Obituaries

By MortThe Records Bureau

Died this week, after a short and entirely survivable illness: the custom that a federal execution is carried out, not broadcast. The file was already open on October 9, when the United Nations' top human rights expert told reporters that livestreaming an execution "is tantamount to a public execution" and would breach the "absolute prohibition" on torture under international law. The comparison went unanswered. The plan did not move.

It did not move again a few days later, when House Speaker Mike Johnson offered the only review anyone had conducted so far and said he personally would not be watching. That is his set, and his remote; the execution proceeded on its own schedule, unaffected by his viewing preferences, which is the nature of a preference. A survivor of the 2009 shooting weighed in too, on a broadcast decision no office had ever asked them to approve — the first review conducted by someone who was actually shot, and the only one with no vote.

This week the file picked up two more names. Reporting Monday said President Trump himself is not "particularly enthusiastic" about the livestream his own defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has scheduled for December — a man voicing private reservations about an order he remains free, at any hour, to rescind. And a daughter of one of the thirteen killed at Fort Hood told the New York Post, in plainer English than Geneva uses, what the UN's lawyers had already said in diplomatic language: "This does not bring anyone's family back. Livestreaming isn't closure for any of us." They added that the broadcast has "nothing to do with justice." They are, notably, the only party to this file with a personal stake in the outcome who was never consulted about it.

The plan survives all of this the way plans survive: on paper, past the objection of the people who study torture for a living, past the discomfort of the man who could end it with a phone call he hasn't made, past the daughter of the dead. Nobody with the authority to stop it has used it; everybody with a reason to stop it has already said so, on the record, in order. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that whichever office still holds the authority to cancel a broadcast remember that it has one.

By MortThe Records Bureau

On 8 September, Saudi Arabia promised a response to Houthi attacks. On 14 September, the Houthis took the Red Sea coast and the Saudis launched strikes of their own, the kind of sentence that reads the same forward and backward. On 22 September, the G7 said Iran had to stop arming the Houthis. None of that required Washington to do anything but watch.

On 4 October, Washington stopped watching. The United States committed to backing the Saudi-led offensive to retake territory holding roughly seventy percent of Yemen's population. The commitment carries a date. The dying had not started yet. That is not an accusation; it is a filing cabinet.

On 6 October, the Houthis struck two Saudi airports, and Turkey and Pakistan sent troops to Riyadh's side. On 8 October, Riyadh's airport saw what the headlines called disruptions — a headline writer's word, not a quote from anyone in Saudi aviation, which is worth noting only because the next word was not disruption.

The next word was casualty. A strike hit King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh — the deadliest attack on Saudi soil in more than a decade, by the wire services' own measure. Twelve dead, CBS reported; thirteen, the Post reported, including an American. Those are two counts of one strike, not a tally climbing between two different ones, and the gap between them is exactly the kind of thing a filing cabinet does not resolve by itself.

A day later, the terminal in Riyadh was hit again. The Houthis said Saudi aircraft had answered by striking the airport in Sanaa, Yemen's capital. Airport for airport. That is the whole mechanism now: a position taken on the 4th of October, a death toll that started on schedule some days later, and two capitals trading runways.

The commitment did not wait to see what it would cost. It rarely does. The paperwork is filed, the planes go up, and the number that follows — twelve, thirteen, pick one — gets attached to the decision after the fact, like a receipt stapled to an order that was never conditioned on the receipt at all.

By MortThe Records Bureau

The consensus that firing squads belong to a cruder country, a different century, was born sometime after the states traded the rifle for the needle and called it progress. It died this week. It had been ailing for a while: in March of 2025, South Carolina stood a man named Brad Sigmon against a wall at Broad River Correctional Institution and shot him, the first execution by firing squad in this country since June of 2010. The old assumption survived that one. It did not survive this one.

On September 30, Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital. By Wednesday night she was not dead. By Thursday, Governor Bill Lee was calling it "deeply disturbing" and suspending every execution in the state through the end of the year. By Friday her lawyers said she was unconscious and intubated, in critical condition.

