According to a recent report, more than half of Australians have lost confidence that people of all faiths and backgrounds can live safely together in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.

The new finding comes from research conducted on behalf of the Combat Antisemitism Movement. It found that 52 per cent of Australians said they were less confident in social harmony, while just 15 per cent said they were more confident that people of different faiths and backgrounds could live safely together following the December 2025 attack.

To be honest, the fact that the figure is only 52 per cent is surprising. You would think it would be much higher.

How can Australians be so naïve as to believe that people of fundamentally different faiths can simply live together harmoniously? It sounds nice in theory, but to believe that religious differences are irrelevant to social cohesion requires abandoning any meaningful understanding of what it actually means to have a different faith.

We are not talking about different denominations of Christianity disagreeing over infant baptism, hymn books or whether women should hold a church office. We are talking about different religions—in other words, different gods and fundamentally different understandings of ultimate reality.

Think about the implications of that for a moment.

Different gods mean different understandings of what is true and false, right and wrong, good and evil. Different religions make different claims about how truth is discovered, what man is obligated to do and what constitutes moral behaviour.

One religion may consider a particular practice sacred while another considers it morally evil. One may permit a form of marriage that another prohibits. One may regard conversion as essential while another considers apostasy a crime deserving death. One may impose religious laws concerning food, sexuality, family or punishment that another completely rejects.

These are not insignificant differences.

They are contradictory moral claims.

So, which god takes precedence? Which moral law governs when two religions make contradictory demands?

There must inevitably be some religious hierarchy of authority. Whenever moral laws are applied to an entire society, someone must ultimately determine which standards are binding.

This is one reason the Christian conception of God is so significant to Western civilisation. Christianity does not present morality as merely tribal or factional. It teaches that there is one God who created all mankind and whose moral authority stands above every tribe, nation, ruler and political faction.

The same moral law applies to the king and the commoner, to friend and enemy, to the powerful and powerless.

That provides the conceptual basis for universal morality.

Polytheism, by contrast, fragments ultimate authority. If different groups appeal to different gods, each with different powers, commands, interests and moral expectations, then there is no universally recognised divine authority above them.

One deity may permit what another forbids.

Different groups can therefore appeal to different gods to justify competing understandings of marriage, sexuality, warfare, sacrifice, justice and social obligation. Religious factions can become political factions, with people identifying more strongly with their god, temple, tribe or religious community than with the society as a whole.

Polytheism creates social disunity because it decentralises ultimate authority.

And without a recognised religious authority above competing gods, there is no common ultimate standard to resolve fundamental moral disagreements.

This is precisely the problem with the modern assumption that multiculturalism and religious pluralism will automatically produce harmony. They often demand that we accept radically contradictory belief systems as equally legitimate without ever explaining how their contradictions are to be resolved.

But harmony requires something people have in common.

So what is it?

It is not their heritage, culture, customs, religion, morality, ethics or understanding of human purpose. And yet we are told that all these differences can somehow be overcome through a shared commitment to multiculturalism, relativism and pluralism.

But on what basis?

Why should we think people with fundamentally different religious convictions will accept the doctrine that all religions and moral systems are equally valid? Why should we think them willing to suspend the exclusive claims of their own faith in order to participate in a pluralistic society that effectively treats competing gods as equally legitimate?

In practice, this is little more than a return to polytheism—a society in which competing conceptions of ultimate authority coexist without any universally acknowledged authority above them.

And that is why belief is not some irrelevant secondary factor when it comes to social harmony. It is one of the most fundamental factors determining whether a society can establish a coherent moral order.

The West did not develop its understanding of universal human dignity, moral accountability and the limits of political authority in a religious vacuum. These ideas were profoundly shaped by Christianity.

But peaceful coexistence is not the same thing as genuine social unity.

A nation needs more than people living beside one another. It needs some common understanding of truth, morality, justice, authority and human purpose.

So when 52 per cent of Australians say they have become less confident that people of different faiths can live safely together, perhaps the answer is not simply to demand more multiculturalism.

Perhaps we should start asking the question multiculturalism has largely avoided:

What, exactly, is supposed to unite people who disagree about the most fundamental questions of reality, morality and human purpose?

If we have no shared understanding of what is true and what is good, what ultimately binds us together?

A passport?

A geographical border?

A vague commitment to “diversity”?

