Supreme Court corruption
It is not accidental that the two Justices "outed" as having inappropriately close relations with billionaires, Thomas and Scalia, are both on the far right. They have always represented in their jurisprudence a culture of greed, selfishness and superiority. You would have to have a very powerful firewall, which most humans don't, to endorse mass selfishness and live with integrity privately. I never quite saw it this way before, but the capitalist creed actually eats the Kantian imperative. Kant said we should all behave as we think everyone else should (which is a version of Jesus' "do unto others"). Libertarian capitalism says that we should always behave with maximum selfishness, or as we wish no one else would; but if everyone does that, we set each other off, in a way which somehow produces the maximum utility and good self regulation in lieu of government. But we can imagine Clarence Thomas, like a character in Godfather III wanting to "dip his beak", wonder why he should spend a lifetime fighting for wealth and luxury for others without carving off a little for himself. Along comes a billionaire who offers him a house, absolutely free, for his mom, expensive presents, and a seat on a private jet flying to exotic places...
HBO
Before the Titan imploded, I had already written the first draft of a lead essay, "The Kitschification of Everything", in which I mentioned, along with six or seven other examples, the death of the HBO brand. At its inception in the 1980's and '90's, HBO stood for high quality, thought-provoking and relatively sparse content. Who would possibly want to get rid of the brand? The answer is executives in a world of completely bland, by the numbers content, where the streamer spends two hundred million dollars for rote superhero, espionage, and thriller stories which lack any personality, quirkiness or memorable elements whatever. Critics have suggested the "what was your favorite scene in _____" test: nobody remembers. Perhaps HBO was too much of a Cool Medium back in the day, making the audience think too much....?
Wagner Group Rebellion
I was fascinated by the Wagner Group's very brief march on Moscow: everyone was speculating what it meant for Putin's Narrative, or if Prigozhin would be even worse if he were in charge. But for me a highly interesting element is why a mercenary force acquired so much power in the first place. You could argue that, acting by proxy, you can commit more murder (and rape), use outlawed nerve gas and poisons, and more effectively terrorize civilian populations than via uniformed troops (not that Putin cares very much about the optics of anything but power). But I think there is something else going on: I well remember Donald Rumsfeld's strange desire to outsource everything in the days of the Iraq war. If you are unable to resist allowing deep corruption on the part of your major players, you have created a terrible conflict in an organization which supposedly exists to win wars. The oligarchs make money by skimming it, decreasing effectiveness. At the end of the Roman empire, no emperor could really know how many soldiers a legion had, because half or more of them might have gone home or died, while their officers continued collecting their salaries; nor was it possible to be certain how many swords, shields, harnesses etc. they possessed, because oligarchs had been selling garbage or nonexistent ones. Even in America circa 2002, this problem, though not as severe as in Russia or late Rome, existed, in the sense that any project in the military (a new software system, tank or airplane) gets contracted to the same few mega-companies, which might charge hundreds of million dollars without ever producing a working product. By "outsourcing" to mercenaries in Rumsfeld's or Putin's world, you create a competitor which actually makes money killing people,which the oligarchs do not.
The night sky
One of the beautiful things about living where I do was being able to see the Milky Way. I bought a small Dobsonian scope and spend a few memorable nights per summer searching for Messier objects. This summer, I haven't seen a decent night sky since the day of the Canadian wildfire smoke which overcame New York City. Haze in the atmosphere is not the only problem; there is spreading light pollution, more of a glow from Montauk and East Hampton than there used to be-- and more neighbors who, for no good reason, leave bright floodlights on all night. For professional astronomers, their ability to photograph faraway objects has also been heavily compromised by Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, which pollute almost every frame. Who knew that even the night sky could be ruined, in a classic Tragedy of the Commons?