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Weather: Sunny. Not as cool with highs in the mid 80s. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Sunday Night: Showers likely with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Not as cool with lows in the mid 60s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent.
Today at a Glance:
Time for the painful, unnecessary and likely unhealthful ritual: Advance your clocks forward an hour. You can look forward to moving them back on Sunday, Nov. 5.
The Annual Strawberry festival in Palm Coast’s Central Park is from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Entry fee is $6 per person except for children 2 and under. The festival describes itself this way: “Family Fun & Festivities, Plant City Strawberries, Art & Crafts, Delicious Food, Free Bounce Houses, Organic Strawberries, Strawberry Shortcake, Live Entertainment, Free Rock Painting, Strawberry Fudge, Pony Rides, Free Strawberry Relay, Face Painting, Free Hula Hoop Contest, Pie Eating Contest, Free Petting Farm, Berry Cute Baby Contest, Free Sack Races, Train Rides, Free Corn Hole, Yummy Treats & Much More!”
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
Trinity Handbell Choir and Friends in Concert: Trinity Presbyterian Church, 156 Florida Park Drive North, 4 p.m. This will be a musical journey from Lent to Easter. Join the Trinity handbell choir with organ, piano, vocal and flute solos and narration. A freewill offering will be received to benefit local food banks.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 1 to 4 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Swingtime: The Jive Aces, at Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast, 7 p.m. Britain’s Got Talent stars, The Jive Aces, are the UK’s No.1 Jive & Swing band. Renowned for their high energy Jump Jive and swing music and spectacular stage show, the band’s repertoire stretches from the timeless tunes of the swing era to the glitz of the Rat Pack, with a dash of rhythm & blues, swing and jazz. They feature songs made famous by such greats as Louis Prima, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Bobby Darin, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald – along with a selection of superb originals taken from their albums. An incredibly in demand sextet, they have worked with John Travolta, Van Morrison, The Proclaimers, Keely Smith, Hayley Westenra and most recently played for Her Majesty The Queen. Book tickets here.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
In Coming Days:
Monday, March 13: A Flagler County School District Review Committee meets to discuss a book challenge, at 6 p.m. in Room 3A at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The meeting is open to the public. The book under discussion is The Nowhere Girls, by Amy Reed. A joint committee of Flagler Palm Coast High School and Matanzas High School reviewed the book and voted to keep it on the shelves. The decision is being appealed to the district committee. A Flagler County group is seeking to ban the book, a novel about three high school girls, each a misfit, on a quest to end their high school’s rape culture. Book bans in Flagler have been the unoriginal work of a vigilante group called “moms for liberty,” except when it comes to the liberty to read. See:
- Challenged in Flagler Schools: Amy Reed’s The Nowhere Girls, a Review and Recommendation
- Against Policy, Flagler’s Book-Challenge Appeal Panels Dim Faculty and District Vote to Minority Status
- The Black Flamingo Thwarts Book Ban as Matanzas and FPC Vote 10-0 to Keep It on Shelves
- Book Challenge in Flagler Schools: Dean Atta’s ‘The Black Flamingo,’ a Review and a Recommendation
- “The Truth About Alice” Survives Book-Banning Attempt in 12-0 Vote by FPC and Matanzas Committees
- Thank God DeSantis and Moms for Liberty are Protecting Our Kids from ‘Literature’ They Push in Schools
- “Flagler Schools Have Been Quietly Banning or ‘Removing’ Many Books Since Summer in Bow to ‘Moms for Liberty’.”
- In Flagler Schools, New Regime of Book Challenges Is Laborious, Subjective and Fraught With Uncertainties
- Flagler School Libraries Face Chilling Dangers Beyond Book Bans
Celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) with NEFJA–the North East Florida Jazz Association. NEFJA is proud to present the Longineu Parsons Quintet at its annual JAM concert on Saturday, April 1 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Sciences. Proceeds from the concert will provide scholarships for talented Florida music students enrolled in a Jazz Studies program at a Florida college or university. Tickets are $40 for members and $45 for guests. Tickets can be purchased at Chez Jacqueline in Palm Coast, on nefja.org, or by calling Carolyn Hawkins 386-793-0182.
