Call this “odds and ends.” You see the photograph above?

That’s the mega-tony L.A. suburb of Malibu Beach, perhaps the wealthiest stretch in that huge L.A. metro area and home to many Hollywood types.

Houses here go for around ten to twenty million, though one is priced at $210 million.

They’re owned or were by people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Larry Ellison, David Geffen, Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Mark Hamill, Cher, Barbra Streisand, and others. It would all seem untouchable, no?

Yet their homes were either totally destroyed, badly damaged, or barely survived.

Here’s what this incredible stretch was reduced to in January of 2025:

“Over the course of a frightful few days in early January, flames moved with impressive disinterest from the Santa Monica Mountains to the beachfront, roaring north from just above San Vicente Boulevard to (nearly) Nobu Malibu, at will,” reported a newspaper. “It’s hard to comprehend that kind of scale, to really understand how fire could steam the tops of ocean waves for almost ten uninterrupted miles.”

One of America’s supreme symbols of wealth and worldly permanence was reduced in hours to foundations and chimneys—while a handful of houses inexplicably remained standing amid the devastation.

L.A. Fire chief Anthony Marrone revealed that nearly 1,000 structures, including those in Malibu and Santa Monica, were destroyed in what was known as the Pacific Palisades fire. The point: no one and nowhere is immune to great natural occurrences and “signs of the times.” This gorgeous stretch is also sorely afflicted by warm rising seas (warmest, claim scientists, in perhaps a thousand years) that have washed out most of the beach.

Speaking of the wealthy and famous, susceptible also can be those uber-rich techies, a single one of whom could buy the entire Malibu stretch and not notice much missing.

Perhaps a bit more noticeable was what occurred this week to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook, Instagram). It agreed to pay more than $17 billion and add child-safety measures to its platforms to end a landmark trial over teen social media addiction and settle claims filed by 47 state attorneys general.

An interesting-looking almost Star Trekkish bunch, these uber-rich (we’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars).

A bit of photoshopping and editorializing by someone:

We can’t judge, but it would be nice if they gave away the vast majority of their excessive wealth to the needy and good causes, leaving themselves with several billion, which will certainly pay the rent. It would also be nice if the major technocrats professed belief in God. Most are agnostic or atheists. This gives us people to pray for—Gates, Bezos, Altman, Thiel et al—as we also keep in mind our own constant need for purification.

When it comes to natural events, some look to the blood-red moon, which occurs for parts of the world today.

Usually, it arrives and leaves with no major events.

Already this week, we’ve seen our fair share, with an incredible torrent of floodwater in Nepal, a magnitude-eight quake in Russia, and an explosion of fire (here we go again) in Texas.

Terremoto de 8.8 sacude Kamchatka al Este de Rusia y activa alerta de Tsunami en el Pacifico pic.twitter.com/Kj45wCh21E

— Tony Venet (@TonyVenet274186) August 26, 2026

[resources: Fear of Fire and Future Events]