Elon Musk recycled one of his tired, old ‘SF is a [fill in the blank] zombie apocalypse’ insults in an X post supporting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s statement about sending the National Guard to “clean up” crime in San Francisco.

As KRON4 reports, Musk jumped into the conversation surrounding Benioff’s statement Saturday, noting that downtown San Francisco is a “drug zombie apocalypse.” The timing of Musk’s renewed interest in San Francisco politics is notable given the recent news that Musk’s startup Neuralink just signed a lease on a 144,209-square-foot building in South San Francisco, per SFist.

Musk added in another, barely coherent X post that the off-duty police officers hired by Benioff to monitor Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which is taking place October 14–16, get paid “million dollars for each drug zombie they ‘manage.’ Their incentive is therefore massive to keep the narcotics dealers operating, otherwise their herd of drug zombies will leave.”

Similarly, back in 2023, Musk referred to downtown San Francisco as a “derelict zombie apocalypse” when comedian Dave Chappelle claimed “wokeness” was the cause of SF’s problems, per the Chronicle.

“The disaster that is downtown SF, once beautiful and thriving, now a derelict zombie apocalypse, is due to the woke mind virus,” Musk wrote on X at the time.

Benioff is now downplaying his original statement about sending the National Guard to San Francisco, per the San Francisco Standard. Local figures responded over the weekend including San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who emphatically said, “We don't need your help here,” while pointing out steadily decreasing crime rates. Mayor Daniel Lurie backed up these assertions.

“Crime is down 30 percent citywide. SFPD, our sheriff’s department, is doing an incredible job. We’re going to keep people safe during Salesforce and Dreamforce this week. And we’re going to keep people safe 365 days a year, Lurie said, per KPIX.

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Previously: Day Around the Bay: Salesforce's Marc Benioff Wants to Bring National Guard to SF, ‘Re-Fund’ SFPD

Related: Elon Musk Comes Crawling Back to the Bay Area, Seeking New Office Space for Neuralink and xAI

It's probably not a wildly accurate prediction of what will happen to Northern California in 1,000 years. But a new PlayStation game by Sony-owned Guerrilla Games depicts San Francisco and some other parts of the state as they might appear without so many humans, in a distant future well populated by threatening robotic dinosaurs.

Horizon Forbidden West, released last week by Sony Interactive Entertainment, is the latest in Guerrilla's Horizon series, which began with 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn. The earlier game was set in the post apocalyptic Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone National Park, and in the ruins of Denver, and featured stunning graphics of roving machines — giant, animatronic dinosaurs and other creatures — who are the dominant species in this future world.

Like the earlier game, Horizon Forbidden West is a first-person, single-player game that allows the player to control Aloy, the heroine and hunter on a quest through dangerous lands.

"In a lush, post-apocalyptic world where nature has reclaimed the ruins of a forgotten civilization, pockets of humanity live on in primitive hunter-gatherer tribes," said the description of Horizon Zero Dawn. "Their dominion over the new wilderness has been usurped by the Machines – fearsome mechanical creatures of unknown origin."

The second game moves further west to the Bay Area and other parts of Northern California, including Yosemite and the Big Sur area. And in the grand map of the game, which a user is allowed to broadly explore, the ruined remains of an overgrown — and very lush and tropical-looking! — San Francisco is just one small piece that Aloy can run through and do stuff in. In the video below, the trip across SF starts around the 25:20 mark.

The first trailer for Horizon Forbidden West, showing the ruins of the Ferry Building and the Palace of Fine Arts underwater, came out last June, and you can see that below, along with a newer trailer that features some more HD graphics, especially the shot of the broken and plant-covered Golden Gate Bridge.

"Everywhere I look, the world is dying," says the narrator in the game, in the voice of Aloy.

"The Old Ones perished a thousand years ago. Their great cities turned to graves. In their place came new life ... then new dangers."

The landscapes of the game are far from bleak, despite the premise.

"One of the things I love about both games is that they’re beautiful," says Guerrilla developer Ben McCaw, who served as narrative director for the game, speaking to the SF Chronicle. “But it’s not without sadness, and that’s the juxtaposition we really like."

