Weather: Showers likely. A slight chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall in the afternoon. Highs around 90. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent.
Monday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly in the evening. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall. Lows in the lower 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In Court: Circuit Judge Terence Perkins holds arraignments, pleas, sentencing and bond hearings throughout the day.
The Flagler County School Board holds a closed-door session to discuss an ongoing collective bargaining dispute with its service workers’ union, who have been promised a minimum pay of $15 an hour, but who are arguing that those above that threshold should be getting some higher pay as well. The meeting is at 8:30 a.m. in the superintendent’s conference room.
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.
The US Open begins in Flushing meadows, Queens. Unfortunately, Palm Coast’s Reilly Opelka, now ranked 28th in the world after a difficult summer, had to pull out because of injuries. Medvedev is seeded first, Nadal second, Djokovic, currently sixth in the world, is not playing, since he’s unvaccinated (and Moderna, the vaccine manufacturer, is a top sponsor of the US Open this year).
Keep in mind, I: Private Behind the Scenes Tour at the Sea Turtle Hospital at Whitney Laboratory Let one of our Sea Turtle Biologists guide you through our Hospital. You’ll learn about who we are, what we do and meet our current patients. Behind the Scenes Tours of the Sea Turtle Hospital are a great way to see the day to day activities at the Hospital. Please be aware tours last an hour to an hour and a half depending on group questions. Participants will spend that time standing and walking between various areas of the Hospital, occasionally on unpaved surfaces and steps. School aged children are welcome on this tour. COST: $200, for up to five people. Reservations are required. For questions, email turtletours@whitney.ufl.edu Whitney Laboratory Sea Turtle Hospital, St. Augustine.
Keep in Mind, II: The Flagler Youth Orchestra Strings Program, a special project of the Flagler County School District, is launching its eighteenth season. Visit the string program’s website at www.flagleryouthorchestra.org to enroll online. Enrollment is open now and until Sept. 14. An open house and information session will be held August 31 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, in Palm Coast. Flagler County’s public, private, charter and home-schooled students, 8 years old and older, may sign up to play violin, viola, cello, or double bass. Beginner, intermediate and advanced musicians are welcome. Tuition is free. Limited instrument scholarships are available. Students will learn about the enriching world of classical music and many other genres while receiving comprehensive string instruction in a player-friendly environment twice a week after school. One-hour classes are held at Indian Trails Middle School on Mondays and Wednesdays between 3:30 and 6:30 p.m., depending on your child’s time slot. Some scheduling restrictions apply. Attend the August 31st orientation at the Flagler Auditorium to learn more about the strings program and how to get started. For more information about the program, call (386)503-3808 or email cheryl@flagleryouthorchestra.org.
Notably: Today’s notable birthdays are a trifecta of paradoxes: There’s John Locke (1632), founding father to our founders and the religion of political liberty who nevertheless was a slave trader, not just owner. There’s Michael Jackson (1958), superstar of superstars and shadowy pedophile. And there’s Oliver Wendell Holmes, on whom I’ll concentrate today’s cake and ice cream. Holmes was considered to be part of the minuscule liberal wing of the Supreme Court, along with Louis Brandeis (a more authentic liberal), during one of the court’s most acidly conservative eras (an era the Thomas court is now mirroring). But he was also a fanatical war lover, a supporter of eugenics, and the author of one of the most repugnant opinions authored at the Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell, the 1927 decision upholding the right of government to sterilize the mentally disabled, itself a dog-whistle for the poor. Holmes’s words drip with contempt, if not hatred, the way Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier at one point describes “what we were taught–the lower classes smell…. The smell of their sweat, the very texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours.” Read these lines of Holmes’s and you get the same sense of disgust–first from his prose, then for him, for being a man capable of writing this prose. But before you read this passage, take note of the line right before the one about imbeciles: The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. So anti-vaxxers are not completely, entirely without some historical context for their opposition, however subconscious it may be: when the government wields the tools of public health, it can very well be a slippery slope, as Buck v. Bell proved, and the people at the lower ends of the scales pay: The decision allowed 30 states to adopt laws to that effect. I think Albert Alschuler had it right when he called Holmes’s jurisprudence “law without value.” Here’s Holmes:
“The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck ‘is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,’ and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the Legislature and the specific findings of the Court obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and if they exist they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 , 25 S. Ct. 358, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (See the full decision.)
Now this: Dedicated, of course, to Jill Woolbright.
Flagler Beach Webcam:
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
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
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
A Night at the Museum
For the full calendar, go here.
“Viewing life as a race or contest–an occasion for functioning and nothing more was a basic Holmesian theme. When Yale University awarded Holmes an honorary degree in 1886, he responded: “I never heard anyone profess indifference to a boat race. Why should you row a boat race? Why endure long months of pain in preparation for a fierce half-hour that will leave you all but dead? Does any one ask the question? . Is life less than a boat race? At a law school dedication in 1902, Holmes observed, “Art, philosophy, charity, the search for the north pole, the delirium of every great moment in man’s experience- all alike mean uneconomic expenditure–mean waste–mean a step toward death.” He then remarked an explorer’s “account of his search for the pole rather loses than gains in ideal satisfaction by the pretence of a few trifling acquisitions for science.”
–From Albert Alschuler’s Law Without Values: The Life, Work and Legacy of Justice Holmes (2000).
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Pogo says
@Notably in a nutshell
dilemma
https://www.google.com/search?q=dilemm
paradox
https://www.google.com/search?q=paradox
And so it went.
Laurel says
And here’s how crazy the far right have become: Fauci, who has worked for six presidents, for fifty years, and a leader of experts on viruses, is the one who is suddenly wrong on the subject, and a bad man because horse dewormer Trump told his cult so. Just like John McCain, who was a war hero for fifty years, who served his county all his life, until bone spurs, draft evader Trump, who doesn’t like POWs because he doesn’t like soldiers who get caught, convinced his minions that McCain was no longer a hero. DeSantis backed Trump without shame.
Trump and DeSantis will never be the men Fauci and McCain are. Not in their dreams. Not in a million years.