The Trump administration’s construction project in Big Bend National Park, which is destroying the area’s pristine environment to build more of President Donald Trump’s border wall, is temporarily on hold following bipartisan outrage over the environmental damage.
“CBP is pausing all construction activity in Big Bend National Park while I visit and conduct a personal, on-the-ground evaluation,” Rodney Scott, head of Customs and Border Protection, posted on X Monday. “CBP is firmly committed to protecting America, and that includes our national treasures like Big Bend National Park.”
Last summer, Congress gave the Trump administration $46 billion to construct a wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a project that is happening with little to no oversight in order to fast track construction.
Big Bend, bordering Mexico in West Texas, features volcanic dikes, dinosaur bones and stunning canyon views. In July, the Trump admin waived restrictions on construction, allowing bulldozing and parts of the border wall and roads to be built, drawing the ire of environmental groups and the National Parks Conservation Association, which has warned that the damage could last generations.
“Bulldozing Big Bend National Park is an unconscionable attack on one of America’s greatest treasures,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, National Parks Conservation Association President and CEO, told USA Today. “The administration is slashing through miles of this wild landscape, threatening access to recreation and harming sensitive wildlife habitat.”
The Big Bend project is on hold for now, but on Tuesday, the Trump admin advanced plans to open up approximately 45 million acres of wilderness in places like Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to road construction and logging, removing protections that have been in place for a quarter century, according to the New York Times. The move will rescind the “roadless rule” enacted by President Bill Clinton, opening up millions of acres of untouched wilderness to destruction.
“By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told the Times.
None of this is entirely surprising given how Trump eroded environmental protections for national parks in his first term, such as shrinking the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah. Those efforts were challenged in federal court, but in his second term, Trump has doubled down on his efforts to reshape these and other parks. It’s not yet clear how bad the damage is, but it’s also evident that Trump is just getting started.
In late July, according to the FBI, utility companies in at least seven states experienced cyberattacks from “malicious cyber actors” who remotely accessed water management systems, causing loss of pressure and flooding. As it turned out, there were more hazards. The agency warned in a recent alert that “untreated ground water [could] seep into pipes.” At least 30 municipal water facilities were hit in Minnesota alone. These cyberattacks were likely launched by Iranian agents as part of Donald Trump’s ongoing war with the Islamic Republic he started alongside Israel, and they could become part of a new normal as the conflict drags on.
Now, in a memo released Wednesday, the White House is attempting to fight back against cybercrime by encouraging private companies to go after transnational criminal organizations “by incorporating the ingenuity of the private sector.” Details are vague, but a fact sheet hints at combatting “transnational cybercrime, fraud and other predatory schemes against American citizens,” such as ransomware attacks, phishing schemes and sextortion.
U.S. hacking laws prohibit individuals and companies from launching cyberattacks. According to TechCrunch, “the private sector can defend against incoming cyberattacks, but not launch of operate them,” a policy that spans several presidential administrations.
This program is still in the very early stages, with more guidance coming in the next few months. But there’s no way this could possibly backfire, right? I’m kidding: Even under normal circumstances, giving private companies this much power is likely to incentivize inventing enemies to fight or drive unnecessary spending. That’s the military-industrial complex in a nutshell.
You could say this program comes straight out of the Age of Sail, in which governments issued letters of marque and reprisal, licenses that authorized privateers to essentially practice legalized piracy, with private vessels attacking enemies of the state. Think of American shipping companies plundering British ships, which was common practice once upon a time. These letters haven’t been issued since the Civil War, but the parallel is obvious and creates shades of gray that could present major problems. Just look at Capt. William Kidd, who was hired by the British government to hunt pirates, but was later executed for being one.
Trump’s cyberattack program, in all likelihood, will just be another way for his tech-bro allies, like Peter Thiel of Palantir, to siphon more money from the government while doing next to nothing to actually protect Americans or improve their quality of life. This is especially concerning in light of recent news that the Homeland Security Department spied on left-leaning Minnesotans who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Think these tools and tactics won’t be used domestically? That would certainly buck the trend of U.S. tech companies that regularly surveil Americans, be it Flock Safety, whose ubiquitous cameras are being used to stalk people getting abortions, or Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that hunts migrants.
