The PR Blog

Legacy.com is a website where you can search what it says is “the world’s largest obituary database,” with nearly 50,000,000 entries accumulated since the site started publishing death notices in 1998.

According to Wikipedia:

The Web site hosts obituaries and memorials for more than 70 percent of all U.S. deaths. Legacy.com hosts obituaries for more than three-quarters of the 100 largest newspapers in the U.S., by circulation. The site attracts more than 30 million unique visitors per month and is among the top 40 trafficked websites in the world.

Although it does not appear to have an “About Us” page right now, I was able to locate one from 2019 [and one at a different URL with no apparent date. Both say it is “a top-50 website in the US with more unique monthly visitors than Wikipedia, Netflix, or LinkedIn.”

The site also claims to “offer users a permanent, shareable space to commemorate the lives of their loved ones” with “5000+ funeral home, newspaper, and advertising partners.”

Given the claim that Legacy.com offers a “permanent” space for commemoration, the recent discoveries by an alert researcher raise some interesting questions.

Victorians could go to prison for up to five years for hate speech under new anti-vilification laws proposed by the Victorian Government.

Under the proposed laws, it would be an offence to “incite hatred against, serious contempt for, revulsion towards or severe ridicule” of a person or group based on their sex, gender identity, or race.

It would also be illegal to “threaten physical harm or property damage on the ground of a protected attribute.”

The new laws would lower the legal threshold for prosecuting people for vilification and would add gender identity, sex, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, and disability to the list of protected attributes alongside race and religion, which are already protected.

Online, these laws will apply to anyone, anywhere who vilifies a person in Victoria, although the government acknowledges that this may be difficult to enforce.

Offline, these laws will apply to both public and private interactions.

The MrBeast video serves as a powerful reminder of the potential pitfalls of raw democracy, which allows inter-group hostilities to supersede the rights of the individual.

In a recent video (see below), MrBeast, the most popular creator on YouTube, invited individuals ranging from 1 to 100 years old to participate in a series of games and activities. Each age had one representative who had to stay in a glass box to remain in the game. The goal was, through various tasks, to progressively eliminate participants until only one person remained, who would win a glorious prize of $500,000.

In one of these tasks, all the participants had to vote to eliminate ten of the players. This part of the game offered a thought-provoking analogy for how voters act in a democracy; reflecting how people vote for their own interests and form strategic alliances in order to do so.

Early on the morning of May 3rd the Kremlin was attacked by two explosive drones, and although these were destroyed by the defenses, the Russian government claimed that the incident had probably been an assassination attempt against President Vladimir Putin.

I was skeptical at the time, but when Ray McGovern was interviewed a few days later he seemed to take the accusation seriously.

Given his 27 years as a CIA Analyst, including serving as head of the Soviet Policy Group, I tend to trust his judgment on such matters:

Why would Fox News fire its most popular host? On average, one million additional people tuned into Tucker Carlson every night than to the Fox programs before and after his show. He drew four times as many viewers as the 8PM show on CNN, Anderson Cooper 360°. He was the leading draw on Fox’s streaming service, and there is no rising star at the network expected to take his seat. 

It wasn’t a lack of success that pushed out Carlson, so we are left to speculate why Fox fired their lead anchor. It could have been a battle of egos between Carlson and the Murdochs. Carlson may have threatened to run programming that they disfavored regarding the tapes from January 6, the recent settlement with Dominion, or the coverage of Donald Trump.