A businessman has been jailed for three years for masterminding a scam which saw tens of millions of battery hen eggs sold as free-range or organic.

Keith Owen, who admitted three charges under the Theft Act, was told by a judge at Worcester Crown Court he had abused “well-intentioned” public trust.

Folk pay twice the price for free range and even more for organic. I am one of them. String him up.

The eggs were sold in supermarkets and other stores across England.

And nobody from the supermarkets was sent to check their suppliers?

Owen, 44, of Warbage Lane, Dodford, Worcestershire, has been ordered to repay £3m, plus £250,000 in costs.

Eggcellent!

Judge Toby Hooper QC told him he had to settle the confiscation order within 12 months, or face a further six-and-a-half years in prison.

He deserves to be locked up for this length of time anyway. Preferably in a cage just larger than himself, just like all those chooks whose eggs he sold as free range.

Earlier this month Owen, who ran Heart of England Eggs Unlimited, admitted providing false information for accounting purposes to firms in the egg supply sector between June 2004 and May 2006.

Officials estimate that as many as 100 million eggs were falsely labelled.

The court heard he sold battery and “industrial” eggs imported from France and Ireland to suppliers.

They were told the eggs were British, free range, organic or that they met the RSPCA’s Freedom Food welfare standards.

This joker seems to have been trusted by everyone. Why?

Judge Hooper said Owen’s business had made very substantial profits at the expense of consumers who believed they were buying free-range eggs.

He paid as little as 35p per dozen and sold the same eggs on to suppliers and supermarkets for more than twice that amount.

He said: “Imprisonment there must be, because the offences are plainly so serious that only a sentence of imprisonment will suffice.

“This was all a carefully-planned and executed fraud by false accounting.

It is nice to see that some judges take crime seriously.

“By greed, you have corrupted and destroyed the once-legitimate business which you have known all your life.”

Looks like he has killed the hen that laid the golden egg.

After Owen was jailed, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which brought the prosecution, urged consumers to report any concerns they had about free-range eggs and promised to weed out unscrupulous suppliers.

Tell the supermarkets to check their supply chain and the RSPCA to investigate the claims of suppliers.

Anna Racoon’s campaign via Old Holborn’s PayPal account raised more than enough needed to pay the remainder of Mr Hogan’s fine. £8,664.50 in cash was handed in to the Custody Officer in Forest Bank jail in Pendlebury by a masked Old Holborn.

As Anna Raccoon points out,

Nick was jailed as an example to us all, that when the State barks ‘jump’ you only question ‘how high’.

He didn’t. He said ‘Why’?

The State made him pay a high price for his temerity; they harassed him, hounded him, bankrupted him, and finally forcibly removed him from his family and friends and jailed him for six months.

His crime? No longer the original charge that he had failed to prevent two customers from smoking on his premises. No. He was actually jailed for being unable to pay the £11,600 in fines and prosecution costs resulting from that charge. He had managed to pay off £1,600, but incomprehensibly to the State, he was not able to put his hands instantly on the £10,000 balance.

The State is so used to having a bottomless pot of Taxpayers money to dip into whenever they feel the need, that they have literally lost the ability to comprehend what the recession means to ordinary people.

Leg-iron warns against non-smokers being smug:

How many of New Labour’s laws can you name? They have one with your name on it somewhere, no matter how well-behaved you think you are.

This is one way the State keeps the proles living in fear. There really is a “law” which could be used to fine any single one of us for the most unbelievably microscopic misdemeanour. Then, if you refuse to pay the fine or are unable to, they can lock you away.

This time it was Nick Hogan who was made an example of by refusing to be an anti-smoking law-enforcement officer on his own premises. Next time it could be you! For anything at all.

Hands up all those who still want a Lib/Lab/Con “government” dictated to by Brussels?

For example, the bastardisation of the word equality seems to be limitless. Now, it is vegans who are the latest folk to be in need of some sort of protection. From what, I don’t know. Perhaps leather seats in public places will be banned. I have never been a vegan, but I tried being a veggie for a few months. It opened up a new world of culinary delights. I’m not being sarcastic, by the way! I made a cracking vegetarian lasagne with aubergine, courgettes, mushrooms and of course onions. I concocted homemade burgers using veggie mince and cooked white rice in roughly equal quantities. Add a chopped onion, bind with egg and add soy sauce to colour the rice and the cooked burger was “meaty” enough to put on a roll and cover with ketchup like the real thing.

