Gender and vaccines, a work from home scam, and more skeptical history

9th October 2023

9 October 2023

Hi there

This week my contribution is relatively small. Today, as I write this, is my 15th wedding anniversary, so my lovely wife and I are doing some celebrating today. But, I’ve put together an item covering some email conversations I’ve been having of the last week or two with somebody who’s coming from the other side of things, evidence-wise, and has some quite interesting beliefs.

Mark has been kind enough to contribute an item, writing about a “work from home” scam, and Bronwyn is back again with an item on our skeptical history.

As I write this on Sunday, I woke up to the news this morning of war in Israel, between Israel and Palestine. Any nation going to war, in my opinion, is a sad thing. I have very little understanding of the situation in Israel, so I’m certainly not going to give uninformed commentary on this. I do know that misinformation has already started to emerge about it. I’m sure we’ll see that emerge greatly over the coming weeks. I have made a commitment to try to learn more about the situation and the history around it though.

Of course, we’re a week away from the NZ general election. I’ve already voted. I can’t tell you who to vote for, but I think it’s important that everybody has their say. If you don’t like the result and didn’t vote, you have little basis to complain. Before MMP was introduced, one might have been forgiven for not bothering to vote if your electorate was pretty much a done deal, but with MMP everybody’s party vote crucially helps determine the make-up of parliament. Go out and vote!

Have you thought about coming to our conference yet? It’s coming up at the end of November, and we’ve got early-bird prices until the end of Labour Weekend.

For conference information and to book tickets, go to the conference website

Craig Shearer

Gender, Vaccines and more…

Craig Shearer - 9 October 2023

Over the past week or two, I've been having email conversations with a person from the other side of the skeptical fence. This person I'll refer to as Mark - which is his real name, but I'll not give any more information about him. (By the way, our skeptical newsletter writer Mark Honeychurch has sworn he's not running some elaborate joke on me!)

A week in NZ Skeptical History - October 9th - 15th

Bronwyn Rideout - 9 October 2023

A week in NZ Skeptical History - October 9th - 15th

1980: Colin Gardener and his neighbour Helena Bradley see a lioness near Gardener's home in Wellington. Which is notable because New Zealand has no indigenous big cats. A police search around the Meadowcrofts property turns up nothing. A few days later, Gardener and another neighbour, Maurice Bradley, catch another glimpse of the creature and determine that it is not a lioness but just an unusually big ex-domestic cat.

CleverTap: a Work From Home scam

Mark Honeychurch - 9 October 2023

CleverTap: a Work From Home scam

While shopping in KMart a few weeks ago, on Saturday afternoon, I received an unsolicited text message. This isn't unusual, as I take the bold move when it comes to privacy of not trying to hide my contact details at all. I'm a believer in the philosophy of almost inviting spam, and then dealing with it as it arrives by setting up spam filters and mailbox rules. A benefit of doing this, for me as a skeptic, is that I get to see all the weird and wonderful nonsense that spammers attempt to bombard people with. And so it was with this text message: