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Weather: Mostly sunny with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 30 percent. Monday Night: Partly cloudy. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening. Lows in the upper 50s. Chance of rain 20 percent.
- 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 Commission meets at 9 a.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. Meetings stream live on the Flagler County YouTube page.
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 Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements 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.
Byblos: The mailman delivered the third volume of Joan Didion’s works in the Library of America edition, her last writings, including The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 memoir that won the National Book Award and that requires deep familiarity with stoicism to read: she writes of losing her husband John Gregory Dunne near the end of a life spent writing about loss and trying not to lose. Think of that sliver of Flagler County shoreline, with all its beauty and fragility, with all its unstoppable erosion, as a metaphor for Didion’s life. I am not sure if I’ll ever be ready to read that book. It’s like Proust’s Remembrance, the last book from whose early pages I read aloud to my mother as her mind was going the way of the shoreline. I cannot bring myself to read it, even though I know, from having read those pages, that it is one of the most sublime books ever written. Every page, every line floored me. You get that in much thinner drabs from Didion, though it’s not fair to burden anyone with Proust as a standard. His prose was inhumanly otherworldly. Didion’s is so grounded, at times so crushing with its unforgiving clarity, that it creates its own gravity. The volume also includes Political Fiction, a collection of pieces she wrote for the New York Review of Books, and that I usually clipped (I still have several of them in their original format, sleeved against decay). It includes pieces on the Clintons, on Newt Gingrich, on Democrats in 1992, just before they retook the White House, and the essay on Bob Woodward’s The Choice, appropriately titled “Political Pornography,” which reminds me of Patricia Lockwood’s fabulous “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” takedown of John Updike. Didion on Woodward: “This disinclination of Mr. Woodward’s to exert cognitive energy on what he is told reaches critical mass in The Choice, where not much said to the author by a candidate or potential candidate appears to have been deemed too insignificant for inclusion, too casual for documentation.” There are a few other Didion memoirs, and her “Notes on the South” and “California Notes.” Didion died two days before Christmas in 2021.
—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
Contractor Review Board Meeting
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Aaron Kaplowitz
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
Flagler County Industrial Development Authority Meeting
Scale & Thrive 2026: Growth Strategies for Local Business Owners
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
In Court: Leigha Mumby Pre-Trial
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
A traveler in the rural South in the summertime is always eating dinner, dispiritedly, in the barely waning heat of the day. One is a few hundred miles and a culture removed from any place that serves past 7:30 or 8 p.m. We ate dinner one night at a motel on the road between Winfield and Guin. The sun still blazed on the pavement outside, and was filtered only slightly by the aqueous blue-green Pliohlm shades on the windows inside. The food seemed to have been deep-fried for the lunch business and kept lukewarm on a steam table. Eating is an ordeal, as in an institution, something to be endured in the interests of survival. There are no drinks to soften the harshness of it. Ice is begrudged. I remember in one such place asking for iced coffee. The waitress asked me how to make it. “Same way as iced tea,” I said. She looked at me without expression. “In a cup?” she asked. The waitress in the place in Guin trailed me to the cash register. She was holding a matchbook I had left on the table. “I was looking at your matchbook,” she said. “Where’s it from.” I said it was from Biloxi. “Biloxi, Mississippi?” she said, and studied the matchbook as if it were a souvenir from Nepal. I said yes. She tucked the matchbook in her pocket and turned away.
–From Joan Didion’s “Guin,” in South and West (2017).
Laurel says
Trump’s gestapo.
Pogo says
@P.T.
There you go again, and I’m glad you’re here, and glad that I read you — thank you.
Ray W. says
A short while ago, in Middle Eastern terms of time that can span millennia, Israel’s Knesset voted to annex the entirety of the West Bank.
According to an Axios story, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered members of his party to vote against the measure, but he did not do the same for members of his coalition of parties.
According to the reporter, Netanyahu could have taken the measure off the Knesset agenda, but this too he chose not to do.
A member of Netanyahu’s coalition of parties put a bill on the agenda to annex all of the West Bank. An opposition member put a bill on the agenda to annex one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank. Both bills passed.
