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Weather: Sunny, with a high near 80. Windy, with a northeast wind 15 to 21 mph, with gusts as high as 31 mph. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 70. Windy.
- 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 Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at its new location on South 2nd Street, right in front of City Hall, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
Palm Coast Founders’ Day, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Holland Park, 18 Florida Park Drive, Palm Coast. A celebration of Palm Coast history and the founders that shaped it! Take a free tour through the PCHS museum and check out local food trucks, vendors, games, and outdoor activities for all ages. Located at James F. Holland Memorial Park, 18 Florida Park Drive, Palm Coast.
Peps Art Walk, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. every second and fourth Saturday, Beachfront Grille, 2444 South Oceanshore Boulevard, Flagler Beach. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
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.
‘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
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Notably: It was Flagler Beach Commissioner Rick Belhumeur’s birthday a few days ago. He was born the year Dwight Eisenhower was first inaugurated, back when we had presidents worth the title. His friend Dennis Senek took the picture above last week, on a stop in the wilds of northern Ohio (specifically, Newton Falls). As with the sun on George Washington’s armchair at the constitutional convention a few years before Behumeur’s birth, we can say, with Benjamin Franklin, “I have often looked at that picture behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting.” Franklin concluded that it was a rising sun. Belhumeur himself is not setting of course, but that sun he was shooting in Ohio, in this deplorable year, is surely no longer rising.
—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’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
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.
This period from 1763 to 1789 has a singular unity, from which the rush of events and the din of arms can easily distract our attention. We must not let the high-strung debates that preceded the American Revolution, or the vivid events of the War for Independence, hide from us the real meaning of these years. Just as the Greek tragedies of the Periclean Age are concerned not merely with the conflicts of gods and heroes, but with the depths of human nature, just as the stories of the Old Testament explore the mysterious relation between God and man, so we may discern, behind the noisy conflict of words and arms in the American Revolution, the stirring of a political problem older than re-corded history: the balancing of liberty with authority. That underlay all the tumult and the shouting. And this ancient question of liberty or authority resolves itself into two: the horizontal or federal problem of distributing power between one central and many regional governments; and the vertical or democratic one of how far the masses of mankind shall be entrusted with control. These two problems are the warp and woof of American history through the Civil War, and the circumstances of our own time have simply restated these ancient problems in terms of liberty versus security and permissiveness versus discípline.
–From Samuel Eliot Morison, H.S. Commager and William Leuchtenburg’s The Growth of the American Republic, vol. 1 (1930, 1980).
Dennis C Rathsam says
A while back, when the market was tanking, I told you all now was the time too buy. Had you invested, you to would be making money. You all have short memories Bidens inflation was up to 9 % TRUMPS is now 2 1/2% Its the democrats that were going the wrong way…. 4 years of hell with Biden. TRUMP turn this country around, in record time. All you folks know it, but your hatered of TRUMP clouds your brains! SCHUMERS shutdown has made TRUMPS popularity boom!!!!! No more will we entertain foreign leaders in a tent, with porta potys.TRUMP IS 1st class all the way…. JUST LIKE I SAID!
Terry says
Definitely a dying empire. China is more reliable and taking over. Orange terror is good at enriching himself and violating the constitution. Top 10% are the economy now they make up 60% of spending. Most Americans can barely scrape by to obtain food and shelter that’s the greatness rcons sold you?
Dusty says
Trump is absolutely going in the right direction. You can’t be more pleased with a man who is doing everything he said he would do and more importantly the insane are no longer running things. Border is closed, criminal illegals being deported. Crime is a being cracked down upon. Threats of tariffs has brought countries to even up out trade agreements. No men competing against women in Women’s sports the list goes on. I think it is great yahoo. The Dem platform is now so nuts they probably won’t have a majority again for another decade.
Ray W. says
Tension between liberty and authority being an ever present predicament of the human condition! Tension between state and federal rights! Tension between regions within the country! Tension between political factions!
