer and those 350 minutes aren’t wasted, so it’s not as if FlaglerLive is suffering), but I’ve always thought exercise was for health, not aesthetic stomachs. It’s all very strange, because I also feel, like André Gide when he was 10 years younger than me, “How young I would still feel if I didn’t know that I would soon be fifty!” We have, Scott Fitzgerald would tell us, “reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise.” But our look can still make us (or our friends) gasp: the body we inhabit–that sack of treacheries, that sluice of deceptive pleasures–is alien enough to make us strangers in our own decay. Ian Kelly in his biography of Casanova imagines why one of Casanova’s women, Marie Anne Charpillon, distanced herself: “… perhaps she sensed what he had only begun to guess, that beneath his dazzlingly confident carapace something more vulnerable was emerging: a man who recognised the ridiculousness of his position, his self-aggrandised fantasy, the preposterous ness of male vanity and the evanescence of lust. And she sensed her power to mock his sexual prowess at the moment when it was turning from its full tide. ‘I knew,’ he declared melodramatically, ‘that aged thirty-eight, I had begun to die.”
—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 Library Board of Trustees
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Joint Veterans Day Ceremony and Parade
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
For the full calendar, go here.
“Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humour, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch and grey, mouldering trunk. In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood.
–From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Allyn Susan Feinsetin says
At least Jared and Ivanka Kushner are involved in something that might result in something of positive value to the rest of the world–unlike, let’s say, Hunter Biden who was the total opposite.
Pierre Tristam says
The comparison is as absurd as it is misinformed, but that’s what self-serving cruelty gets you: The only thing they’re involved in is their ledger’s corrupt bottom line, and they don’t have the loss of a brother and addiction as excuses.
Pogo says
@A public service
Because you should think — always:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sagan+baloney+detection
Ray W. says
Hello Mr. Tristam:
It may be that Ms. Feinsetin is unable to perceive herself a cruel person, despite her presenting as a cruel person.
So I looked up studies that have been conducted over the decades on the capacity of people to engage in delusional self-perceptions.
I looked to something that I have known about for about 40 years now.
In a 2022 Nationwide Insurance study, 85% of Americans perceive themselves to be “excellent” or “very good” drivers. Apparently, there is almost no such thing as an average American driver, much less a poor one.
In the 80’s, from what is now described as a “well-known” Swedish study of American perceptions of their driving skills, 93% of Americans thought their driving skills “above average.” This may have been the study I read about so long ago, but my 68-year-old brain is not what it once was, so I just can’t recall.
I keep commenting to the FlaglerLive community of Wittgenstein’s assertion that perhaps the hardest thing in life for anyone to do is to not delude oneself. It may very well be true that Ms. Feinsetin is wandering through life fooling herself. She thinks that her hurting one person proves that another person’s motives are good.
The issue involves development of the Gaza strip and from her comment she believes that if she only she can hurt Hunter Biden, she will prove Jared and Ivanka Kushner are positive and good people. This is only one facet of what cruel people do.
Good people simply argue that Jared and Invanka Kushner just might positively impact Gazans all on their own. Good people do not need to bring in Hunter Biden to make that point, but cruel people must be cruel.
Had Ms. Feinsetin limited her argument to the potential positive impact by the Kushners on Gazans, I would have agreed with her. But, no, she couldn’t stop herself. She had to try to hurt Hunter Biden.
I can do the same thing that Ms. Feinsetin did, as it isn’t hard to do.
From this issue of whether Gazans will be positively helped by Kushner development, after the murderous destruction wrought on Israel by Hamas religious extremist murderers, I decided to look up whether Jewish religious extremist settlers were still murdering Palestinians in the West Bank.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in 2025 thus far, at least 178 Palestinians have been murdered by settlers. The height of the murder rate occurs during olive grove harvesting season, when murderous Jewish religious extremist settlers most often shoot Palestinian farmers in their groves.
Al Jazeera, a source that perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt, estimates that since October 7, 2023, some 1000 West Bank Palestinians have been murdered by Jewish religious extremist settlers, often aided and protected by IDF soldiers in coordinated attacks.
Apparently, according to OCHA data, in 2023, 1,291 settler attacks in the West Bank took place. 1,449 settler attacks occurred in 2024. Over 1,000 settler attacks so far this year.
The latest Jewish religious extremist settler murder, as of the date of publication, occurred on October 8, 2025, when a murderous Jewish religious extremist settler shot and killed an 26-year-old West Bank Palestinian.
But the large scale murder of West Bank Palestinians doesn’t prove whether Jared and Ivanka Kushner can bring good to Gaza.
Yes, after 30 years in the criminal justice system, including many years as a prosecutor, I have internalized the idea that some people were born to hurt other people. Not all of these born hurtful people become criminals. Some of them, from my experience, become prosecutors.
I don’t know how many of these hurtful prosecutors with whom I worked somehow persuade themselves that they were good people. Maybe some of them knew and accepted that they were born to hurt others and didn’t think they were good people.
From my experience, very few of those born to hurt others become judges, but there is no doubt in my mind that some of our judges are such hurtful people, all in the name of the public good. These vengeful judges may think themselves good.
I keep going back to an instance witnessed by my brother. After court one day, my brother returned to the office as angry as I have ever seen him. He had just watched a now-retired judge sentence another lawyer’s client to prison. Prior to imposing sentence, he heard testimony from the defendant’s fiance’. She told him she needed her fiance’ to receive a probationary sentence to help with their unborn child. After her testimony, according to my brother’s account, the judge asked her, if he did decide to sentence her fiance’ to prison, what would she do after she brought her “bastard” into this world. My brother was incensed by this act of verbal cruelty.
