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Weather: Partly sunny. Highs in the upper 70s. South winds around 5 mph. Monday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the upper 50s.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: Lyonel Jeune, who faced a first-degree felony charge for the hit-and-run death of William Rembert, 56, in December 2021, is sentenced to three years in prison following a plea deal. Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols imposes sentence at 2 p.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse. Docket sounding is then scheduled for the case of Michael Jennelle, who faces a capital felony charge and several life felonies in the alleged rape of two minor. The judge will also hold a hearing on a motion by Brian Pirraglia for a new trial, just two weeks after he was sentenced to life in prison following a jury’s guilty verdict for first degree murder in the overdose death of Brian O’Shea.
The Palm Coast City Council holds a strategic planning “retreat” from noon to 5 p.m. at the Southern Recreation Center, 1290 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast. The retreat, kicked off with an introduction by Bunnell City Manager Alvin Jackson, is intended to make three new council members, including the mayor, more comfortable with the council’s priorities and challenges. The retreat is open to the public, but no public comment is expected to be taken.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, where the City Commission is holding its meetings until it is able to occupy its own City Hall on Commerce Parkway in 2025. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
The Flagler County Library Board of Trustees meets at 4:30 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The meeting of the seven-member board is open to the public.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
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.
Notably: Novels, essays, poems, county commission meetings and tv commercials are full of metaphors about life, or are themselves metaphors. Life, for that matter, is a metaphor. At least at its best. (I’m thinking of Pablo Neruda telling the postman in that wonderful movie, “Il Postino,” in that wonderful scene, about metaphors.) Sometimes whole passages sparkle with luminescence, like this from Wendell Berry: “It is easy to think, before one has ever tried it, that nothing could be easier than to drift down the river in a canoe on a strong current. That is because when one thinks of a river one is apt to think of one thing—a great singular flowing that one puts one’s boat into and lets go. But it is not like that at all, not after the water is up and the current swift. It is not one current, but a braiding together of several, some going at different speeds, some even in different directions. Of course, one could just let go, let the boat be taken into the continuous mat of drift–leaves, logs, whole trees, cornstalks, cans, bottles, and such–in the channel, and turn and twist in the eddies there. But one does not have to do that long in order to sense the helplessness of a light canoe when it is sideways to the current. It is out of control then, and endangered. Stuck in the mat of drift, it can’t be maneuvered. It would turn over easily; one senses that by a sort of ache in the nerves, the way bad footing is sensed.” We can paddle alone of course, but not always, and the trick is to know when to let someone else paddle, not to take advantage, but in surrender to one’s incapacity, hoping it’s more brief than terminal, though of course in the end, the river always wins. To say it’s worth the ride depends on our station in life, on the luck of the draw: what if we’d been born in abject poverty, in medieval Albania, in plague-ridden Rome, or in a maga household of the panhandle? Red, too, is a metaphor. As in: My Name Is Red, circa Orhan Pamuk. Which opens with: “I Am a Corpse,” though that line from Berry about the river is more apt: “It bore us like a consciousness, acutely wakeful, filling perfectly tgd lapses in our own.”
—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.
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
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
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
These men come out from the cities now that the hunting season is open. They walk in these foreign places, unknown to them for most of the year, looking for something to kill. They wear and carry many dollars’ worth of equipment, and go to a great deal of trouble, in order to kill some small creatures that they would never trouble to know alive, and that means little to them once they have killed it. If those we saw had killed the bobwhite they would no doubt have felt all their expense and effort justified, and would have thought themselves more manly than before. It reminds one of the extraordinary trouble and expense governments go to in order to kill men and consider it justified or not, according to the “kill ratio.” The diggers among our artifacts will find us to have been honorable lovers of death, having been willing to pay exorbitantly for it. How much better, we thought, to have come upon the life of the bird as we did, moving peaceably among the lives of the country that showed themselves to us because we were peace-able, than to have tramped fixedly, half oblivious, for miles in order to come at its death.
—From Wendell Berry’s “The Rise” (1969).
Laurel says
Trump is busy filling the swamp.
Ed P says
No he’s not. Swamp already at capacity. He going to introduce invasive species to solve the no vacancy issue.
Also, remember, alcoholism is a disability under the ADA. Can’t discriminate.
And before anyone goes to philanders, remember democrats who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones….JFK, Bill Clinton
Ray W, says
Hello Ed P. Why waste a generally decent comment by claiming the swamp is full. Not only is the swamp never full, but there are many discrete swamps and each produces species that are normal in their own swamp but invasive when introduced to other swamps. Hyperbole does not become you.