These things can create a fragmented population. They cannot, by themselves, create a unified society.

If there is no moral authority above competing religions, cultures and factions, then social harmony ultimately depends upon everyone voluntarily restraining themselves—and that becomes increasingly difficult when people disagree about what they are morally obligated to do.

You cannot build a stable society by declaring contradictory moral systems equally authoritative and simply hoping they will never collide. If there is no higher standard to which everyone is accountable, then there is no genuine foundation for social harmony—only a fragile truce between competing gods, competing moralities, and competing expectations of what society ought to be.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Aug. 11, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

A right-wing talk show host on Tuesday pushed President Donald Trump to declare a “national security emergency” that would let him meddle in the 2026 midterm elections—and the president did not rule it out.

In an appearance on Real America’s Voice, Trump listened as host Wayne Allyn Root rattled off actions he would like to see the president take ahead of the midterms.

“Let me put an idea in your head,” Root told Trump. “Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections.”

Root then told the president that “if you do this in the next month” it would allow for the implementation of photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements, as well as restrictions on mail-in ballots.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” Trump said in response. “I’ll leave it at that.”

The US Constitution does not give the president power to declare a “national emergency” that would allow him to unilaterally rewrite states’ election laws.

Regardless, ABC News reported in February that a group of pro-Trump attorneys were circulating a 17-page draft order that would use the purported threat of election interference from the Chinese government to declare a “national emergency” that would outright ban mail-in ballots and mandate that all ballots be hand-counted.

Trump has not yet signed such an order, but he has issued other election-related directives, including one that instructs the United States Postal Service (USPS) to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to their voter lists.

The USPS executive order and an order that required Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote have been blocked by courts.

Regardless, some observers expressed concern that the president wasn’t yet finished in his efforts to meddle in the coming elections.

“There is zero reason,” wrote CNN host Jake Tapper, “to not take Trump at his word that he and his team are planning something alarming to disrupt the midterms and beyond.”

Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield observed in response to the president’s appearance on Real America’s Voice that “Trump has no legal authority to do this,” but warned “that doesn’t mean he won’t try.”

Journalist Mike Rothschild questioned what the conversation between Trump and Root said about both men’s mental stability.

“Once again, Donald Trump is not a wizard,” wrote Rothschild. “He can’t just manifest things into existence by saying them or with a tweet. There is no ‘right’ to do this in US law, nor is there any mechanism that would enable any of this to happen. Both people in this conversation are deranged.”

After losing the 2020 presidential election to former President Joe Biden, Trump refused to concede the race, lied about the election being “stolen” by nefarious actors, pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overtake Biden in the Peach State, and pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject certifying the election despite lacking constitutional authority to do so.

When these efforts to overturn the election failed, Trump encouraged his followers to march to the US Capitol, where they broke into the building, assaulted law enforcement officers, and sent members of Congress running for their lives.

Why are establishment Democrats so eager to reach across the aisle to work with a delusional, uncompromising Republican party?

Iran has set a high price for President Trump to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, while Israel's PM has rejected his Gaza plan.

In February 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency stamped a Soviet scientific document CONFIDENTIAL and locked it away at Langley. That document proved that cheap, off-the-shelf anti-parasitic drugs were destroying tumors in laboratory tests. For sixty years, that [...]

The post Bombshell CIA Files Confirm Anti-Parasitic Drugs Cure Cancer — Big Pharma Knew and Buried It For 60 Years appeared first on The People's Voice.

A shocking recent article reveals the extent of the Ohio representative’s delusional behavior.

Maybe the president’s son-in-law shouldn’t try to annex a protected wildlife habitat in Albania, just saying.

This article was originally published by Truthout on Aug. 10, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Police in cities across the U.S. are rolling out a pro-drone PR blitz as hundreds of local police departments prepare to deploy autonomous, AI-driven surveillance drones. The drones are capable of following a single vehicle across an entire city, capturing footage through apartment windows, and generally recording daily life from the sky without being noticed.

As of February, more than 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies had received waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of so-called “drone-as-first-responder” (DFR) programs, according to public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and released in July. While the list of waiver recipients includes fire departments and other first responders, the vast majority are law enforcement agencies, including police in cities large and small.

