It's Friday, so it's conspiracy theory day

The answer to yesterday’s conundrum is that if you start with 10 and do the subtraction for numbers above 10, you’ll fast see a pattern emerging. It doesn’t take long to realise that there can only be 9 possible answers to the subtraction. It took me about 30 seconds to note the pattern and then maybe another 45 seconds to confirm it. These 9 numbers are then all seeded with the selected gift. The voice-over then tells you that you guessed a scarf, or a pair of cufflinks, or whatever – except you didn’t guess any of these; you derived a number which was seeded with the chosen gift. Simple really.

Why is it we never see films about German PoW escapes?

Why did Christopher Lambert never make it really big in films?

Did you ever watch the film Highlander? The makers certainly took some liberties with accents; a Scot with a French accent and an Iberian Egyptian with a Scottish accent.

This is part of Kennedy’s 1962 speech about the USA’s space program: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Does anyone know what the ‘other things’ he referred to were? Did he have a momentary lapse of memory?

Yesterday, and again today, I received a missive from friends about the swine flu vaccine. It is a conspiracy theory – and I suspect it was started by charlatans within the vitamin pill industry – stating that all the agencies of government in the USA are colluding to kill half the world’s population through mandatory vaccination with contaminated swine flu vaccine. The aim is to reduce the world’s population to sustainable levels.

Here’s my analysis:

• The links provided in these conspiracy stories are invariably broken, or lead to crank sites. They do not lead to reputable and verifiable sources.
• The levels of collusion required to effect such a policy would mean we would have achieved world peace and defeated world hunger decades ago.
• People rarely check the truth of circulated stories and accept them at face value, especially if they contain elements of truth at the start and come from friends and relatives.
• People love a conspiracy theory and so you can be 100% sure that those not having an enquiring mind will spread the meme.
• If the allegations had a scintilla of truth, investigative journalists the world over would have them in the mainstream news quicker than you could say Jack Robinson. Proper journalists check the sources as their reputations are at stake if they get something wrong.
• If the name David Icke is attached to any of it in any way, shape or form, then you can guarantee it's completely bonkers.
  

Icke believes in The Illuminati, a race of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.

I can well believe the bit about GWB, but not Mrs Queen and certainly not Boxcar Willie.

If you receive a copy of this conspiracy theory, my advice is to bin it and ask the sender to personally verify just 10% of it (preferably not the start, as that’s where truth may be insinuated to make it look plausible) before passing on crap that may cause harm.

Here are some links that perpetuate the meme. The first is a Facebook site, so you may not be able to read it if not on Facebook.