Our founding fathers devised a counter to these many tensions checks and balances, and they knew that tension against tension itself was what best could preserve their experiment in a liberal democratic Constitutional republic, a form of government they believed had never been tried in all the history of the world.
I recall, perhaps as many as 30 or more years ago, sitting down with my father in his office. I asked if I could pose an idea. I told him I had been pondering whether American justice, i.e., our judiciary, was the tide rolling in or out.
Had his generation of lawyers seen a time of ever increasing individual rights that did not exist now? Had his generation of lawyers gone home each evening thinking they had expanded the cause of individual rights that day?
I was well aware that his generation of lawyers had been the ones who suited up and went out to kill Germans and Italians and Japanese in order to “extirpate” Nazism and fascism and totalitarianism from the Axis powers, that they were the ones who knew the true face of vengeful political structures, but I didn’t put it that way as we talked.
I told my father I felt that each evening as I drove home the best I could say about the practice of criminal law was that I had held back a rising tide of authoritarianism against individual rights.
Just the other day, Ed P. had argued that Chicago’s high murder rate of over 1000 each year justified the insertion of the military onto the streets of Chicago, i.e., that authoritarianism in the name of safety was more important than the limited political power of mayors and governors to determine for themselves whether police forces were enough for the circumstances.
As an aside, Ed P. didn’t help his credibility when he presented to the FlaglerLive community fake homicide figures to support his argument. In 1974, 970 murders occurred in Chicago, the most in about 60 years, according both to a 2012 Chicago Tribune article that tracked murder numbers each year and other sources. Not once in the past 60 years has the number of murders in Chicago exceeded 1000 and Ed P. argued that it had been happening nearly every year for decades.
There should never be tension between what is true and what is a lie. Somehow, however, here we are. People gleefully post fake news, thinking that act makes them good people.
I have not forgotten the HBO miniseries titled Our Boys, in which is detailed the abduction and gruesome murder of a young Palestinian man by Jewish religious extremists who had persuaded themselves to set out in search of someone to kidnap and kill.
I understand that the miniseries is based on a true story and that certain inferences were employed to fill in gaps in what is known about what happened.
The Jewish religious extremists burned their victim to death in a wooded section off a main road, a shocking way for any abducted victim to die.
A highly secret Israeli investigate unit took on the task of learning what had happened, taking the audience deeply into the world of Jewish religious extremism and what highly immoral actions it is willing to condone.
A scene in the miniseries depicts the investigation into an internet claim that the Palestinian victim was a homosexual, a heinous offense in the Palestinian culture.
Investigators tracked down the source, who told them he had fabricated his claim up to bring shame on the victim’s family. The investigator, incredulous, yelled about how much the liar had cost, and not just in monetary cost. The liar retorted that if he had steered the investigation away from Jews, then his act had to be worth a few shekels.
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for what you do.
Ray W. says
According to a news outlet called Tasting Table, America exported 2.84 billion pounds of beef in 2024, and that of all the beef produced around the world, American ranchers and cattle producers contribute 20% of the global supply. Yet, America imported 4.38 billion pounds of beef last year.
I have commented on the reason before.
America imports beef primarily because American cattlemen focus on highly marbled, “high quality” forms of fatty beef. That is good when consumers want ground beef (27% fat). But when consumers want ground chuck (20% fat) or other types of even leaner ground beef, we have to import leaner trimmings of beef from foreign sources to mix into our more fatty beef.
According to the reporter, nearly 70% of our beef imports are these leaner cuts of beef. Some of our imports are Wagyu beef, too.
Make of this what you will.
Pogo says
@Denise
… you ignorant slut; get off the sauce before it’s too late.
How low IS low:
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+presidential+rankings
Ray W. says
In 1957, Congress created an independent civil rights agency, named the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, with eight of its members appointed by the president and eight appointed by Congress.
In its mission statement is this language:
“Established as an independent, bipartisan, fact-finding federal agency, our mission is to inform the development of national civil rights policy and enhance enforcement of federal civil rights laws.”
Despite being delegated fact-finding authority, Congress did not give the agency enforcement powers.
