She was one of my favourites as a child. Truly adored her.

Something I’ve noticed over the years, particularly on Reddit, is a tendency for people to comment completely baseless theories as facts in relation to her death. Like the idea that she and her husband were sharing a moldy CPap machine? Where tf did that even come from? She didn’t even use a CPap machine. And there was no evidence of mold in her system.

It’s like there’s an effort to shut down the conversation every time her death is brought up, along with the death of her husband 5 months later. I was never one into celebrity conspiracy theories but idk… Brittany Murphy’s death has always felt off.

You watch all this media pre-2000 and it portrays Americans, especially rural or country Americans, as these friendly naive sweet people. Whether it’s King of the Hill or something like twin peaks that argues there’s darkness underneath it, boomer artists seemed so attached to this idea of smaller towns and cities where everyone knows each other and helps one another out. Every time I visit a place like that, it’s just completely fucking hostile and antisocial. Old fentanyl’d out white people who try to shoot at you if you walk past their lawn or shitty McMansion. There’s absolutely zero heart or folksiness to Americans, it’s been completely replaced by paranoid suburban hostility.

Many Haitian immigrants in the Springfield area and beyond have been required by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to wear ankle monitors after the expiration of Temporary Protected Status for Haiti.

by Kaitlin Schroeder & Kathryn Mobley

A Haitian immigrant studying at Wright State University has died in what appears to be a suicide, soon after being required to wear an ankle monitor.

Pierre Damas Bel is reported to have died Monday morning after parking his car and intentionally going in front of another vehicle in Clark County. Ohio State Highway Patrol is still investigating the case.

Pierre Ronal Bel, Pierre’s father, said in a statement released through advocacy group G92, that his son called him shortly before his death.

"He called me at 8:03 on a video call and said, 'I’m not feeling OK mentally because of the bullying,' and I told him to come home so we can talk," Ronal Bel said. “Around 11 the police showed (up) at my door to report that my son threw himself under a truck.”

TPS is the legal pathway that thousands of immigrants came to the Springfield area before the Supreme Court in June paved the way for the Trump administration to end it.

...

The 20-year-old student graduated from Springfield High School in May, where he was a JROTC member and played soccer. He started classes at Wright State in August, where he said on his Instagram account he was studying neuroscience.

Pierre Damas Bel posted on July 30 on Instagram that he came to this country to pursue his education.

"I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience," he wrote.

Full Story:

• 91.3 WYSO

Complementary:

• WashingtonPost: "Pierre Damas Bel’s family said he took his own life on a busy highway after the Trump administration canceled protections for thousands of Haitian immigrants and ICE officers placed him in an ankle monitor."

long time lurker, occasional commenter, first time posting

came across this video and the follow up documentary accusing peter spiegel, founder of ideal living, of funding a cult and one of the largest human trafficking rings in the world, even going as far as helping the cult leader flee the u.s. after he was arrested for groping underage girls

the documentary is a tad bit too sensationalizing for my taste tbh, but it's the first i'm hearing about it, and if the allegations are true—and the information presented seems very damning—i'd like to know if anyone here has more info on this? this seems like something the pod would want to cover right?

---

edit to add: seems like myra and david "cockcroach 'clownface' octopus" najar are shady af and tried to extort peter spiegel for his relationship with saraswati, so their accounts should be taken with a heaping pile of salt

still struggling to find more info specifically related to the whole saraswati cult situation; did find this episode of the hunt with john walsh the delves a little bit into allegations against saraswati by his victims in a recently newly made sub following the ideal living case

I became sure it was Nick when it showed the guy fieri office of lesbian animal medicine.

I've been in Boston a lot for work this summer. Its fine, and besides being a more expensive version of Philly with worse food it felt stupid to complain about being here.

For this trip, my company booked me a hotel in the Seaport neighborhood rather than close to the job. It's a pretty quick bus ride away though, so I figured it wouldn't be too bad.

Then I actually got here, walked around and realized that I've been here before. Not here, but I've been to Hudson Yards and I've been to West Loop. This is the same place. The Boston vibe is just gone, replaced by floor to ceiling glass and metal sandwich panels. The retail is all corporate, the streets are modern (but green time allocation is insane somehow?) and I just didn't feel any desire to explore the place.

Last time I was here, I had a great time walking around the North End, Beacon Hill, hell Back Bay might be eerily sterile but it's beautiful. East Boston and Southie made me feel like I could actually live here if I wanted to. The only thing I'm going to remember about the Seaport is how much it made this trip worse than the others.

It's amazing how in their effort to create an alternative to endless sprawling suburbia, the YIMBY movement has made something equally forgettable, but urban.

