Don't worry, this newsletter isn't going off air

Mark Honeychurch - 15 April 2024

I was planning to attend a Safe ICT event in Wellington last weekend, where I was going to be warned about the dangers of WiFi mutating my mitochondria. I’ve written about Safe ICT before, after I spent a while talking to them at the Go Green expo in Wellington. They’re an advocacy group who appear to have irrational fears about technology, and prefer to side with individual fringe scientists who write flawed scientific papers, rather than choosing the side that has the weight of scientific evidence behind it. A large part of what they seem to push for is turning off any wireless protocols where possible, and buying expensive ethernet to USB adapters that allow you to run a wired connection from your home router to your mobile phone. Wait until they find out about everything else around them that happens to generate electromagnetic fields! Anyway, a prior event ran for longer than expected, and I missed the event, but next time they run something local I’ll be sure to attend.

For those who want to practise some armchair skepticism at home, during my attempt to hunt down the last few sources in our (by now massive) plagiarism project, a broken link redirected me to the following web page:

I sat in the pub at our Skeptical Activism meeting on Thursday staring at this article, and I’m pretty sure my mouth was open in disbelief. I challenge you all to read this and see how many blatant misrepresentations of current scientific understanding there are. For me it got to the point where I just stopped reading, which for someone with the level of love of nonsense that I have is an impressive thing for an article to manage. I half-considered writing an article debunking all of the utter tosh in the article, but then there would be no room in this newsletter for Craig or Bronwyn’s excellent pieces this week.

Speaking of which, in this week’s newsletter we start off with a follow-up to our last newsletter’s plea from an old ex-member. This ex-member has contacted us again, and this time the subtle hints in his previous email have become giant red flags! Next we have an excellent article from Bronwyn with her thoughts on digital archiving, and whether we may need something more robust than the Internet Archive. Katrina has looked at recent reality TV revelations, and Craig has looked into the shuttering of Reality Check Radio, and whether it’s all just a ploy to make more money. And finally, I’ve tried my best to dissect a claim we received in our email recently about time-travelling song lyrics, although I eventually had a revelation that stopped me dead in my tracks.

p.s. When Reality Check Radio announced they were going off the air, with a web page listing all the “challenges” that they were helping people to face, I saw it as a good opportunity to make a matching spoof page for our own online audio presence, the Yeah… Nah! podcast. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of their list of issues and ours: