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Weather: Partly sunny, with a high near 70. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 59.
- 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:
Tree-lighting ceremony: The City of Palm Coast is inviting residents and visitors to the 11th Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony at Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave., Palm Coast from 6 to 9 p.m. Join Santa, the Palm Coast City Council, and the Rotary Club of Flagler County as they count down to the lighting of a beautiful tree and celebrate the arrival of the most wonderful time of the year! Details here.
Notably: The cartoon above appeared in the January 6, 1940 issue of The New Yorker. On that day Nazis invaded France along a 120-mile front, crushing what little French resistance they got, but that’s beside the point. The cartoon’s prescient punchline is the thing. The same can be said of the haunted-faced Thomas Powers’s Galatea 2.2, his 1995 novel where a computer scientist builds a computer that “learns” and writes literary criticism as good as the Richard Powers of the novel. Powers (he is a character in his own novel) also teaches Helen, as the machine comes to be known (not of Troy). Helen and Powers develop a relationship until Helen self-executes. As suicides go, that one doesn’t sound so tragic.
–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.
December 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
The Bronx Wanderers at the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy
Santa in Bunnell
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
Members of an air-crash cult will hijack a jumbo jet and crash it into the White House in an act of blind devotion to their mysterious and reclusive leader, known only as Uncle Bob. The President and First Lady will miraculously survive with minor cuts, according to close friends of the couple.
–From Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985).
Dennis C Rathsam says
The Democrat,s HAVE NO BALLS! period
Skibum says
Dennis, for someone who espouses conservative extremist maga “values”, I would think you would be focusing your attention elsewhere instead of peering down to the sexual organs of people you don’t agree with to see if they have balls or not. Such behavior is juvenile and amateurish… but you do you.
Mark says
Dennis, why are republicans always concerned with peoples genitals and bathrooms?
Skibum says
Latent sexual tendencies, and insecurities with their own manliness I suppose.
Capt Bill Hanagan says
Republicans have an extra set of orange ones in their mouth lately ..
Pogo says
Perfect
Thank you.
Ray W. says
Every so often, I track political positions, knowing that certain subjects are the things about which the professional lying class that sits at the top of one of two parties lies the most.
One of those political positions about which lies are expended en mass is energy.
Our president has repeatedly lied about gasoline prices going down because of policies he has enacted.
I checked with GasBuddy.com about historical national average gasoline prices at the pump. The site publishes an update about every two weeks.
During the week ending on December 4, 2024, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline at the pump dropped to as low as just over $2.97. Not a bad average price to pay after four years of OPEC+ manipulating the world’s crude oil marketplace for profit.
For the week ending on November 28, 2025, the national average price for a gallon of regular gas at the pump is just over $2.96.
It’s been more than 10 months and President Trump’s policies, if you were to believe his promises, have brought gasoline prices down by slightly more than one penny per gallon.
Or did his policies have anything at all to do with that slightly more than one penny per gallon drop?
Since March of this year, OPEC has continuously, albeit somewhat slowly, ramped up its output, with a 2.9 million barrel per day total increase since April, according to some news outlets. Unless demand keeps up with rising supply, standard economic theory holds that prices will eventually come down.
Did Trump’s policies have much at all to do with dropping gasoline prices at the pump in light of OPEC+ increasing its crude oil output? How much?
Let’s face facts. Professional liars have to lie. Gullibly stupid followers have to launder the lies. This is the very definition of how a “pestilential” partisan member of faction lacking virtue acts.
Me?
The international energy marketplace is incredibly complex with many moving parts. No two days are quite the same.
For example, each spring and fall, American refinery owners shut down their refineries for scheduled maintenance to ensure that their refineries operate as efficiently as possible.
In the spring, each refinery is modified, usually during the scheduled maintenance shutdowns, to produce “summer blend” gasoline that costs, according to some industry journals, some five to 15 cents more per gallon. Gasoline costs more in the summertime because the ratio of long-chain volatile hydrocarbon molecules in the gasoline is changed so that the gasoline does not evaporate as fast in hotter weather. Summer blend gasoline carries 1.7% more energy per gallon because of the addition of these long-chain volatile hydrocarbon molecules into the gasoline blend.
In the fall, when the refineries are again shut down for routine maintenance, they are modified back to producing less dense forms of gasoline that cost less per gallon to make. Winter blend gasoline means lower prices at the pump, all other things being equal.
Yes, I know that to some it feels good to launder lies in hopes of strengthening party bonds. It doesn’t take much to see for what it is the many FlaglerLive lie launderers who are wandering through life fooling themselves. Still, we can all marvel in the knowledge that the neutered wonders among us who launder their political lies are incapable of understanding what really is happening in the political world.
As an aside, I really enjoyed the scene in Landman, Season 2, where the MTex lead lawyer, during a fictional meeting, completely upends the position taken by an insurance company’s legal team, at the end of which fake meeting she is offered a job by the insurance company’s lead lawyer. Good TV, good actors, good script. I wonder whether Dennis C. Rathsam thinks the fictional event real.
Ray W. says
In an Interesting Engineering story, ethylene is described as “high value” base plastic used in the manufacture of other plastics, textiles, and solvents.
Methane, some 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere, is transformed into ethylene via “oxidative coupling of methane), a high heat (610 degrees Celsius) and costly process.
University of Queensland, School of Chemical Engineering researchers found a way to catalyze methane into ethylene without using high heat by pairing a palladium-gold alloy with titanium oxide as a catalyst and exposing methane to sunlight as the source of energy needed to catalyze methane into ethylene. In essence, the new process “uses nothing more than Australia’s intense sunlight and a new catalyst.”
While the catalyzing metals used are expensive, the researchers theorize that iron may be made into a catalyst, too.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
One of the world’s most atmospheric heat-trapping of chemicals, methane, may soon be able to be comparatively inexpensively transformed into a valuable commercialized product, ethylene.
In the U.S., alone, there may be hundreds of thousands of “orphan wells”, i.e., old abandoned uncapped oil and natural gas wells that leak oil into the soil and vent methane into the atmosphere. Finding an inexpensive and scalable way to commercialize vented methane might kill two birds with one stone.
Laurel says
I highly recommend people watch this video on YouTube. It starts out about people in prison, but that’s really, super brief and off subject. Then it goes on to the subject and explains just what is going on in the world today, and how it effects our lack of affordability. It explains how we are being manipulated, and who benefits from it. It’s an hour long, so you may want to look it up on your TV, or wherever you are comfortable. It’s well worth it. It is titled “Global Capitalism: Affordability: Why So Much Costs Too Much.”
Ray W. says
A news outlet called Mediaite published a story of how President Trump’s repeated use of the slur “retarded” has incensed a Republican state senator who is father to a disabled daughter; he says Trump’s words “have consequences.”
Indiana state Senator Mike Bohacek has publicly announced that he intends to vote against President Trump’s effort to redistrict Indiana’s federal congressional districts.
After President Trump criticized Minnesota Governor Mike Walz yesterday evening, in which criticism he used the phrase “seriously retarded” to describe the Governor, Senator Bohacek posted to X:
“Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you who don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There is a sickness upon the land and our president is trying to exploit the depraved and vengeful who walk among us for political gain.
Not every Republican is buying President Trump’s insulting and degrading persona. That some still buy into that persona says more about them than the rest really want to know.
Many among us recognize President Trump for the vengeful person that he is. Republican state Senator Bohacek is one of them. Dennis C. Rathsam is completely fooled. He has it backwards. It takes testicles for Senator Bohacek to stand up to the politically powerfully vengeful among us. That the neutered remainder of the nation’s Republican politicians cannot see Trump for what he is …