Are We the Scabs?

I'm looking forward to the day that someone writes a reasoned critique of the New Zealand Skeptics that we can engage with. We receive quite a few emails from people challenging us, but so far there's been nothing we could get our teeth into - we mainly see bad faith arguments, people's personal bug-bears, and grievances based on misremembered events.

I was intending to do further blogs on esoteric climate related subjects such as the recent articles from the Guardian on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) changes that may be responsible for very significant alterations in the climate over the next century. Ocean currents are very much in the climate change news, and are certainly altering - likely due to the climate crisis - and have altered in the past, contributing to ice ages in the North and warming in the Southern hemisphere, documented from ice cores and other evidence.

Some recent research has pointed to some potential health impacts for those on the keto diet long-term. I wrote about the keto diet in the newsletter in May 2023, so I was interested to see this update as we are sorely lacking long term data on the impacts of this diet on healthy people. Although the diet has been used since the 1920s as an intervention for some specific health conditions such as epilepsy, I am more interested in whether it is an unnecessary risk for those who do not have a specific medical condition.

In an article from two weeks ago, I wrote about an Official Information Act request sent to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet by Melanie Petrowski, a conspiracy theorist from Napier. The request was about the rapture, which had apparently been given a date of September the 24th this year. Melanie wanted to know whether the Government was aware of this pending event, and what preparations they may have made. She also wanted to know if the government was ready for some of the new systems that were about to be put in place by the antichrist to monitor and control us, and she sought reassurances that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (or Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour if Luxon was raptured) was going to resist these new technologies, such as drones, the Beast System, quantum dot tattoos, and more.

What I hope has been self-evident in previous instalments of my Wham, Bam, Autism Scams series is that some people are willing to do whatever it takes to spare their children from what they see as a lifetime of suffering; usually by avoiding vaccines and making their children ingest all sorts of god awful things, i.e. bleach. What I haven't really explored is the things people do to themselves to prevent having Autistic children because, well, people don't necessarily think of preventing Autism at the parent-level, save for the occasional new blurb about sex selection in fertility medicine. Developments in the United States last week demonstrate what happens when unchecked Autism misinformation is used to justify asking women, pregnant people, and their families to make a choice that could kill them.