Marching Into The -ber Months

Today is the last day of summer, when we wake up tomorrow morning it will be the 1st September and the first day of Autumn and boy have i heard some people whinging today.
Amnesia about all the stingy things, the sunburn and having to rip the pillow from your sweaty face each morning as we recall halcyon days where we sat outside watching the dying embers of the barbecue while sipping continental lager at 2am or sitting around a swimming pool sipping a cocktail while your feet sway rhythmically in the cool water.
Well, wake up because that's all over and it's now the steady march towards cardigans, big coats and gloves and i can't say i'm that upset as out of the four seasons that our wobbly, lopsided planet provides, Summer is bottom of the list.
Autumn brings a riot of colour as the trees shed their leaves, we get to wear woolly jumpers again, watch sunrises at an acceptable hour and we get that hour back that we handed in back in March.
Most importantly we get into the -ber months and everyone knows that once you get a -ber at the end of the month it is a short stop off at Halloween, then Guy Fawkes Night and then we are into the throes of most wonderful time of the year...CHRISTMAS!!

Taxing Times For Apple

You would have thought that if someone was being made to shovel over £11bn into a nations coffers, the recipient country would be whooping it up but the Irish are a strange breed and far from eyeing up a cut in taxes or a installing some hospital equipment, they are doing all they can to make sure to show that they don't want it.
After a three year investigation which showed that Apple's headquarters was an empty office in Dublin which had no staff, the European Union have decided that the tech giant's tax arrangements enabled it to pay a tax rate of as little as £50 in taxes on every £1m of profit  was illegal and they must hand over a cheque for £11 billion for tax that they had evaded paying.    
Far from happy is Ireland's finance minister, Michael Noonan, who has said that he 'disagreed profoundly' with the decision and would seek an appeal.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook threatened that if they had to cough up the amount of back-tax due, it would have: 'a profound and harmful effect on investment and job creation in Europe' before strangely explaining that the company paid all the taxes it owed despite just being revealed they haven't been paying all the tax they owed hence the £11bn bill.
Ireland of course are concerned that if Apple are made to pay what they should rather than the pathetic amount, £50 in every £1m they make in profit which is presently thrown towards the Irish Government, they will up sticks and go somewhere else where they can evade paying the tax they should.  
The EU's have other multinationals in their sights including with Amazon and McDonald's tax arrangements under investigation and and Starbucks ordered to pay up to £26m back tax due to the Netherlands.
I am sure that if Irish taxpayers tried the same thing and protested that if they were made to pay the tax they owed rather than throw the Irish Governments a few crumbs now and then, the Government's tax collectors would disagree just as profoundly and refuse to accept it, wouldn't they?  

Little Help

The Royal Navy recently took delivery of six shiny new destroyers and they looked very nice gleaming in the sunshine of Portsmouth Harbour but the problems happen when it leaves Portsmouth because the billion pound ships break down in warm water leading to the Government announcing that at present the warships cannot operate if the water is warmer than it is in Portsmouth harbour.
Not letting an issue like that stand in their way, the Government has now dispatched one of the six, HMS Daring, to the Persian Gulf to help the fight against Islamic State in the region, tasked with protecting US aircraft carriers as they launch airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
That is if it gets there at all because the ship has already broken down twice when it left dock and had to be towed back to the cooler water of Portsmouth as its engines 'degraded catastrophically causing total electrical failure' as the First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Philip Jones told the House of Commons’ Defence Committee.
If i was the American Navy i would make sure that alongside all the military hardware they bring along a good, sturdy rope because i can see our lot asking for a tow back to Portsmouth very soon.

The US Flag Code

America, it seems, have a few obsessions ranging from making sure they keep guns handily placed around their homes for when the Government oppresses them, Israel, God and a new found passion for all things lavatorial from either smashing them up or dictating who can use them.
Other things they have a preoccupation for is their national anthem and the flag, the latter you can see being burnt in most Middle Eastern countries but such is the enthusiasm with the national emblem that they have a Flag Code which covers all aspects of etiquette in relation to the Stars and Stripes which is enshrined in law, including how to behave when someone starts warbling 'Oh, say Can You see...'         
So what should you do when the national anthem is played?
The code states that you must stand and face the flag, if there is one with the right hand over the heart, while military personnel and veterans should salute continuously throughout.
Hats or caps must be removed and while you do not necessarily have to sing along to the anthem, it is expected.
The Flag Code states that it should not be used for any advertising purpose or printed on any material for temporary use and should also never be part of a costume or sports uniform, or used as 'wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery' which may start a few Olympians worrying as they ran around to celebrate their success covering themselves in the stars and stripes. 
The flag should never be displayed upside down but surprisingly it is not illegal to burn the US flag and is actually encouraged as the code states that flags should be 'destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning'.
So next time the news shows a bunch of middle eastern men dancing around a flaming Old Glory it is not because your nation has just bombed yet another wedding ceremony by accident, don't take umbrage, they are merely destroying your national flag in a dignified manner as per the instructions of the US Constitution so rise up from that chair guarding the toilet door, take off your baseball cap, find a flag to peer at and sing along..'Oh say can you see by the Dawn's early light...'