A better solution might be to invest more in improved cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, like the power grids that risk being hacked. As they say, the best defense is a good offense. A digital bill of rights would be a major part of that by boosting privacy and protecting the level of data that corporations can siphon up about ordinary people. An even simpler solution, come to think of it, would be not picking fights with other countries that are likely to fight back. Alas, that’s probably too obvious a strategy for our tech-illiterate president, and not enough of a slush fund for Silicon Valley. Maybe someday we’ll have leaders who understand the internet and the importance of avoiding perverse incentives. Until then, it’s a good idea to keep your system software updated and use a strong password.
By now most of us have heard the acronym TACO, for Trump Always Chickens Out, but I was recently introduced to NACHO, which means Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about these cutesy insults — Donald Trump surely enjoys them, given his apparent enthusiasm for Mexican food — but appropriate or not, the labels seem accurate.
On Monday, Iran announced the strait will remain closed until Trump gives in to their demands, which include, according to the New York Times, “the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, the withdrawal of American forces from around the country, the payment of war reparations, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the end of attacks on Iran’s allies in the region.”
Trump is so eager to claim victory in the war he started alongside Israel that he might even be willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, unnamed U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. The president has also made his own list of demands, not all of which are coherent, that includes compensation for the 18 U.S. service members killed since the war began. In a Truth Social post, he also demanded that “compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months.”
Iran’s timetable of negotiations is reportedly designed to drag out past the midterms, with the expectation being Republicans will get clobbered in elections over high gas prices and the deeply unpopular war.
Let’s not pretend Trump truly cares about dead Iranian citizens, given how many have been killed by U.S. and Israeli bombs. But even if Trump were to agree to the Islamic Republic’s terms tomorrow, Tehran seems unlikely to serve up the victory he so badly craves. Iran’s timetable of negotiations is reportedly designed to drag out past the midterms, with the expectation being Republicans will get clobbered in elections over high gas prices and the deeply unpopular war. Such a loss could lead to Trump’s third impeachment — a very big if! — or at least hobble any further funding for the conflict.
But failing that, Tehran’s Plan C could already be coming clear: Just wait till Trump is gone. As reported by the International Business Times, Majid Shakeri, a senior adviser linked to Iran’s parliament, has urged the nation’s leaders to avoid both open war and a definitive agreement with Trump. The best strategy, he argues, is simply to wait until the end of Trump’s term, writing on X, “The path to victory in this war is neither just fighting nor just reaching an understanding. The path to victory is ‘managing the process of neither war nor peace, up to the point of victory.’”
Similarly, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday that “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost.”
While such a pathway is not Iran’s official policy, it nonetheless seems like a plausible outcome. But waiting until Jan. 20, 2029, when Trump’s second term will end — assuming he doesn’t die first, get impeached and removed from office, or try to break the Constitution badly enough to somehow serve a third term — could backfire. (That might mean an end to Iran’s problems, but it certainly wouldn’t be for Americans. A Tucker Carlson win in 2028 might sound like a joke now, but so did Trump in 2015.)
At any rate, the president’s war with Iran is clearly unsustainable in the long-term, and the U.S. may have to bow out sooner rather than later. Since attacking Iran, the U.S. has increasingly ran low on weapons stockpiles. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies details why this is happening; it’s not just the Iran war, but the entire spectrum of how the military operates, including the Pentagon’s budget process and how the U.S. has engaged in recent wars, including under the Biden administration. While I’m skeptical of such reports being used to further inflate the military-industrial complex — look no further than Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget — numbers are numbers, and you can’t bomb something with what you don’t have.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy announced Monday that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell by 6.1 million barrels to just under 300 million barrels last week. That’s the lowest the SPR has been since 1983. For this and numerous other reasons, such as the recent jobs report that shows how badly the economy is faring under Trumponomics, many folks are comparing the president to Jimmy Carter, who famously faced his own economic challenges and stalemate with Iran during the 1979-1980 hostage crisis. But really, this level of incompetence is in a league of its own.