The automated drone push comes as resistance to mass surveillance by license plate-reading cameras goes viral. Residents are packing city council meetings across the country to demand restrictions on the data gathered by high-tech drones and cameras — or an end to mass surveillance altogether.

Scandals over digital stalking by police and other abuses are erupting as new surveillance tech empowers the state to violate privacy in entirely fresh ways. In response, people are taking direct action, sabotaging automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that are capable of building complex profiles of individual vehicles.

Flock Safety, a top surveillance tech firm, is the company most associated with ALPRs and is itself often at the center of controversy. But Flock also has a number of competitors, including Axon and Motorola Solutions. And business across the surveillance tech economy is booming.

In many cities, local cops have extra funding for surveillance from wealthy private donors, police foundations, and federal grants; surveillance companies also often offer police free trials and help with applying for grants and waivers. Those surveillance firms have expanded from offering singular technologies such as ALPRs or body-worn cameras to become one-stop shops for police seeking the latest surveillance setup — including advanced drones.

Unlike most consumer drones, which are controlled by an operator looking up from the ground, autonomous surveillance drones used for DFR programs are operated remotely, allowing police to send drones much longer distances and stream live video footage back to headquarters. Cops in many cities have launched camera-carrying drones for years, but autonomous drones guided by AI are capable of flying “beyond the visual line of sight” of the operator (also known as BVLOS drones) and can be managed from a central launch pad, freeing up police time and capacity.

“The human increasingly is not flying the drone; the drone is driven by artificial intelligence and just deployed from one spot to another spot,” said Beryl Lipton, the senior investigative researcher at EFF, in an interview. “They don’t have a pilot, but there is often a human person who is there to manage the feed.”

Instead of attending a street parade and launching a drone overhead, for example, police can fly multiple drones with AI-driven navigation from a desk, as EFF writes:

FAA rules for police drones also required a human operator to manually fly the device to a scene, but DFR technology has become a more common and more automated police technology. DFR programs increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to automate drone flights from launchpads placed around the city, often atop municipal buildings, and make it possible for one drone operator to “fly” multiple devices at once.

Flying a BVLOS drone requires an FAA waiver. The agency streamlined the waiver process in April 2025 and approved more waivers for BVLOS drones between then and February 2026 than it had in the previous seven years combined, EFF reports.

Lipton said most law enforcement applicants are already deploying automated drones or are strongly considering a “drone-as-first-responder” program. Once police begin a relationship with a company such as Flock Safety or Axon, Lipton said, taxpayers can expect a push for purchases of additional gadgets, upgrades, and storage for video.

It’s also not surprising that these programs now seem ubiquitous. “There is a lot of this kind of peer pressure in law enforcement, you can really see it with Flock,” Lipton said. “One police department gets a new tool or signs off on Flock cameras, and then you see neighboring cities are now signing up for Flock to keep up with the latest new thing.”

Flock Safety boasts that its automated “first responder” drones carry ALPR cameras that can read license plates from above up to 2,000 feet away, allowing police to connect surveillance footage of individual vehicles to data captured on the street. Lipton said companies such as Flock and Axon bundle services like gadgets and processing software to help police compile data from multiple streams into easily searchable databases, including footage from body-warn cameras, ALPRs, automated gunshot detectors, and drones flying overhead.

While a corporate partnership between Flock Safety and Axon fell apart in early 2025, some of the most prominent companies selling drones to police departments, including Skydio, integrate their products directly with the software and data analysis tools sold by leading manufacturers of ALPRs. “People don’t realize that video analytics has really developed as much as it has in the past few years, no matter whether coming from a police body-worn camera, drones or ALPR,” Lipton said. “All of these can easily be analyzed and made searchable, and that is a really integral part of what Axon and Flock are doing.”

Amid widespread backlash to ALPRs, police across the nation are going into PR mode, releasing footage of drones in action along with statements casting the technology as a “first responder” that can arrive on the scene before police to establish “situational awareness,” help with search-and-rescue, and track down suspects and stolen property.

“It seemed much more palatable for a drone to be framed as a ‘first responder’ going to a specific crime rather than a tool for surveillance that has a very abstract crime-fighting purpose,” Lipton said. “But in practice it is plain old surveillance.”