Summer And Lovin' Spoons

So how's your summer been? Three more days and then Autumn comes slamming in and it's goodbye evening cocktails on the veranda in flip-flops and hello hot chocolate on the sofa in Ugg boots.
Each summer there is a song that follows us around like a bad smell and this year i have been haunted by a song which came out before i was even born, The Lovin' Spoonfuls 'Summer In The City'.    
Not only has it been on the radio several times but it put in an appearance in a couple of TV shows including one of the Die Hard films on television.   
I have therefore decided that the Cosmos is trying to tell me something via the medium of Heart FM and Bruce Willis but reading through the lyrics of the song, what it is saying is beyond me unless it is telling me i have a dirty 'n' gritty neck.
I won't be going out to find a girl anytime soon, dancing all night or looking for a kitty but i did go on a roof top one night to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower but it was too cloudy to see any.
I can only conclude that the Cosmos has used it's powers to tell me i need to buy some more spoons so to shut it up and stop it reminding me constantly, i went to buy some.
Then i remembered as i stood trying to decide exactly which type of spoons i was meant to buy, on my last day at work before the break my colleague used my teaspoon to throw a weird looking bug out the window so i told him to throw it away as i wouldn't be using that one again.     
I would have hated to have turned up back at work Tuesday and not been able to measure out a teaspoon of coffee and sugar so thanks Galaxy.
PS...I have also washed the back of my neck also just in case i misunderstood.

Conspiracy Theory: Jim Morrison Still Alive

There are many conspiracy theories around dead musicians so it can be confusing to remember who is dead and who isn't so while Elvis, Tupac and Kurt Cobain are still alive and well but living in hiding somewhere, poor old Avril Lavigne and Paul McCartney are toast and were replaced by look-a-likes but certainly alive, according to some, is the Doors front man.

The official story is that Jim Morrison died of heart failure, widely attributed to a drug overdose, while sitting in the bathtub of his apartment in Paris.
That's funny some say because there are those who swear they saw him saying goodbye to his girlfriend Pamela Courson at an airport in Paris days later and a bank worker in San Francisco claims that Jim completed a bank transition in his own name, days after his supposed demise.
The theory is that Morrison had a motive for faking his own death, the 20 plus paternity suits he had pending, the six months prison time  and two years probation he faced after he was found guilty of indecent exposure during a concert.
Throw in there was no autopsy, the funeral was a hurried affair attended by just five people and the only person to see Jim dead outside of the hospital staff was his girlfriend, Pam and she died later of a heroin overdose adding fuel to the fire that she simply went to join Jim wherever he was holed up.

Conspiracy Theory: Mars Already Inhabited

We have done the Moon and now our attention is turning to the Planet Mars and talk of a manned mission is taking shape but some are convinced that not only did we go there a long time ago but we have a colony already set up on the red planet. 

Without doubt we have made an almighty mess of this planet so it is natural that we search elsewhere in our Solar System for somewhere else to populate ands Mars is a candidate and while some people speculate if there is life there, others know there is because it's us.
In 2014, a woman who would only call herself Jackie claimed that she used to work for NASA and that she saw evidence that we have colonies on Mars—or that there are actually intelligent Martians living on the red planet. According to her story, she was helping bring the Viking Lander down on the Martian landscape when she saw two figures walking toward the lander. She claims that she and her colleagues nearby had their feeds cut out as this happened.
They ran upstairs to try to get a better look, but their superiors had locked the doors and taped up any cracks so they could not look through.
The woman is open to speculation as to whether it was aliens or fellow humans but she is convinced there is something already there.

Conspiracy Theory: The Real Reason For The LHC

Beneath Switzerland sits the Large Hadron Collider which we thought was groups of people with white lab coats with pens in the top pocket bashing together particles to further our scientific knowledge of atomic particles but some people know the real reason, to create a portal to awaken the Egyptian God of Death.

The ancient Egyptians had an object named Ta-Wer aka 'Osiris device' which was a stargate machine capable of opening inter-dimensional wormholes to allow their Gods (specifically Seth and Osiris) to travel across the underworld.
The science bit is that nothing can travel faster than light but a 'shortcut' could be opened to connect two distant if a huge amount of energy is used to 'bend' the space, forming an interconnected tunnel in space-time where matter could pass.
The LHC, being a particle booster, is capable of creating such huge amount of energy similar to the required cosmic conditions to spawn wormholes, or a huge Stargate device.
Makes you wonder.