There are other dumb acronyms for the Trump administration, continuing the taqueria theme, such as EMPANADA, for Everybody Makes Promises and Nobody Actually Delivers Anything, and TAMALES, for Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everybody Shafted. I have my own feelings about this era, steeped in euphemism, but whatever people decide to brand it, there’s no denying reality: As we should’ve learned with Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, you can’t just drop bombs on countries and expect them to do your bidding. Or as I might put it, SALSA: Someone Always Loses to Stupid Aggression. That someone is inevitably us.
Nearly two years ago, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in New York City. A massive manhunt followed, resulting in the arrest of Luigi Mangione, who quickly became a sort of folk hero for people fed up with the state of healthcare in the U.S., even if they may not support the use of violence in fixing or protesting the system.
On Friday, Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges in Thompson’s death.
“I shot Mr. Thompson and he died,” he told the court. “I knew what I was doing was illegal.”
Mangione also explained his motive: his back injury and experience with the U.S. healthcare system as a patient drove him to kill Thompson, although he was not specifically a customer of UnitedHealthcare. However, the company has a large reputation for denying claims to customers, especially compared to other insurers.
Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s on Dec. 9, 2024, and police said they found a 3D-printed gun and a 3D-printed silencer in his backpack, as well as a notebook describing grievances with the healthcare industry, such as “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
Mangione is to be sentenced at a separate hearing on Dec. 18, which will be determined at the full discretion of the judge. At the state level, Mangione still faces murder charges and the possibility of life in prison, though his defense is expected to argue that both cases cover the same alleged conduct, which is essentially double jeopardy.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that one of his “most trusted” aides is leaving his administration at the end of the month. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, 28, the youngest person to hold the role, has been one of the biggest and most controversial mouthpieces for the president, describing Democrats as “terrorists,” making “your mom” jokes and organizing a White House “media offender” list.
Leavitt is leaving “so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!” Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social. “Karoline will now be one of my top outside advisors, and an influential voice within the Republican Party, as we work to defy History, and conclusively win the Midterm Elections.”
In May, Leavitt took time off from work for the birth of her daughter. She also has a two-year-old son. She entered politics soon after graduating and in June 2020 became an assistant White House press secretary. After Trump lost the election, Leavitt campaigned for House of Representatives in New Hampshire’s first congressional district, branding herself a “pro-Trump” candidate, but ultimately losing to Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas. After a stint as a spokeswoman for Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., Leavitt became the press secretary for his 2024 presidential campaign.
She presented an enormous lie during her very first press briefing on Jan. 28, 2025, claiming the Trump admin had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” There is no evidence this happened. She also made claims that a double-tap strike on a boat in the Caribbean was “self-defense” and downplayed Trump’s appearance in the Epstein files.
In her time as secretary, Leavitt attempted to elevate “non-traditional media” like One America News Network, LindellTV and The Daily Wire, and mirrored Trump’s antagonistic approach to the press. “Because Karoline’s boss is so vociferous, she is vociferous,” Ari Fleischer, the press secretary under Republican George W. Bush, observed after her first year. “She channels Donald Trump in a way that I’m certain makes Donald Trump very happy.”
So far this, most of the departures, voluntary or not, from the Trump administration have been women, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Trump has yet to announce who will replace Leavitt.
As the western United States is gripped by record-shattering wildfires, some unscrupulous people aren’t just contemplating what it will be like for future generations living in our new normal of erratic weather patterns, or wondering whether climate change is making this situation worse. They’re thinking about how much money they can make.
Prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to bet on pretty much anything, whether it’s some boring sports thing, election results or perhaps even war crimes. You can even bet on the outcome of clinical drug trials and whether cancer drugs will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which experts criticize as undermining the integrity of medication research. The father of a seventh-grader living with cancer recently raised the issue of “whether researchers in a trial could be motivated by prediction market profits,” something so heinous it is difficult to contemplate.
