Aires Tech is the latest in a line of scammy companies, going back to the 1990s, selling products that are claimed to protect you from the dangers of electromagnetism. Previous iterations, like WaveShield, SafeTShield and BluShield, have sold stickers that you apply to your digital devices, pendants that you wear, and totems that you can strategically place around the house. Aires is no different, selling “One” holographic stickers for your mobile phone, “Flex” pendants and “Go” keyrings to carry around with you, and two different types of device to cover your home - the “Zone” and “Zone Max”:

Clavicular, better known to his mum and dad as Braden Peters, is a 20 year old internet influencer who promotes an extreme beauty regime known as “looksmaxxing”.

While researching for the articles I write for the NZ Skeptics newsletter, I often find myself staring at the Google AI response that shows up ahead of search results, trying to come to terms with just how uncritical our current slate of AIs have been trained to be. If I type in the name of a crank scientist, all I see is positive words about the groundbreaking, unconventional work they've done. A quack therapy is painted by Google AI as a miracle cure. A fringe conspiracy theory sounds like a legitimate political viewpoint.

A couple of decades ago I backpacked around Iran, and to this day I consider it to be one of the most fascinating, rewarding countries I've ever visited. Without meaning to bore you, here's a short summary of some of the highlights:

A few years ago at the Society for Science Based Healthcare, we attempted to tackle what we saw as a problem with the fundraising website Givealittle.

Yesterday my daughter told me about a recent trend on TikTok - Scientology Runs. For those not in the know, Scientology is very much a pseudoscientific self-help cult that has ruined many people's lives and tries to legitimise itself by, amongst other things, convincing celebrities to join and then convince others in turn that it's a legitimate organisation. If you want to know what Scientology teaches, check out this primer from South Park:

My friend Aaron messaged me the other day and let me know about a pamphlet that's recently been released by prominent ex Jehovah's Witness Lloyd Evans. The pamphlet, available both digitally and in printed form, is titled “You Should Not Fear Him” - Why It's OK to Question “The Truth”, and is a counter-argument to JW arguments for the existence of their particular version of God.

Last week I was in the pub having a few drinks with a friend, and in the middle of a particularly heavy part of the conversation he mentioned how it's common knowledge that sugar feeds cancer. This statement is a common alt-med claim that comes along with the idea that if you have cancer you can treat it by reducing your sugar intake, starving the cancer cells of energy.

A while ago a work colleague told me that she had a strange connection with a friend of hers, where they had been talking late into the night and found out that both of them would sometimes wake up just before their alarm goes off in the morning, especially if there's something important happening that morning. When I told her that I also have this ability, she was surprised - there were three people all with the same unusual ability. At this point I let her know that this, like many of the quirky things in her life, is likely to not actually be very rare at all - it's just that we don't often talk about these odd everyday things that happen to us.

The Auckland Deep Thinkers is a group on the MeetUp website that meet both in-person and online. The group's description states:

The current intrepid set of Mormon missionaries visiting me at my house have been very tenacious. Over the last month and a half or so, they have visited almost every week - and have also invited me on a tour of the local church in Titahi Bay. It's been an interesting experience, not least because this current pair of young missionaries are joined by a man from Utah in his 70s - one of the post-retirement missionaries that are sent around the world, usually with their spouses, to take on leadership and administration roles in the church in the country they end up in. It certainly seems like a much nicer role than that of the younger missionaries, with more stability and creature comforts.

The NZ Skeptics mailboxes have recently been receiving some interesting emails, asking to have content published on our website. Whereas historically these requests would be for hosting obvious spam on our site, featuring online casino adverts, alternative medicines, MLMs and other dodgy products and services, this trio of recent emails were a little more subtle.

With the recent release of millions of digital files (mainly emails) related to Jeffrey Epstein, there's a lot to go through. Both journalists and activists are combing the documents for people they want to name shame - politicians, celebrities, culture war pundits, etc.

A nearly 6 hour long video was published on YouTube by Mike Winger last week on the topic of Bethel church. Bethel is a well-known and popular evangelical church in the US, but Mike didn't have good things to say about the organisation. Instead he detailed the misdeeds of church leaders, including their handling of a “prophet” who has spoken frequently at Bethel church services, preacher Shawn Bolz.

While watching the six hour long video from Mike Winger about Bethel church for another article in this newsletter issue, I was tickled by a story that was mentioned briefly about a supposed miracle healing.

Last week I watched a video from Laurie Kirk, ȧ Google employee who creates some great content online under the name LaurieWired. The video looked at some of the more interesting recent advancements in computing, with one segment talking about new CPU schedulers for Linux that run in user space rather than kernel space:

I've been a little slow to pick up on this one, but there's a company in the US, Reflect Orbital, that is offering services based on having mirrors in space. Given that the company's previous name was Tons of Mirrors, it would seem that their aim is likely to be to imitate Elon Musk's Starlink by launching thousands of mirrors into low-earth orbit, and pointing them back at earth. One article reports that the company plans to have 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, with the eventual aim of launching a quarter of a million satellites.

