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Weather: Finally, a little coolness to go with those Christmas lights: Partly cloudy. Highs in the lower 70s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph.
Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the upper 40s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: A wrongful-death civil trial pitting representatives of the estate of Richard Starr against AdventHealth Palm Coast continues in its second week. Circuit Judge Chris France is presiding over the trial in Courtroom 403. Starr was 38 when he died of a cardiac episode in March 2018.
Palm Coast Civil Citation Hearings are scheduled at 10 a.m. at City Hall. Two hearings are on the schedule.
Palm Coast Animal Control hearings are scheduled at 10:30 at City Hall.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 3 p.m. in workshop to go over the items on its upcoming school board meeting later this month. The board meets in the training room on the third floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here. It is generally a good idea to bring to the meeting suspenders of solid enough quality to bear the weight of disbelief.
Flagler Beach’s Planning and Architectural Review Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 S 2nd Street. For agendas and minutes, go here.
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board meets at 6 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The board consists of Carl Lilavois, Chair; Manuel Madaleno, Nealon Joseph, Gary Masten and Lyn Lafferty.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
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. 6: Moms Into Literary Freedom: Jennifer Vale and Courtney Vandebunte, co-creators of the highly-regarded Moms Into Literary Freedom podcast will be the featured guests at the next Separation Chat, a gathering created by the Atlantic Coast Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. All are welcome to attend on Wednesday, December 6th from 12 noon until 1 pm at the Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast, FL 32164, (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
Dec. 7: One Night in Memphis, created and directed by John Mueller at Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast, 7 p.m. It is the number one booked and critically acclaimed tribute to legendary Sun Records recording artists Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, performed live and starring former cast members of the Broadway smash, “Million Dollar Quartet.” Over 90 minutes of authentic rockabilly, country, gospel, and 1950s rock and roll. The San Francisco Examiner raves, “An Amazing Show!” The show has an ever-growing list of sold-out performances, outstanding reviews, and a great social media presence and fan base. Be a witness to and experience rock and roll royalty with the music and talent that has stood the test of time. True American music featuring acclaimed national talent will get you rocking and rolling. There’s a whole lot of shakin’ going on! Book tickets here.
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.
Notably: Another reason to love Superintendent LaShakia Moore: “Bring back that art!” Moore tells me she’s ensuring that student art work is not only turning the third floor of the district’s offices at the GSB into a gallery again, but she’s asked that the exhibits be refreshed every month. Walking the hall up there yesterday the work below caught my eyes, and, justly or not, reminded me of one of my favorite Rothkos. It’s by Indian Trails Middle School 7th grader Evelyn Athrean. She should have a conversation with JJ Graham and keep painting. For all I know she may even be one of his students.
—P.T.
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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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
The Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, as incompetently planned and carried out as it was, laid bare a stark truth that twenty years of posturing by policy elites and intellectuals could not mask: the Afghan state and military were a fiction. They did not reliably exist when it counted. Despite two decades of fighting and trillions of dollars spent, in the end we had built nothing. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were much less significant in terms of casualties compared to Korea and Vietnam. Nevertheless, in a metaphorical sense, the abject failure of our Middle Eastern wars will live on as a caution for many years.
–From Robert Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power (2023).
Ray W. says
The “stark truth” is that nation building is fraught with externalities. All the planning and utopian dreams of the neoconservative foreign policy hawks advising W could not overcome the dysfunction that was Afghanistan in 2001. Iraq, too. Obama hesitated in Libya, but we would still be nation building there, too, had he set out to attempt to put that broken egg back together.
It isn’t that nation building never works. The UN Charter contains a number of clauses that define how nations should engage in building nations out of weak or wrecked states.
For example, the Federated States of Micronesia were occupied by the Japanese during WWI. The League of Nations gave Japan a Mandate to rule the islands after the war. Treating the region as a colony, the Japanese built major naval and air bases at Truk (now Chuuk) prior to WWII. During the island-hopping campaigns in the South Pacific, the U.S. destroyed the bases in a major naval battle, but never invaded the islands.
After WWII, the UN declared Micronesia a nation incapable of defending itself from its neighbors and assigned trust status to the islands, naming the United States as the nation entrusted with a duty to lead it to independence.
Originally, the four largest islands agreed to form a confederation, with an extremely weak central government. Over time, various referendums were conducted and the Micronesian people slowly ceded portions of state powers to an ever-stronger federal government, molded loosely on the U.S. Constitution.