While the makers of these apps insist they are “future exchanges,” not digital gambling parlors, regulators in places like Singapore, France, Belgium and elsewhere aren’t convinced and have banned the platforms altogether. There are several mechanisms inherent to prediction market apps that make them a little different than putting it all on red. They involve binary contracts that resolve based on whether certain events happen or not, using some complex math to factor in a probability of an outcome. Critics are increasingly looking into the consequences of making almost everything wagerable.
Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.
On Aug. 3, Democratic senators from six states sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent government arm that regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that the apps are allowing bets to be placed on wildfires, which could incentivize arson. They highlight previous examples of bets placed on the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which razed large areas of Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures.
“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter’s authors, who include Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wrote. “There’s also the heightened risk — according to state and local fire officials — that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”
For example, someone might bet on how big a fire might get or how many buildings it might destroy. I wanted to know what unexpected stuff I could find on the apps, so I downloaded Polymarket and Kalshi, seemingly the two most popular platforms or at least the ones I’m tired of seeing ads of the most. Both were littered with sports events, which I scrolled past, but also had sections for elections, politics, tech and a lot more. Polymarket seemed to have fewer and more bland options for betting, with the most shocking queries I could find being things like who will get kicked out of Trump admin next or if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by year’s end.
After giving over way too much private data to Kalshi, I was able to browse entire categories dedicated to natural disasters and climate change, such as if 2026 will be the hottest year ever or if the U.S. will ever meet its climate goals. I also found weird things like how many Atlantic hurricanes this year or if California will be hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake, which goes without saying but would be extremely bad. For context, the recent Colombia and Venezuela earthquakes were both magnitude 7.4 and 7.5 respectively. All of these things are likely to kill countless people if they happen, but climate change is already widely treated like an abstract future problem, rather than our disastrous present, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.
Both apps allowed wagers on the number of “explosive diarrhea” cyclosporiasis and measles cases this year, with both outbreaks shattering records. I could not find anything related to fires, presumably such content being recently removed, as there have been plenty of cited examples of bets on fires in the past, such as how many acres or locations the Palisades fires would reach.
So many of the scenarios on these apps present classic examples of a perverse incentive, in which the structure of a system encourages undesirable results. The classic example is of dubious historical accuracy, but originates from the British occupation of India. Weary of venomous snake bites, British authorities put a bounty on dead cobras — but this only incentivized locals to breed more of the snakes, in order to collect even more reward money. If you allow people to earn cash from dead snakes, you risk getting a lot more living snakes in the process.
Are we already seeing this with wildfires? It’s hard to say, but it’s true that arson is, strangely, a common catalyst for wildfires. One man was arrested outside of Spokane a few days ago, admitting to starting the Old Trails Fire, which burned entire neighborhoods to a crisp. Police say that Aaron Farinacci admitted to having set two dozen other blazes since 2025.
The conditions that make these blazes so out-of-control are thanks to climate change, which is causing hotter and drier conditions. According to a 2021 study supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the increase in fire weather in the western U.S. is primarily due to climate change. (Still, trying to explain that level of nuance to a climate denier is like teaching rocks to play Risk.)
What these apps do best is lay bare the ways in which our entire economy is structured like a betting app strung together by incentive perverts. It’s why the market rewards the most amoral and destructive behavior, from hedge funds that short the market and destroy company value to vulture capitalists who gut businesses like Toys “R” Us or Radio Shack, and then escape on their golden corporate parachutes. Even when such behavior results in a recession, the government is likely to bail big corporations out, while any form of assistance for the working class is branded as “socialism.” In fact, the entire stock market could be best described as a casino that incentivizes absurd growth like the historic tech bubble provoked by the spread of artificial intelligence.
Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.