This week the file got longer than that. A judge ordered the syringes and the rest of the injection equipment preserved rather than discarded, and Pike's lawyers asked to examine them directly. A death-row inmate in Texas named Jamaal Howard cited her case in a motion to stop his own execution. Legal scholars went looking for precedent on what happens, constitutionally, when a state fails to kill someone on the first attempt, and found a 1947 Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to have settled it. Pike herself, by her lawyer's account, woke up angry and confused, unable to move her arms, asking what had happened to her. The department's own account of what went wrong amounted to a mechanic's story about a car he says he fixed — call it malarkey and move on.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009, will be shot to death on December 3 — the first execution by firing squad in the history of the United States military since 1945. Eighty-one years is a long time for a method to sit on a shelf marked unthinkable. It did not move; the shelf did.

The consensus is survived by a date on a calendar and a woman who can still ask questions. It is preceded in death by the idea that the alternative was ever gentler, only quieter.

In lieu of flowers, read the autopsy before the next one.

By MortThe Records Bureau

"The Working Theory That a Rally Helps" is dead this week, in San Antonio, on its third outing, survived by a crowd, a stage, and the tape that kept outvoting it.

It was born quietly on September 30th in Dallas, when the president's own candidate, Ken Paxton, told donors at a fundraiser that the midterm convention had cost him in the polls — "it dropped our numbers," on tape. Asked that day whether he'd heard it, the president said no, and praised the convention anyway. The theory held.

It held again on October 1st, when the president flew to Texas to campaign for Paxton regardless of the audio, the trip itself standing in for an answer.

It did not survive the third tape. This week Paxton told another closed-door fundraiser that the issue dragging his campaign was not tariffs — "it's the war, it's gas prices, it's diesel" — the president's war, named by his own candidate as the reason voters are souring. Diesel does not care who is on the ballot; some shit does not poll, and this is that kind.

On Wednesday the president made his third trip to Texas in a month, to San Antonio, to rally for the man whose own recordings say the rallying is the problem. Asked outside the White House what the trips were accomplishing, he told reporters he thinks he's helping the Republican Party with the rallies. He said it the same day his candidate's tape said the opposite of him, for the third time, in his own voice, on the record.

The theory leaves behind no formal rebuttal, because none was needed; it refuted itself, three times, into the same recorder.

Preceded in death this week by "I Haven't Heard That," the position that ignorance of one's own candidate's complaints could be maintained indefinitely. It could not. Neither could this.

There is no malarkey left to spread on the grave; the grave filled itself in, on tape, in the candidate's own voice, three separate times, while the rallies kept being booked.

In lieu of flowers, check the price of diesel before you check what anyone tells you a rally did.

By MortThe Records Bureau

The idea that a Nobel Peace Prize requires peace died this week, in the pages of Time magazine, where it was asked a simple question and given an answer with no room left in it for ambiguity.

Born, as these things are, when a committee first decided a prize for peace should require some peace in evidence, the idea had limped through a century of applicants who started the wars they later asked to be forgiven for. It held on through worse. It did not survive Oct. 1, when Time published an interview in which the president of the United States, asked about his threat to annihilate Iran, said the annihilation was the peace. The sentence had been building for seven months, since an April warning that Iran's "whole civilization" would die if it did not sign his terms, each threat a little plainer than the last until there was nothing left to misread.

This week the same president told reporters flatly that he deserves the prize for it, and allowed, almost sportingly, that he isn't sure he'll get it. He has not brokered peace in Ukraine either, noted in the same report as his boast, as though two wars still open made a stronger case than the one he's already calling finished. The White House is already writing the loss before the vote is in: aides are bracing for a snub, and the New York Post reports the president could still turn his prospects around with two actions the paper never specifies. Whichever two, they arrive too late for the idea they'd be meant to save.

That is the job now: not reward peace, but manage the fallout of the last award and brace for the next applicant who treats the word as a synonym for whatever he just finished leveling. Call the whole arrangement malarkey, and the word still does less work than the quote it's describing.

The idea is survived by the Nobel committee, which will absorb the blame either way, and by the dictionaries that still list peace as the opposite of war. It is preceded in death by the ceasefire in Ukraine, not yet arrived.

In lieu of flowers, read the Time interview in full before anyone else tells you what the word means now.

By MortThe Records Bureau

Pentagon transparency on this war died this week. That was reported here before. What follows is what happened to the question the estimate raised: if the Pentagon knew the number, would it say so.

In a dispatch dated September 3rd, the Washington Examiner reported the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a departure Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's own allies read as confirmation that Driscoll was never aligned with Hegseth's "radical transformation" of the department's culture. Six days later, on September 9th, Workers World described an internal conflict inside the Pentagon that had, in its own words, spilled into the main corporate media.