The egg makes this recipe useless for vegans, so I guess I must be guilty of discrimination by writing about it without considering the hurt I may cause to them. I can’t say I found myself discriminated against as a vegetarian, however I have always been in a particular culinary minority – well since the age of five or six – which is subject to an incredible amount of discrimination and ignorance.

I am a person who does not take butter or margarine on sandwiches and I do feel hard done by because practically everywhere I go where sandwiches are served, they are buttered.

When Cranmer learned that vegans are to enjoy the same protection against discrimination as religious groups, he suggested,

And if they, why not vegetarians, non-dairy consumers, wheat-eschewers and teetotallers.

I love cheese, but I hate butter. Surely this makes me an extra special case in need of much wider understanding. Schoolchildren should be taught to respect me for what I am. They should be told that some people don’t like butter, or even margarine and other low-fat spreads, and that it is also their right not to have butter.

The “non-dairy consumers” would not want a cheese sandwich, or any sandwich with butter, but I would take a cheese sandwich without butter. I think this proves that information ‘packs’ urgently need to be sent to all businesses that supply food and also to the likes of community halls and churches, where sandwiches may be offered around after an event.

Even churches have their sandwiches smeared with butter. The Lord’s prayer says, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

There is no mention of butter.

Cranmer continues,

We could have a bit of fun with this.

The Equality Bill makes it a legal requirement for all public bodies to consider the impact of all their policies on minority groups.

If churches can successfully be sued for not hiring homosexuals as youth workers, then surely I should be able to take them to the cleaners for not providing me with a butterless sandwich, especially after having had the decency to sit through a sermon without once yawning out loud.

I am seriously considering writing to Harriet Harman about this because I have suffered a lifetime of abuse. Every time a sandwich is produced, I feel picked on; left out; humiliated. And of course, hungry.

I think I stand a fair chance of success. Because butter contains so much fat, the government may see this as the excuse they need to impose a ban on the supply and consumption of buttered sandwiches in public spaces.

Sometimes I catch a whiff of butter when the sandwiches are being passed around. I’m sure the government could find some barmy ‘experts’ who could prove that second-hand butter-whiffing causes obesity.

All in all, then, I think I have proven that I am in need of protection from those who ‘use’ butter as a means of keeping the contents of their sandwiches from falling out. Secondary butter fumes make me nauseous and I leave the venue still hungry while others are full and satisfied.

There can be no equality while my butterless brothers are still being persecuted. I demand justice!

Michael Foot: dedicated avoider of fashion

Apparently, he was also a scallywag. Aren’t they all?

After reminiscing for a bit, I realised that I hardly knew anything about what he stood for. Unfortunately for Mr Foot, he was leader of a divided Labour Party full of loony lefties. Foot was a co-founder of CND. He thought it was a good idea to unilaterally disarm our nuclear deterrent at a time when the Soviet Union had theirs pointed our way, and when mutually-assured destruction was preventing nuclear war. After what New Labour have done to Britain, had we disarmed and the USSR was still going, I doubt they would bother wasting missiles on us.

But he scores massive points for wanting to get the UK out of the EEC.

Condolences to those he leaves behind.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission began a new push Tuesday to allow farmers in Europe to grow more biotech crops, clearing a genetically modified potato for cultivation despite persistent public opposition to the technology.

In the first such step in more than a decade, the commission approved the Amflora potato produced by the German company BASF for cultivation inside the 27-country European Union. John Dalli, the bloc’s health commissioner, said the potatoes could be planted in Europe, with some conditions, as soon as next month.

BASF? So this is what they are doing since the demise of the videotape. The potatoes could be planted in Europe as soon as next month. No point asking us proles what we want.

The potato is engineered to be unusually rich in a starch suitable for making glossy paper and other products, as well as for feeding animals.

Currently the only other biotech crop grown in Europe is a type of corn produced by Monsanto, which was approved in 1998. On Tuesday, the commission also approved three additional types of genetically modified corn by Monsanto for food and feed, but those are for import and processing rather than cultivation.

Do I take it that these seeds are going to be sold to Third World farmers for an exorbitant price? And they will have to buy the patented seed from Monsanto every year thereafter. I think neocolonialism is probably the right word.

For the biotech industry, the decisions handed down by Mr. Dalli, who took office last month, could signal the emergence of a major new advocate for genetically modified products in Europe.