The federal government consists of four senators (one from each island) who serve four-year terms. Ten additional senators elected at large serve two-year terms. The U.S. maintains federal courthouses on each of the four islands, with U.S. Marshalls, Magistrates, federal prosecutors and public defenders, and other personnel. Where Micronesian law doesn’t cover a situation, the U.S. Code fills the gaps.
Now, Micronesia is recognized by the UN as a limited member. One of the several referendums gave the federal government the right to negotiate fishing treaties with regional powers such as China, New Zealand and Australia. The U.S. provides military force, if needed. But this slow process took nearly 80 years and Micronesia is still not ready to stand completely on its own.
The idea that we would stay in Afghanistan for 80 years was always absurd, but the Afghans today are likely incapable of ruling themselves without the exercise of extreme authoritarian force applied at the cost of freedom, individual rights and the rule of law.
When we ousted Saddam Hussein and disbanded the Iraqi Army, the greatly weakened state of Iraq likely fit the definition of a nation incapable of defending itself from its neighbors. The opportunity to declare Iraq a trust came and went. I always thought that if the UN had taken that step, then Germany could have been awarded the duty to shepherd Iraq into nationhood one referendum at a time.
The Shiites in Iraq were once allied with Germany prior to WWI, when Germany built a rail line linking Berlin to Basra and the Indian Ocean. The Germans wanted a warm-water port that would enable them to bypass the British-controlled Suez Canal. In WWII, the Iraqi Army rose against the British early in the war. When the British defeated that army, the leading Shia mullah fled to Berlin. A number of Iraqi brigades fought alongside the German Army in Russia during WWII.
It could have been argued at the time of second Gulf War that Germany had much closer ties to the Shiites in Iraq than the U.S. or the British ever had. German courthouses, German magistrates, German lawyers and German police, all could have paved a different path than the one paved by the neoconservative theorists who inhabited the White House during W’s two administrations.
Looking back on the failed Afghanistan effort, trillions of dollars, thousands of American and allied lives, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, and much international goodwill, all was thrown away by four presidential administrations. We either left too soon or too late; no one can really tell.
Academia recognizes three types of empire: Trust, conquer and destruction.
History informs us that only two nations have ever tried to build empires of trust: The early Roman Republic and the United States in the 20th century, with the League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, SEATO, and other alliances of mutual trust and aid.
The early Roman Republic repeatedly signed mutual aid treaties with neighboring nations. The important fact was that Rome neither based legions within the borders of the neighboring nations nor did it interfere with how the neighboring nations were ruled. It did insist on free trade and protection of Roman citizens. Rome established outposts near borders, so the legions could immediately come to the aid of the neighbor, when called. Rome insisted that it had the right to invade the neighbor to install a new government if a king tried to unilaterally withdraw from the pact.
Can it be argued that the Russian Federation initially tried to build an empire of trust with the government of the Ukraine when it was formed after the fall of the Soviet Union and, further, can it be argued that when the Ukrainian people threw out the government led by a pro-Russian president, the Russian Federation attempted and failed to install a new government in 2014? In 2022, the Russian Federation clearly set out to destroy a democracy that had announced its intent to ally with the EU and, eventually, with NATO. When it failed to reach Kiev, the initial effort by the Russian Federation to build an empire of conquer shifted inexorably toward building an empire of destruction of infrastructure.
Is Israel attempting to build an empire of destruction in the Gaza Strip, after decades of attempting, badly, to build an empire of slow conquer?
Pogo says
@Ray W.
The single best remark, about the referenced subjects, I have read. Anywhere.
With sincere admiration, thank you.
“My purpose is not to relate at length every motion, but only such as were conspicuous for
excellence or notorious for infamy. This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy
action be commemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words
and deeds.”
– Cornelius Tacitus, Annals, Book 3, Chapter 65 (117 A.D.) [Church and Brodribb, trans.]
Pogo says
@Ray W. (apologies, corrected spelling within)
The single best remark, about the referenced subjects, I have read. Anywhere.
With sincere admiration, thank you.
“My purpose is not to relate at length every motion, but only such as were conspicuous for
excellence or notorious for infamy. This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy
action be un-commemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words
and deeds.”
– Cornelius Tacitus, Annals, Book 3, Chapter 65 (117 A.D.) [Church and Brodribb, trans.]
Ray W. says
Thank you, Pogo, for your kind observations.
