Weather: Mostly cloudy. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs around 90. West winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the evening, then a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. Southeast winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. Chance of rain 60 percent. Tropical storm watch: No significant activity.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In Court: It’s pre-trial day, all day, before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins, including a pre-trial for Kwentel Moultrie, recently convicted of rape, now appearing regarding his second degree murder and armed burglary charges.
The Community Traffic Safety Team led by Flagler County Commissioner Andy Dance meets at 9 a.m. in the first-floor conference room at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. You may also join by zoom. Meeting ID: 823 5444 1058, Passcode: 565882
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. The council will discuss its legislative priorities, and discuss changing the date, to a later week, when new office holders are sworn in to the City Council. The full agenda is available here.
The Census Bureau releases the 2021 Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance statistics from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement at 10 a.m.
The St. Johns River Water Management District Governing Board holds its regular monthly meeting at its Palatka headquarters at 3 p.m.. The public is invited to attend and to offer in-person comment on Board agenda items. 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 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.
Notebook: Xenophobia has yet to meet its Xanax. Monday morning I came across a Gibbon description of Rome in the 5th century that made me think of that Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker, back in the late 1990s, who made headlines after he told Sports Illustrated: “Imagine having to take the 7 train to the ballpark,” a reference to the New York City subway line that goes from Flushing, Queens, to Times Square in Manhattan, “looking like you’re [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right, next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.” I recall writing a column for The Ledger about how I’d grown up in two places: In Beirut, and on the 7 line, which to this day is the featured image on my Facebook page (the 7 train). I wrote that column–a love letter to the 7 line, itself a lovely symbol of New York—on a trip to New York, while riding that line. The Rocker quote sounded awfully like something I later came across in Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise: “When Armory went to Washington the next week-end, he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens-Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogenized race, how much easier it would have been to fight as the colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.” Those poor Greeks seem to get the brunt of everyone’s Xenophobia, but not just the Greeks. Juvenal in his Satires shreds them all:
My friends, I can’t stand
A Rome full of Greeks, yet few of the dregs are Greek!
For the Syrian Orontes has long since polluted the Tiber,
Bringing its language and customs, pipes and harp-strings,
And even their native timbrels are dragged along too,
And the girls forced to offer themselves in the Circus.
Now this:
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.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
The stupendous aqueducts, so justly celebrated by the praises of Augustus himself, replenished the Thermae, or baths, which had been constructed in every part of the city with Imperial magnificence. The baths of Antoninus Caracalla, which were open, at stated hours, for the indiscriminate service of the senators and the people, contained above sixteen hundred seats of marble; and more than three thousand were reckoned in the baths of Diocletian. (58) The walls of the lofty apartments were covered with curious mosaics, that imitated the art of the pencil in the elegance of design and the variety of colours. The Egyptian granite was beautifully encrusted with the precious green marble of Numidia; the perpetual stream of hot water was poured into the capacious basins through so many wide mouths of bright and massy silver; and the meanest Roman could purchase, with a small copper coin, the daily enjoyment of a scene of pomp and luxury which might excite the envy of the kings of Asia.(59) From these stately palaces issued a swarm of dirty and ragged plebeians, without shoes and without a mantle; who loitered away whole days in the street or Forum to hear news and to hold disputes who dissipated in extravagant gaming the miserable pittance of their wives and children; and spent the hours of the night in obscure taverns and brothels in the indulgence of gross and vulgar sensuality.
–From Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 31 (1776).
Ray W. says
While a young student, Gibbon visited Rome. One day, a vignette of a poor goatherder leading his flock from a doorway in the once great Senate building sparked a question: How did it come to pass that the greatest empire in history had come to this? Gibbon plunged into the historical records and wrote the two-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first volume, published in 1776, was widely read in America. Many of his observations and conclusions were accepted among our founding fathers.
In that same year, Smith published An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations. He, too, had asked an important question. Wondering why all the other economic books of the day studied the poor, he wondered how nations acquired wealth. The traditional economic belief of his day was that nations acquired wealth by taking it from other nations. Adam Smith countered with the idea that nations acquired wealth by working together, through trade, introducing the idea that the invisible hand of the marketplace builds national economies in ways that conflict never can. Of course, the idea of the importance of international trade is far older than Smith’s book. In the Magna Carta, first signed in 1215, King John agreed in one of the over 70 clauses in that document to offer safe passage home to French tradesmen whenever war ever broke out between England and France, in the hope that the French king would offer safe passage to English traders.
It seems possible to me that Putin retains the archaic idea that national wealth comes from forcefully taking wealth from neighboring nations, rejecting the idea that building an economic engine from trade with the Ukrainian people might benefit both nations far more than war ever could. Do Chinese leaders also harbor such an archaic worldview towards Taiwan?