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Weather: Sunny. Highs around 90. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph.
- 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:
The Palm Coast City Council’s workshop has been cancelled, due to most of the council members having Covid. The meeting was to be at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Flagler Beach City Commission holds a special workshop-listening session at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall regarding the proposed annexation and rezoning of Veranda Bay, the development at the edge of town on John Anderson Highway. See: “Annexation Into Flagler Beach of 2,700-Home Development Crosses Key 1st Hurdles, With Some Public Opposition.”
The NAACP Flagler Branch’s General Membership Meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway). The meeting is open to the public, including non-members. To become a member, go here.
Fall Horticultural Workshops at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE., 6:30 p.m on Tuesdays, 10 a.m. on Fridays. Join master gardeners from the UF/IFAS Agricultural Extension Office for these workshops that cover a variety of horticultural topics. $10 a workshop.
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club at the Flagler Beach Public Library meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
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.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Editorial Notebook: In Lebanon, you can time an Israeli assault to American communiques there. You can time them to when the American Embassy lets its citizens know that they should get the hell out. Like when rats sense something is amiss on ship and scurry. It’s Lebanon’s version of the cone of probability–the National Hurricane Center’s cone–sitting all these months just far enough to let one’s guard down, then shifting just enough to make you its bull’s eye. It’s happened, like clockwork, before every major Israeli assault. There was 1978, there was 1982, there was 1996, there was 2006. Those were the major ones, unlike the daily insults of Israeli jets’ violation of Lebanese airspace, when they like to break the sound barrier just to frighten everyone below, animals included, their literal daily blasts of arrogance, or unlike the regular bombing runs any time a Hezbollah militant happens to spit past the border fence. The hospitals literally prepared for the attack before it happened the same way we prepare for hurricanes. They knew it was coming. This is where I’m required to say–to denounce–Hezbollah, as most Lebanese who aren’t Shiites always do, in peace or war: we hate Hezbollah. But we also understand its violence. Unlike the PLO, Hezbollah is indigenous to the Lebanese south. Its fief is endlessly violated by Israel’s impudence. In this case Netanyahu has been looking to get something started: he is seeing his massacres in Gaza peter out. He needs to stretch out the killing, at least until Trump is elected. That’s his end game: his reset, if Trump regains the White House. But he can’t make peace until then, can’t give Biden and the Democrats the satisfaction. He needs war. So does Trump. So Monday he unleashed his well-trained killers. They struck at least 800 sites (at least at the time when I was writing this), putting in motion the other ritual: if Americans fly out and ship out, the Lebanese jam the highways, heading north, though that’s not always wise. The Israelis like to strike highways. They like to demolish infrastructure, not just human beings, not just children. Reporters are calling it the deadliest day since 2006, when George W. Bush and Condi Rice stood by and watched it happen, a clap short of cheering. Hundreds dead already, a thousand injured. Mostly with American-made ordnance. Over here the fuckers will justify it, repeat the old mantras about terrorists and Israeli self-defense and all other tired tropes trotted out of AIPAC’s basements for easy consumption, and the days will accumulate with Hezbollah missiles one way and Israeli attacks the other until Netanyahu, in his imbecility and lust for mass murder, invades again, to gain nothing more than he has in Gaza. The juxtaposition is just too bewildering.Â
—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.
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Carlos M. Cruz
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
For the full calendar, go here.
On August 20, 1982, following an Israeli attack on Bourj al-Barajneh, a Palestinian man and his wife returned to the refugee camp and entered their home. Their eight- and ten-year-old daughters remained outside to play. One of the girls, the ten-year-old, picked up a M-43 cluster bomb and her hand was partially blown off when it exploded. The X-rays of the child’s hand showed three pieces of metal shrapnel. Two were approximately 2 mm in diameter. One was a half-millimeter and lodged in the soft tissue at the top of the wound. […] In a July 22, 1982, report by retired British Army officer Major Derek Cooper (one of those representing Oxfam in Lebanon) stated, “Some bombs leave small devices like cigarette lighters, which are in turn fused to go off on being handled or trodden on. A number of children have been injured by these, and I have been shown children who have lost a hand or leg or been seriously hurt by such devices in West Beirut.” Major Cooper’s report refers to the M-42 type. The general public in Lebanon has not had much available technical information on cluster bombs, and the M-42 type is sometimes described as a cigarette lighter device because of its appearance. It should be noted that I did not confirm this incident to be one of the so-called “toy bombs” claimed to have been used by Israel. These bombs are described in detail later in this report.
