Reflections from the Heart of the Empire: Collapse at Home and Bloviating Billionaires Everywhere

And elephants get a Christmas treet(misspelling intended)

• The Federal Emergency MisManagement Administration(FEMA) announced it won’t pay for 3500 North Carolinians whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Helene months ago because it says it can’t contact them.

  • As anyone who has applied for Food Stamps, Medicaid, or unemployment knows, it is often literally impossible to speak to any human being at those agencies, and it’s amazing how one can be sitting by one’s phone waiting for that appointment call, only for the phone never to ring and then to receive a cancellation notice because one didn’t answer.

• And winter is here. Tell me these people don’t deserve help but Israeli genocidal maniacs do.

• Meanwhile, in California, over 10,000 structures in Pacific Palisades alone were destroyed in a massive wildfire because there was literally no water for the city fire hydrants almost immediately, and because planes and helicopters cannot fly in hurricane-force winds. (Below: Pacific Palisades before and after the fire)

• Why was there not enough water for the fire hydrants in Los Angeles County? There’s a whole legion of reasons, but its commanding general is capitalism.

  • When the Prime Directive of a governing system is More Profits Soonest for insanely wealthy donors, things that require planning, engineering, science, extremely competent management, and any other long term investment for the public good, will sooner or later stop getting the support they need to prevent literal societal collapse.

  • This predicted weather event, no surprise since global warming has been around for decades, was just the proverbial last straw on the back of a water infrastructure system which has been steadily undermined by capitalist interests for at least 40 years.

  • Throw in a lot of grift, corruption, and resulting incompetence—this is the state that gave us Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and the Hollywood Elite, after all—and the only surprise is that this disaster didn’t kill a lot more people than it did.

• Pacific Palisades is not alone. Here’s famed Malibu Beach:

• Surely America’s leaders are all focused on these disasters and upon helping their own citizens, right?

  

• Donald Trump bloviated about annexing the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, Mars, and the whole Alpha Quadrant.

  

• Just a week after telling Trump’s MAGA base to go fuck themselves in the face, power-mad South African Elon Musk weighed in on an old Pakistani rape gang scandal in northern England that he didn’t know jack shit about, launching a chain of reactions that ended up making Keir Starmer, of all people, look like the Voice of Reason.

• For those of you who missed the social media storm in the UK, Musk basically accused Labour Prime Minister Starmer of allowing Pakistani rape(I don’t like “grooming.” It sounds too harmless, like brushing a cat.) gangs to run wild victimizing working class English girls when the Sir was a Crown Prosecutor.

• All Starmer had to do was to point to his actual record on the subject when he was a Crown Prosecutor, and all anyone else had to do was ask just whom was in power all that time and did absolutely nothing about it because they’ve never cared all that much about little working class girls of any race for centuries?

• Yup, it was the

  

• Tell us what you think of the World’ Richest Man’s searing intellect, Bugs!

• Fortunately for Musk, there was another megabillionaire who wanted some attention. Mark Zuckerberg upset fact-checkers by announcing he was getting rid of them on Facebook and Instagram because he feels like he can now, is going to some XTwitter-like community notes approach, and even tried to look a little less like Lt. Commander Data.

  

• Plain English translation for Meta users: You can tell trans activists they’re full of shit now, and you can call for shutting down immigration, and they’re moving their moderation team from California to Texas to suck up to Trump, but no mention of capitalism, Israel, Palestine, or pharmaceutical products, so we have yet to see how much censorship will actually be lifted.

• As for the censorious, self-righteous fact-checkers facing unemployment,

  

• That censorship was always unconstitutional, and never should have been allowed just like billionaires never should have been. Fortunately, neither problem is unsolvable.

  

• Finally, elephants at the Berlin Zoo got a belated Christmas present of a bunch of unsold Christmas trees, which they used first as toys or grooming implements, and finally as snacks. Now that’s what I call an efficient waste disposal system.

Thank you for reading, good day or night, and good luck.

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