On September 17th, every Senate Democrat but one signed a letter asking Hegseth for a plain accounting of what the Iran war has cost. Three weeks passed. The letter went unanswered.

This week the bill came due twice. Senator Chris Murphy, touring the Gulf, asked to inspect Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest American installation in the Middle East, struck by Iranian missiles in the war's opening days, its damage still undisclosed. The Pentagon would not let him on the base and would not arrange a briefing. Murphy told reporters in Riyadh that Hegseth was working to cover up the true cost of the war. The same week, in the Times, a Special Forces veteran sat down with the columnist David French to take up the question of Hegseth's Pentagon. What was said there is not yet part of this record — only that the sitting down happened, the same week a senator was turned away at the gate.

Pentagon transparency on this war is survived by the receipt still not produced, and by a senator who flew to the Gulf and flew home without seeing the base he came to see.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the Department of War give the Congress that funds it the accounting it asked for three weeks ago.

By MortThe Records Bureau

"No Stone Unturned," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's promise about the Cornell rape case, born September 30 in a statement calling the allegations "horrifying," died three days later, NBC News reported October 3, when the public learned the Tompkins County district attorney had declined to bring charges without reviewing the witness statements and other evidence Cornell police had already collected. It was survived, as of that account, by a tip: Cornell police had received an anonymous call about a Chi Phi cover-up that went nowhere.

New York Attorney General Letitia James holds government letterhead; Governor Kathy Hochul appointed her special prosecutor October 2, the Guardian and NBC reported, to take over the case the district attorney had already let go cold. Sally Yates does not hold government letterhead. Cornell's trustees, a private body answering to nobody's ballot, retained the former deputy attorney general October 6 to review how the university — their university — handles sexual misconduct complaints, the Washington Post and ABC News reported the same day. And the Faculty Senate is not a person at all; it is weighing a no-confidence vote in the university's leadership, the Post reported, which is a body asking a body to resign from reviewing itself.

Three overseers, one of them elected, one of them hired by the accused party's own trustees, one of them a vote that has not happened yet. That is not thoroughness. That is three different offices circling the same shit nobody looked at the first time, and National Review published, also October 6, under the headline "The System Worked in the Cornell Seven Case," the argument that the authorities handled the matter in keeping with the facts and the law available to them. The facts available to them, per NBC, did not include the witness statements.

The system produced one more penny-ante complication the same day: a lawyer for one of the Cornell Seven asked BBC News to have James removed, on the grounds that comments she made about the case before she was ever appointed should disqualify her from leading it.

Elsewhere on campus, over 35 percent of undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact in a university-run 2025 survey, the Hill reported October 2. Students protested the administration's handling of the matter this week, the Guardian's video showed, demanding firmer discipline and an outside inquiry — a fourth request for review nobody has agreed is the last one needed.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the next office to open a file on this case be the one that reads what the last office already collected.

By MortThe Records Bureau

OBITUARY: THE HAVE-MERCY PULPIT

Born in the days after the second inaugural, 2025, when the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Edgar Budde, used a sermon at the National Cathedral to ask the newly sworn president to have mercy on immigrants and on LGBTQ+ people.

In September, the president shared photographs of gold-plated statues, mended fountains, and an arch rising in his own honor, all of it work he credited to National Park Service crews updating the capital under his beautification label. Days later he urged the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to take down the abstract steel sculpture at its entrance, called Infinity, and put up in its place a thirty-foot Washington Colossus.

This week, a different kind of notice arrived. Budde told her diocese she is leaving the post on June 3, 2028, once her successor is consecrated and ordained — more than three years after the sermon, timed so the seat is never without a bishop, only ever, eventually, without her.

Born: a sentence, January 2025. Died: by her own letter, June 3, 2028. Survived by: the pulpit itself, which does not resign; whoever is consecrated into it next; a diocese that watched its one quoted request for mercy outlast the news cycle that made it famous. Preceded, in its way, by the abstract sculpture at the museum door, which the president asked to be replaced with a man thirty feet tall.

Washington keeps adding statues. It is getting a new one, Colossus-sized, where an abstract shape used to turn in the wind. The ask for mercy gets a succession plan instead — a hogwash arrangement by which the pulpit stays filled on schedule and the man who was asked keeps deciding what gets built around it.

In lieu of flowers, read the letter in full before the new bishop is seated.

