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Weather: Mostly cloudy. Highs in the upper 70s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the upper 50s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Check tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Creekside Music and Arts Festival 2023, the 18th edition, at Princess Place Preserve, 2500 Princess Place Road, Palm Coast, Fla., Saturday and Sunday, October 7 and 8, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, admission is $10 per person, kids 12 and under get in free. Free parking. Gather under the majestic oaks for this local tradition that celebrates the natural beauty of Northeast Florida. Bring a lawn chair and enjoy a variety of music including bluegrass, country, rock & classic hits. Shop rows of unique arts & craft vendors. There’ll be historic demonstrations from a blacksmith, a fur trapper and pottery wheel creations. Kids zone with train rides, pony rides, petting zoo, hayrides, bounce houses. Big food court. Fall festival brews in the beer garden. Explore the Princess Lodge and other historic sites. Organized by Flagler Broadcasting.
Pink on Parade 5k Run/Walk in Town Center, from AdventHealth Palm Coast South. The City of Palm Coast and the AdventHealth Palm Coast Foundation host the 13th Annual Pink on Parade 5K Run/Walk (aka Pink Army) & the 1-mile Pet-Friendly Fun Walk/Pink Out Your Pet Contest (sponsored by the Flagler Humane Society), starting with registration at 6:30 a.m. Proceeds stay in Flagler County to assist qualified individuals with early detection screenings, cancer-related education, materials, and cancer diagnostic testing.
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email PalmCoastFarmersMarket386@gmail.com
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 1 to 4 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
In Coming Days:
Notebook: I’ve been thinking about the implications of 2+2=4: it is immutable. But is immutability the same as predeterminism? If so, would 2+2=4 not be proof of the impossibility of free will? Free will has always seemed to me a nice idea but, like god, not an easily tenable one, especially if one believes in god (a more bearded version of 2+2=4). Whether or not there is belief, free will begins at its origin. To have free will one must’ve had the choice of choosing or not the life in which free will is debatable. We were not given the choice, though we can never be sure that there was a choice to give, if randomness is given its due. Who would there be, what would there be, to give that choice, other than randomness? But 2+2=4–in other words, mathematics—argues against randomness. I don’t know that we have a truth more pure and incorruptible by belief, superstition, ideology or any of the other infectious diseases of the mind than mathematics. Most of us don’t understand most of it, couldn’t comprehend it if we tried, but most of us understand it at its basic level. 2+2=4 is the Homer of math: all of western literature begins with Homer, all of math begins with 2+2. The rest is detail. But is it freely willed? Math may be sublime and in real, visible, tangible ways, infinite (think pi), but it is also a closed set: ultimately, all of mathematics is certainty, all of math is immutable. It is the only truly platonic ideal we know, sitting there, its formulas endlessly rich with discoveries, but not alteration. The truths of math are all predetermined. We can never discover them all. But they’re there, making math the closest thing to god we can touch. But also making math the surest proof of predeterminism: I cannot will math to be anything other than what it must be, and if life is just another formula, then I cannot will myself to be anything other than what I have been programmed to be. It’s a little depressing, though the alternative is not exactly reassuring: if 2+2 is 5, we’re into worlds of chaos and worse. It’s a different kind of prison, without the sublime dimension of math. I don’t think Orwell seized on 2+2=5 coincidentally in his formula for totalitarianism—that double irony, in this context, considering that totalitarianism is the definition of the complete absence of free will. To Orwell, 2+2=5 is the human attempt to supplant any notion of individualism, or free will at least in the short term (assuming we have a degree of it in our daily lives and choices), with immutable power over the individual. It’s the subversion of truth to impose a falsehood posing as truth. It is predeterminism in the name of power. But doesn’t that leave us with a choice without a difference? Totalitarianism is unbearable. It is all-determining in the day to day. But isn’t 2+2=4 its purer, more objective echo? What does it matter if we have the illusion of freedom for the brief duration of our lives if in the end it all comes down to the same thing: we have no choice, and really no choices. Choice is a dress-up game in the absence of a leviathan removing even choice from our lives. And isn’t that what Dostoevsky was getting at in his Grand Inquisitor chapter in Karamazov, when the Grand Inquisitor slaps Christ and tells him the people don’t want him, don’t want his freedom, don’t want free will—they want to be told, to be controlled, to be made to submit? Dostoevsky could have titled his chapter: 2+2=4. For that matter, maybe even Orwell’s math was off. There was no need for Big Brother to change the formula. 2+2=4 equals 2+2=5, but with a few illusions to make life more bearable. In other words, Dostoevsky+Sartre=No Exit.
