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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly cloudy. Highs in the lower 80s. South winds around 5 mph.
Tuesday NightPartly cloudy in the evening, then becoming mostly cloudy. Lows in the mid 60s. Southwest winds around 5 mph.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In Court: The trial of Randy Alexander is on the docket. Alexander is charged with attempted second degree murder.
LGBTQ+ Business Networking in Flagler/Palm Coast, 120 Belle Terre Parkway, Suite 28, Palm Coast, 8 a.m. Morning networking for LGBTQ+ owned, operated and/or friendly businesses in Flagler County and surrounding areas! Bring business cards and make connections! Free event, use the ticket link to reserve your spot. Hosted by The Erica Rivera and Flagler Pride.
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 9 a.m. at City Hall. The commission will consider a rezoning application for the Harborside Master Planned Development from JDI Palm Coast, an application the planning board voted unanimously not to recommend, and that has drawn considerable opposition from residents in and around Harborside. See background here and here. The council is also ready to file a lawsuit to recover damages from the splash pad gone awry at Holland Park. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here. For today’s full agenda, go here.
The Flagler County School Board’s pair of meetings normally scheduled for today will take place next Tuesday, with a 9 o’clock meeting where the new school board members are sworn in, and an afternoon workshop.
Food Truck Tuesdays is presented by the City of Palm Coast on the third Tuesday of every month from March to October. A previous entry here incorrectly noted that it was on this evening. It is not. It will return the third Tuesday in March.
Notably: It is the birth anniversary of Curtis LeMay (1906), one of history’s great criminals against humanity but for history’s habit of getting written by the victors. LeMay was the architect of the Berlin airlift in 1948, but that was the exception that proved the rule. He was also the architect of the allies’ mass-murdering air campaign against Japan at the end of World War II, when bombing civilian targets became his obsession. He headed the Strategic Air Command, inspiring a few of the nutty characters in Dr. Strangelove, not least of them Major Kong. “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough, they stop fighting.” That’s how he defined war (according to Richard Rhodes). Polite society gave it a euphemism: “Strategic Air Power,” the words the New York Times used atop his obituary. Had he had his way, he’d have pre-emptively nuked Cuba during the missile crisis. Obviously, he was the (forgotten) running mate of George C. Wallace in the racist Alabama Governor’s unsuccessful campaign for the presidency. He tried to mitigate his descent to hell in a 1985 interview, when he tried shifting the blame for Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a way of hiding his blame for what had preceded those bombings. “We felt that our incendiary bombings had been so successful that Japan would collapse before we invaded,” he’d told the Omaha World Herald. “We went ahead and dropped the bombs because President Truman told me to do it. He told me in a personal letter.” It does not appear that he produced the letter. An onion of a demon.
Now this: From the Luka Collection:
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.
As Twitter plunges into ever more mayhem under Musk’s erratic management, the big question is whether it will survive at all. I hope it does. Social media has absolutely deepened polarization and abetted extremism across the globe. But it did so by breaking sclerotic and easily manipulated monopolies on speech. Musk is right that the world needs a digital public square; unfortunately, he seems to have little idea that creating one involves balancing free speech against abuse, misinformation and government overreach. Twitter had just barely managed to get the hang of that difficult, important work in the past couple of years. Musk has left little doubt that rather than continue that work, he’d rather burn it all down.
–From Lydia Polgreen’s “If You Want to Understand How Dangerous Elon Musk Is, Look Outside America,” The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2022.
