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Weather: Sunny, with a high near 79. Breezy. Friday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 69.
- 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 Florida Ethics Commission meets at 8:30 a.m. in the third-floor Courtroom, First District Court of Appeal, 2000 Drayton Drive, Tallahassee. Except for the closed-door session, the meetings are generally live on the Florida Channel. No local cases are on the open docket.
The Palm Coast Charter Review Committee is hosting one of four community engagement meetings at 6 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE., to hear public input on the review and potential amendments to the Palm Coast Charter, the document that is the equivalent of a constitution, but for the city. The committee is reviewing the document at the City Council’s request, and will potentially submit a list of amendments by the end of March, which the council will in turn review. It’ll be up to the council to decide which amendments appear on the 2026 November election ballot. The committee is hosting four such community engagement meetings, one in each of the city’s districts.
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, Sheriff Rick Staly and Southeastern Sports gunshop owner Chris Swirn talk about Florida’s new opem-carry reality, gun safety and situational awareness at major events. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
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.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
‘The 39 Steps,’ at the Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. Box office: (386) 255-2431. Adults, $25, seniors, $24, Youth, $15. Book here. Mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a juicy spy novel, add a dash of Monty Python and you have The 39 Steps: a fast-paced whodunit, with over 150 zany characters (played by a cast of only four), an onstage plane crash, handcuffs, missing fingers, and some good old-fashioned romance! Content advisory: Fake guns and gunshot sound effects.
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m. most days, with matinees on Sundays, at 2 p.m., and on Nov. 15. Thornton Wilder’s timeless masterpiece chat quietly and powerfully explores life, love, and loss in small-town America. A deeply human story that resonates with every audience.
Notably: I have not heard of any lawmakers wanting to put up a statue celebrating Andrew Lih or Richard Knipel or name a free-speech contest after them. Chances are you haven’t heard of them anymore than you had of Charlie Kirk before he was assassinated. Lih and Knipel had the misfortune of averting a massacre, and did so not at a political event, let alone a right-wing fiesta of bile, but at a Wikipedia conference for Wikipedia editors, with some 100 people in attendance. The heroism was barely reported: “The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling. The audience of well over a hundred people panicked.” The gunman also pointed the gun at the audience in a sweeping motion. Knipel, a Wikipedia contriobutor who has no law enforcement background, came up behind him and grabbed him as Lih, a “Wikipedian on the trust and safety team,” charged him as well. They saved the day. No guns of their own, no brawn. Just wikis. “In seconds, the potential scene of bloodshed at WikiConference North America at Civic Hall in Union Square had been averted, a life may have been saved, and two volunteer editors of an online encyclopedia had become unlikely heroes,” the Times reported. “Other Wikipedia editors responded to Mr. Knipel’s courageous act by awarding him several “Barnstars,” the site’s official tokens of appreciation. “You’ve got some guts man!” wrote a user who awarded him a Barnstar of Diligence. Mr. Knipel did not respond to a request for comment.” That’s it. “When Grief Wanted a Hero, Truth Didn’t Get in the Way,” the same Times headlined a story in 2000 about a pretend-savior, Ben Strong, who had made himself a hero by peddling the story that he had convinced the Paducah school shooter in 1997 to drop his gun. He had not. “The Ben Strong story shows how chaos and panic can distort the accounts that witnesses give of the rampage killings that periodically horrify the country. It may show, too, how the stories of the killings are often shaped by the powerful desire of reporters and everyone else involved to find some good news, even signs of heroism, in horrible, inexplicable events,” William Glaberson wrote at the time. It also points to the contrast of motives in the aftermath of shootings–how the humble and unsung heroes of Wikipedia wanted to remain unsung, how the blaring and chest-thumping mercenaries of the airwaves in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination succeeded in turning the killing into their own domestic Gulf of Tonkin resolution, soaked in lies and distortions. Excuse me while I go to donate a few dollars to Wikipedia.
—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.
October 2025
Florida Ethics Commission Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Palm Coast Charter Review: Community Engagement Meeting
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
‘The 39 Steps,’ at the Daytona Playhouse
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Founders’ Day
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
‘The 39 Steps,’ at the Daytona Playhouse
For the full calendar, go here.
Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs.
–From Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011).
Dennis C Rathsam says
Im glad to be TRUMP supporter, Im happy he doing a great job! Gas is under $3.00, Food costs have come down, interest rates are falling, & the economy is booming. Theres peace in the Middle East, And all of Europe embrasses TRUMP as a great statesmen! Cities plagued by violence, are now peacefull again….American healthcare, is not being ripped off anymore since TRUMP stopped paying illegals healthcare. The border is closed, & deportations are booming. Seems every things going TRUMPS way. As a bussinessman, TRUMP has made a mockery of a 50 year politition, who never ever had a real job, & contiues to lie everyday! It brings me joy to see the democrates falling apart by the seems. With no leader in site, no plans for the future, what is to become of the Jackass party? I love to see them go after TRUMP…. Rallys full of old fools that are being paid, or just plain brainwashed. We are on the cusp of a great American revival! America 1st, now & forever. May god bless the democratic party, in hope they see the light. May they come togeather too stop socialism, communism, & Islam. Great days are ahead, my friends, Great days indeed.