I wonder how long the biotech industry tended this weed.

At a news conference in Brussels, Mr. Dalli, who is from Malta, also said he would present a proposal this summer to give national governments more authority to decide whether to allow genetically modified crops to be grown within their borders. That could make it easier for biotech-friendly states to go ahead with planting certain new products even when other states disapprove of the technology.

When the EU grants national governments more authority, they must be up to something. Perhaps they expect two or three governments to risk the health of their people and farming industry with GM crops and the others will join in out of jealousy.

“Responsible innovation will be my guiding principle when dealing with innovative technologies,” he said.

That’s why one of the first things he has done is approve these crops with unknown consequences?

The bloc has long been divided over biotech crops, with countries like Britain favoring the technology and Austria in fierce opposition.

“We feel encouraged by this decisive regulatory approach,” said Willy De Greef, the secretary general for a group representing the biotech industry, EuropaBio. The “approvals represent a step in the right direction and a return to science-based decision making,” he said.

Can you see what he’s done there? He said, “a return to science-based decision making.” In other words, if you have concerns, that makes you a Neanderthal with the same IQ as a cauliflower. But of course, we all believe the scientists, don’t we? They would never tell us lies to make money or further an agenda.

The commission first forwarded an application to grow the potato to governments in May 2004. When a number of countries raised objections, the commission sent the application to experts at the European Food Safety Authority.

Experts at the authority approved the application for the potato in 2006 and 2007, and again in 2009. But because member governments were repeatedly unable to reach a qualified majority to approve the potato, the commission on Tuesday invoked its power to approve the application by a form of fiat.

This means we live in a technocracy, not a democracy.

That procedure had only been used once before to get a biotech seed to market for cultivation in Europe. The seed, called Bt176 and produced by Syngenta, no longer is grown in Europe.

The Amflora potato looks like any garden-variety spud, but in developing it, BASF included a marker gene as a way of identifying plant cells that successfully produced the desired type of starch. Some scientists have linked the marker gene to antibiotic resistance in humans, raising concerns that the ill and the elderly, especially, could become more vulnerable to disease.

I imagine that’s a plus from some of these people’s point of view.

Environmentalists reacted with fury to the decision, saying that Mr. Dalli had overstepped his mandate.

For a change, I agree with them.

The commissioner “only needed weeks in his new position to show such flagrant support for industry interests ahead of his own portfolio,” said Martin Häusling, a German member of the European Parliament for the Greens.

Opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of European consumers are apprehensive about such technology.

Neanderthals.

The European Commission, however, wants to allow more gene-altered products into the Union to remove an irritant in trade relations with the United States and other countries that use them — and to lower costs for European farmers and industry.

“The way is now clear for commercial cultivation of Amflora this year,” Peter Eckes, the president of BASF Plant Science, said in a statement on the company’s Web site. “Amflora will strengthen the international position of the European potato starch industry.”

There are huge deposits of all types of traditional seeds being stored in Norway, presumably so that when this part of the population reduction programme has finished, the elite can grow the good stuff again.

If anyone thinks this is another of my crazy conspiracy theories then perhaps they could offer conclusive proof that GM crops are safe to eat and safe for the environment, because they are getting the blame for disappearing bees on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the USA where GM crops are more prevalent.

And as Albert Einstein is credited with saying: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

I imagine it sounds very convincing – to those who allow themselves to be drowned in the sea of grand ideas and emotion.

This is what I told Tom:

Any thinking person would question almost everything on this list of ‘achievements’. I don’t have the time or will to demolish everything, but from the first half of the list…

Winter Fuel Allowance – A pittance given to old folk at Christmas compared to what the state pension should be – all year round.

Crime down by a third – If this is true, which I doubt, is it because people can’t be bothered reporting many crimes because NuPlod is disinterested in pursuing real criminals half the time in order to meet targets and so has become antagonistic towards the law-abiding citizen to achieve this with less effort and danger?

Record results in schools – You know that’s a joke, surely? Making exams easier and easier to make New Labour look good, surely just shows the level of political interference in state education.

More students than ever – and fewer tradesmen, and more NEETS. You’ve got the balance all wrong to the detriment of British industry and many individual lives and families, incl. record debt for those leaving further education.

Devolution – Divide and rule. Obvious when even a cheaper prescription in Scotland and Wales can cause such furious reactions in our normally gentle English friends.

