Nine months after the Pacific Palisades fire, a city is SLOWLY rebuilding itself

 

Nine months after the Pacific Palisades fire, a city is SLOWLY rebuilding itself

     Recently I had to attend a conference in Los Angeles so I took the FlixBus down to L.A.  The FlixBus is cheap, efficient and boring -- but it got me there.  Then I stayed at the (highly recommended) SameSun hostel on Hollywood Boulevard, right next to the historic Grauman's Chinese Theater movie palace and Marilyn Monroe's star on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame.

     After I'd TCB down there, I still had one free day left to wander around Los Angeles, so I decided to take public transit out to the site of the tragic January 2025 Pacific Palisades fire, the one that burned 23,000 acres and destroyed 7,000 homes.  What was happening there now?  Was everyone rebuilding their houses okay?  Had the schools and libraries re-opened?  What's it like there now, over nine months later?  I took the windshield tour.  

     It took me five and a half hours to get from Hollywood to the Palisades and back -- but well worth the effort because I got a front-row seat on that disaster and how well this disaster-stricken community is building back.

     From the windows of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's #9 bus, it became pretty damn obvious that Pacific Palisades wasn't even building back -- let alone building back better.  

     Sure there were housing starts here and there -- but most of the affected lots were still just dirt and rubble.  Yeah, I know that designing and building homes takes time, but still....  I only saw a handful of housing frames going up and even Palisades kids are still attending school in trailers.  Made me think of Ukra$ne and Gaza.  Made me ponder how America can spend billions, even hundreds of billions, of dollars on blowing things up and tearing things down in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America but can't even manage to come up with a few billion (or even a few million) dollars to fix up the Pacific Palisades.  FEMA?  You suck eggs.  Disgusting.

     At the conference in Los Angeles, I also met a man from North Carolina who told me the same rotten shameful story about what happened after the Hurricane Helene disaster.  No FEMA money to help rebuild there either.  And yet America happily spends all those billions and billions and billions of dollars on just blowing stuff up.  Disgusting.

     And yet nobody in America seems to even notice -- let alone complain.

PS:  Did you see all that "war" footage on TV about Gaza and Iran and Kiev and Moscow and Venezuela and Yemen and....  Nobody talks about all that stuff either -- about how all this zealous munitions detonation is damaging and/or destroying our air quality and climate.  No, all they talk about is how your freaking car is doing all that damage.  Yeah, right.

 

PPS:  On the way down to Los Angeles on the FlixBus, I read John Steinbeck's excellent novel The Pearl, about a lowly peasant who finally stands up to his overlords and says, "Basta!  Enough is enough!"  That will never happen here.

      I also read Juliet Blackwell's cozy-stle murder mystery, The Last Curtain Call, about ghosts who haunt an old movie palace in San Francisco.  On page 250, she writes, "The yuan gui are restless spirits who died a wrongful death and are seeking redress."  Oh boy.  So far, the ghosts of over 100,000 ghosts from Gaza are definitely going to seek redress and haunt the freak out of Netanyahu, Biden and Trump.

 

Resources:  

 

As usual, the Electronic Intifada updates us:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91auXrrcS_Y&t=2419s

 

The situation in Ukra$ne still sucks eggs:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY4vP3DvlY0 

 

The power-mad elite threw us into a global prison lock-down once.  What's to keep them from doing it again?  https://jshepard.substack.com/p/remember-the-global-lockdown-of-spring 

 

America won't be defeated by Russia or China.  It is already being defeated by the Federal Reserve:  https://gregorymannarino.substack.com/p/i-will-say-it-again-no-one-is-ready

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