Audits of drone flight logs — from piloted or autonomous drones — tell a more complicated story. In places police are required to log flights, officers often record only vague justifications for launching drones without a warrant, often for what appear to be routine dispatches and training flights, the ACLU has noted. Even on mundane missions, such drones equipped with powerful zoom lenses or infrared sensors can capture significant data that can later be analyzed with AI-powered data processing and facial recognition technology.

On July 13, Wired published an investigation into hours of drone footage from the San Franciso Police Department, providing an unfiltered look at automated drones in action. The footage was accidentally released on the open internet via the website for Skydio, the company providing the drones and software behind them. Discovered by security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert, the leaked footage itself raised serious privacy concerns.

“In the case of San Franscisco, they are doing a lot of locking onto license plates and, particularly, people, and the drone is able to navigate itself,” Lipton said.

The innocuous scenes captured by drones — police talking to a unhoused person, an arrest at a gas station by undercover officers, two men parking a car before joining a basketball game — also raised questions about the nature and breadth of the surveillance.

In one video, a response to an alleged “prowler” incident, the drone hovers over a young person wearing headphones and apparently having a private moment on the roof of a building. The drones have powerful zoom lenses, and footage captured of living rooms in the interior of apartments and people on private rooftops raise serious constitutional questions about the level of intrusion involved, according to Jay Stanley, a privacy analyst at the ACLU.

“It’s pretty clear that a police drone hovering, say, outside a 2nd story window in a suburban backyard would violate ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ and thus the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, but it’s less clear what the courts would find to be a reasonable expectation of privacy in a city, where people are already susceptible to Rear Window-type observation,” Stanley wrote in a blog post on July 17.

In some cities, police launched drone-as-first-responder programs with automated BVLOS drones with little or no oversight. The city council in Nashville, Tennessee, is considering placing restrictions on automated drones after learning that police had quietly launched a trial program without a vote or hearing by the city council. After public outcry, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced on August 6 that it would end its trial drone program.

New Orleans was among the cities that received the FAA waiver for an automated drone-as-first-responder program. Police plan to expand their existing drone program to launch drones in response to 911 calls from the historic French Quarter later this year. But residents were outraged after activists discovered that the city’s police department had changed internal rules to allow police drones to carry “weapons” with prior approval from the police superintendent, according to Edith Romero, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance. Police claimed the change was only a proposal added to a draft policy, but as Verite News pointed out, the file name for the “draft” document suggests the policy was meant to go into effect on June 21.

“Nobody knew; city council didn’t know, we had to announce it, and we mobilized people to start calling and start demanding that this be rescinded,” Romero told Truthout in an interview.

Police ditched the policy on drones carrying weapons after public outcry. On August 6, the New Orleans City Council voted to require police to publicly publish regular drone flight logs and reports on usage and reasons for deployment. While the new ordinance addresses transparency, it does not place enforceable restrictions on drone use. Romero echoed residents who submitted public comments arguing the ordinance does not go far enough.

“We need to do an investigation of the policy violations that happened last year, and the change in policy that weaponized the drones before we can move toward an expansion,” Romero said, adding that there must be penalties for police who deploy drones for unapproved uses.

The city has become a testing ground for surveillance tech, including ALPRs and cameras equipped with facial recognition. Wealthy private interests have funded an expansion of policing in the French Quarter, and the nonprofit Project NOLA secretly supplied police with data from a network of facial recognition cameras in violation of local law.

Officials said the use of facial recognition was paused after a Washington Post investigation exposed the program in May 2025, but the ACLU reported in April 2026 that abuses continue. The ongoing controversy has left residents anxious about surveillance in a city where drones are already a common sight during parades and street festivals.

“We already have people coming to us saying, ‘I saw drone outside my window, we don’t know what to do, how can we even confirm that it was a police drone?’” Romero said. “But we don’t know who was manning the drone, and for what purpose.”

According to Skydio flight logs for 2025 obtained by Eye on Surveillance and reviewed by Truthout, piloted drones were overwhelmingly dispatched to respond to calls about minor incidents, including a subject who was “involved in a disturbance with the hot dog guy then fled the scene.”

Drones were twice dispatched in response to a “Black female” causing a “disturbance” on or near Bourbon Street, famously one of the rowdiest bar crawls in the world. While many entries for “Type of Incident” in the flight logs are left blank, in multiple cases, drones responded to calls about unhoused people and people with mental illness.