I could go on and on. You know that, don’t you?

What do you think about one or more of New Labour’s achievements?

Nick Hogan, 43, from Lancashire, was sentenced to six months in prison for repeatedly refusing to pay a fine imposed for flouting the legislation.

As Leg-iron says,

In this wonderful free country where everyone has the choice to do as they are told, not doing as you are told is automatically a criminal offence. As is not forcing others to do as they are told while they are on your private property.

It is the same kind of situation I wrote about in yesterday’s post, where faith schools are under pressure for not doing as they are told.

Labour promised in their last manifesto that smoking would still be allowed in pubs which didn’t serve food, but that was another of their big lies for which they cannot legally be held accountable, unlike Mr Hogan and his customers, many of whom probably voted for New Labour. They are the ones who have to suffer the consequences of Labour’s lies and collusion with fakecharity ASH.

This ‘charity’ gets but two or three percent of its funds from voluntary donations. Its 2007/08 accounts show that nearly a third of its funding comes from the Department of Health (i.e. you and me) and most of the remainder comes from ASH International (part-funded by Pfizer), Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation.

Leg-iron again,

ASH consists of nobody who was elected or in any way chosen to rule our lives. It is full of child-obsessed weirdoes and control-freak sociopaths who demand that their arbitrary rules are followed to the letter on pain of violence. ASH is nothing more than a government sponsored protection racket.

This is absolutely typical though. This is the same government that gets its ‘advice’ on teenage pregnancy from more fake charities, like Brook and the FPA, providers of abortion and contraception. Then they wonder why the advice leads to more abortions. So they hand out more condoms at schools and youth clubs and make the abortion pill easier to come by and yet the abortions continue unabated and misery and confusion reign among the youth.

It is another government sponsored protection racket.

So, while the state hands out contraceptives to 12 year olds, it increases the age at which people can buy tobacco to eighteen.

While children get state abortions behind their parents’ backs, grown men and women are expected to stand outside pubs to smoke.

The infantilisation adults are being subjected to is astounding.

The British Humanist Association are furious that some schools want to teach about sex and relationships according to their ethos.

The BHA, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England and the Accord Coalition have condemned a new Government amendment to its own Children, Schools and Families Bill, describing it as discriminatory.

It is discriminatory, yes. Just as forcing people to accept beliefs and behaviour that are at best alien to them discriminates against them. But that’s all right, isn’t it? This is how it works. Nobody is allowed to be discriminated against except those people who don’t do as they are commanded by the state. No matter how unfair or crazy.

A great myth has grown which says that discrimination is wrong. Any discrimination. Personally, I discriminate all the time, don’t you? Some food I love and others I detest. Some people I find are wonderful and others I avoid. How many parents don’t discriminate when it comes to choosing a babysitter? Fortunately, not many.

I have looked at the members of the aforementioned Accord Coalition on their website. They include The British Humanist Association themselves, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, the Hindu Academy, The Lesbian and Gay Christian (sic) Movement, The Socialist Education Association and the admittedly feminist Women Against Fundamentalism.

In other words, this is a political/religio-political attack on faith schools to further an atheistic/secular/humanist/socialist agenda. Dress it up as children’s rights and they think they can get away with anything.

The BHA encouraged its supporters to email their MPs,

Please do this today to ensure all young people have access to accurate, balanced SRE that promotes equality and diversity, and to prevent faith schools from teaching that same sex relationships and the use of contraception are wrong.

They go on to elaborate on the importance of promoting equality, diversity and rights: three of the main pillars of political correctness.

Ian Dunt, writing for politics.co.uk, was also upset. He wants faith schools ‘banned’. As I commented under his article,

I’m not sure if this is meant to be satirical, but it sounds like it. Mr Dunt is a ‘libertarian’ (he says) who naturally hates government interference – except when it comes to parents’ choices in how their children are educated, then they should have no choice. Despite the majority of the population having a faith, the author thinks their children should be herded into secular state institutions to be conditioned not to be ‘too religious’. I wonder what he thinks about the news that faith schools are best at building social unity:

“It found that secondary schools run by faith groups scored eleven per cent higher for their promotion of community cohesion when compared with secular schools.

“The report also concluded that faith-based schools outperformed secular schools by almost nine per cent when it came to tackling inequality.”

