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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the mid 60s. North winds around 5 mph. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Not as cool with lows around 50. Northeast winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
Kwanzaa Celebration at AACS: Come join in the fun as we observe the Kwanzaa tradition of lighting the candles and learning the seven principles each candle represents, eat delicious food from local food vendors, shop retailers selling African and other clothing, jewelry, and many beautifully crafted items. Listen to African drumming, spoken word and view a multigenerational African Fashion show. Gifts and give aways. You won’t want to miss this year’s celebration.
The Bach Festival, some 170 hours of Bach interrupted only by the presentation of its Columbia University disk jockeys, is in its zillionth year, streaming free on WKCR here and running through the New Year at midnight.
Fantasy of Lights at Palm Coast’s Central Park: The Rotary Club of Flagler County hosts its 17th Annual Fantasy Lights Festival at Central Park in Town Center, through Dec. 30, 6:30-9 p.m. each night. Fantasy Lights is free self-guided walking tour around Central Park with over 50 large animated light displays, festive live and broadcast holiday music, holiday snacks and beverages. A favorite for the kids is Santa’s House and Village with a collection of elf houses festively painted and nestled among the lights, warm fire to roast marsh mallows or create smores, and encircling the village is Santa’s Merry Train Ride. See the full brochure here and the nightly schedule of events https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/Fantasy-Lights-Program-2022_FINAL.pdf#page=7
For more information, please contact Bill Butler at 386-986-3760 or 386-445-0598 or email: [email protected].
Notably’s anti-hero: It’s not the happiest birthday anniversary–that of Woodrow Wilson (1856), whose racist presidency has finally more fully come to light. Even when he was at his best, he was at his worst. During negotiations on the Treaty of Versailles and talks for a League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson was fighting for a clause on religious tolerance (which he lost), while simultaneously himself defeating a Japanese attempt for a clause on racial equality. Fortunately he did not put on blackface or dance the jig, two forms of “entertainment” he thoroughly enjoyed at the very White House. On May 9, 1930, the New York Times ran a letter from a M.M. Lewis in Phillipsburg, North Carolina (of course), urging the addition of Woodrow Wilson’s mug on Mount Rushmore. “How is it possible,” Lewis wrote, “for anyone to write a truthful history of the United States, or indeed the world, and omit the name of Woodrow Wilson?” And indeed the world.. Almost exactly a year later, Gutzon Borglum, the racist sculptor of Mount Rushmore (he sat on the KKK’s policy-making council, among other examples of his Wilsonian supremacy), was sailing for Poznan, Poland, on the German liner Berlin to attend the unveiling there of his own statue of Wilson. The unveiling included a message from Herbert Hoover. On Feb. 7, 1940, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported: “A monument to Woodrow Wilson in Poznan, Nazi occupied Poland, has been dynamited by drunken Nazi storm troopers, unofficial sources here reported today. The statue was first shot through the head by a German soldier, the report said.” Wikimedia Commons gives us this contemporary picture of the monument:
Now this: The 10 Days of Bach: Prelude and Fugue Nr. 8 in D-sharp minor, BWV 877, from the Well tempered Clavier, Book II, Christine Schornsheim, harpsichordist.
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.
December 2025
Santa in Bunnell
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
For the full calendar, go here.
“I believe that when the tall heads of this Rebellion shall have been swept down, as they will be swept down, when the Davises and Toombses and Stephenses, and others who are leading this Rebellion shall have been blotted out, there will be this rank undergrowth of treason, to which reference has been made, growing up there, and interfering with, and thwarting the quiet operation of the Federal Government in those states. You will see those traitors, handing down, from sire to son, the same malignant spirit which they have manifested and which they are now exhibiting, with malicious hearts, broad blades, and bloody hands in the field, against our sons and brothers. That spirit will still remain; and whoever sees the Federal Government extended over those Southern States will see that Government in a strange land, and not only in a strange land, but in an enemy’s land. A post-master of the United States in the South will find himself surrounded by a hostile spirit; a collector in a Southern port will find himself surrounded by a hostile spirit; a United States marshal or United States judge will be surrounded there by a hostile element. That enmity will not die out in a year, will not die out in an age. The Federal Government will be looked upon in those States precisely as the Governments of Austria and France are looked upon in Italy at the present moment. They will endeavor to circumvent, they will endeavor to destroy, the peaceful operation of this Government.”
–From Frederick Douglass’s “What the Black Man Wants,” 1865.
Pogo says
@FlaglerLive
RE the Frederick Douglass quote: Douglass was 100% correct; the former CSA states abound in the proof:
The Trumpiest court in America
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is where law goes to die.
By Ian Millhiser Dec 27, 2022, 6:00am EST
“Trent Taylor says his cell, in a Texas psychiatric unit operated by the state’s prison system, was covered in human excrement. Feces smeared the window and streaked the ceiling. Someone had painted a shit swastika on the wall, alongside a smiley face. According to Taylor’s allegations in a federal lawsuit, there was such a thick layer of dried human dung on the floor of the cell that it made a crunching sound as he walked naked across the cell.
Taylor alleged that he was kept in this cell for four days, where he neither ate nor drank due to fears that the excrement, which was even packed inside the cell’s water faucet, would contaminate anything he consumed. Then, on the fifth day, he was moved to a bare, frigid cell with no toilet, water fountain, or bed. A clogged drain filled the new cell with choking ammonia films. With nowhere to relieve himself, Taylor held his urine for 24 hours before he could do so no longer. And then he had to sleep alone on the floor while covered in his own waste.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled 7–1 that Taylor’s lawsuit against the corrections officers who forced him to live in these conditions could move forward, and that lawsuit settled last February. But the Supreme Court had to intervene after an even more conservative court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, attempted to shut down these claims against the prison guards.
A unanimous panel of three Fifth Circuit judges held that it was unclear whether the Constitution prevents prisoners from being forced to remain in “extremely dirty cells for only six days” — although, in what counts as an act of mercy in the Fifth Circuit, the panel did concede that “prisoners couldn’t be housed in cells teeming with human waste for months on end.”
This decision, in Taylor v. Stevens, is hardly aberrant behavior by the Fifth Circuit, which oversees federal litigation arising out of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Fifth Circuit’s Taylor decision stands out for its casual cruelty, but its disregard for law, precedent, logic, and basic human decency is ordinary behavior in this court…”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/27/23496264/supreme-court-fifth-circuit-trump-court-immigration-housing-sexual-harrassment
Pierre Tristam says
Our own 11th Circuit is not far behind, thanks to the 2016-20 revamp.
Pogo says
@Pierre Tristam
Indeed.