Conspiracy Theory: Aliens

There is no shortage of alien conspiracy theory out there from UFO crashes at Roswell to humans being the result of a giant alien experiment.

Depending on who you speak to, Aliens are either watching us, were directly involved in creating us or are in communication with our World leaders who keep it hushed up to stop panic spreading but the most widely believed theories show that aliens are out there somewhere doing something.
One theory hinges on the presence of 'junk' DNA of unknown function in our bodies which shows aliens tinkered with our ancestors DNA long ago or created them to begin with which serves as a kind of trademark to show that we are the creation of extraterrestrial life forms.
Another theory is that ancient aliens influenced human life in the past. The ancient aliens were directly involved in the evolution of primates, including humans. It has been suggested that they helped in the development of human cultures, technologies and even religion.
An opposite conspiracy theory is that aliens generally avoid making their presence known to humanity, or avoid exerting an influence on development, preferring to observe us using equipment located on Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System and on occasion throw us a curve-ball such as an earthquake or warming climate to see how we cope and evolve.

Conspiracy Theory: Chemtrails & HAARP

If you look up into the sky on a clear blue day, you might catch a glimpse of the latest Government conspiracy to control our minds and/or alter the weather.

On any clear day you can see the unusual pattern of thin clouds that look almost—but not quite—like aeroplane contrails. These are chemtrails, which the government sprays over the population to spread mind-controlling chemicals, biological weapons, or weather-altering super-technology, depending on whom you ask.
The theory states that the chemicals spewing out of government planes are designed to create 'ionospheric disruption' that can be used to manipulate weather patterns with the resulting engineered Hurricanes, floods and droughts.
Others believe that they don't even have to charter a plane and they are doing it here on the ground through the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP).
This theory is that that someone out there, usually the Americans or Israelies, have a secret weapon that can alter the climate at any given point of the Globe by disturbing the ionosphere and cause all manner of climate disasters.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say in theory they could, they even have a name for it, Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling, which is a geek way of saying heating the ionosphere.

Conspiracy Theory: AIDS

With seven billion of us on the planet using up it's resources at an amazing rate, there is a theory that someone has decided to trim some of the excess population.   

According to conspiracy theorists, the trimming process is to down to the New World Order (NWO) killing most of the humans on the planet and leaving about two billion people of the best and brightest to continue the human race.
Exactly how the NWO will trim down the population is a point of contention among theorists but the most popular theory is that the weapon of choice is a devastating virus bio engineered by the NWO released into the population and that virus is AIDS.
There are claims that the HIV virus was created by scientists in a laboratory and administered to African Americans and homosexuals in the 1970s, via tainted vaccinations as part of a plan to destroy the black race. Others claim that it was administered in Africa as a way of crippling the development of that continent but backfired when white men went to Africa, had sex with infected Africans and brought it back to the West.
A similar theory explains that the virus was created as an experiment in biological warfare, and then escaped into the population at large by accident.

Conspiracy Theory: Reptilian Humanoids

Conspiracy theorists do like to think that we will be enslaved whether it be by aliens, robots or even humanoid reptiles who are currently among us.

The blood-drinking, flesh-eating, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids are well on schedule to suppress us humans and take over the World as they have wormed their way into the seats of the World leaders, the Royals, our corporate executives and even Oscar-winning actors and Grammy-winning singers and are responsible for the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks.
These reptiles, called Annunaki, have controlled humankind since ancient times and they count among their number Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jack Nicholson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sean Connery, Brad Pitt, Roger Moore and Angelina Jolie. 

I don't recall seeing Benedict Cumberbatch blinking sideways or breathing fire but you know, in the right light, at a certain angle, without the actors make-up...hmmm.

Conspiracy Theories: 9/11 An Inside Job

Many conspiracy theories have been presented concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks, many of them claiming that President George W. Bush and individuals in his administration knew about the attacks beforehand

The twin towers were still burning when the first conspiracy theories began with traders laying an 'extraordinary' amount of put options on United Airlines and American Airlines stocks, the same airlines that were hijacked during the attacks.
The US Air Defense was told to stand down, the World Trade Center collapse appeared similar to a controlled demolition with some witnesses hearing explosions inside the building as they attempted to escape, the impact holes in the Pentagon were much smaller than a commercial American Airlines plane would make.
The conspirators question how the paper passports of the terrorists survived the explosions which destroyed buildings and why 4,000 Jewish employees at the WTC took the day off from work on September 11, 2001.
The most agreed upon theory is that the President set it up as a justification to go on a war frenzy in the Middle East to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq, a conspiracy which gained further traction when it was shown that the President had to defend his extremely tenuous links between Saddam and the 9/11 attack while all of the terrorists were Saudi Arabian.