The Dunts and Dawkins of this country need to mind their own business when it comes to how parents bring up their own children. Oh, and stop using people’s aversion to homosexuality as a reason for getting your own angry way.”

And this is another great myth, that people who are against homosexuality being approved to children do it on grounds of hatred. We get this word discrimination as usual. That’s exactly what it is – like the babysitting example I gave above, parents and schools discriminate because they see it as the right thing to do by their children. This is their right.

Then the word homophobic gets thrown around. Never religiophobic (if that’s a word), because religious people are now, by default, in the wrong. Let us not be misled; when humanists promote homosexuality as normal, they do so against the biological evidence. Theirs is also a belief system. They believe it is right and I believe it is wrong. Why do they expect their beliefs to carry more weight than mine?

To conclude, then, what is next? How much more diversity are we meant to teach children, or be accused of the next invented ‘phobia’? Some children are already being groomed to be dysfunctional through state sex education that tells them anything goes and here are your free condoms and this way to the abortion clinic – your parents won’t find out.

This increases the underclass dependent on state intervention at every turn: the single mothers on handouts, the unemployed and unemployable, the depressed, the diseased, those for whom life has no meaning because they are used to their every whim being catered for and being shielded from the real world.

This attack on freedom of conscience and parental responsibility is demonic. For what benefit?

A company selling “Anyone but England” T-shirts for this year’s World Cup has rejected suggestions it is racist after police in Aberdeen visited its store.

Police warned Slanj, which also has stores in Glasgow and Edinburgh, that a window display featuring the shirt could cause offence.

Grampian officers advised a store worker to consider whether the display was appropriate and should be removed.

A spokesman for Slanj said staff were “flabbergasted” by the warning.

Ross Lyle, from the company, said: “To be honest we’re absolutely flabbergasted.

“We have been selling this T-shirt for the past three months and we’ve had a great response.

“Even the English people who come into the store think it’s a laugh and just a bit of tongue-in-cheek football banter.

“We’re certainly not being racist. We are the same race as the English. It’s just daft to say it’s offensive.”

A spokesman for Grampian Police said the force’s visit to the Slanj store was not in response to any public complaint about the shirt slogan and was prompted by an officer acting on his own initiative.

In a statement, the force said it was purely an “advisory visit” and there was no criminal investigation as a result.

Pc Kirk Hemmings added: “The primary role of any police force is to preserve the peace and we would be failing in our duty if we did not make people aware of the potential for disturbance such a window display could cause.

“The Grampian area, in common with the rest of the country, has recorded incidents relating to nationality and we have a responsibility to do our best to ensure that incidents of this nature are kept to a minimum.

“The public expect no less of us.”

During the last football World Cup, we sold a few flags to Scots of the teams England played and I expect it will be the same this year. Personally, I find it embarrassing how narrow-minded Scots can be at times, but I’ll pocket the money from selling them flags as it is not for me to judge their motives.

The police involvement in this is just pathetic. The company sells a few nice T-shirts, so they can only win with the media attention. Freedom is what we are losing with the ‘authorities’ constantly het up due to their diversity and equality brainwashing.

I lived among the English for thirteen years and I hope they do well.

So there!

But let me know if you want any flags…

I left a reply there, but like he says about his comments, he didn’t want to waste them on someone else’s blog!

Ian seems to have some peculiar ways of looking at this. He says that conspiracy theories tend to say more about the theorists than the alleged conspirators. While this might be true of bizarre and unfounded notions people sometimes have, when there is lots of evidence for a more believable answer to issues like the attacks on 9/11, it is those who refuse to believe anything other than what the government and mainstream media tell them that need to get out more.

Ian says, I’m going to approach the examples cited by asking two questions- If the theorists are correct, what do the conspiracists get out of it? and Why might the theorists want to believe in this particular conspiracy? Very basically, most people want to know the truth and like to see justice done. Theorists don’t necessarily want to believe in conspiracies just for the sake of it.

Even the word conspiracy suggests mental illness to some people, but the reality is that the world is full of conspiracies. People read about them in newspapers every day!

Conspiracy ‘theorists’ don’t invent things they want to happen – they think something is amiss with the official story and look for other possibilities – based on evidence, testimonies, motives, logic, common sense and lessons from history.

Anyway, I told Ian I was going to demolish his arguments faster than a controlled demolition on 9/11.

The numbered items in bold were my five original proposals, and underneath each are Ian’s replies in italics, followed by my thoughts.