And, indeed, maybe this is sort of a rosy imagining of what the world of Northern California could look like after 10 more centuries of climate change. The Chronicle spoke to a few climate experts who think it might not look so lush, though Ben Strauss, CEO of Climate Central, tells the paper, "I especially appreciate showing how vegetation could change. That’s hard work, and little appreciated. The future of California, later this century and the next few, probably involves a lot less forest and a lot more grassland as wildfires increase and more evaporation from hotter weather makes water scarcer."

Sea-level rise of this magnitude is not what's being predicted, though experts suggest that we could see six to 15 feet of ocean rise by 2150, which will be catastrophic enough.

The Chronicle also got a comment on the game's depiction of SF from Larry Goldzband, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. "We don’t foresee this happening, let’s just get that straight," Goldsband says of the game. "It does provide people an incentive to talk about rising sea levels."

Related: Confirmed: Godzilla Will Destroy The Golden Gate Bridge

Hey! The entire city is lit up Giants orange! JK. Too soon?

As discussed earlier, Wednesday is shaping up to be an especially dark — literally — day in San Francisco's recent history. The cause is massive amounts of smoke being pushed into the atmosphere high above us from multiple wildfires in Northern California and Oregon, which is blocking out the sun.

The air in the city is, remarkably, pretty clear and doesn't smell like smoke at all. But that doesn't really alleviate the dread and surreality of this moment — in the middle of a pandemic and historically bad fire season with a psycho narcissist in the White House who might just refuse to leave.

Anyway, here are photos to commemorate this day with showing __ San Francisco landmarks under a russet orange sky. ("BladeRunner2020" is trending on SF Twitter, obvi.)

Related: Sky In SF Turns Apocalypse Orange As Smoke From Oregon, Mendocino Fires Fills Atmosphere

Oh shit, @NancyPelosi called Bannon a White Supremacist TWICE pic.twitter.com/a53ANqRaOo

— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) February 2, 2017

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi finally said the words so many of us have been waiting for her to say, when at a press briefing Thursday morning she repeatedly referred to White House chief strategist and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon as a "white supremacist."

It all went down at her weekly press briefing this morning, during which she said "What's making America less safe is to have a white supremacist named to the National Security Council as a permanent member, while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of national intelligence are told, 'Don't call us we'll call you, you're no longer permanent members.’”

"It's a stunning thing," Pelosi said Thursday, "that a white supremacist, Bannon, would be a permanent member of the National Security Council."

This isn't the first time that Bannonwho's been praised by KKK leader David Duke as "basically creating the ideological aspects of where we're going," has gotten him tagged with that title, but is arguably the most most assertive commentary on his beliefs thus far. The announcement of Bannon's appointment as Trump's chief strategist was met with dismay by those with a functioning soul: For example, Senator Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson said that the appointment "signals that White Supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump’s White House, and that the decision makes it "easy to see why the KKK views Trump as their champion."

Over this past weekend, the president added Bannon to the National Security Council, a decision currently being fought by Democrats and other people who have watched movies about the apocalypse and thought that it didn't look very fun.

“[We] demand you immediately undo the politicization of America’s national security,” a Wednesday letter sent to to Trump from a group of House Democrats, including Reps. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Cedric Richmond (D-La.), as well as Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), read.

"It is completely dangerous and morally reprehensible.”

In addition to the letter, Rep. Stephanie Murphy’s (D-Fla.) introduced a bill Wednesday that, if passed, would "ensure that no person whose 'primary or predominant responsibility is political in nature' could be designated as a member of the Security Council or be allowed to regularly attend its meetings," The Hill reports, effectively banning Bannon from NSC access.

“Our men and women in uniform, our intelligence and homeland security professionals, and our citizens should feel secure in their knowledge that the critical decisions made by the NSC are free from political considerations," Murphy said in a speech from the House floor Wednesday.

"The American people deserve a national security policymaking process that inspires confidence, not cynicism.”

During Thursday's briefing, Bannon was not the only target of Pelosi's disdain. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Pelosi also described Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch as "far outside the mainstream of American judiciary thought." She also suggested that the president's timing of his announcement of Gorsuch's nomination was intended to distract from his controversial immigration ban.

