Last week was a busy one. On Monday I visited parliament for a church service called The Power of One, along with another couple of skeptics. The event was organised by a group called Jesus for NZ (who formed back in 2017 when Jesus was taken out of the parliamentary prayer), hosted by Alfred Ngaro and facilitated by Simon Bridges. There was a lot of talk about Jesus re-taking the nation until everyone in this country is a believer, and restoring NZ to its “former glory”. Personally I'm much happier with NZ being a rational, secular democracy than a theocracy, but it turns out that not everyone wants a fair society and equality for all.
On Wednesday morning I took a detour on the way to work via the High Court, where Sue Grey was inside arguing that the government's vaccine rollout is illegal. The building was packed! I spotted some of the conspiracy usual suspects, including Tiamara Williams in the foyer and Billy TK arguing with some security guards outside. It turned out that the guards had ejected Billy from the building because he was filming inside where it was prohibited. In the end he started one of his “liveys”, using his mobile phone to live stream his anger and indignation to Facebook. I took the opportunity to film him doing this, which felt very meta!
Finally, on Thursday evening a few of us visited a talk on cancer treatment, given by someone who runs a local holistic “clinic”. There was a lot of the same tired old nonsense about disease being dis-ease, cancer thriving in an acidic body and everything modern (including power points, wifi and microwaves) causing cancer. And then there was some new stuff, like that emotions are the root cause of all cancers, and that emotion is really e-motion: “energy-in-motion”. After the event we retired to the pub and submitted ASA complaints about the unproven medical claims we found on the clinic's website. It's always nice to be able to do something constructive about the nonsense we see around us.