Conspiracy Theory: Kubrick Helps Fake Moon Landings

REM sang 'If you believe they put a man on the moon' and million said they never because to them Neil Armstrong never set foot outside of a movie studio and the US Government wheeled in a famous director to help create the fake landing.

The story goes that in the midst of the Space Race, someone in the American government saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and asked Stanley Kubrick to help them fake the Apollo 11 moon landings in order to gazump the Soviet Union who were ahead of America in the Space Race at the time.
Kubrik agreed but afterwards he realised just what a big deal it was but become worried that he might be silenced by the Government so to protect himself, he filled his film, The Shining, with clues about the conspiracy.
Danny wears an Apollo 11 jumper, Room 237 is a reference to the 237,000 miles distance between Earth and the moon, when Jack types 'All work and no play…', the first word looks like “A11” or Apollo 11. The twins represent NASA’s Gemini space programme, the guy in a bear suit represents the Soviet Bear and then there is Jack’s rant at Wendy when she wants to leave represents Kubrick arguing with his own wife about his deception: 'Does it matter to you at all that the owners have placed their complete confidence and trust in me, and that I have signed a contract in which I have accepted that responsibility?'
If that isn't enough to convince you then how about the final piece of the jigsaw, Jack agreed to look after the Overlook Hotel during the winter just like Kubrick agreed to help America during the Cold War.
I don't know how much more proof anyone would need but it would explain why Kubrik made such a pigs ear of filming the King novel, because he was too busy stuffing it full of fake moon mission hints that he completely forgot how the book finished and just made up his own ending.

Conspiracy Theory: Global Warming

Even 99% of scientists saying the globe is warming isn't enough for some who view the whole Climate Change  movement as nonsense and just another attempt at controlling us.

The Global Warming Conspiracy Theory claims that scientific consensus on global warming is based on false data and suppressing dissent for ideological and financial reasons.
Reasons range from exercising political influence, to try to introduce a world government, to control people, raise taxes and ruin industry and keep the funding rolling in for scientists and environmentalists.
The conspiracy theorists assert that scientists critical of global warming theory have been denied funding and science and lefty environmentalists are colluding to bring down oil companies and Capitalism itself.
The evidence provided by the deniers are that there is no accumulation of CO2 and it is actually getting colder. There is no correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and a warming globe and if the climate is changing, it has nothing to do with human activities, just natural variations that would have taken place anyway and climate scientists don’t follow normal scientific rules.
Forget the solar panels, chop down the wind turbines and untie the tidal wave generators because all that flooding, desertification and extreme weather is just a clever rouse by those damned Greenies to make us pay more tax.

Conspiracy Theory: Hollow Moon

Since man evolved eyes, he has gazed up at the Moon and scientists believe that it was created by a giant impact between the young Earth and a Mars-sized body. Some non-science based people prefer to believe that it is an Alien spacecraft. 

The Moon, it has been said, is apparently in the wrong orbit for its size and density which can only mean that it is not as heavy as we think, with the obvious conclusion that it is hollow.
Some of these claims come from the fact that when meteors strike the Moon, it rings like a bell. More specifically, when the Apollo crew, on November 20, 1969, released the lunar module, after returning to the orbiter, the module impact with the Moon caused their seismic equipment to register a continuous reverberation like a bell for more than an hour.
The conspiracy theory developed that if the Moon is hollow then it must be an alien spacecraft. The Moon is a hollowed-out planetoid created by unknown beings with technology far superior to any on Earth. Huge machines would have been used to melt rock to form the outer shell we see and large cavities within the Moon where aliens sit and watch us.
Proponents of this theory point to the many asteroids and meteors impact sites on the Moon's surface which are shallow craters with a convex floor instead of concave as expected, supporting the idea of a rigid shell.
Further evidence is that the Earth is aged at 4.6 billion years old, while Moon rocks were dated at 5.3 billion years and the moon’s crust is much harder than originally presumed. When NASA was recorded drilling down a few inches into the Moon’s surface, it appeared that metal shavings were visible.
Also, the Moon is the only natural satellite in the Solar System that has a stationary, near-perfect circular orbit and why is just the absolute perfect distance and size to completely cover the sun during an eclipse?
Over to you Professor Brian Cox.

Conspiracy Theory: Flat Earth

A famous saying is that it is always better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are an imbecile than to open your mouth and confirm it which could be a lesson for the Flat Earth Conspiracy Theorists. 

