Ken Ring is getting worse

Most of us will know Ken Ring both for his claim that he can predict the weather by looking at the moon, and his supposed ability to predict earthquakes. Here's Ken talking about how you can supposedly also use rainbows to predict the weather:

In recent years Ken's been slowly falling down the rabbit hole of misinformation, and a post on Facebook from the other day shows just how bad it's gotten…

He starts with a warning: “do not read this if you are not openminded”. By this I think he means that he doesn't want people to disagree with him, so he's looking for people who will accept what he says without questioning it to read his post.

He then goes on to lay out his thoughts:

• The bible is missing 100 books that were taken out for nefarious reasons.
• There are lost lands of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Rama.
• 18 foot tall people used to roam the world, as depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphics. They may also have been aliens.
• There are giant underground labyrinths in both the Arctic and Antarctic, which rich people use to imprison child slaves. These may be where the aliens used to live.
• Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings.
• Michelle Obama used to be a man.
• There are buildings on the moon, Mars and Uranus.

There's even some local nonsense in there. Apparently the New Zealand election was rigged by voting machine companies, the government is bankrupting New Zealand so that our country can be sold to China, and Egyptians used to live here thousands of years ago.

In one way it's nice to have local conspiracies mixed in with Ken's other nonsense, but that last one just feels like a version of the usual racist garbage we often hear over here, arguing that Māori weren't here first.

Ken ends by saying:

“one thing's for sure. At one time there lived a race who were far more technologically advanced than we are… These people had electricity, nuclear capability, building techniques that were unsurpassed… they lived in huge societies in many different places.”

Having kept an eye on Ken for many years now, there's an arrogance to a lot of what he says. He's convinced that he knows better than the world's experts, in many, many scientific fields. But he's getting silly now - he appears to have fallen for some of the daftest ideas on the internet. From what I can tell he's getting a lot of his ideas from people on YouTube such as Robert Deutsch and Ben Pellom - people with outlandish worldviews whose videos get very few views. It's hard to believe, with all of these bad ideas being shared by Ken Ring, that some farmers still trust and buy his made-up weather almanac.