“This is really why they want the [drones-as-first-responder] drones in the French Quarter,” Romero said. “These business owners don’t want to see people that are houseless, and they want to harass people they think are suspicious.”

Romero said building a surveillance state is clearly not the solution to homelessness or the budget crisis facing city leaders, who may be tempted by lucrative federal grants that require cities to build out surveillance infrastructure. Romero pointed to the Trump administration’s Model Cities Initiative, which offers $300 million to cities that invest in “proactive policing” and surveillance tech.

“We have to take into consideration that the federal and the state governments are trying to use all the surveillance technologies out there. And so if cities are building the surveillance infrastructure, the risks that our data will end up in the hands of the federal government or state government in our case are really high,” Romero said.

Lipton said many questions remain about how police are actually using drones as “first responders,” and advocacy around restrictions and transparency is critical. Drones are not as immediately visible to the public as traffic cameras. But as anger continues rise over the automated license plate readers sold to police by Flock and Axon, Lipton expects a similar backlash to automated drones once more people learn about the technology.

“The adoption of these tools has outpaced the public’s awareness that they exist,” Lipton said. “License plate readers have been around for a very long time at this point, but we are seeing a moment where everybody — even people who are not tech-savvy — understand what it means that these systems are accessible in real time and interconnected.”

An Iranian threat caused the president to abandon Air Force One, leaving those on board to deal with the consequences. Maybe he wouldn’t be so scared if he didn’t start this stupid war in the first place.

There’s nothing like walking into a pub and sitting down at an empty stool where your regular order awaits you. You have been seen; it’s a singular feeling of camaraderie and community. Club 2101, a dive bar in Oakland California, opens around 8 am each day. For The Oaklandside, Azucena Rasilla profiles a 16-hour-day in the life of the 80-year-old haunt, a story as colorful as the dedicated regulars who frequent the establishment, many of them captured in evocative photos by Sarahbeth Maney.

Another regular, Steve Powell, puts on the jukebox’s first song of the day, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood,” and just as Vaughan’s guitar solo builds, another Breakfast Club member walks in: 71-year-old Kurt Meyer. Perez says Meyer had a health scare a few months ago; Perez is happy to see Meyer get back to his routine of hanging out with the crew. 

By 11:30 a.m., the ice chest is in need of a refill and the bar starts to settle down. There are about a dozen people inside, some playing pool, others chatting or reading the newspaper. A few attentively watch the horse races now playing on the TV screens.

George is the first of the early morning crew to call it quits and catch the bus home. Winn and Altamonte follow shortly after. 

“All of these regulars are not just customers,” Perez says. “They are friends and family.”

Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.

Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.

Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.

NaturalNews.com

The ‘Turbo Aging’ Crisis Isn’t Cosmetic

Look at the faces on your screen. The celebrities, the influencers, the athletes – they aren’t just “aging badly.” Their skin is thinning, their eyes are hollowing, and their bodies are breaking down in ways that can’t be explained by ordinary time. The mainstream answer is to call it stress, menopause, or “bad genetics.” But the real cause behind turbo aging is hidden from the public.

The root cause is the spike protein generated by the mRNA injections. That protein suppresses your body’s ability to repair routine genetic damage, and the result is visible collapse on the outside while the damage compounds on the inside. As I warned in my interview with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, the forecast was specific: sudden deaths within three to five years, slow kill-off factors extending up to ten years, and “turbo cancers primarily affecting leukemia, lymphoma, breast cancer, and prostate cancer” ^[1].

Even the World Health Organization’s own cancer agency projects more than 35 million new cancer cases by 2050, yet it “conveniently ignores vaccine-induced turbo cancers among the young” ^[2]. That omission is not science. It’s suppression. It’s no coincidence this is happening now, in the years after the mass injection campaign. The timeline lines up. We are watching a generation be sacrificed on the altar of pharmaceutical profit, and we are being told to smile and call it aging.

How Spike Protein Silences Your DNA Repair Machinery

Every day, your DNA is struck by tens of thousands of lesions. UV light, environmental toxins, and even normal metabolism constantly break strands and damage bases. To survive, your body relies on overlapping repair systems: non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), homologous recombination (HR), base excision repair (BER), and nucleotide excision repair (NER). These pathways fix thymine dimers, strand breaks, oxidative damage, and other genetic injuries before they become permanent. These repair systems are not optional. They are the difference between health and disintegration.