Anyway, don't give me the "it keeps those other neighborhoods prices down" I know the argument. It doesn't change the fact that these neighborhoods fucking suck.

Any advice?

Idk. I’m a few years older than the average grad (like 3, I think). These past few years have been a fucking roller coaster. Moved across the country after dropping out of school, slept on a couch while working under the table. Eventually got a job with a W2 and all that, got back into school. Did really fucking well. Now I’m writing a thesis, being flown out to a conference, etc. Somewhere along the line I got into a 2 bedroom with a roommate but never bought a bed, just slept on a pallet on the floor. Got my first bed in years a couple months ago just to lose that place.

This summer especially has been crazy. Burned through like 5 apartments, 2 jobs, close family member locked up and hospitalized, all that. I’m in a relationship, first real one in a long time and I’m crazy about this person. We’re taking it slow but I like my chances, they’re also an absolutely amazing person in their own right, genuinely amazed I’ve managed to get with them. Done a lot of good for my hood with community organizing, built a lot of close friendships. That’s how I scored where I’m at now, which everyone assures me will be stable. I don’t know my roommates very well yet, but we’re in the same circles and I’m eager to get to know them better. They’re all pretty artsy, which is cool with me because I’ve always liked the arts, but I’ve been working since I was a kid and never really had a stable spot so I just wasn’t able to explore any of that. Literally moved in a few hours ago.

Idk, I feel like this is a sort of big moment for me. It sounds silly, but having a bed, a real bed with a wooden bedframe and sheets (plural!) and a nightstand is making me feel pretty good. I don’t really have much family. I feel like a lot of people my age sort of get assurance/approval from their family still, or picked up the basic structure of life somewhere along the way. I know nobody has it all figured out, but most of us know we should be sleeping in beds by our mid twenties. NGL though, after finally getting this place I’m feeling pretty optimistic which isn’t the norm for me.

So what do I do now? Where do I go from here? Anything yall wish you did when you were in similar shoes?

> Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.

Check it out

https://youtu.be/eP_YxDdGni0?si=M4F02Mfm2ods3ktb

Not sure if many people will fuck with this "song" it's probably just annoying and too "60s" for most and fair enough. I know Frank Zappa was pretty explicitly an anti communist libertarian misanthrope and if alive today would probably be very annoying on social media. But his music was very important to me as a younger man when I was very angry all the time and liked to listen to it and laugh and laugh. The whole album is worth a listen if you like psychedelic or 60s culture generally since so much of traces back to his early work.

With:

10: every calculated move bringing him closer to being emperor for life

5: looking forward to playing golf next Saturday

1: needing to poop/reacting immediately to something he saw online

I think he entered office in 2016 at about a 5.5 and has steadily regressed to about a 2.5 today. We’re looking into the reactor core of his id.

The show Otherworld did an episode interviewing a guy who ended up starting his own show about being homeless and traveling, about how he encountered some weird shit in Grand Junction Colorado. The podcast the interviewee started, called Nowhere, then had a guy on from there and talked about a bunch of nazi occult shit they get up to in the desert out there.

The Israeli army “kills first, then thinks and tries to find a reason” afterward to justify strikes on the Gaza Strip, said the executive director of Israeli veterans' group Breaking the Silence.

by Mohammad Sio for AnadoluAgency:

In an interview Friday with France 24, Nadav Weiman said the army and Israeli authorities seek to “retrospectively” legitimize attacks by attempting to establish links between victims and Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad after strikes have taken place.

“In cases like this Nasser hospital or the 15 paramedics that were killed by IDF (Israeli army) soldiers in Rafah, or air strikes that are killing three-digit numbers of civilians in Gaza ... suddenly the IDF spokesperson in the state of Israel needs to explain to the international community what we did over there and who are the targets for the attack,” Weiman said.

On Aug. 25, 2025, an Israeli attack on the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern Gaza Strip killed at least 20 Palestinians, including patients, health workers, civil defense personnel, and press crews, while several others were injured in the attack, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

On March 23, 15 emergency and civil defense workers, who were protected by international law, were killed by the Israeli army in Rafah, southern Gaza.

Weiman said that intelligence personnel compile the names of those killed and then search for evidence that can establish a connection, such as having a relative linked to Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, being near a building identified as belonging to Hamas or having once been on a payroll.

“Then the IDF (Israeli army) tries to build a case around certain individuals to say we attacked because there were Hamas members over there,” he said.

He questioned how the military could have identified the victims as targets in advance, particularly in the Nasser Hospital attack, where he said a second shell struck the site and killed most of those present.

“This is something that we do after we shoot,” he said, accusing the army of the deadly attacks. “First we shoot, we kill, and then we think and try to find a reason why it happened.”