When asked by reporters before he boarded a plane to leave Israel, Vice President Vance said:
“If it was a political stunt, it was a stupid one and I take some insult to it”, adding that “… the West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel.”
Secretary of State Rubio said that annexation of the West Bank would be “potentially threatening to the peace deal” in Gaza, adding:
“So they’re a democracy, they’re going to have their votes, people are going to take positions, but at this time it’s something that especially we think it might be counterproductive. … We’re concerned about anything that threatens to destabilize what we’ve worked on.”
Here are some positions taken by certain Arab states, in the words of the reporter:
“The United Arab Emirates told the Trump administration that Israeli annexations would harm the Abraham Accords.”
“Trump held a meeting last month with leaders and senior officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan and asked them to support his plan for ending the war in Gaza. … The Arab leaders presented Trump with several conditions for supporting his plan, including a commitment that Israel won’t annex parts of the West Bank or Gaza. … Trump made it clear to the leaders that he’d block such a step. Three days later he told reporters that he won’t allow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.”
Make of this what you will.
Bob says
So Pierre, why would u even put this cartoon on ur website. I would hate to believe that u feel that way. It’s not true and u must know that. I feel sorry for those who really believe this is so.
Pierre Tristam says
How would you know it’s not true? They’re masked, as not even the SS were. And if their masks don’t say it all, their tactics and violence do.
Laurel says
Bob: If you truly don’t know government propaganda when you see it, then let this be your first lesson:
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/29/dhs-launches-defend-homeland-nationwide-recruit-patriots-join-ice-law-enforcement
Now, did you read anything about training or experience? No, because it’s not required. Instant *law enforcement.* We don’t need no stinking badges. No IDs either, just masks and tee shirts that claim “Police.”
If you were to join, how would you determine “the worst of the worst”? The color of their skin? The language they speak? What are the legal determinating factors? No warrants required.
You need to read some more, and not from the sites you stick to. This is serious stuff, and your government is flat out lying to you. Sorry, but it’s so.
This is where we have gone.
Ray W. says
According to a Reuters article, in October the United States exported in excess of 10.1 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG). No nation has ever exported that much natural gas in a month.
According to the reporter, the “start-up” off an LNG exporting facility in Plaquemines, Louisiana, and the “ramp-up” of a Corpus Christi export plant pushed exports to a record level.
69% of the national export total went to Europe. Export totals to Asia rose significantly, too.
The Dutch Title Transfer Facility price dropped from September’s $11.13 per million BTUs to October’s price of $10.88 per million BTUs. Roughly the same thing happened with the Japan Korea Marker price.
According to IntelliNews, a Canada company is proceeding with plans to construct a second liquefaction train at its Kitimat, British Columbia seaport. Partnering with LNG Canada in the expansion project will be Shell, Malaysia’s Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi and South Korea’s Kogas.
The first liquefaction train at the Kitimat site opened this past June, with 15 “cargoes” already having been shipped by LNG supertanker to “partners in South Korea, Japan, and Malaysia.”
When completed, both trains will have a combined capacity of 13.0 million metric tons per year.
According to the Intellinews reporter, prior to opening the Kitimat export plant, all of Canada’s exports of natural gas, constituting 8.6 billion cubic feet of gas, went by compressed natural gas pipeline to American buyers. Shell’s Chief Financial Officer Sinead Gorman told a Reuter’s reporter that the second liquefaction train will “come online before the end of the year.”
In a second IntelliNews article, China’s Hudong-Zhongua Shipbuilding delivered a record four “high-tech” new “fifth-generation” LNG tankers in October, a record for any one month, with another 11 such tankers expected to be delivered before the end of the year.
A total of more than 20 LNG tankers are under construction, including the 11 that will be delivered before the end of the year. More than 50 more LNG tankers are on order.
