A Supreme Court ruling against birthright citizenship is a dangerous stepping stone toward mass denaturalization and the erosion of individual sovereignty. That’s Trump’s endgame. Anything less than a decision demolishing the challenge would disgrace the sestercentennial anniversary we are about to celebrate.
Pierre Tristam
Saturday in Byblos:
Charlie Sheen’s Addictive Book of Hedonism
Charlie Sheen survives his own history of addiction to deliver a surprising memoir in “The Book of Sheen,” a three-voice fugue of stardom, debauchery, and Casanova-like reflections. He skips the Hollywood trap of mawkish regret as his narrative energy and wit recount a life spent mostly in a drug-induced haze.
CFO Blaise Ingoglia’s Disinformation Campaign at Local Governments’ Expense
Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia is touring the state to accuse local governments of reckless overspending, but his claims rely on a simplistic formula ignoring critical economic factors like property value increases and essential service needs. Flagler County faced his unsubstantiated attacks last week. Actual budget data reveals that Ingoglia’s claims collapse under the weight of even feathery scrutiny.
Limiting Student School Board Members To Cheerleading Scripts Undermines Role’s Original Intent
Flagler County Schools established student board members in 2002 to provide authentic youth perspectives on policy. The students once influenced graduation requirements and infrastructure improvements. Recent trends relegated them to ceremonial duties and prepared scripts. Board members Lauren Ramirez and Janie Ruddy want to restore meaningful participation, Will Furry and Christy Chong don’t. A new policy defining the roles would be pointless if it does not empower students to lead effectively as intended.
Saturday in Byblos:
Wendell Berry’s Celebration of Old Jack’s Crusty Life
Wendell Berry’s 1974 novel explores the final day of Jack Beechum. The narrative drifts through decades of Kentucky history as Jack finds sanctuary in the land but remains alienated from the people on it or in his life. The prose reaches heights of elegiac beauty, occasionally descending into mawkish parody and didactic sneers as Berry maintains a tension between agrarian ideals and harsh judgment of urban progress and human failure. The novel is part of the Port William series.
25 Years of American Stupidity in the Middle East
Western and particularly American meddling in the Middle East represents a persistent cult of failure rooted in historical hubris. Leashed to Israel, Donald Trump is continuing the tradition by targeting Iran, a civilization far older and more resilient than the United States. The escalating stupidity is accelerating the American empire’s moral and financial bankruptcy while leaving behind a legacy of mass graves.
Palm Coast’s Development Derangement Syndrome
Palm Coast often luxuriates in development derangement syndrome as residents of established communities and neighborhoods move to block new housing projects. This hypocrisy ignores that existing homes also replaced native wilds. Developers are not faultless. But Florida’s property tax system forces local governments to chase growth because homestead exemptions prevent existing residents from paying their fair share. Consequently, infrastructure decays while impact fees rise to subsidize the sprawl.
Saturday in Byblos:
John Updike and Paul Bowles do Morocco
American authors John Updike and Paul Bowles portray Morocco in two short stories that start from the same geographic spot on the Mediterranean. Bowles approaches his Moroccan characters with a lyrical detachment that leaves room for interpretation. Updike projects a bleak, fear-driven racism reducing Arabs to menacing stereotypes. Both writers reveal much more about American anxieties and orientalist attitudes than the actual North African landscape they visited.
Trump’s United States of Amnesia Blunders Into Iran
While a lobotomized American public gorges on Super Bowl spectacles and celebrity gossip, an impotent Congress is letting the president bypass the Constitution to drag us into another disastrous Middle East war. Recycling the same radioactive lies used to sell the 2003 Iraq invasion, the administration pushes a distracted nation toward a bloody, unprovoked, and entirely preventable conflict with Iran.
Randy Fine’s Bigotry and the Silent Complicity of Florida Republicans
Congressman Randy Fine’s long history of deploying bigoted, dehumanizing language against Palestinians and Muslims reflects a broader political decay. Condemnations have been rare except by his rivals, and what outrage there’s been frequently feels performative. Otherwise, silence. This widespread complicity from elected officials actively normalizes hateful rhetoric, rewarding fascist behavior and degrading the fundamental standards of our national civil discourse.
