The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, June 24, 2024

clay jones
From Clay Jones: “In a blistering dissent to the majority opinion legalizing bump stocks, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer wrote, “Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machinegun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose.” Writing for the majority, Clarence Thomas wrote, “We conclude that [a] semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machinegun’ because it does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.” And to that, Justice Sotomayer responded, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” That also applies to corrupt Supreme Court justices. When I see a justice taking free vacations and other gifts from sugar daddies, that justice is corrupt. When a justice’s wife participates in trying to steal an election, or his wife is flying treason flags from two of their homes, that justice is compromised and needs to recuse himself. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a corrupt duck.

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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. Chance of rain 70 percent. Heat index values up to 105. Monday Night: Mostly cloudy with showers and thunderstorms likely in the evening, then partly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. Chance of rain 70 percent.

Today at a Glance:

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.

The Flagler County Beekeepers Association holds its monthly meeting from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Flagler Agricultural Center, 150 Sawgrass Rd., Bunnell (the county fairgrounds). This is a meeting for beekeepers in Flagler and surrounding counties (and those interested in the trade). The meetings have a speaker, Q & A, and refreshments are served. It is a great way to gain support as a beekeeper or learn how to become one. All are welcome. Meetings take place the fourth Monday of every month. Contact Kris Daniels at 704-200-8075.

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.

In Coming Days:

June 22: “Crows and Ravens: Birds of Myth and Magic,” a workshop by author and FlaglerLive culture writer Rick de Yampert, 2-3:30 p.m. Saturday June 22 at Vedic Moons – Ayurvedic Wellness, Metaphysical Shop & Herbal Apothecary, 4984 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Unit 4-6, Palm Coast. Cost of the workshop (which does not include a book) is $20. The workshop will include a PowerPoint slide show featuring de Yampert’s crow photography and Mr. Crow art, and the handout “Five Ways to Forge Communion with Crows – both Practical and Magical.” The workshop also will feature de Yampert’s Mr. Crow art for sale, as well as his other book “Mr. Crow Haiku and Other Zen-y Writings.” A book signing (separate from the workshop and with free attendance) will be held 1-2 p.m. Saturday June 22, prior to the workshop. For information, call Vedic Moons at 386-585-5167 or go online at vedicmoons.com.

Through June 22: Three Exceptional Artists: Art Show presented by Expressions Art Gallery on Colbert at Expressions Art Gallery inside Grand Living Realty, 2298 Colbert Lane, Palm Coast. Artwork created by three exceptional artists. Each with her own unique style and each using different materials: Kathy Duffy, Gina-Marie Hammer and Deborah Hildinger. The show is on display from May 9 through June 22, 2024.

June 22-23: Local Ham Radio Clubs Test Emergency Capabilities and you’re invited! The local effort will include Hams associated with the Flagler Palm Coast Amateur Radio Club, Flagler Emergency Communications Association, and Flagler County ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) who will gather at Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast to operate multiple Ham Radio stations for 24 hours beginning at 2 pm. Saturday, June 22nd. Local Amateur Radio operators will be representing our community in American Radio Relay League’s annual Field Day. Every June, more than 40,000 hams throughout North America set up temporary transmitting stations in public places to demonstrate ham radio’s science, skill and service to our communities and our nation. It combines public service, emergency preparedness, community outreach, and technical skills all in a single event. The public is welcome to visit this local Field Day site to learn more about Ham Radio, local clubs and hams in our own neighborhoods. Opportunities will be available to operate radios under the supervision of Federal Communications Commission licensed Radio Amateurs. This event is free of charge, no advance arrangements are necessary.

For the full calendar, go here.

Notably: The historian Steven Hahn writes perceptively in Illiberal America (2024) that “illiberal solutions always seemed the resort for liberal-directed problems.” Case in point: the eugenics movement of the 1920s in America was very much a liberal project championed by the economist Irving Fisher and, most of all, by Margaret Sanger, who’d founded the Birth Control League in 1921 to “elevate the function of motherhood,” but also to develop “a race of well-born children” (Sanger’s words) and advocate “sterilization of the insane and feeble-minded.  Speaking no differently than Jim Crow’s bigots, she saw a “menace to civilization” in the “lack of balance between the birthrate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ and saw “no more urgent problem” than the “over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” (The headline of a Sanger biography’s review in The New York Times in 1992: “Margaret Sanger, Warrior for Women’s Rights.”) She held a national conference on birth control framed by those principles in December 1921. Participants were a who’s who of liberalism. They included Herbert Croly, the editor of The New Republic, Will Durant (though I’m hesitant to call him a liberal: these days he’d be to the right of Patrick Buchanan), Theodore Dreiser, Havelock Ellis, and Winston Churchill (no liberal, that one). Durant in a footnote in Our Oriental Heritage had written: “Blood, as distinct from race, may affect a civilization in the sense that a nation may be retarded or advanced by breeding from the biologically (not racially) worse or better strains among the people.” The philosophy, which Theodore Roosevelt had loved in his day (favoring sterilization of criminals and the feebleminded), would culminate in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 opinion upholding legislation giving government authority to sterilize “imbeciles,” and one of Holmes’s most repellant phrases (there were so many from that justice too often too wrongly considered a stylist): “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Sanger supported the decision. Holmes appears to have been reincarnated as French novelist Michel Houellebecq. In 2020, Planned Parenthood announced it would remove Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan health center and from an award. I’ve never been comfortable with the erasure of history or the canceling of individuals in most contexts. But removing a name here and there is neither. It’s more of a proper reckoning, the way laws change, the way morals change. We are not imprisoned by “founders,” a worthy lesson to keep in mind about those other ones, who tend to stifle more than inform our present, or our more humane reparations toward the future. 

P.T.

 

Now this:

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.

June 2024

nar-anon family groups palm coast

Monday, Jun 24

Nar-Anon Family Group

St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church

Monday, Jun 24

Flagler County Beekeepers Association Meeting

Flagler Agricultural Center

Monday, Jun 24

Bunnell City Commission Meeting

palm coast logo

Tuesday, Jun 25

Palm Coast City Council Workshop

Tuesday, Jun 25

Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library

315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach

naacp

Tuesday, Jun 25

NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting

African American Cultural Society

Tuesday, Jun 25

Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy

Cinematique of Daytona Beach

No event found!

For the full calendar, go here.

FlaglerLive

Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions. We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate “product of her time.” Until recently, we have hidden behind the assertion that her beliefs were the norm for people of her class and era, always being sure to name her work alongside that of W.E.B. Dubois and other Black freedom fighters. But the facts are complicated. Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge — a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century. […] We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices. What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly. Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question. Our reckoning is understanding her full legacy, and its impact. Our reckoning is the work that comes next. And the first step is making Margaret Sanger less prominent in our present and future. 

–From From Alexis McGill Johnson, from “I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,” The New York Times, April 17, 2021.

 

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