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Catastrophic Fire Erupts In West LA - The Wednesday AM Quickie 1/8/25

By Jacob Silverman —

For this week's book recommendation, let me commend to you "99% Perspiration," a humane, clever investigation and travelogue about modern work and its discontents, just published by friend-of-the-newsletter Adam Chandler. -Jacob

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THE BIG NEWS

Catastrophic Fire Erupts In West LA

Yesterday afternoon, amidst heavy winds, a massive fire erupted in the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood in west Los Angeles. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the Palisades abut Malibu and the fire-prone Santa Monica Mountains, but it is firmly an urban neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles. By Tuesday evening, 3,000 acres had burned.

Videos on social media showed cars abandoned on the highway, houses burning on tree-lined streets, and huge plumes of flames consuming hillsides. Pacific Palisades High School burned. As of last night, the fire was pretty much uncontained, with fire crews focused on preventing flames from spreading to Topanga Canyon, Brentwood, Santa Monica, and other adjacent areas, much of which had been evacuated.

Having grown up in west LA, I tracked the fire news slack-jawed, stunned, texting with friends and family about who was evacuating and who had lost power. One friend, who had bought a condo in the Pacific Palisades after his family's house in Calabasas burned down in a previous fire, said that the latest fire was burning the building across the street from his. By the end of the night, he was waiting to hear whether his apartment was gone.

A sprawling city surrounded by dry scrubby hills and mountains, Los Angeles has always been defined by the capricious and apocalyptic possibilities of wildfire, but the city itself has never been so directly torched by it. It's an urban climate disaster of the type that has become routine, and for which we remain dangerously unprepared.

Trump's Expansionism Talk Is Getting Kind of Serious

President-elect Donald Trump continues to talk about making America great again by bringing back imperialism and expanding the American empire. In a typically bizarre news conference in Mar-a-Lago yesterday, Trump suggested that he could use the U.S. military to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland. He also said that he wanted to rechristen the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

As I kvetched in yesterday's newsletter, it's all very dumb, juvenile politics, but Republican officials and MAGA influencers seem to love this blunt jingoistic, America-fuck-yeah talk. Trump gets that, which is why he keeps doing it.

Meta Pivots Right. Again.

As tech companies and their CEOs scramble over each other to express their support for Donald Trump, donate money to inauguration events, and proclaim their appreciation for the ketamine-addled oligarch who saved free speech, Meta been leading the way. Newly dripped out CEO Marc Zuckerberg has talked about Trump's election allowing the company to return to its core values. In the last week, Meta did away with a fact-checking initiative, added UFC goon and Trump buddy Dana White to the company board, and elevated senior policy executive Joel Kaplan, a well-connected Republican political operative, to the role of chief global affairs officer.

QUICKEST QUICKIES

  • Israel Massacres Gazans In "Humanitarian Safe Zone" Israeli forces killed about 50 people in Gaza yesterday, including a group of children in one of the areas designated as a safe refuge by the IDF. There's another round of reporting about Israel and Hamas "inching toward a ceasefire deal," but at this point in the genocide, it would be a sign of media and political illiteracy to take those reports seriously. via Al Jazeera.
  • French Nazi Dies, Goes Straight To Hell Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of a right-wing French political party now led by his daughter Marine, died at the far too old age of 96. For decades, he was a leading far right figure in French politics, running for president five times while espousing Holocaust denial, demonizing immigrants, and praising French Nazi collaborators. via The Guardian.
  • DoJ Accuses Big Landlords Of Defrauding Renters The Department of Justice and 10 states are suing six large landlords, representing more than 1.3 million housing units, accusing the landlords of using an algorithm to inflate rents and collude across markets. via AP News.
  • South Korean Authorities Will Try Again to Arrest the President The political crisis in South Korea continues to be just batshit crazy, with the Presidential Security Service now apparently fortifying a compound in which impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol may be hiding. Prosecutors want to arrest Yoon for his botched attempt to institute martial law late last year, but they've so far been unable to nab him. via Reuters.

SOME NUMBER

$18.2 billion

That's how much money US consumers spent on buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services in the last two months of 2023. Services like Klarna and Affirm lead a booming market that allows consumers to shop online by paying in installments – i.e. by taking on debt. Consumer credit card debt is also at a record high of $1.17 trillion.

ON THE SHOW TODAY

1/8: It's Hump Day! Sam and Emma speak with Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, to discuss the recent overturning of net neutrality. Then they speak with Joshua Kaplan, reporter at ProPublica, to discuss his recent piece entitled "The Militia and the Mole."

DON'T MISS MR CLIPS‌

Bernie Knows Harsh Truth Dems Don't Want To Hear

The old class-first independent from Vermont might have some ideas for Democrats to win again.

Trump Claims He'll Do Some Crazy Shit To The World Map

Instead of making America great again, what if Trump made it bigger?

PARTING WORDS

"I am confident that the United States does not fear that I would return to a battlefield that no longer exists."

-- From a statement by Muhammad Rahim al Afghani, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who the U.S. government claims was a member of Al Qaeda. Rahim may be included in a proposed prisoner swap between the United States and the Taliban.

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