Might it be more accurate to say that taking an “invasive species” from the no-longer conservative swamp and introducing it into the no-longer liberal swamp means that denizens from the original swamp will be feeding on denizens of another swamp? That taking an invasive species from the original swamp does nothing to address the problems of original swamp; it only spreads the original swamp into the other swamp? After all, Churchill argued that all governmental systems are bad. Democracy was simply less bad than all the other options.
Ed P says
Touché
Ray W, says
More from yesterday’s Meet the Press interview of President-elect Trump, this culled from a Newsweek article.
During the interview, Trump said: “So we had 11,000, and 13,000, there are different estimates. 13,099 murderers released into our country is the last three years. … They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you, and your family.”
Kristen Welker immediately fact-checked him: “The 13,000 figure I think goes back about 40 years.”
Trump retorted: “No, it doesn’t”, adding that the Border Patrol put out these figures for the Biden administration.
In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security released a letter informing a requesting Congressman that 13,099 “non-citizens” convicted of some form of homicide are living within U.S. border.
Last October, when a BBC reporter asked a DHS official about the letter, the official asserted that politicians were misinterpreting the data. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
The DHS official later said: “The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration.”
During Trump’s first administration, DHS officials released a similar letter, establishing that its figures collected over time showed that 405,786 noncitizens were convicted criminals living inside U.S. borders.
During the interview, Trump also declared that the United States was the only nation in the world with “birthright citizenship”, despite the fact that 30 other countries give automatic citizenship to infants born in their countries.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
The evidence, including from other sources, shows that when asked to provide data on the number of noncitizens convicted of murder who are currently living in the United States, DHS searched through records dating back over more than 40 years and came up with the number 13,099.
That figure includes people who are currently incarcerated in federal and state prisons and in county jails.
Others were convicted and served their time and are in immigration detention awaiting deportation after their release from jails and prisons. An unknown number are not in custody but await deportation. Others are not subject to deportation for whatever reason.
According to a Cato Institute study, during the first Trump administration, over 3,000 noncitizen convicted murderers awaiting deportation were released from detention into the general population because detention facilities were at or above capacity.
When I write of the professional lying class of one of our two parties, I mean what I write. The Trump administration released thousands of murderers into the general population and Trump distorts the figures to claim that this only happened during the Biden administration.
There is a moral imperative to push back against the liars among us, against the misinformation launderers among us, against the disinformation launderers among us, against the vengeful among us.
Yes, according to data collected over more than four decades, 13,099 noncitizen convicted murderers are currently alive in the U.S. Many are at loose among us because the Trump administration released them. But many others are in custody.
Somehow, lying for political gain has become virtuous in certain circles.
As an aside, if 30 other nations automatically recognize birthright citizenship, saying that the U.S. is the only nation that does might to some seem like simple political hyperbole. Maybe they are right. Maybe the slippery slope of the virtuous who lie for political gain is the best path forward for our fractious citizenry. We can just choose which lies we will ignore and which ones we will oppose, depending on party tendencies. I do this out of necessity. I do not have the time to devote to every lie posed by every liar on this site who thinks himself virtuous because he is lying for political gain. I have repeatedly asked other commenters to fill the role of conservative gadfly.
I have dozens and dozens of topics saved to address when the time seems apropos. Right now, battery technology and EV subjects are the focus. I have been waiting weeks to write about advancements in iron-ion batteries. Maybe one day I will get to it. Maybe never.
The fools who castigate Mr. Tristam for not immediately addressing their pet subjects in the way they want them addressed are simply missing the point. No one person can report on the activities of 130,000 Flagler County residents. It is just too much. Imagine trying to cover the activities of 330,000,000 Americans.
Ray W, says
Seeking Alpha reports on November EVs delivery totals from four Chinese automobile manufacturers:
BYD: 506,804 units delivered, up 67.9% year over year.
Li Auto: 48,740 units delivered, up 18.8% year over year.
NIO: 20,575 units delivered, up 28.9% year over year.
XPeng: 30,895 units delivered, up 54.2% year over year.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Just another article about the continuing growth of the Chinese EV sector. These four carmakers are not alone, there are over 30 other manufacturers making EVs. Yes, there is a winnowing underway in the Chinese EV sector. Yes, industry analysts and leaders say that the process might take years. But these four automakers delivered over 607k EVs in November and the numbers are rising.
Ray W, says
On April 29, 2021, a little more than a year after Governor DeSantis signed an executive order shutting down Florida to all business activity, excepting those deemed necessary, a team of medical researchers published one of the first, if not the first, papers addressing the effects of the novel SARS-CoV-2 on human lungs.