Saturday in Byblos:
Raja Shehadeh’s Vanishing Palestine
Florida’s House Bill 31 seeks to rename the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” erasing Palestinian history and rights to their land and violating international law. Raja Shehadeh’s “Palestinian Walks,” originally published in 2007, explores the systematic expropriation of Palestinian land through legal chicanery, balkanization, theft and settler vigilantism. But it does so through six walks that, for all the politics and bitter history, also have the transcendent feel of inner discovery of the soul through nature or reverence for the deep roots of genealogy through places as ordinary as a hillside.
Saturday in Byblos:
Sophocles’s ‘Ajax’ and the Savagery of Honor
Sophocles’ Ajax remains a visceral critique of the destructive power of pride and the vanity of hollow honor. By contrasting Ajax’s murderous fury with the profound empathy of Ulysses, the play explores the transition from fanatical violence to civil justice. It serves as a timely reminder that true nobility lies not in vengeance, but in recognizing our shared human frailty.
Saturday in Byblos:
Mme de Sévigné at 400
The 400th anniversary of Mme de Sévigné’s birth is a chance to revisit the enduring vitality of her 17th-century correspondence. While modern communication devolves into emojis and AI-generated snippets, Sévigné’s letters remain vivid psychological studies and prose poems, her voice a warm, essential guide to living, loving, and aging.
Unmask ICE. End the Rittenhousing of America.
Masked ICE agents operate with dangerous impunity typical of paramilitaries and militias in third-world countries. It’s time to take off their masks, end their immunity, require bodycams, and to diminish the undisciplined violence of amateurs, prevent any agent hired within the past year to be in the streets.
Mourning for a Vanishing America
The United States is undergoing a self-inflicted social and economic trauma through aggressive mass deportations. By prioritizing performative violence and warrantless incursions over economic stability, the current administration mirrors historical failures like the 1924 Immigration Act whose agents are dismantling the nation’s community fabric in a futile pursuit of an unattainable, exclusionary utopia.
Saturday in Byblos:
Saul Bellow Goes Looking for Mr. Black
In “Looking for Mr. Green,” Saul Bellow crafts a “Heart of Darkness” in Depression-era Chicago. Classically educated George Grebe hunts for an elusive check recipient, navigating a Black neighborhood Bellow depicts as a “blighted” backdrop. The author’s sublime prose serves a supremacist lens, reducing human beings to transactional props for Grebe’s enlightenment.
Saturday in Byblos
Claptrapped in the Underworld: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘Morning Star’
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “The Morning Star” following nine interconnected Norwegians over two sweltering August days, using a sudden celestial event to explore the boundaries of life and death. The narrative is addictive and atmospheric but devolves into incoherent theological meanderings and dangling plot threads. Knausgaard proves to be a masterful architect of labyrinths but an ultimately unsatisfying guide through them.
Killing Renee Nicole Good and Stand Your Ground
Seen through Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minnesota highlights the dangerous subjectivity of moment-of-threat self-defense claims and the equally dangerous expansion of law enforcement immunity, which weakens reasonable use-of-force standards and immunizes lethal vigilantism.
Saturday in Byblos:
Henry James’s ‘Special Type’ and the Ethics of Exploitation
Henry James’s 1900 story “The Special Type” is basically Dear Abby for its time, highlighting class-rancid exploitation through the kind of modern elitism anyone would recognize today: Commodifying human beings is not a corporate invention.
Saturday in Byblos
Getting to Know Karl Ove Knausgaard
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” is a polarizing masterpiece of autofiction, blending mundane details with profound existential dread. Despite his flat style and occasionally tedious philosophical tangents, Knausgaard’s uncompromising honesty regarding family, addiction, and self-loathing creates a bewitching, page-turning intimacy as he ennobles the ordinary. His place as a Scandinavian literary giant seems assured even as he tests the reader’s patience with his massive scale.
Reading Into Them: Flagler County Leaders’ Favorite Books of 2025
The third edition of FlaglerLive’s annual best reads project celebrates the personal joy of reading over academic or literary hierarchies. Featuring contributions from a local judge, attorneys, elected and other Flagler County leaders, the collection highlights diverse favorites ranging from Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” and Erik Larson’s history to a legal decisions and self-actualization books. Here’s to venturing beyond comfort zones to discover transformative titles.
