The proposed Hastings District Plan (November, 2013) includes references to 'matakite walkover', the use of Maori clairvoyant powers as a means of determining an area's cultural or spiritual significance. Vicki Hyde, on behalf of the NZ Skeptics, made the following submission on the proposed plan.
Mark Hanna reports on how to use the Advertising Standards Authority to fight back against the promotion of questionable therapies.
So after a break of almost 13 months, fluoride is now back in Hamilton's water supply. It was 5 June last year that the council, after three months of public consultations, submissions and hearings, decided to cease fluoridation, despite clear support for the practice from the Hamilton populace and the medical profession. In doing so they bowed to pressure from a well-organised and well-funded lobbying campaign, and ignored scientific evidence, which they said they lacked the expertise to assess (for background on the funding of the anti-fluoride lobby, see Ken Perrott's excellent analysis at openparachute.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/who-is-funding-anti-fluoridation-high-court-action(.
In the Autumn 2014 NZ Skeptic, Martin Manning stated:
"… she successfully resisted the forces pitted against her, giving an astounding manifestation of some power other than that making up the ordinary phenomena of nature." So wrote the Feilding Star on 25 October 1899, reporting on an early incarnation of the supernatural showpeople that still tour the world today. But other newspapers took a sceptical line that media today could learn from.
Matthew Willey has a series of discussions about big questions.
Late in his life, in answer to a question, Freud compared the human condition approximately to the contents of a baby's nappy. When I first heard this story, it seemed to mark a bitter old man. That was when I was in high school in the late 1950s. Higher education was spreading in the world's democracies. Ignorance and superstition, the plague of the human species since the caves, were on the way out. Reason, knowledge and tolerance would rule the future of the world. Or so it seemed. Does it look like that today, even to high school students? A few news items:
Author and journalist Ian Wishart claims Taranaki could be the last resting place of a giant lizard- like "dinosaur" and is issuing a challenge for it to be rediscovered (Taranaki Daily News, 10 May).
Author and journalist Ian Wishart claims Taranaki could be the last resting place of a giant lizard- like "dinosaur" and is issuing a challenge for it to be rediscovered (Taranaki Daily News, 10 May).
Pills & Potions at the Cotter Medical History Trust, by Claire le Couteur. Otago University Press, 2014. RRP $25. Reviewed by Vicki Hyde.
At the 2013 NZ Skeptic Conference Vicki Hyde presented a series of soundbites and talking points skeptics can use in discussions with others. Here are some of them, presented as a smorgasbord of ideas to be dipped into.