-- I'm providing Snoofy footnotes here so he needn't plunk down the ducats for my autobiography.

Wikipedia:

On September 6, 1999, Jim Keith injured his leg after stepping off a three-foot stage at the Burning Man festival. Thinking it was only a severe sprain, he went home. The next morning, in severe pain, he checked into the Washoe Medical center for treatment of a broken knee. On September 7, 1999, a blood clot released from his leg and entered his lung, which resulted in his death aged 49.

After his death, conspiracy theorists expressed suspicion that he was killed because he mentioned the name of a physician who declared Princess Diana was pregnant at the time of her death.

Thanks, AI:

In April 2001, 48-year-old alternative publisher and researcher Ron Bonds died in Atlanta, Georgia from a severe bacterial infection following a meal containing ground beef at an El Azteca restaurant.

The Incident and Medical Cause
The meal: Ron Bonds and his wife ate a lunch featuring ground beef at an Atlanta Mexican restaurant on Ponce de Leon Avenue.
The symptoms: Roughly eight to nine hours later, he experienced severe nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
The cause of death: He was rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital where he passed away roughly 15 hours after the onset of symptoms. Medical findings attributed his death to a rare, fatal bacterial food poisoning that severely aggravated pre-existing chronic gastrointestinal conditions (gastritis and diverticulosis).

Context and Legacy
IllumiNet Press: Ron Bonds was well-known as the founder of IllumiNet Press, a publishing house specializing in fringe topics, conspiracy theories, alternative history, and unexplained phenomena.
Conspiracy claims: Because of his line of work researching sensitive or unusual subjects like the JFK assassination and New World Order theories, his sudden death from a rare lethal foodborne illness occasionally surfaces in online conspiracy circles.

Also author of Black Helicopters over America.

I had some very fun reading in the 90s, before almost full immersion into theology and university publishing.

Snoofy: I'm not sure I ever received a hard copy myself, and I delete all my project files every 10 years or so.

1996.

The author is Jim Keith, who also did the Gemstones File book and may himself have met an unfortunate demise himself.

Not doubting, just curious.

Like the frog in the slowly building pot of water. Eventually, the frog actually hops out. It doesn't not notice that it's slowly cooking.

#18 | Posted by snoofy

Link?

"The classes were broken into academic level.
Some of this movement had nothing to do with the education, but the look of student being educated."
#33 | Posted by Petrous

Some of that broke-making had nothing to do with academic level but with race and poverty.

The right-wing Catholics I'm paid to read are all about forming and finding trad husbands.

I read books from priests telling them to do so all the time. I got no problem with that. To each their own.

What I have a problem with is that the books read more like how-to manuals on being a decent human being. They feel compelled to tell men to

* Listen to your spouse.
* Spend at least 15 minutes a day alone with your kids (a jaw-dropping thing to have to say).
* When you come home, don't immediately start doing something else.
* Remember sex. It helps with procreation. Oh, and men can like it, when they have it with their wife, especially knowing that it could bring another cradle Catholic into the world.

6. Oh. I thought it was like fish in a barrel. Forgetting my metaphors.

2.

Painting a dot on the wall, drawing a circle around it, and claiming they hit the target?

5. An author I worked with:

"You'll be the same person five years from now, except for the people you meet and the books you read."

The latter closes out lots of people.

California, 2021-22:

The people who hired on under this administration were nuts anyway. Not people with a long-term view on their career.

Hopefully a Trump administration job on a resume is eventually viewed like Charles Manson's swastika-adorned third eye.

Press release for LA County report, giving health, income, education highlights:

LYD/TrueBlue:

Los Angeles County: Neighborhood by neighborhood.

They want you just smart enough to operate the cash register at the Piggly Wiggly.
They don't want you smart enough to see how they are screwing you.

#27 | Posted by Nixon

Those Piggly Wigglies will be taking care of others in nursing homes 40 years from now (if you're lucky) -- and have been brought up in These Trumpian United States.

Stay healthy, folks.

Yes, the full article is subscription-only. So sue me. It's recent original research.

So if you think science and academia and research and psychology and such stuff is useless . . . well, hammer away.

Basic point here: People change a lot over the last 10 years and don't think they'll change in the next 10.

Retort's been around 20+ years. I see the same folks grouching over the same arguments with the same sources over and over and over again: i.e., God or no God. For Zarathustra's sake, that argument hasn't changed here in 20 years, and won't for another 20. Or 200.

Way past copyediting, I had a direct hand in the following. And I don't think my name is in it, which is why I'm posting it here.

Should be enough hooks for the pilot episode.

#133 | Posted by Doc_Sarvis

Everything I needed to know about conspiracy theories started with reading broadsides plastered on phone poles throughout the Lower East Side of NYC in the 1970s discussing the Gemstone Files.

Which is where the whole sodium morphate thing began, as far as I know.

T'wasn't necessary to archive anything.
The Internet is forever.

#141 | Posted by A_Friend

Well, that's good to know. I'm a luddite.

I think the recent spate of "puling" here is courtesy of a poster railing against progressives. I forget which one.

It's a great word.

#67 | Posted by A_Friend

Why would someone archive years of the Retort? Even if it's for fun, what a life.

A question I posed sometime back: Who came here in 2005 and created sock puppets and why?

I don't know what Hans is up to these days. Nor do I know what A_Friend is up to.

But it's interesting.

I'm using common sense.
#157 | Posted by BillJohnson

I've stumbled into a world of fiction.

It's not an assumption. What does the scoreboard say?