Diary: The good times, as Russell Baker called them: at my five-year anniversary in my days as a reporter then an editorial board member at The Ledger in Lakeland–a few months before I was fired, as I recall, in one of those “reductions in force” that eliminated the Week in Review section I was writing for–the paper gifted us old timers little $5 trinkets, as companies usually do when they know that condescending to their employees with illusions of appreciation is a lot cheaper than better pay or benefits. It often has the same effect in employees dulled by servility and necessity, or fear of layoffs. Mine was a pair of cuff links with The Ledger’s logo. Ironic in a company-store sort of way. Also not bad, really: I was the only one there who wore cuff links. Someone had put a little thought into it. And it had been a fun five years. Good work, good colleagues, good times.
Last Thursday one of the links somehow came undone from my sleeve at the Flagler Beach City Commission as I was speaking with the city attorney. It fell and broke. It could be welded back together, but that would defy evolution. I received the links when The Ledger was at its height, having recently moved into a gigantic building on Lime Street, its cost of course not in a small part related to the need to fire a dozen employees to pay for the splurge compounded by a drop in ad revenue. The glory didn’t last. We were in Lakeland for a spring training game between the Yankees and the Tigers in 2019 and swung by the old building. It was a pitiful, its three floors turned over to Publix and an insurance agency, among other tenants, The Ledger’s operations reduced to a semi-basement in a corner of the building, I think where we used to have those monthly cake parties (another head-patting handout). The Ledgerites should feel fortunate: the Daytona Beach news-Journal’s reporters are homeless since the old Davidson palace on Sixth Street was sold. There was a huge dumpster in the parking lot in front of The Ledger’s building. Collecting what, I’m not sure. But it said all there was to say. The good times were over.
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 County Beekeepers Association Meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
The seven weeks in New York hadn’t been a complete waste of time. I had read a lot of Dostoyevsky after realizing that you weren’t expected to work much at the Times. With so many to cover so little, a reporter improving his mind in the classics was a greater blessing to editors than the ambitious pest hanging around the desk asking for something to do. The paper seemed comically overstaffed. Remembering nights at the Sun when we had half a dozen reporters to cover the whole city, I marveled at the swarms in the Times newsroom with nothing to do for days at a time. At the Sun, I had written two thousand words a night without feeling overworked. At the Times, writing a six-hundred-word story seemed to be considered a whole week’s work. Some reporters never seemed to write anything.
–From Russell Baker’s The Good Times (1989).
Pogo says
@FlaglerLive
Just between us, is it true that obituary writers are the true giants of both: published fiction — and news?
Pogo says
@On the occasion of the 2023 Oscar Show
everything everywhere all at once
https://www.news-journalonline.com/story/opinion/columns/2023/03/12/mark-lane-will-rewrite-of-libel-law-doom-free-speech-in-florida/69993919007/
Tomorrow is Monday — 2023, or 1929?
Ray W. says
“The [Lakeland] Ledger’s operations reduced to a semi-basement in a corner of a building, …”
I call notice of the significance of the fact that Mr. Tristam started FlaglerLive amidst a national turndown in local news operations, a decline in the quantity and quality of reporting local news. In the intervening years, he built a local news service from scratch where so many others who started with so much more have failed. I offer my thanks and admiration for a job well done.
I write after reading a Times editorial authored by Jamelle Bouie: Disinformation Is Not The Real Problem With Democracy.
The author reasons that disinformation, misinformation, living in “partisan silos”, etc., is nothing new, that the American political landscape from its infancy was “saturated” with misinformation and conspiratorial thinking. In his opinion, all newspapers at the time of the founding were operated by “local political machines”, a circumstance that changed little up until events before, during, and shortly after WWII prompted radical change in the ethics and professionalism of reporting as a career. If this is so, he asserts, then misinformation and conspiratorial thinking may not be the true problem facing today’s democracies.
Mr. Bouie then shifts focus to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote that newspapers do not “… serve only to guarantee freedom; they maintain civilization.”
Importantly, the author poses the following idea: “A vibrant press is one of the forces that helps shape individuals into members of a community with responsibilities and obligations toward that community. It acculturates them into political life and ties them to other like-minded people.”
Mr. Bouie then pivots to today’s news deserts, in which large segments of the American populace are served no longer by local newspapers, with local reporters, but by regional or national news disseminators; he posits that centralized national news sources foster “political hobbyism”, by which individuals no longer feel compelled to act – an essential facet of citizenship – but to convert politics into “… a game where the only goal — the only objective — is to somehow embarrass and humiliate our enemies.”
