Some of you will say: who cares, the moon's just a rock. It's also one of the most sacred objects in all of human history, and Elon Musk just put a crater in it with his trash.

On Wednesday morning, a SpaceX rocket stage-struck the moon at 5,400 miles per hour, carving a fresh crater near Einstein Crater on the lunar surface. The 8,800-pound, 45-foot upper stage had launched in January 2025, run out of fuel, and been abandoned in space, left to drift, uncontrolled, for 18 months until gravity brought it down onto the one object every human who has ever lived has looked up at.

SpaceX confirmed to CBS and CNN that the impact was unintentional. That is not a defense. It is the indictment. No one at the company decided to hit the moon. They simply released four tons of industrial metal into space with no plan to bring it back, and then went on with their day.

This is the pattern. Not malice, indifference. A conviction, held by one of the most powerful men on Earth, that the places his machines touch are his to mark, and that cleaning up after himself is somebody else's job.

Consider the record.

In Texas, regulators found SpaceX discharging industrial wastewater into protected coastal wetlands near its launch site. Musk dismissed the enforcement as red tape.

In February 2025, a Falcon 9 upper stage broke apart during an uncontrolled reentry over Europe, scattering debris across Poland and releasing a plume of lithium vapor that drifted more than 1,000 miles across the continent, the first pollution event ever traced directly to a specific piece of space debris, documented by atmospheric scientists in a peer-reviewed Nature journal.

And now the moon.

Each time, the response has been the same: the rules were the problem, not the wreckage.

For years Musk has demanded that federal regulators step aside, casting environmental review and safety inspection as obstacles to progress. When the FAA slowed launches to examine safety risks, he called it tyranny and pushed for the agency chief's removal.

NASA and international space agencies maintain disposal requirements for spent rocket stages precisely so that near-Earth space does not become a junkyard. SpaceX did not follow them here. It left the stage adrift, blind and unpowered, until it came down where it came down.

There is something worth naming about the target. The moon is not merely empty. It is the oldest shared object in human experience, the same disc that ordered the calendars of ancient civilizations, guided sailors across oceans, and anchored the myths and prayers of nearly every culture that has existed.

It has hung there, unmarked, for billions of years. The first meaningful mark a private company leaves on it is not a monument or a message. It is garbage.

Musk built a political identity on the premise that public law is a drag on human achievement. The achievement, this week, is a crater.

On the moon.

Made by accident

 

Imagine the various translations of the bible....all written by men.

In 2017, a woman opened a 2,800-year-old poem and found something every man before her had missed.

Not a plot hole. A single word.

Homer's Odyssey had been translated into English by roughly 60 different scholars over 400 years. Every one of them was a man. And in one scene near the very end of the poem, they had all made the same choice — quietly, without ever explaining why.

Here's the scene: Odysseus finally returns home after 20 years. While he was gone, invaders occupied his house. Twelve women who worked there — with zero power, zero rights, zero ability to say no to anyone — were forced into the invaders' beds. When Odysseus returns, he has all twelve of them hanged.

For centuries, English readers were told this was justice. Translators called the women "disloyal." "Guilty." "Sluts." As if they'd chosen this. As if they'd betrayed someone.

But the actual Greek word Homer used for these women was dmôai.

It means "enslaved."

Not maids. Not staff. Property, with no right to refuse anyone — the suitors or their owner. Homer wrote it plainly. Translators, for 400 years, softened it into something these women could be blamed for.

Emily Wilson was the first to just... translate the word. "Slaves."

And the second she did, the entire scene flipped. This wasn't loyal justice against traitors. It was a powerful man killing enslaved women for surviving something they never had the power to refuse.

That single word had been quietly protecting the hero's reputation for four centuries.

It wasn't the only one. Homer's Penelope isn't the passive, weepy wife English readers grew up with — the Greek calls her periphron, which means shrewd, calculating, strategic. Wilson's Penelope spends 20 years running political circles around men who think they're in control. Calypso isn't Odysseus's "lover" holding him on her island out of devotion — the Greek word Homer uses means she held him captive. It was never a romance. It was a captivity story, just with the genders reversed from what readers expected.

None of this was Wilson rewriting Homer. It was Wilson refusing to keep rewriting him the way everyone before her had.

When critics accused her of injecting modern politics into an ancient text, her answer was simple: go read the Greek yourself. Every choice she made was already sitting there, untouched, for 2,800 years. She didn't add anything. She just stopped removing it.

That's the part that stays with you. It's not that the truth was hidden in some lost fragment we finally recovered. It was sitting in plain sight, in a word every translator had already read — and 60 people in a row decided, without ever saying so out loud, that readers weren't ready for it.

Sometimes rewriting history isn't about finding something new.

It's about finally

 

 

President Kennedy didn't want to reform the CIA. He wanted to tear it apart.

In April 1961, the agency's director, Allen Dulles, promised the new president a clean operation: land a brigade of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban people would rise up against Castro. Within three days, the plan collapsed.

Brigade commander Jose San Roman radioed for the air cover Dulles had promised. It never came. Over a hundred exiles were killed on the sand. More than a thousand were marched into Castro's prisons, San Roman among them, while the world watched Washington's humiliation unfold live.

Kennedy was furious, and not only at the failure. The agency had told him the invasion could not fail. It failed completely, and Castro turned the wreckage into the greatest propaganda victory of his Cold War career.

Within weeks, Dulles was forced out. Kennedy told his closest aides he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." A sitting president had lost faith in the agency built to protect the country from exactly this kind of failure.

The CIA survived intact. Kennedy's plan to dismantle it did not. Six decades later, the CIA remains one of the most powerful unelected institutions in the American national-security system.

Some historians argue Kennedy was hunting for someone else to blame. The CIA presented options, and the Oval Office approved every one of them, then pulled the air support at the last hour and let the agency absorb the fallout.

Others point to what Dulles's own team knew going in: that Cuban civilians were not going to rise up, and they let Kennedy believe otherwise anyway. An agency willing to mislead a president about an operation this size, they argue, cannot be trusted with the far larger calls it was actually built to make: covert wars, regime change, the fate of governments most Americans never hear about.

Was Kennedy right to distrust Dulles and the CIA he ran, or was he blaming an agency for a failure the Oval Office itself signed off on?

 

The 1934 Business Plot remains one of the most controversial episodes in U.S. political history. Retired Marine General Smedley Butler testified before Congress that he had been approached by intermediaries seeking support for a plan to organize a force to pressure—or potentially overthrow—President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A congressional committee concluded that evidence supported parts of Butler's testimony and that discussions of such a scheme had occurred. However, no senior business leaders were prosecuted, and historians continue to debate how far the alleged conspiracy had progressed beyond preliminary discussions. The episode remains a reminder that wealth, political influence, and accountability do not always intersect in predictable ways.

See less