—P.T.
Now this: Daniel Boorstin on Charlie Rose:
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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.
May 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
Murder at Shivering Timbers Murder Mystery Dinner Show Fundraiser
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Murder at Shivering Timbers Murder Mystery Dinner Show Fundraiser
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
These pseudo-events which flood our consciousness must be distinguished from propaganda. The two do have some characteristics in common. But our peculiar problems come from the fact that pseudo-events are in some respects the opposite of the propaganda which rules totalitarian countries. Propaganda–as prescribed, say, by Hitler in Mein Kampf–is information intentionally biased. Its effect depends primarily on its emotional appeal. While a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood.
Pseudo-events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to have “all the facts,” and even to have more facts than there really are. But propaganda feeds on our willingness to be inflamed. Pseudo-events appeal to our duty to be educated, propaganda appeals to our desire to be aroused. While propaganda substitutes opinion for facts, pseudo-events are synthetic facts which move people indirectly, by providing the “factual” basis on which they are supposed to make up their minds. Propaganda moves them directly by explicitly making judgments for them.
–From Daniel Boortsin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962).
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam. Your comment evokes thoughts about the three great unanswerable questions:
1. How shall I live my life?
2. How shall I be governed?
3. How do I know what I know?
Many philosophers over time have argued that the moment any of us think we have answered any one or all of these questions is the moment we lose the perspective necessary to attempt to understand the world around us. Wittgenstein published his first book on philosophy and then announced that he was walking away from philosophy; he believed he had answered all of the philosophical questions. Of course, years later, he came back to the idea that maybe there was more out there to be questioned.
My acceptance of these three great questions is the reason I fill many, if not most, of my comments with terms like “perhaps”, “maybe”, “it might be”, “suggests”, “is it possible”, “I recall”, etc. It also motivates me to post great or controversial ideas posed by others and then ask questions of all FlaglerLive readers, in hopes of prompting some to ask their own questions, instead of the approach utilized by so many other commenters of telling people with an aura of invincibility what they think is or isn’t real, when they don’t even know what is or isn’t real. Democrats are, with any doubt, communists? Really!!! This type of fantastical thinking is what is curious about JimboXYZ. He shows so much promise from time to time, so I know he can engage in rational thought based on intellectually rigorous introspection, yet he then allows the wheels to fall off, over and over again, posting irrational comments as if he has actually thought them through. Yes, we are entering into a time of America’s uniquely extended political races, so it is to be expected that JimboXYZ will be limping through life with flat tires until the election period is over, and we just have to bear with his hyperbole, but … really!
,
I don’t know if this will help the discussion, but have you considered the idea that the universe is digital, not analog?
,
A digital universe suggests an ordered reality and infers the existence of creation by an intentional, yet infinite, being, i.e., one beyond our capacity to fully conceptualize.
If the universe is analog, then randomness and its synonymous companion, chaos theory, just might inhere in all of creation and life. I was born in Halifax Hospital during the Jim Crow era. You? Lebanon before the age of violence. Yet here we are, during an American age of political violence and the reemergence of Jim Crow laws. Is it random or digital? I recall meeting Krys Fluker in 1996 at a DeLand home at a political function? Random or digital? I recall meeting you in 2000 during a group interview at the editorial office of the News-Journal. Random or digital?