By MortThe Records Bureau

Michigan's sex offender registry died this week at the state supreme court, survived by the law it enforced for a number of years this record does not state — there is no birth date given for it anywhere in the wire, which is worth sitting with for a public list whose whole business was keeping an accurate account. The court found a problem in how the law could be applied, a legal technicality in the paper's own phrase, and struck down the whole registration scheme rather than one name on it. Michigan State Police began removing offenders from the database. Roughly twenty thousand people came off the list. Larry Nassar was one of them.

Walk the years backward from that fact, because the order is the whole obituary. On September 15, 2021, Simone Biles and three other U.S. gymnasts testified before Congress that USA Gymnastics and the FBI had let their team doctor keep working for years after the first report of his abuse reached a federal desk in 2015 — six years before anyone in Washington said so under oath. Nassar was already convicted by then.

The registry did not die because a judge decided Larry Nassar belonged off that list. It died because the law that put him there, and nineteen thousand-some others beside him, could not survive being asked to apply the same way to all of them. That is not malarkey — that is the actual shit sitting under this headline: a registry wide enough to need no judgment calls turned out to be too wide to survive a single judgment call.

Survived by: the underlying convictions, which the ruling does not touch. Preceded in death by nothing stated in the record — no earlier Michigan registry is named in these receipts, no amendment history given; this obituary runs on what the wire provided, not what a fuller search might someday turn up.

In lieu of flowers, Lansing could write the registry it actually meant to build — one narrow enough to survive a courtroom — before the next name comes off the list the same way this one did.

By MortThe Records Bureau

It was born in federal regulation in 1975, when wildlife officials wrote into law that a trap didn't need a trigger-man to count as a killing — that habitat destroyed, water poisoned, or forest clear-cut could injure a species as surely as a bullet. It is survived by a lawsuit, filed in July in federal court in Seattle, and by the conservation groups who amended that lawsuit Thursday to name its cause of death a second time.

It was preceded in death by the Roadless Rule.

The current death came in two stages. On September 14, the rescission of "harm" took effect, and US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik issued a memo instructing agencies that only the intentional killing or wounding of a protected species now counts as illegal — not habitat loss, not pollution, not the slow incidental kind that was the word's whole reason for existing. The New York Times found the memo late on September 16; by the next morning Common Dreams and The Hill had it, and critics were calling it, not for the first time this year, "an all-out war on America's wildlife."

The supplemental complaint filed Thursday names John Luce, general counsel at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among the officials now carrying that interpretation into the agencies' daily business. What exactly crossed his desk, the wire does not yet say. What the plaintiffs say is that the harm is the same harm — only now it has to be on purpose to count.

Born in regulation. Survived by a lawsuit. Preceded in death by a rule protecting forty-five million acres. Malarkey was never built to withstand a word this small doing this much work; take the word away, and the forest, the river, the slow poisoning stay perfectly legal.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you read the supplemental complaint now before the federal court in Seattle, and remember that the number 400 is not a forecast. It is a study's name for what the agencies have already started.

By MortThe Records Bureau

It was conceived by Pope Francis, in his first major action on the matter, to advise the Catholic Church on how dioceses and seminaries ought to handle the sin and the crime of clergy abusing children. It was not conceived with the power to do anything about a bishop. That job — removing a cleric, laicizing him, opening his file — stayed where it had sat at the signing: with the dioceses themselves, and with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a body that answers to Rome and, on the record so far, to little else.

It is survived, this week, by a report from the Massachusetts attorney general counting more than 270 Catholic clerics who sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three dioceses over decades. The commission had no authority to open a single one of those files. Twelve years of advising, and the advice apparently never reached the filing cabinet.

It was preceded in death, in July 2022, by a different promise in a different country: a three-year independent inquiry into Telford, Shropshire, found more than 1,000 children sexually exploited since the 1980s, teachers and youth workers discouraged from reporting it, and police nervous that investigating the abusers would inflame racial tensions. Different institution, same arithmetic — a four-digit count of children, and the people positioned to stop it choosing the institution's comfort over the count.

This was malarkey dressed as reform, filed under good letterhead, and the filing cabinet this week came up short three dioceses and nearly a thousand children. A commission can advise for twelve years running and still never touch a bishop's personnel file, and that is not an oversight; it is the design working as built. There is a difference between an institution that failed once and an institution that has now failed on two continents with the same number, and the difference is twelve years of a tribunal that was never given a key to anything.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that every diocese that has not yet opened its personnel files to an independent civil authority do so now, and that no advisory commission be mistaken for an enforcement one again.