As an aside, I recently commented on the fact that only one U.S.-flagged LNG tanker currently exists, servicing a facility in Puerto Rico. As can be easily discerned, China is building a monopoly in the LNG tanker industry. Frankly, I don’t care how many LNG export facilities are built in the U.S. to send our excess natural gas all over the world. If we do not control enough tankers to carry all of the gas, exports of LNG cargoes will cease, should China in a crisis order its tankers to avoid U.S. ports. President Biden saw this possibility and started the process of funding the creation of a domestic heavy shipbuilding industry. The Trump administration just announced that it was continuing the Biden initiative.
A Reuter’s reporter focused a story on Exxon Mobil’s delay in finalizing a $30 billion project in a liquefied natural gas plant named Rovuma LNG in Mozambique. An Islamist-linked insurgent attack four years ago stopped work on developing an off-shore gas field. Work in that field, called “Area 1” has not restarted.
The Exxon Mobile project was also delayed because Exxon Mobile shares a facility with TotalEnergies. Work by Exxon Mobile cannot resume until TotalEnergies’ own $20 billion LNG project is finished.
One issue of contention is that TotalEnergies has a time limit with the government of Mozambique to complete its “development and construction” period. The government recently denied a TotalEnergies request to extend the time period by 10 years.
According to consulting company Deloitte’s 2024 report on the project, Mozambique could become a worldwide top-10 natural gas producer by 2040.
Oil Price US reports that India, under pressure from excessive reliance on imports of crude oil and natural gas, intends to dramatically expand its exploration efforts to locate domestic supplies of the two fuels.
India imports 80% of its domestic demand for oil and roughly 50% of its domestic demand for natural gas.
This past September, the first deep-water exploration for natural gas in the Andaman Sea bore fruit. What gas was initially found was considered to be of high quality, with up to 87% methane content. The size of the gas field remains undetermined but it “could be a game-changer for India’s self-reliance in natural gas”, wrote the reporter.
A “basin system” of crude oil in the Andaman Sea could hold as much as 22 billion barrels of oil, but these are estimates, not “proven” oil reserves. Right now, only 10% of the “basin system” is open for crude oil and natural gas exploration. India’s oil minister recently stated that it is hope that up to 16% of the basin will be available by the end of 2025.
An Indian energy expert told a reporter that in the intermediate term, oil and gas exploration is important, but “[o]ne day, we will be looking at a situation where alternative forms of energy will increasingly matter more for incremental demand satisfaction than fossil fuels.”
The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) told a reporter:
“A ‘wave’ of new liquefied natural gas production capacity set to come on stream this year and in 2026 will transform the global market into one dictated by buyers.”
Right now, in the reporter’s words, “demand for liquefied gas remains rather robust, even at current prices”, with global LNG exports hitting an all-time high in September, at 34.59 million tons. Since this is the time for European LNG sellers to fill their storage tanks for the coming winter, European LNG imports rose 40% in September.
Should LNG prices drop too low in the face of rising capacity to export the fuel, producers are expected to place curbs on how much natural gas they produce, just like crude oil extractors cut production when oil prices drop too much.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The international energy marketplace is incredibly complex. No single snappy political refrain, like Drill, Baby, Drill, outweighs the economic considerations of energy producers and distributors.
Guyana wants to expand oil output from its deep-water oil basin. So does Brazil and Argentina. Egypt is drilling. Mozambique remains ready. India plans to expand. Autonomous Kurdistan has reopened a pipeline to export its crude oil. Kazakhstan is increasing output of crude oil and natural gas.
Report after report predicts that almost all of the cheapest crude oil in the Permian Basin has been located and exploited, and that by 2030 any new exploration efforts in the most productive of all of America’s shale oil basins will become comparatively more and more expensive.
Pogo says
@Hello Ray
Arithmetic is a powerful thing — thanks for demonstrating this on a regular basis; it is a much-needed counterweight to the enormous self-deception, and ordinary damn lies that plague our existence. The unfortunate truth that truth itself, and lies, can exist in the same space and time is a great conundrum — yes?
And then there is everything not said.
It’s early, but the need for a nap has suddenly become urgent — God bless this mess, all the rest, and all deserving.
Ray W. says
Hello Pogo.
Can it be successfully argued that if a truth and a lie exist in the same space and time the condition is best called “cognitive dissonance?”