The paper, published by Columbia University, Irving Medical Center, was titled:
New Cell Atlas of COVID Lungs Reveals Why SARS-CoV-2 Is Deadly and Different
Here are some bullet points:
– A team of more than 40 medical investigators led by Dr. Benjamin Izar, MD, completed “in several months a series of analysis that usually takes years.
– A companion paper prepared by Harvard/MIT researchers and collaborators was published on the same date.
– Critical to the speed of the investigation was a decision by Columbia’s Department of Pathology & Cell Biology to flash freeze lung tissues from deceased COVID patients to allow research of the cell’s molecular state.
– Evaluation of lung tissues from patients who died from COVID-19 revealed “a detrimental trifecta of runaway inflammation, direct destruction and impaired regeneration of lung cells involved in gas exchange, and accelerated lung scarring.”
– “It’s a devastating disease, but the picture we’re getting of the COVID-19 lung is the first step towards identifying potential targets and therapies that disrupt some of the disease’s vicious circuits. In particular, targeting cells responsible for pulmonary fibrosis early on could possibly prevent or ameliorate long-term complications in survivors of severe COVID-19.”
– Using “single-cell molecular profiling” to directly examine lung tissue, researchers could identify and record the activity of each cell in a tissue sample, “resulting in an atlas of cells in COVID lung.”
– “A normal lung will have many of the same cells we find in COVID, but in different proportions and different activation states. … In order to understand how COVID 19 is different compared to both control lungs and other forms of infectious pneumonias, we needed to look at thousands of cells, one by one.”
– Cornell University researchers aided in the study of lungs of patients with other respiratory illnesses. Lung tissues of subjects suffering from no respiratory illnesses formed baseline tissues. Lung tissues from 19 subjects who died from COVID-19 formed the third comparison group.
– COVID-19 lung tissues, compared to normal lungs, were filled with immune cells (macrophages). Macrophages “chew up” pathogens, but they also help in regulating the intensity of lung inflammation, but with COVID-19, researchers saw “expansion and uncontrolled activation of macrophages, including alveolar macrophages and monocyte-derived macrophages. … They are completely out of balance and allow inflammation to ramp up unchecked. This results in a vicious cycle where more immune cells come in causing even more inflammation, which ultimately damages the lung tissue.”
– Researcher found one inflammatory cytokine (IL-1Beta) produced at a high rate by the macrophages activated by COVID-19.
– “In a typical infection, a virus damages lung cells, the immune system clears the pathogen and the debris, and the lung regenerates.”
– In COVID-19 cases, the virus not only destroys alveolar epithelial cells important for gas exchange, but the ensuing inflammation impairs regeneration of damaged lung cells by remaining cells, by a process that traps repair cells in an intermediate state and, thereby, renders them “unable to complete the last steps of differentiation needed for replacement of mature lung epithelium.”
– “Among others, IL-1Beta appears to be a culprit in inducing and maintaining this intermediate cell state, … thereby linking inflammation and impaired lung regeneration in COVID-19. This suggests that in addition to reducing inflammation, targeting IL-1Beta may help take the brakes off cells required for lung repair.”
– Large numbers of pathological fibroblast cells that create rapid scarring were found in COVID-19 lung cells, causing fibrosis. Cells scarred by fibrosis permanently reduce lung space available for gas transfer.
– Certain drugs may inhibit STAT signaling, which might alleviate some of the deleterious effects caused by pathological fibroblasts.
– “Our hope is that by sharing this analysis and massive data resource, other researchers and drug companies can begin to test and expand on these ideas and find treatments to not only treat critically ill patients, but also reduce complications in people who survive severe COVID-19.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I have long maintained that when researchers almost immediately applied the term “novel” to the COVID-19 virus, that meant that the virus was unique and that all previous studies of SARS-CoV-1, and any other study of infectious viral lung diseases like pneumonia, were useful only on an inferential basis, i.e., no scientifically valid information existed to treat the novel disease.
A whole new body of research had to be developed.
Over a year passed before this study was rapidly rushed to publication. All infectious disease specialists were operating blind, due to a lack of scientifically valid data from which to draw medical conclusions.
Why do I write of this now?
Recently a number of incredibly stupid commenters opined that Dr. Fauci needs to be prosecuted. What idiocy! No doctor in the country knew the mechanics of the virus, much less how to treat COVID-19 until new studies were conducted and results published and that took over a year before the first of the medical studies came out. Even the vaccine took nine months to develop under Operation Warp Speed, and that effort was not devoted to understanding the disease. There was no science, only guesses, until the studies were published. The best anyone could do was to draw weak inferences from treatments for other infectious viral diseases that were genetically different from COVID-19.
The term “novel” means new.
The exercise of vengeful ignorance by gullible FlaglerLive commenters is not a valid course of action.