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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. West winds around 5 mph, becoming east in the afternoon. Chance of rain 50 percent. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. Chance of rain 50 percent.
- 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 Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Flagler County School Boardholds a special meeting to approve the 2024-25 budget and taxes, at 5:15 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. See: “How Flagler Schools’ ‘Truth in Millage’ Budget Hid $10 Million Going to Private and Home School Tuition.”
The Flagler County School Board holds a 5:45 p.m. meeting at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, to discuss the District’s refunding of its Series 2014 COPs debt issuance and the opportunity to refund an additional year at a lower rate based on current market conditions.
The Flagler Branch of the NAACP hosts a candidate forumat 6 p.m. at the African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway). The forum will feature candidates for Flagler County School Board and the County Commission.
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.
In Coming Days:
Aug. 3: The annual Back to School Jam is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Flagler Palm Coast High School gym, 5500 State Rte 100 E, Palm Coast. Administrators from all of our schools will be on-site to answer questions. There will also be school shirts available for purchase at each school’s booth. District personnel will be on-hand to provide information on various programs and services, including after-school programs. Our Transportation department will be rolling up its booth to address bus schedules and our Food Services team will be available to answer questions about what you need to know about the free breakfast and lunch programs that are available to all students this coming school year. Additionally, dozens of local vendors will be on-hand with information about their youth-focused activities and programs. Be sure to get photos with various mascots and the always popular “Costumers With a Cause” roaming the gym. Food trucks and a bike rodeo will set up behind the gym.
Aug. 5: Nexus Center/South Library Groundbreaking is scheduled for 1 p.m. on the acreage opposite the Sheriff's Operations Center on Commerce Parkway in Bunnell. The “Nexus Center” will be a multi-purpose facility to house a new library and the county’s Health and Human Services Department. See: "Flagler County Library’s $14 Million South Branch ‘Nexus Center’ Breaks Ground in August, Ending 10-Year Wait."
Tangents: I am an admirer of Jimmy Carter–as a politician, as a president, as a post-president, as a human being–despite that “lust-in-my-heart” sanctimony that makes him sound like a latter-day Woodrow Wilson a bit too often. He was by far a better president than Wilson, whose deal-breaker will always be his un-reconstituted Southern racism despite giving us one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever (Louis Brandeis). His other appointees were more forgettable (James McReynolds and John Clarke. Who?) But Carter on March 5, 1989, wrote one of the worst pieces of his career: “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” published as an OpEd in The New York Times that day. The ayatollah’s fatwa–no need to capitalize either–had gone out against Rushdie for his Satanic Verses. Rushdie was in hiding. His near-murder in August 2022 was far off, though Carter would live long enough to see it (he is still alive as I write this). I hope he regrets that column, the way Rushdie himself regretted his pathetic “Now I Can Say I Am a Muslim” column in the same pages, on Dec. 28, 1990. Carter doesn’t regret it, judging from the fact that he still feature his insult at the Carter Center’s website. “The death sentence proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response, surely surprising even to Rushdie. It is our duty to condemn the threat of murder, to protect the author’s life and to honor Western rights of publication and distribution.” Good so far. But then: “At the same time, we should be sensitive to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate Moslems.” Sure we should be sensitive. But who are “we”? To what extent does that sensitivity extend to a novelist’s responsibility not to explore what the novelist wants to explore? Why should we be so deferential to Muslim sensibilities as to restrict our own liberal, humanist, sometimes freely outrageous but always free minds’ willingness to go where they will, especially in fiction? Fiction! Carter was calling Rushdie’s novel “insulting” while Khomeini’s assassins were running around, while Khomeini’s madness (and Saddam Hussein’s) was mass graving the border between Iran and Iraq. But here’s what Carter said: “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility.” In the west we are directly insulted daily by myriad lesser fools. Grow a pair already. It means nothing to invoke the First Amendment (“freedom for the thought that we hate,” to quote the title of Anthony Lewis’s book on the subject) if the corollary is to invoke the stone-throwers. And on Aug. 12, 2022, Rushdie–whose works I have stopped liking a while back, but that’s irrelevant: my affection for him is of a different order–got knifed, lost his eyesight in one eye, and almost lost his life. Because the people Carter apologizes for—-an American citizen, Rushdie’s attacker: a California-born Lebanese, my own ancestry–are still running around, getting third-degree defenses from former presidents because they were insulted. “There’s a thing I used to say back in the day, when catastrophe rained down upon The Satanic Verses and its author,” Rushdie writes in Knife, “that one way of understanding the argument over that book was that it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one. I see you now, my failed murderer, hypocrite assassin, mon semblable, mon frère. You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.”
—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.
August 2024
Thursday, Aug 01
10:00 am - 11:00 am
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Flagler County courthouse
Thursday, Aug 01
11:00 am - 11:30 am
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach
Friday, Aug 02
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
WNZF
Friday, Aug 02
10:00 am - 11:00 am
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday, Aug 02
12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Blue 24 Forum
Palm Coast Community Center
Friday, Aug 02
5:00 pm - 9:00 pm
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Veterans Park
Friday, Aug 02
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens
No event found!
For the full calendar, go here.
Sometimes I think I belong to another age. I can remember being in the garden of our house as a child in the 1950s, listening to my parents and their friends laughing and joking as they discussed everything under the sun, from contemporary politics to the existence of God, without feeling any pressure to censor or dilute their opinions. I also remember being at the apartment of my favorite uncle, Hameed Butt, who sometimes wrote for the movies, and his dancer-actress wife, Uzra, who sometimes acted in them. I watched them playing cards with their artsy-filmi crowd, speaking in even more outrageous language about everything and nothing, and laughing even more uproariously than my parents’ friends. These settings were where I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.
–From Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.