Money itself is just a construct, one with rules dreamt up by humans. We don’t have to live in a world where people profit from tragedy, be it wildfires or a child with cancer, housing foreclosures or weapons manufacturing. I’m willing to bet we can actually achieve such a utopian outcome, even if it takes another century. The alternative is to continue draining everything of value as it goes up in smoke.
Last month, Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump ally David Ellison threatened to relocate the company out of California in response to his ongoing legal battle with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is suing, along with 12 other states, aiming to block the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. The threat was first reported by Semafor. Now, Bonta has responded.
“Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through,” Bonta wrote on X. “Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court. It didn’t work the first time … and it won’t work this time.”
If Paramount were to move its HQ, it would likely happen before Oct. 1, when “Paramount will start accruing a $7-million-per-day ‘ticking fee’ payable to WBD shareholders until the deal closes,” according to Variety. Which state will it be? That’s not clear yet, but presumably it wouldn’t be any of the dozen states suing the company, which include Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. Ellison’s shortlist reportedly includes Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.
The Warner Bros. Discovery takeover has been steeped in controversy since the beginning. Recently, a pair of government watchdog groups demanded investigations into whether Paramount gifted luxury gala tickets to Federal Communications Commission members, thus violating ethics requirements, while the company sought approval for its acquisition.
In a span of weeks, Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.
Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose…
Ellison has been a major Trump acolyte in the president’s second term. After the Trump administration approved Skydance’s takeover of Paramount in 2025, Ellison hand-picked political commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, sparking months of controversy as viewership has cratered and stories related to the Epstein files and immigration were spiked.
Last month, President Donald Trump visited Turkey for a fairly banal reason: a routine NATO summit. But when the president left the country on July 8, he took a secret route home. As he left, the White House reported he was on Air Force One. Trump even made a big show of boarding the plane in front of cameras before later sneaking out the back. But he was really on a different plane, unbeknownst to the public and many in his entourage.
To get people off the trail, Trump even posted on his social media site Truth Social, “For old time’s sake, we’ll be taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall, a short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our Great Military Heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition to the Air Force Fleet!”
Trump was referring to the “flying palace” — the Boeing 747-8 gifted last year to the Trump admin by Qatar, in what has widely been characterized as a bribe — which he took to get there. Instead of leaving on either that jet or “former” Air Force One, the president secretly hopped into an airport catering truck and shuttled to an Air Force C-32A, a smaller military plane.
The clandestine mission was first reported by the Washington Post, citing anonymous sources who say the move fooled some journalists and some White House staff members “who believed they were on the same plane as the president.”
The breakdown in negotiations to end the war with Iran at the time is cited as the reason for Trump’s hide and seek charade, fearing some sort of attack. Such behavior is rare for U.S. presidents.
“In the first hours after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush administration officials did not immediately disclose the president’s whereabouts, saying only that he had been taken to an ‘undisclosed location,” the Post reported. “But they did not say he was somewhere he was not, and within hours officials revealed that he had been flown to a military facility in Nebraska.”
The same week that Trump switched planes, the New York Times, citing anonymous officials, reported that the Qatari-gifted Air Force One lacks the defensive countermeasures of the previous model. The White House later subpoenaed the Times journalists over the report, demanding to know who disclosed the information, and even brought FBI Director Kash Patel into the investigation. The subpoenas were later withdrawn.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is under congressional scrutiny following an appearance before a Senate committee last week, in which the former National Institutes of Health immunologist was grilled by elected officials over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment.
The committee’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has not been shy about his scorn toward Fauci, who led the pandemic response in the first Trump and Biden administrations. Paul floated conspiracy theories that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, was leaked from a Chinese lab and that Fauci covered up this info. There is no conclusive evidence that the virus leaked from anywhere but nature, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from promoting such theories.