Thank You, Palm Coast and Flagler County
It’s been a difficult year for the country and for the freedom to report about it yet FlaglerLive’s fundraiser this Christmas season once again exceeded its goal in this red county, which humbles me and fills me with hope about the community we are–despite and still, to borrow the words of Robert Graves.
Calling CAIR Terrorists While AIPAC Buys Genocidal American Policy
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s executive order designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a terrorist organization is a legally toothless stunt. While ignoring the immense influence of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which funds lavish trips for politicians to ensure support for war in Gaza, DeSantis targets a civil rights group with meager resources. The order relies on conspiracy theories and racism, endangering Muslims simply to fuel the governor’s culture war.
The Phoenix Declaration’s Serenade of Dog Whistles
The Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix” doctrine, recently adopted by Florida, is a Christian nationalist manifesto designed to eradicate educational dissent. It prioritizes “parental omnipotence” over children’s intellectual freedom. By diverting public funds to private vouchers and sanitizing history, the doctrine cements a decades-long conservative war against public education and enforces a “pinched, angry” monoculture that suppresses critical thinking in favor of dogmatic, exclusionary patriotism.
Furry and Chong Won Their Sleazy Battle. Ramirez and Ruddy Won the School Board.
Will Furry and Christy Chong are chair and vice chair of the School Board in title only. In a grab for Furry’s title they fought an ugly, vulgar nine-hour battle that mirrored their character. They won the battle. They lost the School Board, and whatever respect they imagined they still bore in this community. The future, like the true leadership of this board, belongs to Ramirez and Ruddy.
The U.S. Citizenship Test Shouldn’t Be Like Trivia Night at Tortugas
The new citizenship test “for aspiring Americans” is out. It is supposedly longer and harder than its predecessor. In fact, it’s not a civics test. It’s certainly not a citizenship test. It’s the sort of questions Jay Scherr baritones between nachos at his weekly trivia night at Tortugas, and it is riddled with errors while projecting an unrecognizably chauvinist America.
TDS
In France, a former president just got imprisoned for taking money from an Arab despot. Donald Trump just accepted a $400 million gift from another Arab despot in the shape of a 747. He has raided nearly $1 billion out of the country’s missile defense modernization budget so he can retrofit the plane in gold and gaud. If the secret project is completed before Trump is scheduled to leave office, which is doubtful, the plane will fly at most for a few weeks, then get parked as a re-gift to the Trump library in Miami, on land stolen from the public trust and handed over to Trump at no cost, Qatari style.
Thus Spoke Lazarustra
Reports of Democrats’ death, Samuel Clemens telegraphs in Innocents at Home (his Substack), have been greatly exaggerated. But let’s not turn Tuesday’s Democratic sweep into a greatly exaggerated victory just yet. This was Lexington, not Yorktown. And Zohran Mamdani has a distance to go yet for his Hattin: those Christian nationalists have a stranglehold on this unholied America.
Food Stamps Cruelty But for a Gavel
A federal judge ridiculed the Trump administration’s lie that it could not logistically use billions of dollars in emergency funds to continue providing food stamps, and today ordered the government to release the funds. The administration will doubtless appeal. Either way, it should not have gotten this far: the battle over food stamps exposes the mendacity of an administration’s cruel stand in a shutdown that may yet force millions to lose health insurance.
Let Us Now Bow to the Quackery of Conversion Therapy
Conversion therapy is the non-medical and debunked theory that if you hector gays, lesbians and trans long enough, they’ll convert back to heterosexuality. The approach is premised on self-loathing. It’s abusive. It has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with a perverted interpretation of Christianity’s vilification of anything non-heterodox. yet after hearing the case this week, the U.S. Supreme Court, continuing its upending of First Amendment interpretations, appears inclined to open the door to conversion therapy to those under 18 as a legitimate professional practice.
