Weather: Mostly sunny (yay!), with a high near 79. Breezy, with a northeast wind 16 to 18 mph, with gusts as high as 28 mph. Friday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 68. Northeast wind 6 to 13 mph, with gusts as high as 20 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:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. See previous podcasts here. Today, David welcomes Palm Coast City Council candidates Jeffrey Seib and Ty Miller in a debate-style face-off. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
LGBTQ+ Night at Flagler Beach’s Coquina Coast Brewing Company: The monthly LGBTQ+ social for adults is scheduled for every second Friday of the month from 8 to 11 p.m. at Coquina Coast Brewing Co., 318 Moody Boulevard, Flagler Beach. “Come together, make new friends and share some brews. Going strong since Oct 2021! We feature many genres of local LGBTQ+ talent in our community; comedy, burlesque, belly dance, drag, musicians, bingo games, etc. There is never a cover charge but donations are greatly appreciated! When you register, your email is used to keep you up to date on future LGBTQ+ friendly events.
 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. |
Notably: The billboard above, glimpsed during a recent trip to cancerland, as Cheryl and I sometimes think of Gainesville (kindly: the town’s doctors have so far made cats of us lives-wise), brought to mind a couple of red-stop reflections. The first is a matter of history: progress is an invention, and a recent one. As Hannah Arendt writes (in On Violence, of all places), “The notion that there is such a thing as progress of mankind as a whole was unknown prior to the seventeenth century, developed into a rather common opinion among the eighteenth-century hommes de lettres, and became an almost universally accepted dogma in the nineteenth.” Before the Enlightenment, there was no such thing as expecting that society could “progress” toward something bigger, better, richer. There was teleology (defined as explaining anything by its alleged final cause, which requires a lot of imagination, sizeable balls, and a lot of arrogance). But teleology is not progress. I’d argue that as a precursor of ends-justify-means ideology, it’s the opposite of progress. Teleology is religion’s friend, so ironically it cannot be the friend of progress, even though what I’m getting at is the second thought that this billboard elicited: the utter falsehood of its anthropomorphic hopefulness. Human progress has no finish line? I can picture a mushroom cloud or two, or the finish line we are rapidly approaching by way of climate change, if it’s humanity as a whole we are imagining. But the billboard’s other falsehood is its message. It’s not aimed at “humanity,” but at the single human being eying the billboard at a red light. It is a sales pitch. Shop your illness with us: you’ll be happy. But it is only about finish lines. What UF sells, what we all sell each other in the end, what we sell ourselves, is that delay from the finish line. The last thing we want is to hurdle and hurtle toward it. If it’s finish lines we’re being honest about, and how can we not be, the last thing we want to be is that athlete, who–assuming he’s not an AI creation–will face his finish line no differently than the rest of us, immortalized though he might illusorily be on a marketing billboard for the year or two UF will use that pitch. Then what? Discarded. Done. Finished. Marketing campaigns have shorter lives than wild kittens. Human progress has no finish line because it is its own illusion.
—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
For the full calendar, go here.
In the next four centuries, Christianity was often to have disastrous effects. Confident in the possession of the true religion, Europeans were impatient and contemptuous of the values and achievements of the peoples and civilizations they disturbed. The result was always uncomfortable and often brutal. It is also true that religious zeal could blur easily into less avowable motives. As the greatest Spanish historian of the American conquests put it when describing why he and his colleagues had gone to the Indies, they thought ‘to serve God and his Majesty, to give light to those who sat in darkness and to grow rich as all men desire to do’. Greed quickly led to the abuse of power, to domination and exploitation by force. In the end this led to great crimes – though they were often committed unconsciously. It sometimes brought about the destruction of whole societies, but this was only the worst aspect of a readiness to dominate which was present from the outset in European enterprise. The adventurers who first reached the coasts of India were soon boarding Asian merchantmen, torturing and slaughtering their crews and passengers, looting their cargoes and burning the ravaged hulks. Europeans could usually exact what they wanted in the end because of a technical superiority which exaggerated the power of their tiny numbers and for a few centuries turned the balance against the great historic agglomerations of population and civilization.
–From J.M. Roberts’s History of the World (1976).
Jim says
Our “representative” Mike Waltz voted against the FEMA funding bill yet I saw him on Fox News saying that FEMA needs to reimburse Florida for the expenses incurred in responding to Milton. Really? Why should FEMA be expected to do anything for Floridians when their own representatives vote against funding FEMA? Oh, that’s because Floridians are USA citizens and FEMA is a federal program that supports ALL of us regardless of how ignorant and two-faced our representatives are.
When you vote for Waltz in this election, remember that he is voting AGAINST your best interests when it comes to FEMA. In Florida, we are more likely to need FEMA than most other states and it would be expected that our representatives would vote in our interest. Waltz is beyond worthless and I don’t think we could possibly get a worse congressman than him.
I wish people would look more carefully at what scammers like Waltz do and less attention to what they say.