Secrets and Lies

Over the last week or so I've been approached online by two scammers and, I guess because of the amount of free time I have now that I'm not attending Eastern Lightning fellowship meetings, I decided to play ball with both of them and see where the scam leads. Neither has reached the point yet where I've been asked to give them my money, but in both cases it didn't take long to see where the con would eventually come. Once we get to that point, which is likely to be in the next day or two for both, I will have a couple of fun articles to write - I've already been meticulously copy/pasting all of my chat sessions with the scammers in documents, so that I have a record of everything that goes on. As a taster, here's a fun preview of one of the incidental conversations I had with a “Customer Care” representative for a company I'm now apparently working for:

This week, I decided to fact-check a couple of Liz Gunn's claims in one of her recent videos for her new NZ Loyal political party. The claims seemed too outrageous to be true, but I have to hand it to her that they weren't total nonsense - there's a nugget of truth in there somewhere, although that nugget has been turned into a grand conspiracy.

Bronwyn has written about our recent visit to the OTO, to take part in their Gnostic Mass. She's done a great job of describing some of the details of the service, and how it felt - although, honestly, after having attended three of these services myself, I still can't remember everything that happens in them. With so much going on, and the atmosphere being so alien, it's hard for my brain to take it all in!

Finally, I had a response from the Safe ICT group in NZ, a group of tech luddites who seem to be trying to scare everyone unnecessarily about the “dangers” of technology. Check the bottom of this newsletter to see how they responded to my critique of a questionnaire they've been using to try to spread their message that technology, especially wireless communication, is killing us all slowly.