Around 600 BC, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras started telling people that the Earth was a sphere. His fellow Greeks may have been slow to believe him but by the Middle Ages, it was an accepted fact that the earth was a ball even if the likes of Galileo had a harder time making people believe that the Earth wasn't at the centre of the universe.
If seems that after 2600 years we have been wrong all along and the Earth is actually flat, that is according to the Flat Earth conspiracy theory.
Space Images? Faked.
International Space Station footage? Shot In A Zero-G Plane.
Gravity?  Doesn't exist.
That last one may be a shock if they dropped a bowling ball on their foot but they say that it isn't things dropping towards Earth but the flat disc constantly accelerating upward, so you stood on the Earth are actually rising up to meet the bowling ball. You get a sore toe either way.
They also say that the Sun is really only 3,000 miles away, and it’s only 32 miles wide and is like a giant light-bulb that moves in a circle and shines on the flat surface of the world like a lighthouse.
Finally, they believe that the sky and everything in it are fake. What you’re actually seeing is a dome that serves to hide whatever is up there such as God or even aliens, they haven't worked that bit out yet.

Conspiracy Theory: Electric Cars

Like the stories of a tee-total Australian and generous Scotsman, some tales are just so unbelievable that they are dismissed immediately but all the best conspiracy theories work because they contain just enough 'evidence' that you pause before dismissing them.  

The first electric car, The Flocken Elektrowagen, was invented in 1888 and in 1899 an electric car set the land speed record at 65 mph.
Over a hundred years later electric cars have not progressed immensely while the petrol driven models have moved forward in leaps and bounds but conspiracy theorists know who to blame, the oil companies who possess the technology for purely electric cars, but because of the massive fortune they are making off of oil and petrol, they refuse to release the technology, and have even had people killed who have come close to publishing their discoveries.
Howard 'Rory' Johnson invented an electric engine which he offered to the Greyhound Bus Company to test on their buses.
When the bus company contacted him to discuss a trial they were told that Howard Johnson had suddenly died of unknown causes as had the three inventors working on the Thorium Plasma Batteries which could power cars without need for fossil fuels.
Conspiracy theorists ask if the technology has existed from as early as the 1880s, why did it appear to hits its peak at the turn of the 20th Century and then decline and why are we still waiting for electric cars while petrol cars are known to be literally choking us to death?

Conspiracy Theory: Jesus Was An Alien

Any conspiracy theory that includes Jesus is on shaky ground from the start but nevertheless, despite a lack of evidence the son of God is still popular but there is a theory that the carpenters son was all in the imagination of either Romans with too much time on their hands or Aliens.

According to this conspiracy theory, the man himself never existed and his life story is a mash up of God stories doing the rounds at the time, Gods such as Krishna, Adonis, Osiris and Mithra in order to control people (heaven if good and hell if bad) and quell any dissent.
The threat of eternal damnation if they were opposed worked so well that the authorities passed down the idea to their successors until Constantine considered it such a good idea that he called the Council of Nicaea to organize the Church and spread the word to ensure global domination.
Alternatively, some people believe that Jesus did exist but he literally, 'not of this earth', being an alien and all.
The Church has been desperately covering up this fact for centuries as the theory goes, all the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ life hinted at extraterrestrial origins. The 'virgin birth' was aliens artificially inseminating Mary, which in turn would explain why he could perform miraculous feats as well as communicate with otherworldly beings such as angels (who themselves are also aliens).
Believers also point to Jesus’ statements that he was 'not of this world' as hints of his real heritage. The theory goes on to say that after his resurrection, Jesus was beamed up into a spaceship and that the Catholic Church later suppressed the rest of the details by marking books such as the Epistles of the Apostles as factually true.

Conspiracy Theory: Stephen King Shot John Lennon

Marilyn Monroe and JFK were both killed by the CIA while Princess Diana was murdered on the say so of Prince Philip and Mark Chapman took out John Lennon, or did he?
You have to love a conspiracy theory and when you get one that throws together a couple of famous names then it only elevates it to another level.

There is a thought that Paul McCartney gave us the Frog Chorus and lived while John Lennon penned Imagine and got killed which proves there is no such thing as karma but there is a conspiracy theory that Lennon's killer was actually author Stephen King and not Mark Chapman at all who was a patsy who took the fall for the singers killing.
The greatest evidence is the above picture where, according to the conspiracy theorists, the man photographed getting Lennon’s autograph hours before he killed him is not Mark Chapman like we were all told. Chapman’s glasses are the wrong prescription, his features are more centrally boxed in the middle of his face and his hair is the wrong texture, as well as the fact that the killer has dimples that Chapman does not. Only Stephen King’s features exactly trace the proportions of the autograph hound.
After the shooting, a hooded King was bundled into a nearby police station where the unwitting Chapman was being held and then they were swapped and the rest is history, Chapman went to prison and King went on to write 11/22/63 all about trying to stop an assassination of someone called John. Hmmmm.

Conspiracy Theory: Where Did Those 300 Years Go?

