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Weather: Friday: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers with thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. South winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 90 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy with showers with thunderstorms likely in the evening, then partly cloudy with a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 90 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 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. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meeting cancelled.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Notably: Napoleon seized power in a coup on Nov. 9, 1799, a date the French revolutionary calendar referred to as 18 Brumaire. The coup was carefully choreographed but for a few things that didn’t go as planned, among them Napoleon’s brilliant ability to fabricate an assassination attempt against him that same day. The fabrication hugely played in his favor and sealed the day’s (and France’s) fate: it would be at his mercy for the next 15 years, as would Europe and millions who died as a result. According to The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, the Napoleonic wars rank 26th among the deadliest “things,” with 4 million dead, 1 million of them civilians. On 18 Brumaire, Napoleon’s choreographed coup had him stand by the French assembly in St. Cloud as his coconspirators worked their plan inside. He was a celebrated army general by then. He’d won a campaign in Italy and fabricated humiliating defeats in Egypt into victories before escaping back to France. He was already feared as a would-be dictator by those who could see through his vainglory and lionized as France’s savior by blinder masses desperate for an end to the Revolution’s decade of terrors, the Directorate’s clueless leadership and foreign invasions. Napoleon was seizing the day. But he needed an act of god, himself being that god. He heard a false report that the assembly’s Five Hundred had declared him an outlaw. He started making up stories that he’d been to the chamber, where a score of assassins raised their daggers against him. No such thing took place. But he was on his horse, yelling and screaming to his loyal troops and telling them he’d been attacked. He happened to have a rash. He got so excited that the rash itched. He scratched it repeatedly–and bled. A thin streak, but visible blood anyway. His troops, always loyal, believed him. Not only was he attacked by assassins, but they’d drawn blood. The troops rallied. They spread word that he’d been wounded. The rumor–the falsehood, the fabrication, the terrific propaganda coup–spread all the way to Paris. Napoleon was an instant hero. The coup was a success. The account is too near the events of Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump was nicked either by plexiglass or by a bullet, surviving an actual assassination attempt, but milking the moment for every streak of blood he could muster, real or fabricated. We know that Steve Bannon, one of his Rasputins, is an avid reader of history and an even more avid fabricator. We know that the felon is the greatest American propagandist since Joe McCarthy. We know that we don’t know everything we ought to know about that day in Butler, though we know enough to know that it was one shard reality. The rest of it was theater. The rest of it was our 18 Brumaire.
—P.T.
Now this:
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Yet the men of Brumaire did not fully appreciate the imperious temperament of Bonaparte, and still less the incorrigible romanticism of his imagination.
–From Georges Lefebvre’s The French Revolution, vol. 2: From 1793 to 1799, tr. J.H. Stewart and James Friguglietti (Columbia 1964).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
