To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Sunny, with a high near 92. Chance of precipitation is 60%. Tuesday Night: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Partly cloudy, with a low around 77. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
- 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:
A Disaster Preparedness Expo is scheduled for 9 a.m. to noon at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway, with several vendors and speakers and lined up, including Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord, Sheriff Rick Staly, Flagler Cares Executive Director Carrie Baird and Flagler Humane Society’s Amy Carotenuto. The event is free and open to the public. A lineup of the agenda is viewable here.
The Community Traffic Safety Team led by Flagler County Commissioner Andy Dance meets at 9 a.m. in the third-floor Commissioner Conference Room at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. You may also join virtually by computer, mobile app or room device. Click here to join the meeting. Meeting ID: 276 236 998 121 Passcode: CyEKoW [Download Teams | Join on the web]
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 6 p.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The St. Johns River Water Management District Governing Board holds its regular monthly meeting at its Palatka headquarters. The public is invited to attend and to offer in-person comment on Board agenda items. Note: meeting start times vary from month to month. Check here to verify the time. A livestream will also be available for members of the public to observe the meeting online. Governing Board Room, 4049 Reid St., Palatka. Click this link to access the streaming broadcast. The live video feed begins approximately five minutes before the scheduled meeting time. Meeting agendas are available online here.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 3 p.m. in workshop to go over the items on its upcoming school board meeting two weeks hence. The board meets in the training room on the third floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here.
The Flagler County Planning Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. See board documents, including agendas and background materials, here. Watch the meeting or past meetings here.
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
Notably: The United States used to be on that list. That was back in the day when Dwight Eisenhower could drive through Karachi, Pakistan, at 5 miles per hour in a convertible, with tens of thousands of people jamming the road and no fencing (when not even Kennedy could do likewise in Dallas). We have long ago stopped being a favored nation around the world. We only have ourselves to blame. Anti-Americanism has nothing to do with the old Bush line: “They hate us because they hate our freedoms.” (I am paraphrasing, but it’s at least grammatically correct.) The great, the fabulous Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher so far superior to Sartre, her boyfriend, picked up on the trend when she visited the United States in the Truman years (1947), when red-baiting was pinking up: “To declare anti-American the books, the films, the remarks which still lend Jefferson’s ideal a living reality, this is what would mutilate America; the day it is forbidden to challenge itself, it would no longer be different from the totalitarianisms to which it claims to oppose.” We are there.
—P.T.
Now this:
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.
August 2025
Tuesday, Aug 12
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Tuesday, Aug 12
Community Traffic Safety Team Meeting
Third Floor Conference Room, Government Services Building
Tuesday, Aug 12
Disaster Preparedness Expo
Palm Coast Community Center
Tuesday, Aug 12
St. Johns River Water Management District Meeting
St. Johns River Water Management District
Tuesday, Aug 12
Flagler County School Board Workshop: Agenda Items
Government Services Building
Tuesday, Aug 12
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach
Tuesday, Aug 12
Flagler County Planning Board Meeting
Tuesday, Aug 12
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Cinematique of Daytona Beach
Wednesday, Aug 13
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
Airline Room, Daytona Beach International Airport
Wednesday, Aug 13
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine Visits Palm Coast’s Oldest Sewer Plant
Palm Coast Utility Department
Wednesday, Aug 13
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
Wednesday, Aug 13
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Wednesday, Aug 13
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler County Public Library
No event found!
For the full calendar, go here.
In the morning paper I come across two small events that together seem significant. The black singer Paul Robeson was supposed to give a recital in Peoria; at the last minute, the concert was canceled on the pretext that Robeson is a communist. The authorities insist that they didn’t refuse to give him access to the hall because he’s black but because he’s a communist. Elsewhere, an amusing episode just reached its conclusion. Several weeks ago, a bus driver with a bus full of passengers traveling along some avenue got the bright idea to bypass all the stations and the terminal and to head out onto the highway amid his customers’ panicked protests. He let them out in the end, then calmly continued on his way to Florida. When stopped and questioned, he cheerfully declared, “That route was too monotonous. I’ve always wanted to see Florida. One fine morning, I said to myself,
‘Why not go to Florida?’ So I went.” This driver has become a popular hero. Although he’d been fired, he went back to work yesterday amid ovations. He was interviewed, as well as photographed a hundred times, and in all the papers he’s seen laughing through the windshield of the new bus he’s just been given. Perhaps such a fantasy is conceivable only in New York; friends have told me that nothing similar could happen, for example, in Chicago. But even if they are incapable of doing it themselves, all Americans adore these uninhibited actions in which they see ready proof of their love of freedom. This driver is a “character,” an original who has openly demonstrated that individualism America is so proud of. And certainly in France he would never have been reinstated in his job. It’s true that America is much more indulgent of sudden whims and impulses that do not seriously challenge its authority. […] “Our democracy is nothing more than a pseudo democracy,” a friend said to me this afternoon, as we were commenting on these incidents. “The word ‘freedom” is devoid of all content. The individual has no more rights; he’s at the mercy of arbitrary wills.” And indeed, people today invoke two principles successively and together, slipping from one to the other in a way that catches them in a fatal trap: “The interests of each person take precedence over the interests of all,” they declare; and at the same time they assert, “Everybody is free; even a coal miner is master in his own home.” Yet if a citizen is considered Red, he will be fired from the civil service in the name of the general interest; on the other hand, private employers will refuse to hire him: “It’s their right; everybody is free.” And the citizen also finds himself free, to be Red and to die of hunger. In the name of the first principle, the right to strike is restricted and labor unions are destroyed; in the name of the second, all sorts of private persecutions of racial minorities and political parties are authorized. And the sad truth is that the “general interest” applies only to a “private” category of citizens those who profit from the ruling elite and who intend to go on profiting. And the others are free only to the extent that they submit, which is the most abstract of freedoms.”
–From Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day By Day, April 19, 1947 entry.
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