—From Israel’s War in Lebanon: Eyewitness Chronicles of the [1982] Invasion and Occupation, edited by Frank Lamb (1984). The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934).
Ray W says
From the News-Journal’s state by state shorts in its Sunday edition:
“GEORGIA Savannah: Savannah expects to increase its drinking-water capacity by more than 72% over the next two decades. The ultimate projected cost of expanding Savannah’s Industrial and Domestic Water Treatment Plant to meet that increase is $500 million, City Manager Jay Melder said last week.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W says
Six weeks to go before the general election.
Perhaps it is time once again to refer to concerns raised by James Madison in his critique of the historical experiments in democracy prior to the time of our Constitutional Convention. Madison, considered by many of his peers to be the most intellectual of all the members of the convention, was tasked with writing the proposed Constitution; he also wrote Federalist Paper #37, titled: Problems Confronting the Federal Convention.
In his last paragraph to that essay, he wrote:
“We had occasion, in a former paper, to take notice of the repeated trials which have been unsuccessfully made in the United Netherlands for reforming the baneful and notorious vices of their constitution. The history of almost all the great councils and consultations held among mankind for reconciling their discordant opinions, assuaging their mutual jealousies, and adjusting their respective interests, is a history of factions, contentions, and disappointments, and may be classed among the most dark and degraded pictures which display the infirmities and depravities of the human character. If, in a few scattered instances, a brighter aspect is presented, they serve only as exceptions to admonish us of the general truth; and by their lustre to darken the gloom of the adverse prospect to which they are contrasted. In revolving the causes from which these exceptions result, and applying them to the particular instance before us, we are necessarily led to two important conclusions. The first is, that the convention must have enjoyed, in a very singular degree, an exemption from the pestilential influence of party animosities – the disease most incident to deliberative bodies, and most apt to contaminate their proceedings. The second conclusion is that all the deputations composing the convention were satisfactorily accommodated by the final act, or 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.”
Make of this what you will. Me? The man who was entrusted out of respect by his peers to write our proposed Constitution, believed that all prior efforts by other governments to produce a working constitution had failed.
In particular, in his first sentence of the final paragraph, Madison considered the initial Netherlands effort to have been fatally weakened by “baneful and notorious vices” inserted in the original document by the Dutch founders, and that all subsequent efforts by the Dutch to remove the vices had failed.
In his second sentence, Madison argued that almost every known effort by any historical populace to create a governing document to reconcile differences, to assuage jealousies, and to blend together disparate interests – all were undermined by faction; he considered the many failures as emblematic of the “infirmities” and “depravities” of human nature.
In his fourth sentence, Madison details two “important conclusions.” The first was that, somehow, the members of the convention, “in a very singular degree”, had exempted themselves from the “pestilential” influence of faction.
His second conclusion was that he marveled that so many convention attendees found it within themselves to place the “public good” above “private opinions” and “partial interests.”
Even today, Merriam-Webster defines “pestilential” as:
1 a : causing or tending to cause pestilence : DEADLY
b : of or relating to pestilence
2 : morally harmful : PERNICIOUS
3 : giving rise to vexation or annoyance : IRRITATING
Can it be argued that in the age of Madison, pestilential meant plague, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, polio, and other like deadly diseases? If this is a correct assertion, can it also be said that, to Madison, any person who advanced the interests of a political party above the interests of the common good was automatically one of the lowest or most depraved of citizen? That the virtuous citizen through unusual effort of will place the common good above party interest?