The Winds of Change?

It's been an action-packed week this week, with lots of interesting things happening in conspiracy circles, both here and overseas. And a lot of it seems to be in the right direction, with prominent anti-vaxxers and conspiracy mongers like Robert Kennedy Jr and Chantelle Baker having their social media accounts removed, the parliament protest something of a fizzle, the operators of Counterspin being arrested, and Billy TK and Vinny Eastwood having their day in court.

Myself and Bronwyn went to the parliament protest run by the Freedoms and Rights Coalition on Tuesday, and recorded a special episode of the NZ Skeptics podcast that night talking about how the day went. I've written up my impressions of the event in an article below.

Bronwyn's getting ever closer to filling all the gaps in our Year in Skepticism project, and has started to make use of the data we have. She's written an eye-opening article about this week in skeptical history, detailing events that happened on each date of this week, from the 29th of August to the 4th of September - and stretching from way back in 1909, through to just last year. Please get in touch if you can think of any interesting historical events that might be good for this database.

Finally, we have another article from Dan Ryan - this time a great piece of amateur sleuthing, trying to find out who was behind a copycat Facebook page mimicking the Society for Science Based Healthcare.

As always, we welcome any articles from our readers. If you have a good skeptical story in you, we'd love for you to exorcise it, capture it on paper (or should that be in electrons?), and send it to us so that others can enjoy it. Don't worry if you're not great at writing, we're happy to clean up your work and make sure it's presentable. And, once it's published, if you're really keen we'd also love to have you join us on our podcast to talk to you about it.

Mark Honeychurch

On Tuesday, Freedoms and Rights Coalition members converged on Wellington for another protest about our “freedoms”, and of course I was there to see what was going on. The prelude to the protest was ... (1499 words)

Category: News

Bronwyn Rideout

Work on the NZ Skeptical calendar (our attempt to find a New Zealand skeptical event for every day of the year) continues apace, with 346 individual events recorded and now only 140 days remaining to ... (711 words)

Category: News

Daniel Ryan

At The Society for Science Based Healthcare we believe that public health measures in New Zealand should have a clear basis in science and evidence, and we work to counter misinformation in New ... (2353 words)

Category: News