Does Mr. Bouie’s premise of the “saturation” of local newspapers by “local political machines” provide one possible explanation for why Madison used terms like “baneful” — meaning “harmful or destructive” or “causing harm, death, or ruin” — and “notorious” and “dark and degraded” and “infirmities and depravities” and “gloom of the adverse prospect” and “pestilential influence” to describe partisan members of faction in his final paragraph of Federalist Paper #37?
Does Mr. Bouie’s premise of a conversion of politics away from a local life of action, acknowledged as a strength by Alexis de Tocqueville, into a regional and national game of political hobbyism explain how a Flagler County political leader can feel secure enough to take to the local radio airwaves to propose beheading Democrats? Did that local political figure count on inaction by his peers?
If Mr. Bouie accurately and adequately assesses the causes and dangers posed by today’s political gamesmanship, then is it possible that my consistent and insistent focus on our founding fathers’ hope that their experiment in creating a liberal democratic Constitutional republic would foster the rise of men (and women) of virtue to roles of political leadership is correct? And that the many checks and balances just might contain the certainty of attempts by autocrats and mobs to instill government by tyranny or mob rule? And that my hopes just might be furthered by Mr. Tristam’s labors, by which he tries to do so much for the betterment of us all?
Pierre Tristam says
Thank you Ray for the heartening words. After reading your comment I went to Bouie to read his piece. He decries news deserts and blames them for impoverishing our democracy, and at one point sums up that thought, describing what’s missing: “A vibrant press is one of the forces that helps shape individuals into members of a community with responsibilities and obligations toward that community. It acculturates them into political life and ties them to other, like-minded people.”
But I think he’s missing an important part of the picture. It’s true that communities have lost press outlets. But they have not lost those acculturating forces that tie them to “other, like-minded people.” If anything, the surge of social media creates those forces far more than old media did. The difference is in how narrow these self-created groups end up being, since they appeal exclusively to the like-minded in a way that the press tends to do a bit less (I note: a bit, not much). So we’re not lacking for groups or currents that could impress Tocqueville and illustrate Madison’s factions. To the contrary. But what we are lacking are coalescing forces, binding outlets that provide a broader, local perspective with less attention to ideology and more attention to general interests. Maybe it ends up being the same thing as what Bouie is complaining of. But I don’t see a lack of engagement so much as an intensity of narrowly tailored engagements, which, ironically, alienate the more middle of the roadsters and leaves them in the cold.
Ray W. says
When you surmise that acculturating forces that bind people to other like-minded individuals still exist at the local level, albeit in far more narrowly tailored and more intense manner that can alienate centrist citizens, I agree. I think that acculturating forces can positively bind people to like-minded members of a community just as easily as they can negatively bind people to like-minded members of a faction, no matter how broad or narrow. The difference comes from people thinking that factions are synonymous with communities; they are not, if you read Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville in the manner I read them. In Madison’s Federalist Paper #37, he focused on two separate types of citizens. Both can be called partisans. One type he favored. The other type he abhorred.
The partisan Madison favored he named “deputation.” He wrote that “… all the deputations composing the convention were induced to accede to it by a deep conviction of the necessity of sacrificing private opinions and partial interests to the public good, and by a despair of seeing this necessity diminished by delays or by new experiments.” These deputations were individuals selected by their peers to attend the convention with, at the very least, the duty and obligation to either improve on the already existing Articles of Confederation or to create a new form of federal government. In the end, the various deputations chose the new form of federal government, with a far more powerful form of central government.
To me, “deputation” is synonymous with “partisan”, if only barely so, and only in that previously mentioned positive light. I have never argued that furthering a political position is always wrong or bad. If I am correct in this association of the two terms, Madison spent most of a summer in a hot Philadelphia room filled with members who each came to the convention with partisan leanings, yet each individual sacrificed his private opinions and partial interests to the public good, as Madison saw it. This exemplifies the zealous advocate who engages in a reasoning process, defending points, advocating positions, adjusting views, demanding consideration of opposing facts, enhancing favorable evidence. But Madison knew that the pestilential partisan member of faction would always exist. The close minded, the non-reasoning, the absolutist, the never wrong. A partisan zealous advocate who relies on intellectual rigor was to be honored. A pestilential partisan member of faction, unable to exercise a level of intellectual rigor that is so necessary to the capacity of an individual to sacrifice private opinion and partial interests to the public good is to be shunned and abhorred at all levels, as Madison saw it.