For years, I had watched this judge. At his best, he was an excellent judge, but some days, when the wheels fell off, he was one of the most vicious people in the court system.
Another judge’s bailiff developed hatred for a young female public defender. Occasionally, he would go into the pretrial services office in the Daytona courthouse and freely talk of his hatred for her. When he began describing to his audience how good it would be for him to watch a bullet from his gun enter her forehead, they reported his deteriorating behavior to the authorities. He was removed from his position to another courthouse, but he remained on the courthouse security staff. The young female assistant public defender moved to another community outside of the circuit.
Again, if we ask enough people whether they think they are good people, just like most people think they are very good or excellent drivers when in reality they really are average to poor drivers, there is a valid argument that many of the most cruel people among us would claim that their hurting others makes them good people.
Again, one the most difficult things in life is to not fool ourselves of what we truly are. Some members of the FlaglerLive community think themselves virtuous through lying or laundering lies. Others think themselves good through spreading disinformation. Still others think themselves good through expressions of hatred and cruelty. Perhaps the most self-delusional of all Flagler County residents thought himself good when he asked over the radio airwaves just when would it become time to start beheading Democrats.
There is a sickness upon the land. Self-delusional thinking runs rampant. We are giving ourselves permission to kill people.
I oppose President Trump because he openly states that he is vengeful (he is our retribution) and because he so commonly lies. I oppose many FlaglerLive commenters because they, too, are vengeful and because they, too, so commonly lie or launder lies.
I continue to argue that there exists a moral imperative for us to oppose the vengeful among us, to oppose the liars and lie launderers among us. Can anyone prove that there is a moral imperative to be vengeful or cruel or to lie or to launder lies?
Allyn Susan Feinsetin says
Making excuses for Hunter Biden’s crimes just underlines my point. The fact that Joe Biden felt compelled to issue him an executive Pardon is pretty much further proof of that.
More “shoot the messenger” personal insults shouldn’t distract from what is a common sense point (albeit, a politically inconvenient common sense point.)
Pierre Tristam says
Nobody said Hunter Biden should’ve been pardoned. But the comparison was absurd and obscene.
BillC says
Just like Daddy, tearing down the White house for a ballroom.
Laurel says
Allyn Susan Feinsetin: So is this what Ivonka and Jared are doing with the $2,000,000,000.00 the Saudis gave them? Please explain. Thank you.
Ray W. says
Hello Ms. Feinsetin:
The editorial cartoonist did not raise the issue of Hunter Biden. You were the one who took the excuse of the editorial cartoon to add an unneeded point about another person who is unrelated to the editorial cartoon. Please do not twist your failure of common sense into someone else’s fault. This one is entirely your doing. There is no form of common sense, except your imagination, that required you to add your thoughts about Hunter Biden in order for you to make your message about the Kushners, which is they might do some good in Gaza.
Sherry says
@allyn. . . Why are you not upset about trump pardoning the Jan. 6th convicted criminal insurrectionists who beat up police officers?
Laurel says
Ray W: “Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot. Anyone who drives faster than me is a maniac.” – George Carlin
Me too.
Sherry says
The whole Fox BS “Hunter Biden” pardon/laptop issue is used over and over again by those who simply cannot come up with any “factual/ relevant” opposing statement. It’s a Maga trolling tactic called that is used so often it is named”whataboutism”. A lame attempt to “deflect” from the original topic. . . NEXT!
Laurel says
No one, to my knowledge, has yet responded to Ivonka’s and Jared’s receiving the gift, sorry, “investment,” of $2billion from the Saudis, whom they associated with during their time as “Senior Presidential Advisors” to the President of the United States, though I have mentioned it several times. The magas remind me of the “See no evil, and hear no evil” part of the three monkeys. The “Speak no evil” seems to be ignored. Interesting! Oh, and don’t forget about the gift jet, that I suppose will be parked downtown in Miami.
Allyn Susan Feinsetin says
I would suggest that this is why so many American voters are increasingly identifying themselves as being Independents, rather than aligning with either the Democratic or Republican parties–because the self-serving hypocrisies of both of the latter are such a turn-off.
Laurel says
Allyn Susan Feinsetin: Interesting you would think so, and you may be right. I have been an Independent (nka NPA) for over 50 years now. Most new NPAs, however, have identified as former Republicans. Yes, both parties have failed us, but it is disastrous when one party rules everything, as we are now witnessing.
Ray W. says
Yes, Ms. Feinsetin, I agree that you are part of the problem that is turning so many people away from political parties. Many people don’t like people like you who try to hurt others for no common sense reason.
You argued that yours was a position of common sense. It wasn’t. It was a position of individuated sense, not common sense. When you practice individuated sense, you can then draw any connection you want between two unrelated events. This is what turns so many people off.
I am the son of a now-deceased circuit-level Democratic politician. You could just as easily have named me as you named Hunter Biden and there still would be no common sense connection between what was depicted in the editorial cartoon and any child of any Democratic politician. Of all of the children of Democratic politicians, you engaged in an act of preference when you chose Hunter Biden, perhaps because he remains the current whipping boy of the Republican Party. Over and over on the FlaglerLive site, commenters prefer to whip Hunter Biden’s name, not because it is common sense to do so, but because his is the preferred name by those commenters.
I am old enough to remember Billy Carter, who raked in money from Libya. He said if they want to give me money because they think I can do something for them because I am the president’s brother, fine.
All that was proved by the Libyans giving him money was that Billy Carter was an opportunist.
No, you named Hunter Biden because you wanted to whip his name. Now, you squirm and accuse others of wrongdoing because your intent to cause harm didn’t work out the way you wanted it to.