The presence of spike protein toxins suppresses these repair mechanisms by 85% - 90%, according to published scientific research. When spike protein interferes with those pathways, mutations get copied into every new cell. That accumulation is exactly what drives accelerated aging, immune collapse, and turbo cancer. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny has “identified and documented 40 different ways these vaccines” injure the human body ^[3]. These are not side effects; they are mechanisms of injury.

And we are injecting these substances directly into the bloodstream, “bypassing all body safety filters, including the skin” ^[4]. Think about the absurdity: polysorbate 80 is banned in ice cream because regulators don’t want you eating it, yet the same chemical is allowed in vaccines injected into children. When the CDC insists it’s safe, the CDC is lying to you. When those errors are copied into new cells, you don’t just age faster; you accumulate the mutations that become cancer. The predictable result of cells replicating with unrepaired genetic corruption is what we now call turbo aging.

This Was Engineered – and the Nuclear ‘Kill Switch’ Is Next

Make no mistake: this was all engineered, not stumbled upon. From Fauci’s gain-of-function bioweapon pipeline to the Pentagon’s experiments, the spike toxin was deliberately made more toxic and then laundered through the Wuhan lab before it ever went into your arm. The companies behind the mRNA products knew exactly what they were doing. “Moderna and Pfizer sought a court order to conceal clinical data for 75 years, which would have effectively erased our ability to trace any adverse effects back to the original vaccine administration” ^[5]. You don’t hide data for three generations if you have nothing to hide. The goal was never health; it was turning your body into a spike protein factory for a depopulation agenda.

I believe some of the same forces that handed you the spike protein are now pushing nuclear war. Radiation fallout causes double-strand breaks -- the most dangerous form of DNA damage -- and with repair systems already disabled, fallout becomes a global genetic kill switch. A nuclear exchange would be the ultimate kill switch for a population already carrying disabled repair pathways. This is not abstract fear. “Some Russian leaders are now considering a drastic measure: launching a demonstration nuclear strike to send a powerful message to the West” ^[6], while the architects of the COVID agenda escalate toward the exact confrontation that would create mass casualties.

If it happens, you will be told the fallout is safe. The ICRP model will be cited. But that model ignores internal alpha emitters like plutonium and uranium, which irradiate your tissues from within. I refuse to accept that lie. You are being set up to be lied to, and the only way to survive is to know exactly how your body repairs itself and what it needs to do that job.

There Is a Way Out: Restoring Your Genetic Blueprint

Here is the good news: your body has a blueprint for repair, and it can be reactivated with nutritional factors, some of which you can grow at home for free. You do not need Big Pharma to save you. This is not about expensive patented drugs; it’s about returning to the natural order.

To repair broken DNA, you need to give your cells the tools they were designed to use. I have spent my career teaching people to “incorporate healthy ingredients like avocados, bananas, turmeric, and even freeze-dried broccoli sprout powder into their diets for maximum potency” ^[7]. These foods carry the phytonutrients that support DNA integrity and cellular resilience.

This is why I’m producing a free course that lays all of this out -- including how to detoxify and rebuild, even after internal radiation exposure. The same protocols that restore DNA repair and resurrect senescent cells will also protect you from radiological fallout, because the biology is the same. Knowledge is the medicine that cannot be patented. I will announce this free course in the next few weeks at NaturalNews.com

Conclusion: Choose Knowledge Over Compliance

We are being told to accept turbo aging as normal and radiation as safe. But I refuse to repeat those lies. Humanity is worth defending, and the first defense is knowledge. Learn the mechanisms of DNA damage and DNA repair. Grow your own food. Support your mitochondria. And share this information with everyone you care about.

This is not about fear. It’s about freedom. Follow my channel, spread the word, and be ready when the free course launches. The more people who understand what is happening to their bodies, the harder it will be for the empire of lies to survive. Stand up. Prepare. And never stop asking the questions they don’t want you to ask. Choose knowledge over compliance -- and choose life over extermination.