Pierre Tristam says
Ray,
I imagine the difference between digital and analog as a different way to illustrate the difference between an intelligently created and a random universe, but also as the difference between a pre-determined universe where there is no such thing as randomness, and whatever attempt at making order out of chaos we’re left with otherwise. There’s evidence for both, though doesn’t it seem like chaos is the hands-down winner? I mean, a meteor ended the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs, an equally random fleck of universe dust could do the same to our comparatively lilliputian history. Even if we look at it with the most humanist eyes: We typically ascribe the sublime —in nature, in art, in the kindness of strangers or the love of a parent or a child—to something divine, as if it couldn’t exist separately. But nothing says the sublime isn’t its own randomness, probabilities being what they are. Even a civilization-ending meteor, a mass of flying volcanoes, must look sublime as it hurtles to its end. There’s no logic, no explanations, other than the self-fulfilling edicts of a Plato or an Aquinas or a Mohammed, that relate anything “good” or ideal to an intelligent force. We can only go on what we see and know, and mystery is not—contra self-serving “he/she/they works in mysterious ways theology—proof of anything. (You know how the thinking goes: because we don’t know, we can’t know, and because we can’t know, we know it’s God. The scholastics built a thousand years of certainties on that sort of asphyxiating logic.) So the random isn’t any more appealing than the digital, the choice being something like chaos and luck versus a creation’s totalitarianism. A friend who read this useless screed of mine above may have it right: we err when we start giving it much thought instead of paying attention to our more immediate here and now. Philosophers and theologians and artists have been going at it since the drawings in the caves of southern France, and we’re no better advanced today than we were then. The exploration is always its own wonder of course: who would want a world without inane theology or bottomless philosophy? But what we’re left with, when we’re lucky enough to be left with it (these few moments on earth, bookended by the unknowable) is maybe answer enough, at least until the next shoe (or meteor) falls.
JimBob says
That’s some good shit y’all are smoking!
Ray W. says
I have long been drawn to the argument raised in early Greek philosophy that the natural state of being is chaotic, and that it takes great effort of will to force order onto the natural state of chaos. To them, as I understand the argument, civilization depended entirely on this exercise of will and that the family unit was the glue that held civilization together. The love of a parent for a child, or a child’s love for his or her family, a sublime event as you characterize it, was everything needed to foster that great effort.
Laurel says
1. How shall I live my life?
By intention. What is my intention at this moment? Is it good, bad, selfish, giving, needing attention? Intention is everything.
2. How shall I be governed?
By my mind.
3. How do I know what I know?
I know what I know only when I listen.
I no longer believe in randomness. Every creation is mathematical. The seeds of a sunflower spiral out from it’s center mathematically. That can’t be random. So, if a seed spiral is missing one seed, does that make it random? I don’t think so, I think it’s looking for another mathematical possibility.
My personal questions are still the same ones:
1.) How is it all creatures great and microscopic have fear and protect themselves, as that would require the concept of death.
2.) How is it I am here this very, particular moment, in the vast space of time? Sometimes I think maybe we are all Billy Pilgrim.
Ray W. says
Thank you, JimBob, for your valid observation. Remember, though, that validity gets you into the argument. Validity, without more, seldom wins an argument or proves a point. For example, it is a valid point to comment that gasoline costs more today than it did a few years ago. Since early 2021, when OPEC voted to cut production, the world has faced what can now be called a chronic supply of crude oil issue, causing prices to rise and then stay relatively high. U.S. energy producers have enjoyed extraordinary profits even as they produce more crude oil today than they have ever produced. Those who argue that it is the fault of American energy producers simply don’t understand the situation. The valid point loses every time anyone points to American energy production as the reason for high prices.
James says
Perhaps Jimbo, but it’s probably not as good as stuff Joe Kennedy is smoking.
Just another observation.
James says
Oops… sorry JimBob, I thought you were Jimbo.
And I meant Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A slight disambiguation is needed in both cases… I think.
Pogo says
@P.T., et al.
Reading this thread since its start; yesterday I did this search — I hope it’s not seen as absurd:
https://www.google.com/search?q=nihilism+vs+existentialism
Banned in Floriduh
Laurel says
Um, but it was funny.
James says
And as for the cartoon.
Well, if the nefarious lemming herder Trump, really wanted to build a border wall. One of quality, style and longevity, he could have done what any reasonable person might have done.
Have Apple design it, the Chinese make it, the Mexicans install it, and of course, WE WILL HAVE PAID for it… like we pay for everything else.
And hey, sometimes you do get what you pay for… and quality costs.
Just an observation.
Ray W. says
Thank you, again, Pogo! Does this mean that the endless Prevagen commercials are meaningless?
Pogo says
@Ray W.
The “serious” answer, IMO, is more questions: meaningless how, meaningless why, and meaningless for, and to whom. I’ve been told this is a free country — for anyone who can afford it, for some reason, is always left out.
A short answer
https://www.google.com/search?q=clinical+trials+prevagen
Maybe, the real answer