Today at the Editor’s glance: Weather:
In Court: The trial of Philip Martin on a life felony and a second degree felony counts of molesting the minor daughter of an ex-girlfriend continues for its third day, including jury selection day, before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse. See background here.
Flagler County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board meeting at noon, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, first floor conference room. The board will hear the usual requests for uses of county park facilities, and the parallel requests for fee waivers. See the full agenda here.
Future of Flagler Forum, 11:30 a.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE., featuring the Palm Coast, Bunnell, Flagler Beach, Beverly Beach and county managers, administrator and town manager. The event, sponsored by the Palm Coast-Flagler Regional Chamber of Commerce, will be broadcast on WNZF Radio.
Notably: It is Brunei’s National Day. The small Muslim country tattooed on the northwest shoulder of Borneo drew attention in 2019 when its sultan declared that gays and adulterers would be stoned to death. He retreated after a worldwide outcry, both for the keeping-up-with-the-Taliban impulse and the government’s attempted justification for the barbarity: “Its aim,” the minister of foreign affairs said of the stoning law, “is to educate, deter, rehabilitate and nurture rather than to punish. It seeks to strike the right balance between protecting the rights of the accused person and the rights of the victims and their families.” Curiously, and stoning aside, I hear the very same barbaric reasoning in our own courts when American and Floridian punishments, always excessive, often more sadistic than merely punitive, are justified, the “rights of the victims” always brandished as somehow absolving of any second-guessing, even though the rights of the accused and the rights of the victim are on ethically different planes. Of course the victim has rights. But those rights aren’t being infringed by a lesser or greater punishment. In effect, victim’s and criminal’s rights have nothing to do with each other, and cannot be compared in anyway way, unless the right of the victim is judged only to the degree that it finds expression in vengefulness. See the minister of foreign affairs’ actual letter here. On an equally grim note, it is “Defender of the Fatherland Day” in Russia today, a date that marks the birth of the Red Army. It is generally observed with parades. It will obviously be observed with a parade through Ukraine. On a happier note, it is Handel’s birthday (1685). So with sadness, see the video below, a performance at Russian Philharmonic Hall of some Handel with a jazzy twist.
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.
May 2025
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
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
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.
“The most devastating of these ‘social genocides’–the one that swept over the Ukraine in the early 1930s–can even be said to have had a racist overtone. As we now know, this genocide was due to a famine deliberately provoked and organized by Stalin. The weapon of mass starvation was used to crush a population of independent peasants–the kulaks–who were dead set against the collectivization of their lands, but it was also used against a people who were Ukrainian and thus non-Russian. As many victims then perished in the Ukraine as a result of this political famine as later died throughout Europe as a result of the anti-Jewish Holocaust. (I trust the reader will not suppose that I am trying to make the Holocaust sound “banal”; I am simply trying to treat the Ukrainian genocide in the same serious fashion.)”
–From Jean-Francois Revel’s “The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information,” translated from the French by Curtis Cate (1991, originally, “La Connaissance inutile,” 1988).
The Geode says
In the meantime, OUR borders are spilling and flooding like a broken dam, WE can’t afford food and gas, OUR homeless and displaced are causing havoc, and OUR inner-city communities have more terrorists than “Boko Haram”.
…but yeah. Ukraine takes precedence over America