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Weather: Showers likely. Highs in the lower 70s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent.
Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 60s. South winds around 5 mph, becoming west after midnight. Chance of rain 50 percent. Check tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
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 PalmCoastFarmersMarket386@gmail.com
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.
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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Editorial notebook: It’s telling that the top story most of the day Saturday at the New York Times website was not the story that accompanies the graphic you see above, with this arresting headline: “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace.” Two stories were ahead of that one, both 24 hours old already, about Israeli hostages getting released, and one of them headlined “In a Poignant Moment, Israelis Welcome Some Hostages Home.” A few hostages coming home takes precedence over 10,000 women and children getting butchered in roughly six weeks in the deadliest assault on civilians in the 21st century. More civilians–more children, more women–have been massacred in Gaza in the last few weeks than in the entirety of the Ukraine war so far, than in the entire first year of the American assault on Iraq. The Palestinian toll has almost exceeded the entire civilian death toll of the 20-year American occupation of Afghanistan. “People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups,” the article reports. But the article still gets third billing. We should be very glad that the article is running in the first place, and prominently so. But the juxtaposition is not a small matter. It goes to the heart of the propagandistic claim that Israelis are in an existential fight for their survival, when it is the blatant opposite. The Oct. 7 attack on Israel, like the 9/11 attacks, were an atrocity. But they never came close to an existential threat anymore than the sinking of the Titanic or the Lusitania were existential threats to shipping, or to nations whose flags the ships were flying (Britain and the United States). But “More than 60,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the Gaza Strip, satellite analysis indicates, including about half of the buildings in northern Gaza.” That’s beyond existential threats. It’s a vengeful, genocidal assault, with American weaponry Americans haven’t dared use: “Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.” Surprising, they call it. “In fighting during this century, by contrast, U.S. military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb — a 500-pound weapon — was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.” Of course Israel counters that the death toll figures out of Gaza are suspect, and in the same breath says that the death of civilians is unfortunate but inevitable. But collective punishment is not inevitable. It has been Israeli policy since 1948. This time, it is more clearly targeting journalists, too: 53 killed so far.
—P.T.
Now this: (You’ll have to click on the link for that one)
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“All that violence, crime, political cowardice, government deception, all that appeasement, that official faintheartedness. It rankled, it curled him into a furious ball, a fetus of pure rage. The six o’clock news, the seven o’clock news, the eleven o’clock news. He sat there collecting it, doubled up with his tapioca pudding. The TV set was a rage-making machine, working at him all the time, giving him direction and scope, enlarging him in a sense, filling him with a world rage, a great stalking soreness and rancor.”
–From Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982).
Ray W. says
Your comment about Israel’s use of 2000 lb. bombs in a densely populated urban center reminds me of a story that my father occasionally told, in a sense of extreme sadness. I have commented on this before.
As a nose gunner/bombardier in a heavy bomber, flying out of southern Italy, my father spoke of one mission in which he toggled the bomb switch after seeing the flare from the lead bomber. The ten 500 lb. bombs failed to drop. No one in such planes ever wanted to land with a full bomb load, so the protocol was to leave the bomb bay doors open and attempt to manually drop the bombs. Initial efforts failed. My father said he was in his gunner’s seat and suddenly the plane lifted. He told us of watching the bombs hit on the main street of an Italian village in a pattern leading directly to the church. He never said that he had toggled the switch again in an effort to release the bombs and I never asked him, but his sadness was clear. I don’t believe he toggled the switch, because he couldn’t reach it from his seat in the nose turret, but this is just a son’s reasoning based on inferences that he can never prove or disprove.
The emotional toll of war, even on those and perhaps particularly on those who watch helplessly as bombs randomly fall, is something Jabotinsky anticipated in a corollary article he wrote after he published his essay, The Iron Wall, in 1923. A decorated veteran who served in Great Britain’s army in WWI, Jabotinsky had experienced the horrors of that war. He wrote that his Iron Wall policy, if adopted, would cause severe psychological harm to soldiers in the Zionist army that was to implement the wall and that a new Zionist Israel would pay a high cost for imposing the wall.
ray k. says
Poor Ukraine=knocked off the map now…..