The Year Ahead

Mark Honeychurch - 8 January 2024

Happy New Year, and welcome to our first newsletter of 2024. I’ve had a nice couple of weeks off work so far, and weirdly I’ve spent a few days this week staying at a religious retreat in the middle of nowhere! (For context, it was the best deal I could find on Airbnb, and I only found out the details of what the place was used for after I’d booked to stay there).

We’ve just had our first NZ Skeptics committee meeting of the year, and I thought I’d let everyone know about some of the projects we’re planning to work on this year.

Firstly, Bronwyn’s skeptical calendar still needs dates, and at this point she’s (tongue in cheek) asked us if we can create skeptical events on the days that still don’t have an event logged against them. Maybe it’s time for us to recreate the 1952 UFO hoax?

Hamish is looking into online scams, such as those we’ve been documenting that have been appearing on Facebook recently - especially those that are preying on older people. We may have some articles describing the hoaxes, and possibly some more direct action, this year.

I’m thinking of resurrecting an old investigation, where a few years ago a popular alternative medicine practitioner was caught plagiarising other people’s work to help pad out her health books. At the time they flat-out denied that they had plagiarised but, given that this person has recently been touring New Zealand, we think that maybe it’s worth kicking up a stink about the plagiarism - especially as a brief (five minute) look at one of their books the other day uncovered yet another instance of what looks like a copy/paste of multiple paragraphs, with just a changing of a few words. Louise, Dan Ryan and Jonny are going to help me on this one.

Dan Ryan is keen to look into the bogus colour blind glasses that are sold over here, potentially seeing if we can get optometrists to stop selling them - given the lack of both evidence and scientific plausibility.

Louise is keen to help us to up our media game, and so we’re going to try to get some of our investigations that end up as newsletter articles into the mainstream media, either through talking directly to editors or sending out press releases.

Jonny is hoping to look into sellers of bogus ear plugs, and he’s asked if we can purchase one or more pairs of these products for him. Once we’ve sorted that out, he’s hoping to do some kind of testing at his university to see how these products affect people’s hearing, and how that matches up to the claims being made about them.

Finally, I’m in the middle of a fun little project looking into some daft hair testing that says it uses not one, but two different pseudosciences in order to test hair samples for allergies. Dan and Margaret have been helping out with this one, so expect one or more articles about it in the next month or two.

In this week’s newsletter, I’ve finally responded to the kind of request that I usually ignore when these things arrive in my inbox. Although I wasn’t successful, hopefully next time I can manage to get further. Craig has bought, read and reviewed a book that was recommended to him recently, How Minds Change by David McRaney. Al has looked into someone who has been a thorn in the committee’s side, on and off, for a while now, sometimes spamming us with unhinged emails detailing his web of conspiracy ideas. Bronwyn is continuing her series on channelling, working her way towards Highden Manor via this issue’s focus, Alice Bailey. And, finally, I’ve thrown in a copy of a letter I sent to the NZ Medical Journal a few years ago, that I referenced in my article. It’s a long issue this week, which the last couple have been as well. The committee talked about it last night, and we’re not sure what the best way to manage this is - maybe, once my project to get all the articles online is finished, we’ll make sure they’re posted online in a timely fashion, or maybe I’ll just move the newsletter back to being weekly. Your thoughts on this are welcomed.