I found one of the agency’s fact-finding reports, this one titled: “Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election”
In that report was an “Executive Summary”, with a description of the agency’s activities prior to issuance of the report, activities that included:
That after a preliminary investigation by staff, members of the agency unanimously voted to conduct a more thorough investigation into allegations of voter disenfranchisement.
That more that 100 witnesses provided more than 30 hours of sworn testimony, including testimony from then-Governor Bush and then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. After each day of testimony, the Commission invited members of the general public in attendance to testify to the Commission under oath.
That the committee reviewed more than 118,000 pages of “pertinent” documents.
That upon consideration after the end of fact-gathering, the Commission found “a strong basis for concluding that violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) occurred in Florida.”
The Commission added:
“The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities. The state’s highest officials responsible for ensuring efficiency, uniformity, and fairness in the election failed to fulfill their responsibilities and were subsequently unwilling to take responsibility.”
The Commission then called upon the U.S. Attorney General to open an investigation into the facts found by the Commission.
Here are excerpts from the Commission’s lengthy conclusion, in which Florida was lauded for passing legislation after the 2000 election that corrected many but not all of the errors that disenfranchised voters in the 2000 election:
“The Commission found that the problems Florida had with the 2000 presidential election were serious and not isolated. In many instances, they were foreseeable and should have been prevented. The failure to do so resulted in an extremely high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement, with a significantly disproportionate impact on African American voters. The causes include the following: (1) a general failure of leadership from those with responsibility for ensuring elections are properly planned and executed; (2) inadequate resources for voter education, training of poll workers, and for Election Day trouble-shooting and problem solving; (3) inferior voting equipment and/or ballot design; (4) failure to anticipate and account for the expected high volumes of voters, including inexperienced voters; (5) a poorly designed and even more poorly executed purge system; and (6) a resource allocation system that often left poorer counties, which often were counties with the highest percentage of black voters, adversely affected.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I then looked for what happened in the 2000 election that the Commission deemed a flawed disenfranchisement of voters. Among various sources, I found a 2012 ACLU summary of what actually happened prior to the 2000 election.
In accord with the law in existence at the time, a private company was retained by the State to look at voter rolls for persons who might be purged from those rolls. People who had passed away qualified for the scrub. So, too, did people who had moved out of state or to another county in Florida without notifying elections officials. Felons who had not been removed from the rolls after date of conviction was a third category.
A few months prior to the 2000 election, the private company forwarded to Florida’s Secretary of State a list of 57,000 named voters whom the company deemed “ineligible” to vote. This list became known as the “scrub list.”
In the months following the election, it was determined that “up to 12,000” eligible voters had been improperly scrubbed from voting rolls by election officials prior to the election. A disproportionate 41% of these up to 12,000 voters were African-American voters.
Was there a problem with the scrubbing process?
Yes, once the private company placed voters’ names on the scrub list, the State of Florida purposely shifted the burden of disproving their ineligibility to vote away from the State. This shifted burden became one of a scrubbed voter proving for a second time whether he or she still had the eligibility to vote, with only a short time prior to the 2000 election to do this.
Why the State decided to decline to determine on its own whether the voters were eligible to vote before taking away their right to vote is beyond me. Yes, people die. Yes, people move. Yes, people get convicted of crimes. But it seems from the findings that some 12,000 registered Floridia voters did not do any of these things in the few months prior to the 2000 election, yet they lost their right to vote anyway and were informed by the State that they, for a second time, had to show on their own their eligibility to vote. Can it be argued that the private company receiving state money to prepare a “scrub list” should have done this before it finalized the list?
The right to vote is in the Constitution. It is one of the highest, if not the highest, of all of our many individual rights. 12,000 Floridians, 41% of them Black, had already qualified to vote prior to the 2000 election. In essence, the State of Florida told them that the State didn’t have to prove they had lost their right to vote before taking it away. The State told them that they, the disenfranchised, had to prove a second time that they had the right to vote after the State took away that right, again, a right they had never lost prior to it arbitrarily being taken away.