Laurel says
Yes, it’s his, and his alone in his mind. I’ve never seen a person with such selfish priority.
On ego and id:
“The id is the part of the personality that contains our basic instincts and desires, seeking immediate gratification without considering reality or morality. The ego, on the other hand, is the rational part that mediates between the id’s impulses and the demands of reality, helping to make practical decisions.” – Simple Psychology.
Well, something’s missing.
Pogo says
@P.T.
You are hereby proclaimed a Barnstar recipient, and human person of the first rank for the excellence of this page, this day.
By God sir, well done.
Ray W. says
I freely concede that this comment is not serious. It isn’t even important in any real sense. But on Wednesday, NASCAR announced that starting in 2027 the running of the Daytona 500 will be moved back one week, off its traditional President’s Day running. One commenter of the decision claimed that this is evidence that the NFL is going to expand to an 18-game season in 2027.
Make of this what you will, but if the NFL expands to an 18-game season in 2027, some of you can say that you read this first on FlaglerLive.
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for all your hard work in keeping FlaglerLive operating when so many news outlets, one by one, large and small, continue to fail.
Ray W. says
This comment, at least to me, is far more interesting and perhaps far more important than my NASCAR/NFL comment.
I have no idea how many FlaglerLive readers recall President Trump’s statement about trade negotiations with Japan that involved promises of billions of dollars of investment by Japanese companies in American projects that would bring jobs and economic production to the American economy.
Some time ago, apparently, JERA, a major Japanese utility company, announced that, as part of the Japanese government’s agreement to invest more money in America, it planned to invest $7 billion.
For about a month now there has been a smattering of reports about a Japanese company investing in American natural gas assets.
Earlier today, as reported by a news outlet called Oil Price US, a site that claims a subscriber base of 400,000, JERA, announced both that it was paying two American natural gas companies $1.5 billion for their shale natural gas assets in the Haynesville Basin, in an effort to boost its “exposure to U.S. gas” and that it was considering an undisclosed investment in an Alaska-based LNG project.
The Alaska LNG project, if built, will have the capacity to produce 20 million tons of LNG each year. Some of the extracted natural gas will go to Alaskan consumers, but mot of the extracted natural gas will be sent 800 miles by pipeline to a liquefaction plant, from which the LNG will be loaded onto LNG tankers to be sent anywhere in the world.
Hurdles to the Alaska project include additional costs that cold weather locations bring to any natural gas project and the as-yet-undetermined scale of additional natural gas pipelines that will need to be built to connect any new extraction site to the already existing Alaskan pipeline from Alaska’s north shore to the Kenai Peninsula in southern Alaska.
I have repeatedly commented to the FlaglerLive site that prior to the opening of the Cheneire Energy liquefaction plant in Louisiana in 2014, there had been only one operating liquefaction plant in America that exported American LNG, and that planted was located on the Kenai Peninsula. That plant shut down in 2011 after 40 years of exporting Alaskan LNG.
According to JERA’s press release, the Haynesville Basin assets already produce 500 million cubic feet of natural gas each day. There are 200 undeveloped locations within the field that are subject to the purchase. The deal includes a clause that JERA can increase output of natural gas from the basin to 1 billion cubic feet per day. Whether JERA buying the gas field will provide savings sufficient to make its investment profitable remains to be seen.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
From my thinking, the $1.5 million purchase price for already productive natural gas wells in the Haynesville Basin makes sense. Controlling the cost of producing natural gas will likely prove profitable.
Despite the EIA’s projection that too many LNG plants are already under construction all over the world, there is also no dispute about natural gas demand rising all over the world. The EIA knows about the rise in natural gas demand; it just projects a greater rise in worldwide LNG export capacity, which the EIA projects could damage the profitability of any newly constructed LNG export plant, regardless of where in the world it is built.
This bears reminding.
In 2014, prior to the opening of Cheneire Energy’s Louisiana LNG plant, the US exported zero of its domestic sources of natural gas. Since 2014, some 10 LNG export plants have opened, from Texas to Maryland. Many more are past the permitting phase and under construction. In 11 or so years, America now leads the world in LNG exports. Just over six of those years saw Democratic administration. Just under five of those years saw Republican administration. Since application for permitting to opening takes as much as seven years, that means that permitting and construction for all of these plants has proceeded under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Yes, the Biden administration in 2024 paused the permitting process for a proposed Philadelphia LNG plant to export LNG to Europe and another proposed plant expansion to export LNG to Mexico, but the pause was for the applicants to submit more complete applications to satisfy federal regulations. Once the updated information was supplied, the underlying requirements for the permits were met, and a report was issued by December 2024 approving the issuance of the permits and the Trump administration then approved the permits in January 2025.