"Every time something gets hot, he changes the subject," Pelosi said Thursday regarding the president's rapid-fire assault on civilization. "He's an illusionist."

Previously: Nancy Pelosi Calls Ben Carson 'Disturbingly Unqualified' For HUD Appointment

A recent New Yorker magazine piece about the variety of very expensive preparations super-rich Americans are busy making for the apocalypse — an event brought about either by Trump's presidency or other destabilizing factors — called attention to the fact that lots of the US one-percenters have contingency plans Down Under. “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more,” Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, said to the magazine. "Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, 'Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’”

Well, as fate would have it, one of my personal favorite tech billionaires, the Facebook board member and advisor to President Trump Peter Thiel, has his own potential escape plans in New Zealand. Previously we learned, also through a New Yorker article, this on a profile of Y-Combinator head honcho Sam Altman, that Thiel had a NZ compound to which the two might take-off together. As opposed to a Trump-related nuclear or climate disaster, their fear at that time was the less imminent threat posed by the artificial intelligence they're also busy funding and developing.

This all prompted the New Zealand Herald to take a look and discover that Thiel, who is a German immigrant to the US, is a also a secret Kiwi, which is to say he's quietly gained citizenship to New Zealand. Wait: Had Thiel helped elect Trump only to flee the US himself, sticking us with him?

Not exactly, as Thiel has actually had his NZ citizenship since 2011, the Herald found. Gizmodo, who were also on the case, observes that citizenship in the country usually requires five years of living there, which it's highly unlikely Thiel has undertaken.

Now the Herald reports that immigration officials are investigating how Thiel's citizenship was granted. "I can't imagine someone of Thiel's stature and wealth and not being noticed for five years, it just doesn't seem very likely," Labour Party immigration spokesman Ian Lees-Galloway told the publication.

But if Thiel really had his way — and I would happily grant this to him — he'd be a citizen of no land. The rights and protections granted by the US and New Zealand are all just forms of oppression to the libertarian-minded billionaire who dreams of "seasteading" on floating barges. The irony there: Thanks to Thiel and his favorite handholding pal Donald, not just billionaires but in fact all of us could soon be floating around and free from the rule of law. Apocalypse whenever, guys!

Previously: One Percenters In Bay Area And Beyond Busy Making Chic Apocalypse Preparations
Related: In Bizzaro Interview With Maureen Dowd, Peter Thiel Says Fake Wrestling Is Real And No One Cares About The Supreme Court

Whatever apocalypse prep you might be making these days, however drastic, it's probably quaint in comparison to what certain members of America's one percent are busy undertaking. Doomsday "preppers," a category of paranoiacs most commonly associated with rural Americans digging bunkers and stockpiling weaponry, has now come to include elites from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, some of whom spill to the New Yorker this week all the hottest high-end prepping trends for an article titled "Doomsday Prep For The Super Rich."

Apocalypse compounds are the new vacation homes (the 2010s version of atomic bomb bunkers) and for the piece, the New Yorker travels to such destinations as "the Survival Condo Project" in Kansas, "a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo" where, for example, one room's interior is imported from the owner's Connecticut home and features nine-foot ceilings and a gas fireplace. But If the midwest is a bit too close to home for your comfort, you might consider a different continent. "The first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities," the magazine writes. "Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance."

As Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, tells the magazine, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’ ” After explaining that his recent laser eye surgery was actually to keep him from fumbling for glasses in a doomsday scenario, he adds that “I own a couple of motorcycles, I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time."

(Not mentioned here is Tesla's innovation, just out two years ago from local billionaire Elon Musk, is a bioweapon filtration system in the new Model X.)

It all just gets more ridiculous from there:

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system," said a member of one such group identified only as the head of an investment firm. That was "extreme," he said: “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang the 44-year-old managing director of the venture capital firm Mayfield Fund, told the magazine:

“There’s a bunch of us in the Valley... We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.”

The form this hypothetical apocalypse might take is a point of disagreement for wealthy preppers. As Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman asks, “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?” The Reddit CEO, who attributes his prepping inclinations to a formative viewing of Deep Impact and experiences at Burning Man, isn't sure. But whatever the coming disaster might be, instead of trying to use their finances to avert it, the super rich are busy fending for themselves, and no one is surprised. I mean, why fight a war on the rich by redistributing wealth when you just use that wealth to buy an expensive escape hatch?