References

1. Mike Adams. Mike Adams Interview with Sherri Tenpenny - February 28, 2024.
2. WHO Predicts 35+ Million Cancers by 2050 but Ignores Vaccine-Induced Turbo Cancers in Those Under 30 Years Old. NaturalNews.com. May 09, 2024.
3. Mike Adams. Mike Adams Interview with Sherri - June 17, 2025.
4. Injecting Chemicals Is More Dangerous Than Eating Them: Why Is Polysorbate 80 Banned in Ice Cream but Allowed in Vaccines? NaturalNews.com. June 17, 2025.
5. Mike Adams. Brighteon Broadcast News. Brighteon.com.
6. Mike Adams. Brighteon Broadcast News - Part Two: Oblivious Western Leaders. Brighteon.com. June 11, 2024.
7. Mike Adams. Mike Adams Interview with Jonathan Otto - November 18, 2024.
8. Dave Asprey. Game Changers.
9. Luke Jones. The Lost Book of Youth.

Source: https://healthranger.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-youre-seeing-turbo

Original Article: Truth Warrior Suggested

MP | A Truth Warrior Reader Of Truth11.com

An eclipse of the Sun can easily be demonstrated on a map of a flat, stationary Earth. No spinning of a globe earth or orbiting of a moon far away in space is necessary. There is no need for a distant sun93,000,000 miles away or a distant moon 257,000 miles away, to explain how their relative sizes cause periodic eclipses. Real life, on the real Earth is much simpler than that. 

Whilst reading this article, try to temporarily discard any belief that any mention of a flat Earth is just for crazy people. This response is expected in a world where everyone has been conditioned, since birth, to accept the spinning globe model without ever challenging it. Also consider that all real life observations are in fact those experienced from a flat, stationary Earth as opposed to a hypothetical rotating globe. 

Before going into details of the coming eclipse, the first thing to consider is that the Sun and the Moon are in fact the same size. Furthermore, they both travel in regular circuits in the sky. Yes, just up there in the sky where you can see them with your own eyes. 

The Sun completes a circuit around the flat Earth every twenty-four hours. That is why, like clockwork, you can predict exactly where the Sun will be at a given time. As it travels in a daily circuit, it gradually moves from over the Tropic of Capricorn (21^st December – Winter Solstice), arriving at the Equator (21^st March – Spring Equinox) then reaches the Tropic of Cancer (21^st June – Summer Solstice). 

It takes six months to complete this journey between the Tropics. The largest circuit is while travelling overhead in Australia (Tropic of Capricorn), resulting in summer there. The daily circuits then gradually reduce in size until arriving closer to Europe and North America, resulting in summertime while Australia experiences winter. The amazing feature of this journey is that, despite the changes in circumference travelled, the daily circuit is always precisely twenty-four hours. This is just one example of how you cannot truly understand the astonishing wonders of life unless you comprehend the real nature of the Earth on which you live. 

Once arriving at the Tropic of Cancer, the Sun then starts the six month return journey back to the Tropic of Capricorn. As its’ circuits increase in size, it becomes visibly lower in the sky. Simultaneously, the weather becomes cooler in America and Europe because the heat of the localised Sun is further away. 

What most people don’t know, because they have never been taught the fact, is that the Sun travels slightly faster around the twenty-four hour circuit than the Moon. In fact, from the moment the Sun and Moon are in the same position, it takes twenty-eight days for the Sun to lap and overtake the Moon once more. This process of the Sun travelling faster than the Moon is why we experience the different phases of the Moon. 

The 28-day Lunar Cycle: 

Overlaid on top of the Gleesons maps below is the relevant position of the Moon at each of the quarter stages of the 28-day Lunar Cycle. The Sun is shown where it is always at Midday (GMT), which is due south from the timezone in London.

In illustration (2), at Midday, seven days after the New Moon, the Sun is a quarter of a circuit in front of the Moon. This is why the right half of the Moon, the part facing the Sun, is illuminated. By observing this in reality, at the same time each day the Moon will appear to be trailing slightly behind the Sun. As each day passes this distance increases. The daily incremental distance is equivalent to a full circle divided by twenty-eight (the number of days in a complete Lunar Cycle). 

In illustration (3), at Midday, fourteen days after the New Moon, the Sun will have advanced further around the circuit to be directly opposite the slower Moon. This is when we experience a full Moon. 

A week later, shown in illustration (4), the Sun will be three quarters of a circle in front of the Moon. It will therefore appear that the Sun is coming up behind the Moon, hence why the left half of the Moon  will be illuminated. 