I argue that true conservatism is a necessary and integral part of the Madisonian view of the conventioneers, just as important as was true liberalism to that goal of democracy. False conservatism as it is practiced today is pestilential and a danger to us all, just as is the false liberal, the autocrat, the anarchist, the fascist and the nationalist.
The rapidly disappearing local press, imbued with journalistic ethics, remains a blessing to its community. The rapidly expanding forms of social media, the press desert of Bouie’s column, that lack any semblance of journalistic ethics is a curse upon the community.
Pierre Tristam says
That is why I call it social mierda. But while abhorring the “pestilential partisan member of faction” is necessary (or at least anybody’s right to love and abhor what they please), shunning it makes me uncomfortable: it’s the mechanism of cancel culture, which reflects more badly on the canceller than the cancelled. There’s a movement even in the mainstream press to not give a “platform” to certain voices of extremism. We saw this in the New York Times’s decision to walk back its decision to run the Tom Cotton OpEd calling for military repression of Black Lives Matter marchers in 2020. And of course we saw it years ago in the crucifixion of Peter Arnett because he dared interview Osama bin laden, as if it weren’t his job to seek out every way to explain what we were up against. So it’s nothing new, but the cancelling has been democratized, now that those factions are so sharply empowered with social mierda. I think shunning is too radical. Putting in the right context is more effective. We cannot ignore extremism (John Bircherism is an integral part of the American character, which has had its deep flaws since Plymouth), but we can at least dispense with the “balance” part of the “fair and balance” farce, and report accordingly, responsibly, but without blind spots.
Ray W. says
In the sense that my use of the term “shunning” can be equated with cancel culture, then I accept and incorporate your inferred suggestion that I should no longer characterize Madison’s words with shunning, only with abhorring. Thank you. Zealous advocacy based on intellectual rigor at work.
Sherry says
I see the “information playing field” vastly changed from my formative years. Fifty some odd years ago our news feeds were from newspapers and television. Yes. . . being run by human beings in a capitalistic society. . . they were partisan to a certain extent. However, there was a foundation of credibility built on education, along with professional rules and ethics that does NOT exist on “social media” outlets at all. Literally anyone (including foreign Bots) has a virtual pulpit from which they can spout out complete putrid garbage for consumption by the uneducated/unthinking.
That same credibility has been proven to be sorely lacking on major popular TV media outlets as well. For example, FOX is a well documented purveyor of dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Consider the possibility that Flaglerlive has managed to, with sheer grit and determination, ink out its award winning success because there is still a segment of the local community that prizes reporting and commentary based on facts that have been checked and proven. They are a discerning, educated populace that appreciates accurate reporting from an editor and staff that still possesses the ethics and integrity needed for vital truth telling.
Well done Pierre and Flaglerlive. . . Very Well Done!
Ray W. says
Don’t underestimate the role the many FlaglerLive commenters such as you, Sherry, can play in binding members together into a community. I don’t go so far as to say a monolithic community, but a community in which ideas can be posed, challenged, changed, supplemented, and on and on. This is why I support Jimbo99 in any effort on his behalf to incorporate into his comments the all-important intellectual rigor that would remove him from the partisan ranks and install him in the role of zealous advocate. I know he can do it.
Sherry says
Greetings from beautiful Betty’s Bay, South Africa. We are on holiday in amazing nature for a month.
Thanks, Ray, for your optimism regarding the evolution of the community in Flagler county. I sincerely hope that Jimbo99 is influenced by your encouraging words and that he steps up to meet your expectations in any small way.
While I certainly applaud the efforts of Pierre, Pogo, Laurel, yourself, and many others. . . my wonderful husband and I (both Florida natives) have sold and moved. We prefer to live the remainder of our days in a positive place in order to embrace our “best lives”.
In our new home in Sausalito, CA we are surrounded by astounding beauty. . . Beauty of the “Positive Human Spirit”. . . Beauty of an “Open Minded, Educated” populace. . . Beauty of “The Arts and Culture”. . . Beauty of “Nature and the Natural World”. We are at peace in the loving arms of our new community!
I’ll continue to lend my voice in support of my home state when possible. JOY! PEACE! LOVE!