While it is accepted that in 1752 we lost 11 days to align the calendar in use in England to the Gregorian one adopted on the continent, there is a conspiracy theory that the period between 614 ad and 911 ad didn’t exist and the year is actually 1719 ad.

The theory is that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII fabricated the dates so that it placed them as heads of their respective seats of power at the time of the Millennium, 1000 ad, therefore ensuring their places at this special time in history.
Problem was it was only the seventh century so they colluded to get chroniclers across Europe to invent and document an extra 300 years.
Theorists argue that the apparent stagnation in ceramics, language and thought as well as the lack of substantial documentary evidence along with the lack of development of architecture and the presence of Roman architecture in tenth-century Western Europe, suggesting that the Roman era was not as long as conventionally thought and shows that this period simply didn’t exist.
The period is characterised by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it obscure to historians hence the name 'the Dark Ages'.

Conspiracy Theory: Princess Diana & Paul McCartney

It seems that you are not famous until a conspiracy theory appears after you die and in the case of Paul McCartney, even before you die.

In 1997, Diana the Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed (son of Mohamed Fayed, owner of Harrods) were killed in a car crash while trying to escape from press photographers in Paris.
Dodi was Muslim whilst Diana was the mother of the future head of the Church of England which has led many people to speculate that they were actually killed in order to prevent further scandal to the throne of England.
Motivations which have been advanced for such a conspiracy include suggestions that Diana intended to marry Dodi Fayed, that she intended to convert to Islam and that she was pregnant.
Organisations which conspiracy theorists suggest are responsible for her death have included French Intelligence, the press, the British Intelligence services MI5 or MI6, the CIA, Mossad or the Freemasons but mostly the spotlight has fallen on The Duke of Edinburgh and the British Royal Family who were openly displeased with the way the Princesses and mother to the next heir to the throne was conducting herself in relationships with men.
At least the conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana started after she died, for Paul McCartney they began while he was still alive. 
The theory goes that Paul McCartney of the The Beatles died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike and sound-alike. Evidence for McCartney’s death consists of 'clues' deliberately placed in later Beatles recordings including statements allegedly heard when a song is played backwards, symbolism found in obscure lyrics, and ambiguous imagery on album covers and the final nail in the coffin as it were that McCartney is the only barefooted Beatle and is out of step with the others on the cover of Abbey Road.

Conspiracy Theory: Grateful Roswell Aliens

The truth is out there so said Mulder and Scully with the 'there' in this case being the desert in Roswell in 1947.

Probably the most debated extra-terrestrial event happened in 1947 when either a UFO or a weather balloon crash-landed on a farm near Roswell Air Base, New Mexico.
A rather large group of people believe that the 'weather balloon' was actually an Unidentified Flying Object from outer space and the military recovered three or four alien bodies.
For many that is where the story ends but there is a conspiracy theory that takes it up a notch and that one of the aliens was still alive and he was cared back to health until his fellow aliens could come to pick it up. 
In return, the grateful alien established an exchange program with the JFK and then Johnson run Governments that made arrangements for two spaceships to not only pick it up, but take along a dozen specially trained astronauts in 1965.
The astronauts were taken to the aliens planet, Serpo, and spent more than a decade learning about the planet and its inhabitants, a race called the Ebens.
According to them, the Ebens lived in a peaceful, government-free community. After 13 years, the team finally returned to Earth four members short after two of them died and another two chose to stay on Serpo.
The conspiracy theory goes on to claim that such was America's leap in flight technology at that time that humans would have been unable to come up with these technologies in such a short space of time and they actually reverse engineered the crashed flying saucer.

Conspiracy Theory: Bin Laden

We all love a good conspiracy theory whether it be about the moon landings or who shot Kennedy. The usual process is to listen to them and then dismiss them as fantasy but the conspiracy theories behind the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 keep bubbling up.

Before he was last seen slipping off the side of a US Warship, Bin Laden was the big bad and the recipient of the US wrath for being the brains behind killing 3000 of its citizens on 9/11 2001. 
Top of the FBI 10 most wanted list, his poster on the FBI website listed his crimes as 'Murder of US nationals outside of the United States; conspiracy to murder US Nationals outside of the United States; Attack on a federal facility resulting in death of US citizens.'
His poster for Most Wanted Terrorist stated the same crimes.
Conspiracy theorists leapt upon this asking why he was wanted for events such as the 1998 US Embassy bombings and USS Cole but there is no mention of his involvement in the 2001 attacks.
Further digging revealed that amazingly the reason the FBI never included his role as mastermind behind the attacks was because the FBI had no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.
Smelling a conspiracy theory in the air, some asked the obvious question why was there enough evidence to invade Afghanistan and Iraq but not enough evidence for the FBI to connect him to the September 11th attacks?
The US released a videotape that it said provided compelling evidence that Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks.
President Bush said of it that: "For those who see this tape, they'll realise that not only is he guilty of
incredible murder, he has no conscience and no soul, that he represents the worst of civilisation," and the British Foreign Secretary at the time Jack Straw said: "By boasting about his involvement in the evil attacks, Bin Laden confirms his guilt."
Obviously the top man at the FBI was not as sure of who was responsible as his President was that the man who ultimately took the blame, was the man behind it and if Bin Laden was used as a patsy, why?

