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Weather: Sunny, cooler with highs in the lower 60s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 40s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board meets at 10 a.m. every first Wednesday of the month at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For details about the city’s code enforcement regulations, go here.
Moms Into Literary Freedom: Jennifer Vale and Courtney Vandebunte, co-creators of the highly-regarded Moms Into Literary Freedom podcast will be the featured guests at the next Separation Chat, a gathering created by the Atlantic Coast Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. All are welcome to attend on Wednesday, December 6th from 12 noon until 1 pm at the Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast, FL 32164, (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at Vedic Moons, 4984 Palm Coast Parkway NW, Palm Coast, Fl every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at [email protected].
The Flagler County Republican Club holds its monthly meeting starting with a social hour at 5 and the business meeting at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. The club is the social arm of the Republican Party of Flagler County, which represents over 40,000 registered Republicans. Meetings are open to Republicans only.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 7: One Night in Memphis, created and directed by John Mueller at Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast, 7 p.m. It is the number one booked and critically acclaimed tribute to legendary Sun Records recording artists Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley, performed live and starring former cast members of the Broadway smash, “Million Dollar Quartet.” Over 90 minutes of authentic rockabilly, country, gospel, and 1950s rock and roll. The San Francisco Examiner raves, “An Amazing Show!” The show has an ever-growing list of sold-out performances, outstanding reviews, and a great social media presence and fan base. Be a witness to and experience rock and roll royalty with the music and talent that has stood the test of time. True American music featuring acclaimed national talent will get you rocking and rolling. There’s a whole lot of shakin’ going on! Book tickets here.
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: USA Today on Tuesday ran a story on its front page about survivalists, whom it chooses to call, as if they were cute cuddly characters on the amiable fringe of American hilarity, preppers. I imagine the word is used in this case because the paper is trying very hard to make this look like a bi-partisan phenomenon. The story begins with the usual grab-em-by-the-pupil lead: “Brekke Wagoner looks out the windows of her home in North Carolina and sees disaster coming.” Then a couple of paragraphs to cut down the straw man (no, it’s not a hurricane or this or that disaster.) “Instead, she worries that an incompetent federal government run by someone like current Republican front-runner and former President Donald Trump will botch the humanitarian response to a predictable disaster. She’s one of a growing number of people on both sides of the political divide who are preparing for the possibility of a disastrous collapse of society after the 2024 election.” Both sides? Really? When not even the six moderate Republicans left in America are into this absurdity? “In the past 12 months, 39% of millennials and 40% of Gen Zers reported having spent money on prepping, according to Finder.com, which has collected similar data since at least 2017. Overall, almost 30% of Americans surveyed reported taking some steps toward emergency preparedness last year, up from about 25% in 2017, according to the annual Finder survey.” As our Jonathan Lord, the emergency management director here, would probably say: that’s all? Are we not called on preparing for emergencies as a matter of routine, whether before hurricane season or, as goes the advice now, any time during the year–and not because government will collapse, but because the definition of an emergency includes the absence of the usual services, whether government or otherwise? I doubt that survey made the distinction between the usual, necessary emergency preparedness and the survivalist-bonkers type. “On the left, you have people afraid (Trump’s) going to declare himself dictator of the United States and people on the left are going to end up as targets in some sort of authoritarian system,” said prepping expert and author Brad Garrett. “On the right, it’s general malaise and a fear of society unraveling. They point to these smash-and-grab robberies, riots and protests.” Well, as far as the first possibility goes–judging from the comments I get–we’re already there, just about. And hasn’t society been unraveling roughly since this country managed to elect Reagan? Twice? If not before, if you were to ask Jim Jones. If not going back to the 18th century: “Rousseau is the only major figure of the Enlightenment who was skeptical of the importance of literacy,” Neil Postman tells us in his Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century. “In Emile, he requires the young to read only one book, Robinson Crusoe, and that only in order to learn how to survive in primitive conditions.” In 2007 Naomi Kline in Harper’s wrote a piece called “Disaster Capitalism: the new economy of catastrophe,” post-Katrina, post-Iraq. A more global view of a state of being that makes us all, one way or another, survivalists (or preppers) whether we want to be or not, which is really the way most people on earth live: we assume too much of our security, take it too much for granted. This isn’t how the majority of people live now, it’s not how the majority of people have lived in history. The irony is that if you have the means to prepare to the extent that these “preppers” can prepare, as USA Today describes them, then it only proves to what extent they still assume too much, and have the luxury to.
—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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis, the dot-com collapse, and the subprime-mortgage crisis demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 560 percent since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower-intensity conflicts such as those in Colombia, Nigeria, and Sudan), which in turn spawn terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks has increased sevenfold since the start of the Iraq war). Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that if we simply stay the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.”
–From Naomi Klein’s “Disaster Capitalism: the new economy of catastrophe,” Harper’s, October 2007.