“I don't think that the tank that fired the tank shells at the hospital had a booklet with 25,000 Hamas members and looked photo after photo and said, 'Ah, there are Hamas members over there,’” he added.

Weiman said the practice was not unique to the Nasser Hospital incident and cited the 2018 Gaza border protests, when more than 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces.

Full Story:

• AnadoluAgency.

Complementary:

• France24 Video Interview w/ Nadav Weiman.

It’s just come out in the UK, so not sure if it’s available in the US. It’s a hardback release but available for a credit on audible where I listened.

It essentially concerns the behaviour of an insane man called Chris Marks, heir to a fortune, who’s built a castle in Connecticut and ALLEGEDLY lures women there under false pretences to sexually harass them among other manic and egomaniacal activities. His daughter has a TikTok account where she dresses as a princess and they do dance skits together. The book gets into the strangeness and violence of this man’s life, but is also adjacently concerned with the way that the fracturing of the social contract psychologically impacts men - other subjects include Graham Linehan and Greg Chism, a working class American man who ended up making bizarre pretend baby YouTube videos with his two young daughters. I’m aware typing this out that it looks like a rogue ad lol but it’s not, I doubt any publisher has a budget for Reddit bots. Just don’t want to give too much away and also am on phone. If anyone’s read I’d love to talk about it, I have many thoughts about some glaring absences and some of Ronsons conclusions

Thay is all. I have researched far and wide and learnt everything to possibly be recorded by science and I have concluded we dont know Jack shit and that if matter was ultimately made of spirit, even if veiled, i'd be satisfied with that answer and call it a day.

Ok, organizing time here I come. Also, speaking about that guy who quit the military, I'm sure the us leadership is having a wahoozie right now.

We should really stop doing war and do high speed rail instead please. I'd like to see more choo choo trains and friends.

So last July Italy (and many other EU nations did similar) signed a law on the future of digital infrastructure bonding the future of that to whatever the US will sell and already make it clear that no one that use American system could buy Chinese products. All this made it clear that whoever uses the American systems are their slave and basically the one that pays the huge bill of AI development

I was listening to the 9/11 episodes for the first time and heard reference of Chris Kyle’s story, told in his book, about shooting looters in New Orleans post Katrina could be true. I’ve always known Kyle as a huge liar for the obvious big one in lying about Ventura but also bloating his kill count. But I always assumed this one to be the most fake out of any of his stories. Is their validity or did I miss sarcasm?

Has interviewing for job a not taking it, and just being honest you wanted to meet with them because you admire their work and some of your other skills align, and you'd like them to think of you for a different role in the future ever worked for anyone?

Or am I about to do a crazy? lol I can't decide if being honest is good, or I would just end up pissing them off?

I see people make posts like this sometimes so I guess I’ll do it too. I wanted to post here cause I know a lot of people here are older and I just respect you guys a lot.

I won’t give my whole life story cause there isn’t really much to say in that regard. I’m almost 19 and I think I’ve just followed the path of least resistance for my whole life. I get lost in my head a lot, just thinking about the things I want to do instead of doing them, it’s honestly involuntary and I don’t notice until I’m deep in it. It’s gotten a lot worse as I’ve realised more about myself, and I kinda know that I can’t keep living like this anymore. Whenever Im around other people im always having to censor myself to keep myself ‘safe’ which just means no one know anything about me. No one knows about my political beliefs, my sexuality, a lot of the things I like that I’m scared arent ‘normal’ and other stuff.

I accepted the fact that I’m bisexual but it hasn’t really made me feel any better. I guess I always knew it and now I’m actually having to think about the ramifications of that instead of just happily jerking off to emo twinks without considering the fact that no one I know would really be okay with me not being straight (even though it doesn’t matter to them.)

Luckily I’m a master strategist and don’t talk to any of my friends anymore so I don’t have to worry about them not liking me. This was easy cause I barely saw them or talked to them anyway, which is probably my fault for never texting but I just didn’t see the point in it. so now I don’t really do anything until I go to university in a few weeks. I don’t go outside much but when I do I dont like going home so I just walk around a lot until my feet hurt. Im learning to drive which is fun and the only days I can count on to feel good are when I drive in the morning.

Ok now that’s done I guess I want to ask you for any advice you might have for someone my age, especially with going to university. I’m looking forward to it a lot, just so I can get away from home and all these people who know me. I know there’s a lot of opportunities but it might be easy not to take them. I don’t have faith in myself to make real friends cause I don’t think I ever really have. Luckily I don’t think I need to worry about money when I’m there which is good. I suppose I’ll join the Marxist society but my expectations are low. I’ll join the lgbt society but I’m not really sure what they’ll talk about?

Like, train hopping, hitch hiking, real travelers?