Conspiracy Theory: Prince & Michael Jackson

Marilyn Monroe was killed by the CIA, Elvis is alive and well and Princess Diana was murdered by Prince Philip. You just have to love a conspiracy theory and Michael Jackson and Prince joins the list of celebrities whose death is maybe not all they seem.

If you believe the theory, many or all of the vapour trails you see in the wakes of planes are loaded with chemicals as part of a plot by either the government/New World Order/Illuminati (delete as applicable) to do nasty things to us for a variety of sinister reasons. Famous proponents of this theory included Prince who died in April 2016.
Prince was such a convert to the theory that he put it to verse in his song 'Dreamer' ( Think they are spraying chemicals over the city while we sleep, from now on i'm staying awake). He also mentioned the subject in public but not any more because conspiracy theorists say that he was killed by a weaponised 'chemtrail flu' a concentrated version of what the conspirators are spraying on all of us every day.
Michael Jackson's death is also the subject of a conspiracy theory, the theory being that he isn't actually dead. The general thinking among the people who generally think along these lines, is that the singer faked his death due to legal and financial worries and to escape his celebrity.
Evidence is the video of his body being taken by helicopter to the Coroners Office where the body is supposedly seen to move.
Another theory is that he actually died years ago and what we have seen ever since was a Jackson impersonator.
It's a shame that we can't just let both of them rest and remember all the good times that they brought us.
Admittedly, in Prince's case there hasn't been any since 1995 and to anyone under 25 he was that weird and creepy guy who changed his name to a symbol and scrawled words on his face and Michael Jackson hadn't done anything decent since but 1983 and his Thriller Album but he did make zombies cool again for a while.

All Earthly Things Must Come To An End

Some people are quite blase about these things but the single thing that is absolutely certain is the Earth will end one day but we have had a good run of it.
In the 200,000 years since Homo Sapiens began roaming the land we've built cities, created complex languages and sent robotic scouts to other planets. It's difficult to imagine it all coming to an end. Yet 99 percent of all species that ever lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors who came down from the trees with us.
In 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the "Doomsday argument," a statistical way to judge when we might join them but as human activity is messing with the atmosphere and severely disrupting almost all life on the planet, the calculations could be out.
The correct answer to how long us humans have left is of course unknown, but two new studies suggest a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years.
Astronomers have known for years that our Milky Way and its closest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, (a.k.a M31) are being pulled together in a gravitational dance, but no one was sure whether the galaxies would collide head-on or glide past one another. Precise measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope have now confirmed that the two galaxies are indeed on a collision course, headed straight for a colossal cosmic collision.
No need to panic for the moment, as this is not going to happen for another four billion years.
An asteroid five miles wide would cause major extinctions, like the one that may have marked the end of the age of dinosaurs. For a real chill, look to the Kuiper belt, a zone just beyond Neptune that contains roughly 100,000 ice-balls more than 50 miles in diameter. The Kuiper belt sends a steady rain of small comets earthward. If one of the big ones headed right for us, that would be it for pretty much all higher forms of life, even cockroaches.
Every few hundred thousand years Earth's magnetic field dwindles almost to nothing for perhaps a century, then gradually reappears with the north and south poles flipped. The last such reversal was 780,000 years ago, so we may be overdue.
Worse, the strength of our magnetic field has decreased about 5 percent in the past century.
The magnetic field deflects particle storms and cosmic rays from the sun, as well as even more energetic subatomic particles from deep space. Without magnetic protection, these particles would strike Earth's atmosphere, eroding the already beleaguered ozone layer which we have carelessly made as holey as Swiss cheese.
Finally, the studies show that by 2040, machines will match human intelligence, and perhaps human consciousness. Then they'll only get even better and become more autonomous and become more powerful and us puny humans will be no match if they decide they should be the ones running the show.
It may be a gloomy outlook for us humans but its something our future ancestors will hopefully sort out, probably by shifting themselves to another planet.