Seemingly at the advice of his lawyers, Fauci declined to entertain this political side show. Nonetheless, he serves as a convenient scapegoat for the ongoing public health failures under President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As unfortunate as this sounds, COVID did not go away. The virus that sparked a global pandemic still regularly infects, disables and kills hundreds of people per week. Although it’s not anything like previous waves, right now cases are rising slightly across the country, especially in Alaska and Missouri, but also in California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Waning immunity, viral mutations and a refusal for some people to stay up on vaccines are part of the reason why COVID is returning.
This isn’t a pandemic anymore, according to experts, but that’s because the virus is now endemic — it’s a part of our daily lives like flu, HIV and other infectious diseases. Even once-eradicated diseases like measles are now all too common. COVID is also now a preventable disease. Vaccines, masking, improved indoor air quality and acquired immunity have all kept the virus at bay so that morgue trucks no longer fill the streets. Still, even a “mild” infection these days can be devastating and lead to long-term health problems.
But a big part of the reason COVID is endemic in the first place is because it wasn’t controlled early, like MERS and SARS-1 were, related viruses that never became pandemics. The first Trump admin completely botched its response to containing COVID, but now they can deflect from their past and current failures — including letting things like the cyclospora outbreak slip or allowing Ebola to balloon into the second biggest outbreak in history — by attacking Fauci and plugging baseless conjecture about COVID’s origins. Unfortunately, for some people, this strategy seems to be convincing.
The moon has a brand new crater as of Wednesday, thanks to a rogue SpaceX rocket that crashed into Earth’s nearest neighbor at 5,400 miles an hour. Originally part of a 2025 mission to launch a pair of lunar landers for U.S. and Japanese companies, the rocket was supposed to fall back to Earth. Instead, it strayed off course and eventually reached its final resting place on the moon’s surface.
According to the Guardian, astronomers were unable to confirm the impact, “possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.” A day later, a Korean lunar orbiter captured images of the impact, but it will still take time to confirm the size of the crater, which is expected to be about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, for the record. In March 2022, a rocket slammed into the moon, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide. That object was later identified as part of China’s Long March 3C rocket, which propelled the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014. In fact, there’s been trash on the moon ever since humans first landed there, which some scientists cite as evidence of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by how badly humans have messed up the planet and its nearby neighbors.
NEWS 🚨: A Korean lunar orbiter has photographed the crash site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage on the Moon pic.twitter.com/chI8hpWdsv
Indeed, it’s difficult to estimate how space junk is currently orbiting our planet. By one count, there are more than 17,000 metric tons of objects in Earth orbit, including nearly 19,000 satellites. Every time we shoot more stuff up into space, we risk it hitting something else, as in a giant game of billiards. That threatens to create a cataclysmic chain reaction, in which every collision creates more space debris and also risks damaging satellites and space stations we’d like to keep operational. This might make future space launches unsafe (such as the planned Artemis IV moon landing mission) and could render GPS devices completely useless. If you think Google Maps is glitchy now, just wait.
This hypothetical scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, but I propose renaming it Tesla Syndrome, given that Elon Musk’s Starlink has nearly 11,000 satellites in orbit, with eventual plans to launch as many as 42,000. Musk’s car is still floating out there somewhere, too. The statistical probability of a company owned by the world’s richest man making our space trash problem even worse is high, so we’d better keep crossing our fingers for more near misses — and, just maybe, a future in which humans behave less like slobs.
While Jeffrey Epstein’s island or his various mansions get a lot of attention, the late sex offender and financier’s New Mexico Zorro Ranch was also allegedly the site of extensive abuse and criminal activity. Now, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Department of Justice and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, are accused of “stonewalling” New Mexico’s criminal investigation of Epstein’s activities at the ranch outside of Santa Fe.
New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who is behind the lawsuit, argues that the DOJ unlawfully withheld records, therefore delaying justice for victims. The lawsuit accuses Blanche and the DOJ of perpetuating “that disgrace” of failing to investigate or hold Epstein accountable before his death. The suit requests the court to order the DOJ to provide the requested unredacted records.