Some 25 years ago, I represented a man who had been accused of a serious crime. He and his wife had served as missionaries in Micronesia when they first married. Later, they moved to this area and built a family business. When they retired, they sold the business to their children and returned to Micronesia to serve again as missionaries. The charges, and the corollary warrant, had been filed after they had left the U.S. Years passed and the wife developed an illness that could be best treated in a hospital in Hawaii. When the couple landed at a Hawaiian airport, the husband was arrested on the old charges.
I immediately thought of the statute of limitations. There is a tolling provision that activates if a person leaves the territorial boundaries of the United States. So, the great question was whether Micronesia fit the definition of United States territory? After all, there are U.S. Marshalls and federal courthouses in the Virgin Islands. Warrants can be served in those islands, because they constitute a territory, and because federal judges have the authority to take judicial notice of state judicial actions.
I located the U.N. resolution finding that Micronesia fit the definition of a state in need of protection, plus the clause awarding to the United States that title of trustee. I located the congressional act accepting the U.N. resolution. I located the order signed by President Truman implementing the congressional act. I obtained various documents over time that affirmed the primacy of U.S. law in the islands. I called a federal prosecutor in Micronesia; he was not present, as his legal assistant stated he had flown to another island that day to attend court. She told me that it was a normal practice for Micronesian-based federal prosecutors to assist in the service of state warrants in the region.
I deposed the investigating officer, who advised that he had submitted the warrants into both the state and federal databases and that he knew at that time that my client was living in Micronesia with his wife, as missionaries.
I filed a motion to dismiss based on expiration of the statute of limitations and submitted copies of what I had found. The trial judge took notice that Micronesia was a trust territory of the United States and accepted the argument that the investigating officer could easily have followed through with the warrant by calling a U.S. Marshall. The extradition would have occurred years earlier, but it didn’t. Florida law recognizes that if a state officer knows the location of a defendant and doesn’t notify the authorities in that location, a prosecutor can’t rely on the tolling provision of the statute.
The critical issue is no one is capable of knowing everything. We rely on our own curiosity and the expertise and wisdom of others to inform ourselves about the world. There is simply too much going on in Flagler County alone for Mr. Tristam to investigate events in Orlando or Atlanta. He can fill his day and night with local events and still not cover everything of importance to a populace of just over 100,000 residents. There is a great wide world out there, with eight billion people living their lives. We have to take mental and emotional shortcuts, draw inferences weak or strong, rely on first principles valid or invalid, just to attempt to understand the smallest fraction of all that is going on in this world. This is another of the many reasons I use terms like maybe, perhaps, it might be, I suppose, when preparing my comments. I pose many questions. I try to avoid overly broad conclusions. Far too many FlaglerLive commenters post comments with a form of certainty that can only come from ignorance. Democrats as a group are not and never have been communists. An extreme wing of the Democratic Party might be comparable to a broad definition of communism, or perhaps more commonly, socialism, but not the overall group that comprises the mainstream of the party. A recent comment contained an allegation that two carrier groups had been dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean to support the IDF response to the massacre by Hamas. That might have been a valid point, but a valid point only gets one into the argument; it does not, alone, automatically win the argument. We have a significant number of bases in eastern Syria and western Iraq, from which American soldiers prosecute the long war against what remains of ISIS. Can it be argued that the primary purpose of dispatching one carrier group and diverting another was to support American ground forces? If that is true, then is it possible that the certainty posed by the commenter was not based on the best available reasoning process? Yes, should Hezbollah launch an all-out invasion of Israel, the carrier battle groups would likely intervene, but the IDF ground, sea and air forces are sufficiently equipped to engage in Gaza without our help. If the presence of the two carrier groups deters Hezbollah and Iran, that is significant, but it is best to argue that it is a secondary issue to the primary goal of supporting our ground troops that are hundreds of miles away from Gaza?
The idea that the world is complex beyond the understanding of any one individual is where JimboXYZ so often stumbles. He is capable of exercising reason, but his first principles are so divorced from reality that he just can’t quite grasp exactly what he is trying to understand. We need to follow reason to wherever it leads us, instead of contorting reason to fit our preconceived beliefs.
Regarding your statement in a different comment about our bloated proposed state budget, I looked up the state budget for 2019-20: nearly $91 billion. Now, we have a proposed $117 billion budget, up by $26 billion in five years, a near 30% rise, which is far more than the inflation of the past three years. I have to wonder just how much of the Truden stimulus money is padding the proposed budget? And I have to think that but for the billions after billions of continuing Truden stimulus money, Florida would be in financial difficulties sufficiently dire to force the raising of state taxes.
Laurel says
OH! So THAT’S why he wears the boots!