“1) The theory: mass immigration is being used to re-engineer society.”

What do the conspiracists get? Errrrm. What do they get? According to the theory the mostly white, mostly christian engineers of this massed social change get a country where they lose a lot of their privileges because their constituents are less like, and less likely to vote for, them. And we know how willing MPs are to give up their privileges.

Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Because they’re racists? Because they don’t like immigration? Possibly, as a great many of them claim to be christians, they’re scared by falling church attendance and don’t want to have to fight for believers with a younger, louder religion.

These engineers aren’t ‘Christian’. If they were, they wouldn’t be dismantling our Judeo-Christian laws and culture. Because this has been key to our success as a nation, it is being dismantled to your detriment and mine.

If you think only Christians will be affected by Islam, you’re kidding yourself.

BTW, this re-engineering has been ADMITTED! You have a problem with facts and admissions on record.

“2) The theory: climate change is not primarily manmade, but is a ruse to impose a world government which will tax and control us.”

What might the conspiracists get? They’d get to pay more tax. Which I’m sure they really want to do. The scientists will get to keep the funding which pays for their research. Even though they could be better off working in the private sector. I have a problem with the repeated line about paying more tax. The people who’ll pay more tax are the ones who are too dumb to find ways to make their lives more efficient. Those who cut their carbon emmissions will find they’re paying less money to corporations, and the government, so they will have more money for themselves and be financially more secure.

Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? See the last bit above about people too dumb to make their lives better.

You think only dumb people will pay higher taxes? I wouldn’t like your tax bill then (sorry, obvious joke). The FACT (not theory) is that a world government is being set up to collect taxes and make laws. This means that very soon, this global government scam plus the EU means that the British will have practically no say at all in how we are governed.

And you think they will not tax you heavily. I would laugh were it not so tragic.

“3) The theory: the BBC is a propaganda machine for liberals and socialists.”

What might the conspiracists get? The licence fee cut by the next Conservative government. Though that will probably happen anyway.

Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Because Fox News is Fair and Balanced.

Which is the reason I don’t pay for a TV licence. Anyway the BBC has ADMITTED to certain biases and prejudices.

“4) The theory: the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.”

What might the conspiracists get? The satisfaction of having turned real life into the opening sequence of the first X Files Movie.

Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Racism? Brown people couldn’t possibly have organised something this big, it has to be the work of the Illuminati and/or the Jews. (An early 9/11 conspiracy theory had all Jewish workers in the World Trade Centre being called up and told not to go in to work that day.) An inability to grasp reality. Given all the genuinely horrible, stupid, illegal and dangerous stuff the Bush regime did, why on Earth do some people need to make stuff like this up?

Racism? Let me guess, you had a New Labour/BBC “education”. If you’re not following the political whims of the day, you’re a ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘homophobe’ or ‘xenophobe’. It’s difficult to argue with people who don’t have an argument.

As for TV, did you know that the CIA plants storylines into popular programmes? E.g. that bloke out the X-Files, also did the Lone Gunmen, Dean Haglund, admitted this. One episode of the Lone Gunmen is about a hijacked jet heading for the twin towers and it was aired shortly before 9/11. It’s how they operate – by putting notions into people’s minds so that when the real thing happens, they are more likely to accept it – even something so obviously fake as the official 9/11 report. Again, CIA involvement in the media is well known.

“5) The theory: the Theory of Evolution is a 19th Century misunderstanding, which is now clear from modern scientific discoveries.”

What might the conspiracists get? Confused, given that modern discoveries strengthen and refine the Theory of Evolution.

Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Fear that science, and increased understanding of it, will undermine their religion. Inability to visualise a simple and elegant theory. The writer of the post is a Creationist, so this is a favourite subject of his. He claims masses of evidence for his belief, but can never present any that stands up to scrutiny.

The inventors of this theory could never have imagined how complex life is. They thought a living cell was just a blob of goo, rather than something as complex as a city.

If scientists understood the *limits* of evolution, i.e. that changes can be made by random mutations, but not in such a way that, for example, new organs are created, then they would have to ditch the theory. But it is as ingrained in our society as Islam is in Saudi Arabia. If you want to talk about “new religion” it is evolution theory or climate change.

Humanists/’atheists’ like to think that, as non-believers, they are enlightened, but they have to believe in something regarding who they are, where they came from and where they are going, even if it makes no sense.