“USDOJ and Acting Attorney General Blanche are refusing to facilitate the investigation of state law crimes by hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators from Attorney General Torrez and state law enforcement, when New Mexico is one of few jurisdictions that still may have an opportunity to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or otherwise provide some sense of justice to survivors,” the lawsuit reads.
Meanwhile, New Mexico’s legislative “truth commission” released its first report on Zorro Ranch Wednesday, but the 119-page document offers little in the way of new revelations or recommendations. It draws heavily on news reports and what has so far been released from the Epstein files, but does underscore numerous hurdles the investigation has faced.
“Those in law enforcement most responsible for protecting New Mexicans from Epstein played a passive role in investigating him, letting others in Miami and in New York do it. As a result, the conduct of Epstein and his co-conspirators in New Mexico went unexamined and unpunished,” the authors conclude. “Going forward, this commission endeavors to uncover the truth so many for too long were blind to.”
If you need any proof that climate change is not some far off problem for future generations — it’s our disastrous present — look no further than the unfolding wildfire crisis gripping the globe. In Spokane County, Washington alone, three major wildfires have devastated the area, prompting the evacuation of almost 65,000 people and destroying more than 700 homes. But there are at least 14 other fires raging throughout the state. In nearby Oregon, a record-shattering 2 million acres have burned, with 102 new fires reported across the nation on Aug. 2 alone, seven of which are large. Meanwhile, across the pond, Europeans are battling their own record-breaking wildfires in the U.K., France, Greece and elsewhere, where two crew members were killed in a midair collision.
High winds and hot, dry weather have fueled the blazes, but these conditions have been worsened by climate change. Fires are a natural phenomenon, of course, but what’s unnatural is their intensity and the level of heat. Every time we burn fossil fuels, it adds more chemicals to the atmosphere that trap more heat, creating a positive feedback loop that makes everything hotter and drier.
Indeed, months of drought and heat waves tend to foreshadow the fiercest wildfires. As a recent analysis found on fires in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Cyprus and Greece, “human-caused climate change was a key driver of the fire weather conditions, primarily through its influence on exceptionally high temperatures, but also by exacerbating drought conditions.”
The circumstances that make these wildfires so severe are becoming more and more common across the world. “Anywhere can burn under the right conditions, and unfortunately all of those conditions are changing,” Erica Smithwick, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told Scientific American recently. All of this serves as a warning. The question remains if anyone is still listening.
Imagine this conversation with your spouse or roommate: “Dude, what is that smell? It stinks like burning diapers. Did you forget to pay the air?” Sounds like something from a knockoff episode of “Black Mirror,” right? Canned air was actually used as a bit in “Spaceballs,” with the joke being how absurd it is to pay for something we breathe freely.
While I claim no clairvoyant skills, given the ever-diminishing quality of the air we breathe, purified air could definitely become a commodity someday. Air subscription probably wouldn’t work exactly like other utilities, such as internet service or natural gas, where it gets pumped directly into your house, but then again, who is to say? The future could be as weird as the present and when it comes to air quality, things are changing fast.
At the moment, a new front in the endless culture wars concerns whether air conditioning is ethical or even necessary. That comes in the wake of yet another record-breaking heat wave that has pummeled the Northern Hemisphere. Europeans aren’t big fans of AC, it turns out, but things have gotten so hot that many people are now making the switch. It’s become a selling point for far-right figures like French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who has promised to blanket Europe in cool air, while British conservatives want to deregulate building codes that restrict AC.
Most forms of air conditioning are highly energy-intensive and, depending on its power source, can belch even more carbon into the atmosphere, trapping more of the sun’s heat and causing more intense heat waves. That feedback loop is likely part of the reason why temperatures previously considered extreme or impossible are now becoming the norm all over the world — but the suffering might be too great to ignore the benefits of AC.