This month, at a literary event held at the Mission District bar the Make Out Room, I was in the audience when Antonio García Martínez read a scene from his early Facebook employee tell-all memoir, Chaos Monkeys. As a New York Times review of the book makes mention, García Martínez lives on a 40-foot sailboat in the San Francisco Bay. Surprise surprise, turns out he's in the prepper crew, too. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now," García Martínez told the New Yorker to explain his purchase of five remote acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest where he's stocked generators, solar panels, and "thousands of rounds of ammunition." He's ready, it seems, to set sail at any moment. Bon voyage!

Related: Y Combinator President Sam Altman Is Prepping For The AI Apocalypse With Guns, Planes, Peter Thiel, And Elon Musk
Tomorrow's Tech Campuses, Built On Yesterday's Hippie Commune Space Dreams

Want to race through a decimated cityscape, Mad Max-style, in your shiny Tesla without fear of being infected by the weaponized virus that has killed off all your friends? You will be able to with the help of Tesla's Model X, officially unveiled this week, complete with bioweapon filtration. Yes, at the press of a button you can turn on an air filter that is ten times the size of a typical car air filter and that is 800 times better at filtering viruses. It is also, as The Verge reports, "300 times better at filtering bacteria, 500 times better at filtering allergens, [and] 700 times better at filtering smog."

It is, in fact, called the "Bioweapon Defense Button," and as Elon Musk explained to a chuckling audience at the unveiling on Tuesday, "This is a real button." And, mostly joking, Musk said, "We’re trying to be a leader in apocalyptic defense scenarios."

The Model X sports SUV, the electric car company's third model to date, has been much blogged and speculated about among tech geeks for several years now via peeks at concept versions, and it was spotted in testing in Alameda back in February. The car has been in production at the company's Fremont, California facility and goes on sale to consumers this week for $144,000, per the BBC.

As expected, the new model has "falcon-wing" style doors for the rear seats that hinge as they raise to make them easier to open in tight spaces — and the only utilitarian reason for these given in the video below is that you can stand up in the backseat to install a car seat. There is also a cool wrap over windshield, the largest of any car, that allows you to look straight up at the sky from the driver's seat without any obstruction or sun roof.

The Model X is described by The Verge's Chris Ziegler as "a Model S in different clothes," with the same "Ludicrous Mode" speed option, making it probably the only SUV on the road that goes "as fast as a Porsche 911 Turbo."

It's also the only SUV that will save you from the zombie apocalypse, so long as the battery holds out until you escape the infected area.

Related: Elon Musk's Ultra-High-Speed 'Hyperloop' Is Getting Built As Test Concept This Year

As Max Brooks has told us more than once, no one who stays in a city will survive the zombie apocalypse. From the threats of the undead themselves, to infrastructure and supply issues (food, water, etc), to the madness that comes from the constant groaning filling your ears, to the disease that'll arrive with all those dead bodies lying around (hello, cholera): well, you'll want to bust out of town as soon as you catch wind of the first terrible bite.

Just in case you need a tastefully attractive reminder of which way you need to go to get the hell out, Laughing Squid points us to Design Different, which has created a charming set of Zombie Safe Zone maps intended to help you chart a course out of your city. Per their website:

The zombie apocalypse has finally happened and you need to leave your city fast! As panic sets in you quickly remember that to survive a zombie apocalypse you need to find a safe zone, somewhere where there's a natural abundance of water, fish and forestry. Somewhere far away in an isolated area. You decide to Google map a location to search for a safe zone but WAIT, all systems are down. How do you find your safe zone!

Each item in their map collection, which they say is focused on the cities most likely to have an outbreak of the undead, includes "directions, distance, time, and additional information about the safe zone like water type and food resources."

But it's not all survival, as the maps come in six sizes and nine colors, as the apocalypse is no reason to forget about design.