With Shutdown, Democrats Finally Take a Clear and Critical Stand
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will add $4 trillion to the national debt and throw 20 million people off Obamacare over the life of the bill, which lets supplemental premium subsidies enacted during the Biden administration expire. It would more than double premium costs for Obamacare recipients. The cost of extending the subsidies over the next 10 years is $350 billion, or 8 percent of the Trump tax cuts. This is what the Democrats have been willing to shut the government over. It’s about time.
Trump Threatens Peace in Gaza: The Good, the Bad, the Muggy
If you look past the puerility of Trump’s language there are real nuggets in the Gaza peace plan. But it exists as if history did not. Arab memory isn’t that shallow, nor that dumb. Still, Trump’s plan is the best thing to come out of the White House for the Middle East since 2001, as long as it is taken as a starting point for negotiations, not a poisoned take-it-or-leave it threat. Trump’s mobster threat that Israel will “finish the job” if Hamas doesn’t unconditionally surrender ensures failure from the outset, and continued failure of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, genocidal results aside. There is no job to finish. Only lives.
It Is Happening Here
Where would America be without hyperbole? From the chutzpah of the City Upon a Hill speech aboard the Arbella to the skirmish-turned Boston “massacre” to American Carnage a few years ago to the ongoing beatification of Charlie Kirk, it’s fair to say that without hyperbole, America would be more like a sprawly humble Saskatchewan than the Galactic Empire it’s become. But America’s slouch toward fascism is no hyperbole. Sinclair Lewis once mused that it can happen here. Today, it is happening here.
Condemning the Kirk Assassination, and Condemning What Kirk Stood For
It is possible to condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk and still condemn the ideas he stood for, to decry the flags at half-mast for so-called values hardly distinguishable from those of Proud Boys. A glean of the successful agenda Kirk pushed shows to what extent nationalist Christian extremism has been re-normalized, with Kirk playing an essential role in that latest of Great Awakenings. It was not a healing voice.
Zohran Mamdani Exposes Nullity of Democrats and Republicans
The reaction by Democrats and Republicans to the Zohran Mamdani phenomenon in New York City has been like an MRI of both our parties’ cancerous hopelessness. Democrats in their wilderness should be championing energetic countercurrents who could slow the slide and focus the party on everyday challenges. But instead of capitalizing on a new voice that champions the disaffected, Democrats are competing with Republicans in a race to the muckiest.
The Eugenics of the Big Beautiful Bill
Withdrawing or making Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage more restrictive will cost 51,000 lives a year by 2034. It’s one way to reduce the government’s liability for lives on the dole. It is eugenics by other means.
America(n) Unbecoming
If the president can threaten citizenship revocation even for U.S.-born citizens, as he did this week, and just for holding opinions he doesn’t like, the rest of us certainly aren’t safe. For migrants, every night–every day–is Kristallnacht as ICE carries out its pogroms. A majority of Americans are either applauding or indifferent, while protesters are branded enemies and invaders to be crushed by militarized goonery. This is not the America any of us have known, or should tolerate.
The Manchurian Candidate Is Alive and Well and Living in the White House
Until last week I did not believe in the transmigration of souls from celluloid to reality. That changed when Congress passed the so-called “big beautiful bill.” Raymond Shaw, the brainwashed assassin of “The Manchurian Candidate,” is alive and well and living in the White House. There may be other explanations. But outside of the theater of the loony it’s difficult to understand why a president of the United States would gift China the greatest act of strategic self-destruction next to China’s own suicide in the 15th century.
This Will Not End Well
We’ve been here before. It’s never ended well. It’s never ended, period. A few bunker-busters aren’t about to end it either, whether they have Fordow’s Mount Doom in the bag or not. The opposite always happens in the Middle East the moment Israel and the United States substitute barbarism for diplomacy. Always. There’s not been a single exception to the rule since 1956, the last time the United States intervened to stop Israeli aggression on a neighbor.
American Intifada
Of course the intifada against the ICE invasion doesn’t have that much to do with saving migrants from the raids to ethnic-cleanse the country of darker skins lacking a paper or two. Or at least not as much to do with it as even the protesters would have you believe. These are proxy protests. And they’re overdue.