Welcome To Rio (AKA Hell)

It's probably not a good omen if you turn up in a foreign country to be greeted by the police holding
'Welcome To Hell' signs but the Brazilian Olympics has not been your usual sort of sporting jamboree and it hasn't even started yet.
Amidst the riots, the impeached President, drug cheating athletes, corruption, infant deforming virus and a lot of pollution there will be a bit of cycling, throwing, running and jumping going on.
I expect all the above will be forgotten, at least until a 200m runner breaks the tape before the sound of the starting pistol has stopped echoing around the stadium or a British female cyclist forgets to turn up for the medal ceremony as she had her phone on silent the three times they tried to call her.
As the Olympics is held in a country on the other side of the globe, us Brits face the next three weeks bleary eyed and falling asleep at our workplace as we stay up to watch the heat stage of the Men's 1000m canoe sprint.
Fortunately, i won't be one of them as i am off on my holidays for the next few weeks so will be catching whatever bits of the Olympics wherever there is a television while this blog (hopefully) schedules the pre-written blog posts i have scattered around.

Olympic Cheaters League Table

According to the All Time Olympic Games Medal Table, the United States are the most successful country followed by the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Germany and France but as half the Russian team will be sat at home watching it on television due to being caught doping, which is the country that has had the most medals snatched back after being caught cheating?  
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the governing body that strips athletes of their Olympic medals and they also have a table only this one shows which nations have had the most medals taken away.

United States  11
Russia 10
Bulgaria 7
Belarus 4
Hungary 4
Spain  4
Sweden 3
Ukraine 3
Germany 2
North Korea 2
Turkey 2
Armenia 1   
Bahrain 1   
Canada 1    
China     1
Finland 1   
Great Britain 1
Greece 1   
Ireland 1    
Italy     1     
Mongolia 1   
Netherlands 1    
Norway 1    
Poland 1   
Romania 1   
Uzbekistan 1

Slobodan Milosevic Cleared Of War Crimes

When Slobodan Milosevic died, the verdict was that he had somehow 'cheated justice' but in an astonishing verdict, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has determined that the late Serbian president was not responsible for war crimes committed during the Bosnian war and was actually trying to stop the conflict.
In the trial that convicted Radovan Karadzic of war crimes and sentenced him to 40 years in prison, it concluded that Slobodan Milosevic, labeled the Butcher of the Balkans, was 'not part of a criminal enterprise to victimize Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war' and that there was 'not sufficient evidence presented to find that Slobodan agreed with the common plan to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb claimed territory.
Slobodan Milosevic was widely vilified at the time of the war by virtually every politician in every NATO country who conducted the 1999 bombing of Serbia, comparing him to Hitler and accusing him of genocide.
Slobodan Milosevic had to spend the last five years of his life in prison defending himself and Serbia from war crimes allegations over a war that they now admit he was trying to stop.
Now, ten years after his death, they admit that he wasn’t guilty after all but in fact, as the ICTY have confirmed, Milosevic did not cheat justice by dying but the injustice was done to Milosevic.
Unnerving shades of Saddam and his non-existent WMD's, especially as the same countries were involved in attacking both nations with what turned out to be false allegations against the leaders.
As the reasoning behind the Kosovo War was unstable to begin with, either NATO were suckered into doing the Kosovans fighting for them or even worse, deceptively hyped up the threat for the first of what turned out to be a list of dishonest wars to remove leaders the West didn't like.

Jesus Redux

It is said that after his last visit was cut short, Jesus will come back however, the exact time of his comeback is unknown. Mark 13:32 says: 'That day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father' but now we do know because not only is he living in Burnley but he has been trundling a bus around the city for the past 30 years.
John Edward Birtwhistle is now running for the Member of Parliament for Burnley on the basis that he was the son of God in a past life.
So with all that happening in the World, what is Jesus trying to accomplish this time around? An end to famine maybe or World Peace or perhaps he just wants us all to love each other more?
The son of God's manifesto includes weekly bin collections, free bus passes for the over-60s, scrapping the TV licence and children being taught at home by their parents.
He says he remembers being Jesus Christ in a past life, with memories coming back to him in dreams.
'Two thousand years ago I went against the government. I told them who I was, what I was there for and that the people were going to have a better life. They got rid of me because I went against the government. They crucified me. I’m hoping by 2020 I’ll be in a position to stand'.
Lucky, lucky Burnley.

Aussies Top Whinging Medal Table Already

The Australian team has arrived in Rio for the Olympics and they have already tied up the three podium finishes in the whinging category.
First off they were unhappy about the accommodation and refused to move into the Olympic Village citing electrical problems, gas and water leaks among other issues in the building which led the Rio Mayor, Eduardo Paes, to responded that the village is 'more beautiful than Sydney's was for the 2000 Games' and that he could always put a kangaroo outside 'to make them feel at home'. 
Then there was an accusation against Brazilian firemen who they say stole team shirts and a laptop and four members of the women's water polo team have gone down with gastroenteritis.
All that on top of the usual Aussie whinging about what Aussies normally whinge about, which is everything and it is sure to get worse when Great Britain thumps them in the medal table again.