The map for San Francisco guides us way up north to Shasta-Trinity National Forest, a 5+ hour trip to an area that generally only allows camping for 30 days, and requires pets to be on leash at all times. Presumably rules like that, and one prohibiting the "discharge a firearm or any other implement capable of taking human life, causing injury, or damaging property" will fall by the wayside when the dead walk the earth. See you there!

So says this ominous looking flyer that just landed in our mailbox at SFist's Western Branch Office this week. According to the materials that we found with our $5 Bed Bath and Beyond Coupon, every weekend in May, Bible prophecy scholar and epic pessimist Mark Farrell (who unfortunately shares a name with one of our City Supervisors), will be bringing Bay Area truth seekers a "fully-illustrated series of dynamic lectures" regarding the end of days in "an easy-to-understand format." (Read: there will be a Powerpoint.)

The thrilling lecture series promises to shed some light on mysterious events like: the timeline of final events, the location of hell, and "what heaven is like" before finally revealing the actual date of the end of the world at the final lecture on May 27th.

Although we initially thought the agenda was the lineup for a Death Metal festival, we did learn that light vegetarian meals will be served. (So come hungry, we guess?) Although there's no mention of kool-aid refreshments anywhere in these materials, we're sure that was just a misprint.

The whole thing happens at the Loughborough Center on Broderick Street at California Street in Pac Heights. While it is absolutely free, donations are apparently welcome.

Previously: Harold Camping Speaks About Rapture Fail; Righteous Naysayers Rejoice
Harold Camping Updates Rapture Prediction: October 21st
Harold Camping Admits He's A Fool

At 11 a..m. (PST) today, radio broadcasters and TV will take part in the first-ever nationwide emergency alert system test. Although emergency alert system tests have been done at the local level, we've never had one performed at the national level. This type of alert should come on handy when, say, slimy aliens attack (because they will), nuclear warfare erupts, a huge comet comes barreling toward planet Earth (you must see Melancholia; it's an actual masterpiece), or Harold Camping's premonitions of apocalyptic doom come true.

Expect to hear a 30-second "eeeeeeee" and familiar "this is only a test" messages during your TV or radio broadcasts.

Again, this is only a test. Don't panic. Not yet, anyway.

According to Seth Rogen, Hollywood most favorite tender bro, George Lucas thinks the world might end in 2012. Yikes! “George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it," Rogen reveals to the Toronto Sun. “He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time [Steven] Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, ’My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry.' " So, yeah, there you have it. Plan accordingly, people. [TS]

In case you needed another apocalyptic scenario to keep you up nights... Climate scientists are referring to it as "the other Big One," and what they're talking about is a series of torrential storms, caused by "atmospheric rivers" over California, the likes of which the state has seen before: in the winter of 1861-62. That year, storms rained down across the state for 45 straight days, leaving a third of the land under water.

A report from a group of scientists who just met in Sacramento Thursday attempts to project what the impacts of such a prolonged winter weather system would be on modern California, and for obvious reasons, devastating. $725 billion worth of devastation, which is three times what's projected in the event of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Southern California.

Geologic evidence of past floods indicate even bigger storms struck the state long before European settlers arrived.

But with infrastructure development and a population that has grown to 37 million, many of whom live on floodplains and hillsides, a big storm could cause massive destruction to the state.

Suffice it to say we'd be fucked, and what we've seen so far this year in Southern California is child's play.

While it's not very Bay Area-ish, Jesus is allegedly in all of our hearts. And now look what happened? We blame the sodomites. And Code Pink.

Read more about Rio de Janeiro's wonder of the world getting struck by lightning, or a nifty fit of photoshopping, here.

Image credit: UPPA, via Daily Mail

Bitter experience tells us that when a cyclist feels the splat of a gnat on the back of the throat, there is little to be done but swallow and hope that it a gnat. This happens more often than you'd think; as the U.S. Army's standard survival manual puts it, "insects are easily caught." Yes, very easily.

San Francisco is remarkably bug-free, of course. In some parts of the country, cyclists have no need of energy bars--they're like bats, subsisting on the high-protein content of the insects they catch on the wing. Here, though, it's a surprise to find one's self suddenly eating a bug, especially at 8:30 p.m. in November.

What kind of bug was it? Find out after the jump.