Finally, after twenty-eight days, the Sun finally catches up with the Moon. This is known as the New Moon. It is impossible to see the Moon when the Sun and Moon are alongside each other, except, that is, during a Solar Eclipse. This is when the Moon, with no illumination, appears as a dark object in front of the Sun. 

The other important fact that most people do not know is that the Moon travels in circuits between the Tropics every month. This can be proven by regular observations, watching the Moon as it gets higher and lower in the sky during each month.  If the Moon is observed gradually getting higher in the sky each day, it is coming closer, travelling towards to Tropic of Cancer. Alternatively, if the Moon is observed getting lower in the sky each day, it is moving further away, circuiting towards the Tropic of Capricorn. A solar eclipse occurs periodically at the precise moment that there is a New Moon, combined with the altitude of the Moon being the same as that of the Sun. This means the Moon must be on a size of circuit almost equal to that of the Sun. 

The dates of these periodical occurrences can be predicted centuries in advance. Only by understanding how this plays-out over a flat, stationary Earth, can you truly stand in awe at the wonders of nature. 

This amazing spectacle is not occurring millions of miles away in a dark, cold abyss. Rather, it is happening just up there in the day-lit sky, just above your head! 

Solar Eclipse 12^th August: 

For the purpose of this illustration, the daily circuit of the Sun on the 12^th August will be drawn where it is in reality, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator. The precise location of the Sun at the listed time of the eclipse is known. This is illustrated on the map according to where it is at British Summer Time. It is then very easy to predict where the Moon will be at the listed duration of the full eclipse. The eclipse only lasts for two minutes and twenty-one seconds in the location of the observer. This is the time it takes for the Sun to overtake the Moon from the viewer’s perspective on the gorund. 

The way to determine if the Moon will be inside the circuit of the Sun or outside of it can be determined by where the full eclipse will be seen. In this case, the Moon must be inside of the Sun for the eclipse to be witnessed in Siberia, Greenland, Iceland, NE America, and Europe. 

Any observer, located at a Longitude further south than the circuit of the Sun, will not see the Moon completely passing in front of the Sun. Why? Because the Moon is on the opposite side of the Sun. 

The following text describes the predetermined location and precise time in which the eclipse will occur: 

“A total eclipse of the Sun on August 12. The path of totality begins over the Taymyr Peninsula in north-central Siberia and crosses the Arctic Ocean to the north of Servernaya Zemiya, the north-eastern part of Greenland, the north-western coast of Iceland, the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean, northern Spain, and ends over the Balearic Islands. 

The partial phase is visible from the Arctic Ocean region, western Europe, the North-Atlantic Ocean, the north-eastern United States, Canada, Alaska and most of the Aleutian Islands.  

The eclipse begins at 15h 34m (BST) and ends at 19h 58m (BST); the total phase begins at 16h 58m (BST) and ends at 18h 34m (BST). The maximum duration of totality is 2m 21s”. 

The times indicated on the Gleeson Map below are for British Summer Time which is one hour ahead of GMT. This is to indicate the position of the Sun at the times listed for the duration of the eclipse. Because a solar eclipse coincides with the New Moon, drawing a line between the locations experiencing the eclipse and the Sun will give the location of the Moon. 

To conclude, please consider the information presented if you are fortunate enough to be in a location where you can experience the eclipse on the 12^th August, 2026. 

When it comes down to it, the natural world is both amazingly intricate but at the same time, very simple. The Sun periodically lapping and overtaking the same-sized Moon, while at the same altitude, just up there in the sky, is one of the simplest observations anyone can experience. Whether you disagree with this and need a complicated explanation involving distant planetary bodies hurtling across an endless abyss is up to you. The only thing to reflect on is whether the flat Earth reality seems quite logical compared to the spinning globe narrative. 

Original Article: Sent to us by Email from MP

A Syrian court sentenced Assad along with his brother to death in absentia for crimes against humanity and war crimes during Syria's 14-year conflict that left about half a million people dead.

(Image credit: Remy de la Mauviniere)

Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)

Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.

Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!

Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)

People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.

Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.

To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”

Well, not everyone.

Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.” 

In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.” 

Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.

In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.” 

In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)

The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).

The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.

Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.” 

Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.” 

Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.” 

By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.” 

Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.

When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”

“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.” 

The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.

As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.

“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.” 

To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”

What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.

Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.

“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.

The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.

“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.” 

And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”

What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”

Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.

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