I have written of this several times.
My elder daughter was too young to vote in the 2000 election. A few months before the 2004 election, she registered as a Democrat to vote in her heavily-Republican home county.
On voting day, she proudly went to her precinct to vote.
The precinct worker looked at her ID and compared it to her just-written signature and declared that the two didn’t match. My daughter was told she couldn’t vote that day.
At the time, it was a crime for a precinct worker to deny anyone the right to vote on grounds of mismatching signatures without offering the voter a “provisional” ballot. A provisional ballot allows the person to vote, under affidavit subject to penalty, but provisional ballots are not inserted into voting machine counting bins. Provisional ballots are sent to county elections Canvassing Boards for review by three persons. Canvassing Boards are usually led by a judge, but not always. Only the Canvassing Board had the statutory authority to decide whether a person’s signature that day did not match the signature on a voting card. Under no circumstances was a poll worker given the power to determine whether signatures match.
My daughter, upset, called me that night. I asked whether she had been offered a “provisional” ballot. She didn’t know what that was. I apologized to her for my failure to properly educate her that Republicans try to steal elections by disenfranchising voters. Of course, Democrats try to steal elections, too.
I should have taught her about provisional ballots. A Democratic voter disenfranchised because a poll worker decided to commit what the legislature had defined a crime. I no longer remember whether I told he she had the right to file a criminal complaint against the poll worker, so I am not going to claim that I did.
Ray W. says
A new outlet called Electrive published this past Sunday a story about Chery, a Chinese EV maker, developing a solid-state lithium-ion battery with an expected range of just over 800 miles, with an introduction date sometime in 2027.
For years now, I have been commenting on the favorable differences for solid-state EV batteries, when compared to liquid-state batteries.
Chery claims that its new batteries will be more energy dense by volume and by weight.
According to the reporter, Chery issued a press release, in which it is claimed that the new battery chemistry includes an “in-situ polymerized solid electrolyte system paired with a lithium-rich manganese cathode material”, a.k.a., an LMR battery.
Chery’s LMR battery prototype is said to have an energy density of 600 Wh/kg, more than double the density of current liquid-state lithium-ion batteries.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
From other sources, I understand that both Ford and General Motors are investing in LMR batteries. Whether they get to market first is yet to be determined.
The math is easy. Today’s liquid-state batteries can be recharged in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 times without significant degradation. Solid-state batteries promise a more stable battery chemistry that can be recharged more times than that. Even if Chery’s new LMR batteries can be recharged only 2000 times, at 800 miles on a charge, you are talking about a battery that can last in normal use up to 1.6 million miles.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Sodium-ion EV batteries on the market right now can be recharged up to 6,000 times, according to some publications. Even with their shorter range, say 300 miles per charge, lifetime range for these types of car batteries can approach 2 million miles of use without significant degradation.
One of the several definitions of myopia is: “lack of imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight.”
Some 20 years ago, America held the lead in EV battery research, as well as research in solar cell technology. Due to myopia, we through away our industrial advantages. Now, we pay China for the right to use technology they developed.
Do we want cheap electricity bills? If the answer is yes, then solar power backed up with new-generation battery storage is the cheapest source of producing electricity. But we seem to prefer paying more for our electricity, because the current administration is spending hundreds of millions of dollars keeping aging coal-fired power plants operating beyond their scheduled shut-down dates. Coal power generation costs as much as five times the cost of generating electricity from new solar farms, depending on the age of the coal-fired plants, according to EIA figures.
According to POWER Magazine, in 2023, a “cutting edge” Chinese coal-fired power plant reached 49.37% efficiency. The most efficient natural gas combined-cycle power plants are above 66% efficiency in pristine conditions. Still, they can’t compete with the cost efficiencies from solar farms.
Pogo says
@dcr
… put some clothes on — the girls don’t want to look at that.
Sherry says
Good Morning Pogo. . . a very loooooong scroll to get to this video. . . BUT. . . Absolutely Love It! Sent to my list of 97 people! Thank You! What a great way to start the day!