New Year, New Nonsense

Mark Honeychurch - 21 January 2025

It’s been a productive break for our newsletter contributors, and therefore we have another record-breaking newsletter this week, with a great set of articles for you to read. Firstly one of our members, Patrick, has put his hand up and offered to write us a series of articles on climate change - as he says, it’s a serious issue that we can’t afford to be complacent about, let alone try to deny its very existence - as some people do (sadly even some in our skeptical community).

We have an “updates” article from Bronwyn, following up on recent developments related to the subjects of several of her past articles. Following this I’ve also been watching the subjects of my past articles, and there’s been some recent activity from the creator of the “Global Flourishing” movement here in NZ, as he goes through a rebranding of his idea - so I’ve brought you all up to date on what’s happening, and what to watch out for. Katrina has been surprised at the sheer number of online scams that have been reported over the Christmas break, so she’s documented them in a very Christmassy way - it’s a good reminder that these kinds of scams are constantly getting more sophisticated and dangerous. And Brad has written about one of his pet peeves - Hip Singing - although he’s tried his hardest to not be a curmudgeon about it.

Finally Hamish has looked into some of the more egregious pseudo-historical ideas being shared on social media about pre-Māori colonisation of New Zealand, and will continue his thoughts in a second article in a couple of weeks. And, as an addendum, to expand on Hamish’s article I’ve dug up an old article he references about the Kaimanawa Wall from our archives - a site of Skeptical interest that a few of us are hoping to visit in a couple of months, if the stars align.

With all this content, I’ve had to delay several other articles, including one about the Honey browser extension that seems to be ripping off anybody and everybody in order to make money for PayPal, as well as my movie review of Heretic. However, due to the timing, in this issue I really should let you all know that Michael Connett, the son of (in)famous anti-fluoride campaigner Paul Connett, will be visiting New Zealand at the beginning of February, courtesy of fundraising by our local anti-fluoride group, Fluoride Free NZ.

I’ll be going along to Michael’s Wellington talk, at Vic Uni (presumably he’s hiring a room out, rather than having been invited by the University) at 7pm on the 10th of February, and if you’d like to join me please just reply to this email and let me know so that I can look out for you at the event. If you’re not in Wellington, but would like to see Michael talk when he’s in your nearest town or city, you can check out his entire NZ schedule on the Fluoride Free NZ website.

I’ve been to see Michael’s father Paul speak in the past, and managed to have a private conversation with him afterwards for a few minutes where he ended up sharing some of his other non-evidence-based views with me, such as his belief that the plastics in water bottles are poisoning us. It’s always fun to go under-cover to events like these, and I generally find it’s best to just keep quiet and let these people talk - with my phone recording audio if possible. No doubt I’ll be reporting on the meeting in our newsletter in a month’s time, that is of course unless one of you intrepid readers wants to do the reporting for me!