The June heat wave carried a death toll of more than 10,000 people across 27 countries, according to data from EuroMOMO, a mortality monitoring network with backing from the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Over 9,000 of those deaths were people aged 65 and older. Such extreme heat usually kills people via heatstroke, or by inflaming heart and lung diseases. Whatever the specific causes of death, this was a mass casualty event, on par with the earthquakes that hit Venezuela a few weeks ago. Climate scientists universally agree that this summer’s heat waves would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
This summer’s Northern Hemisphere heat wave has been a mass casualty event, on a par with the recent earthquakes in Venezuela.
On this side of the ocean, the U.S. is sweltering under its own heat domes, which have been made worse by more than 100 wildfires in Canada and Minnesota that are smothering the East Coast in toxic, deadly smoke, turning the July skies an earwax yellow. Dramatic videos of members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in Ontario fleeing their homes by boat have flooded the internet because the images are truly apocalyptic.
Views of just one of the wildfires ripping across Ontario, Canada yesterday. Similar fire behavior is expected today.
Fires in Minnesota and Canada have made air quality across the east coast of the United States “unsuitable for everyone.”
At least 18 states have issued air quality alerts, as they should, because wildfire smoke wreaks havoc on the body, from the brain to the heart and lungs to the kidneys. The small particles in wildfire smoke are an escalating threat to global health, increasing risks of other diseases like COVID. As noted in a recent review in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, these effects are not evenly distributed. Poor folks, immigrants, women, children, the elderly and ethnic and racial minorities are disproportionately exposed to these hazards.
But we’re all kind of used to this by now, right? And that’s a big problem. We now deal with wildfire smoke every year, in a “season” that stretches longer and longer each year thanks to warmer and drier conditions. Air pollution, wildfire smoke, industrial disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio train wreck and extended pollen seasons are all reasons why people are increasingly concerned with making their indoor environments actually breathable. The result is that air itself is increasingly becoming a luxury item.
The World Health Organization estimates that around 7 million people die from air pollution annually, while 99% of the world’s population lives somewhere that is exposed to air pollution levels above WHO health guidelines. So we stock up on air purifiers, now an $18 billion industry, along with indoor air quality monitors and subscription air filter services. While AC seems ubiquitous to middle-class Americans, approximately 34 million people in the U.S. struggle to afford it, which doesn’t account for the high-tech HVAC systems the ultra-rich indulge in. The issue of quality air access is increasingly linked privilege and wealth. Startups with names like Air Factory and FreshAir are already starting to crop up aiming to fill this growing market demand.
So what will the future really look like? Will people start wearing N95 masks indoors, or have breathing apparatuses hooked up to their chests like fighter pilots? Will air become a municipal service, or a luxury commodity like canned kombucha? If you miss your monthly payment to Amazon Oxygen, will you choke to death? Given the way things are trending, none of that would be entirely surprising. Summer 2026 is already on track to be the hottest in recorded human history, topping 2024, which edged out 2023’s record. (We saw a slight dip in average temperatures in 2025; it didn’t last.) This might well be the hottest summer of your lifetime, and also might be the coolest summer of the rest of your life. Read that sentence again: If you think things are bad now, wait a year. Or five.
My imaginary scenario could still be decades in the future, but a reality where people pay for air doesn’t seem like a joke anymore. We could decide to treat this sci-fi possibility seriously right now by working to cut down air pollution at the source. That would mean, at the very least, sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels — indeed, ending it, sooner rather than later — and choosing to protect forests instead of chopping them down for toilet paper, which is a big factor in why so much of Canada is burning in the first place.
The good news here — and there is some, believe it or not — is that we’re still in the middle of a global green energy revolution, even if it’s being diminished or undercut by the out-of-control AI industry. As much as the Trump administration denies the reality of climate change while catering to the fossil fuel industry, the Iran war and its resulting spike in energy prices are accelerating the transition to renewable energy. We can’t be sure if that’s happening rapidly enough to make a difference, but it remains true that every decision we make now to lower emissions will help to create a more livable future. Of course it’s absurd to imagine breathable air as something you can put a price tag on. The same could be said about food, water and healthcare. We can at least keep air in the realm of absurdity by fighting for a greener future, which we can still see ahead, even through the smoke.
Login