Don’t Buy the False Narrative that Palm Coast’s Infrastructure Isn’t Keeping Up with Growth
No one disputes that Palm Coast has grown significantly and faster than most communities in the country. The city’s population has grown by 150 percent in 20 years. That kind of growth naturally brings challenges, and anyone who suggests otherwise is being disingenuous. But to claim that our infrastructure is incapable of supporting this growth, or worse, that the city has been sitting idly by, is to ignore a mountain of evidence.
Democracy’s Sunset: There’s a 70% Chance the Constitution Will Be Suspended Before 2028
The democratic moment is over. There’s a 70 percent chance that the Constitution will be suspended before the legal end of the current administration. The chance of a suspension grows to 110 percent in case of an actual emergency, like a 9/11-style attack. But a majority of Americans aren’t interested in democracy anymore. They want their strongman. Nothing else explains the country’s surrender to the degradation of the country’s institutions since Jan. 20.
Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
It is one of the mocking ironies of the Palm Coast reality show known as America’s Next Top Mayor that the same man found to have violated the city charter is now invoking it to boot fellow Councilman Charles Gambaro off the island. Yet the lawsuit Norris filed against the city this week, arguing that the council violated the charter when it appointed Gambaro last October, has merit. The strict wording of the charter, poorly written though it is, is on Norris’s side. But a less fundamentalist interpretation of the charter is not.
Palm Coast Has a City Manager. A Replacement Can Wait Until the Council Defuses Its IED.
The Palm Coast City Council did the right (and impressive) thing when it voted down both of the last two remaining candidates for city manager on Tuesday. It’s now time to shelve that search, stick with Lauren Johnston as city manager, and work on restoring the City Council’s reputation before launching a new search. The city is not in crisis. The same recycled gadfly demagogues addressing the council at every meeting should not create the false impression that it is.
Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris’s Choice: Change Conduct or Become Irrelevant
Palm Coast Mayor Mike Norris doesn’t have to change his politics. But if he is to be a relevant mayor rather than an isolated nobody on the council for the next four years, he should change his conduct. He would benefit from giving his Napoleonic ego a four-year sabbatical and from giving up the illusion that his power is more than one-fifth of the council’s, that his word is law, or that the mayor’s position is defined by authority more than ceremony. He has plenty of time to rescue his mayorship. The council would be his first ally. So would the administration. He doesn’t seem interested.
Lessons from Palm Coast’s Fuel Dump Folly
The push for building the ill-fated Belvedere Terminals fuel dump in Palm Coast was tied to a series of myths: that somehow Palm Coast’s overwhelmingly residential tax base is unsustainable. That its tax burden is lopsidedly on residential homes. That commercial and industrial development lowers property taxes. The premises are taken as gospel in this county and never tested. Not one of them is true.
In Flagler, Voters Cast Half a Million Ballots in 8 years; 5 Were Non-Citizens. Where’s the ‘Fraud’?
An executive order requires that all votes be counted by the end of Election Day. It also requires proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. The order relies on a lie: that fraud is corrupting American elections. Let’s not look far and take Flagler County’s recent elections to test the claim.
Our Silent Genocide of Transgender People
The United States in general and Florida in particular are enacting laws that literally erase the existence of an entire class of human beings. Trump signed an order declaring that transgender people don’t exist. Florida is about to adopt a law that would let government employees dehumanize their transgender colleagues by refusing to refer to them by their preferred pronouns. It is a new kind of genocide: bloodless, to be sure, but no less obliterating.
A Moratorium Won’t Help the Crappy Utility ITT Left Palm Coast. Painful Rates Might.
There’s no question that water and sewer rates in Palm Coast are among the most expensive in the state. That was true even before the City Council this week approved the sharpest and fastest rate increase in the city’s 25-year history. But neither a building moratorium nor blaming the City Council is a solution for a problem seeded by ITT, the original owner of the utility.
Flagler Beach’s Days Are Numbered. That’s No Reason for Palm Coast to Assist Its Suicide.
Flagler Beach’s days are numbered. A beach-protection plan is essential. The county has produced one that spares the cities any tax increase and ensures the renourishment and management of all 18 miles of the county’s beaches. Sending the question to referendum ensures its death, and with it the eventual death of our beaches. Flagler Beach and Palm Coast should not be so fatalistic.