I type all of this because one of the most common lies issued by the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties is that Democratic administrations are stopping fossil fuel energy. The Democratic administrations are not stopping fossil fuel energy; they are regulating it.
The law as defined by Congress and interpreted by the executive requires that any energy company that meets the statutory and regulatory requirements for a permit gets the permit. Yes, regulatory hurdles might make a project more expensive, but the permit will issue if it meets the law. This is how rule of law works. An administrative can oppose fossil fuel energy and still issue every permit that any energy company seeks.
This applies to pipelines, too. The northern leg of the XL pipeline, as planned in its permit application process, crosses the Nebraska Sand Hills that sit atop the Oglalla Aquifer, the main drinking and irrigation source of water for several states. The project has been a near-constant source of lies by our professional lying class.
The tar sands crude oil that comes out of Alberta that will be transported through the pipeline comes out of the ground with what has been described in industry journals as the consistency of peanut butter. This type of oil must be thinned by additives before it can be pumped through pipelines or into rail tank cars.
The additive most commonly used to thin this type of oil is highly toxic and highly carcinogenic. It is also so acidic that it eats through normal steel pipe and normal rail tank car steel walls. Special steel pipe and special steel rail tank cars must be used to transport the additive thinned crude oil. The process is more expensive, compared to the cost of shipping normal crude oil.
Will all oil producer’s tell the truth about their oil, when one type of crude oil transport is cheaper than the additive-thinned crude oil? Do they file forms claiming that their oil is normal oil to save money, when in reality their oil contains the toxic and cancerous and acidic additive?
In 2013, a train’s electric brakes failed while stopped on a hill above the town of Lac-Megantic, Canada. The engineer had gone to a motel during the planned stop, thinking the brake’s were working properly. A fire broke out in a generator that powered the electric brakes. The unattended train derailed on a turn because it rolled down the hill too fast coming into the town. Multiple rail tank cars filled with crude oil ruptured, setting off a huge fire that killed 47 people. Years ago, I read the civil complaint filed by the families of the victims. It was alleged that crude oil mixed with the thinning additive had weakened the normal steel walls of the tank cars. The tank cars were designed to be strong enough to not rupture in that type of derailment; they should not have ruptured. The company that had pumped the crude oil into the tank cars had certified that no thinning additive was present in the oil, obtaining a cheaper transport price. Crude oil samples collected from the soil revealed the presence of the thinning additive.
The case was settled before trial, so no factual finding by a jury of whether the thinning additive was in the crude oil was determined.
I write all this because should the northern leg of the XL pipeline be built, any pipe rupture in the Nebraska Sand Hills section of the pipeline would spill the highly toxic and highly carcinogenic thinning additive onto sand, a very porous type of soil. If enough of the thinning additive were to sink into the sand and later make its way into the Oglalla Aquifer, every water source drawn from it could become contaminated.
The Obama administration proposed to the company that sought permits to build the northern leg of the XL pipeline that it move the pipeline around the Nebraska Sand Hills section instead of through it, a detour that would have lengthened the pipeline by 75 miles. The company refused. The political battle has been on ever since.
The Obama administration was the one that issued permits for most of today’s operating LNG plants because the applicants met the legal requirements for the permits. The Trump administration issued permits, too. So, too, did the Biden administration. The Trump administration recently approved a permit for an expansion to an already operating LNG plant.
Can it be argued that today’s professional lying class that sits atop one of our two parties repeated claims that “No Kings” protesters must be Antifa and terrorists and America haters, when in reality they are not Antifa and not terrorists and not America haters? Can it be argued that they are simply Trump opposers?
Can it be argued that members of that professional lying class have for years been twisting the reasons why the northern leg of the XL pipeline wasn’t built?
My position is that protesters who turned out to protest at the “No Kings” events can hate what they think Trump is trying to do and love America at the same time.
Can it be argued that Democrats can oppose fossil fuel energy and still issue permits to allow those sources of energy to expand, provided the pipeline doesn’t cross directly over the Nebraska Sand Hills?
As for me, I oppose anyone who asks when it will be time to begin beheading Democrats. That doesn’t make me a liberal. I take the position that there exists a moral imperative to oppose anyone who peddles such reckless hate, but that doesn’t prove that I oppose America.
For that matter, since I have actually taken the time to study the Conservative Tradition, dating from the Glorious Revolution in England, I have come to realize that I am more of a true conservative than the majority of FlaglerLive commenters who themselves claim to be conservative.
Who knew way back when that the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party would morph into the mainstream of today’s Republican party?
Who knew that several state level Republican leaders would denounce Young Republican leadership that openly engaged in racist, antisemitic and homophobic social media messages, with the state leaders saying that those many Young Republicans were not a part of the Republican party?
Who knew that yesterday’s true conservatives, in some political circles, would be forced to yield their party influence to today’s Young Republican reactionaries?