A few months ago, I attended a talk given at the Wellington Humanists about consciousness. In the middle of the talk we were shown a short, 5 minute segment of a documentary piece that shows animals, from elephants all the way down to caterpillars, getting drunk after eating fermented marula fruit.

John Campbell is back with Season 2 of his TV show Under His Command, where he takes a second look at the controversial Destiny church in four 15 minute episodes. This time John's looking at the church's “Man Up” program and talking to ex-members of the church, mainly anonymously as these apostates are taking a risk by speaking up.

Siouxsie Wiles is well known to the NZ Skeptics. She has long been an active member of our organisation, helping us out by running Skeptics in the Pub events, MCing and giving talks at our conferences, writing articles for our journal, promoting us in public and much, much more. To illustrate this, these are photos from Wikipedia of Siouxsie sitting on discussion panels at our 2013 and 2015 conferences:

Patrick Medlicott published a piece in our last newsletter about a talk on New Zealand's response to climate change - about what we're currently doing, and what we should be doing. One of our newsletter subscribers, Mike, reached out to me after he received the newsletter, expressing his confusion about the article:

We recently received a request from a student to answer some questions about UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. After reading the email, it looked likely that this project will approach these topics from a somewhat credulous angle:

Some of you may be aware of the MENZ (Masculinist Evolution New Zealand) website that Katrina mentioned in her article. menz.org.nz is a men's rights website that claims to advocate for men, especially in cases of custody rights, sexual abuse allegations, etc. The strapline on the site describes their remit as:

Recently a group of well-known scientists and academics, some of whom were once regular speakers at Skeptics conferences around the world, published a book called “The War on Science”. Collated by physicist Lawrence Krauss, the 39 essays in the book are written by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker, Peter Boghossian, Niall Ferguson, Alan Sokal and Gad Saad.

In the last few months NASA has announced the detection of a third extrasolar object, named ATLAS, on its way through the solar system - following Oumuamua (in 2017) and Borisov (in 2019). We've only been detecting these objects that aren't gravitationally bound to our sun - visitors that fly through our solar system and then continue on their way, never to return - for the past decade or so, and there's good reason for this. Several projects have been created recently that attempt to detect objects that have the potential to collide with earth, such as Pan-STARRS (the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) and ATLAS (the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System). These two projects found Oumuamua and Comet Atlas respectively, whereas the other extrasolar object, Comet Borisov, was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov (an awesome guy who spotted it using one of the many telescopes he has designed and built himself and operates at his personal observatory).

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.

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.

Sara Passmore, the President of the NZARH (Rationalists & Humanists) and one-time committee member of the NZ Skeptics, recently shared with me a link to an interesting Official Information Act request. The request was sent by Melanie Petrowski to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet on August the 22nd this year (2025). Now, Melanie's an interesting character - she's a Christian, and hosts the hour long weekly show “Mel's Magnificent Bible Study” on Radio Hawkes Bay. She's also known in her home town of Hastings as something of an anti-vax protester, and even her own father has had to step in in the past to help the police curb one of her more enthusiastic protests, where she stationed herself outside a supermarket with a megaphone.

Twelve years ago, back in 2013, I subscribed to the Fluoride Free New Zealand (back then known as Fluoride Action Network New Zealand) newsletter, to keep an eye on what the group was doing. I've been happy to see that recently my Gmail account has been treating these newsletters as spam, and I hope that many other people receiving this newsletter also having it going into their spam folders - as there's so much misinformation and fearmongering in the emails (along with regular begging for money), that it's best off being left unread.

After a successful Kickstarter campaign, a newly-formed small games development company from Adelaide, Australia called Team Cherry released the computer game Hollow Knight back in 2017. Hollowknight is a game in the “Metroidvania” genre, meaning that the core gameplay mechanics are very similar to both the Metroid Prime and Castlevania games franchises - created by Nintendo and Konami respectively. It's basically a 2D side-scrolling game with large levels, where the main character explores parts of the map, gathering special abilities on the way that allow for more exploration, collection of the resources needed to fight level bosses, etc. Here's a screenshot from my playthrough of the game:

In episode 9 of the Telepathy Tapes' extra episodes, titled the Talk Tracks, host Ky Dickens has Adam Curry on to talk about the “science”, in an episode titled “The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality”. According to Ky, dam is apparently an inventor and “deep thinker”, although in the episode he describes himself as an “armchair scientist” and “consciousness researcher” - although all I could find of his research online was a single paper on Google Scholar, where he is listed as the third author on a paper about retrocausation. Two websites I found that have profiles on him both listed many research papers, but none of the papers had his name attached to them, despite the fact that they were listed in one case on a website he owns, which sells an app he created (Entangled), and in the other case were listed on his profile page under a picture of him. So I'm left thinking that maybe he's not so much of a researcher after all. Although even if he had been an author on those papers, looking at the quality of them and the places they've been published (and many haven't been published anywhere) makes me think that it still wouldn't be that much of a flex.

Since the explosion in popularity of the podcast The Telepathy Tapes soon after it was released, creator Ky Dickens appears to have quickly realised that her intention to have a break between seasons was not going to be in the best interests of maintaining the attention of the many listeners she had attracted in a very short amount of time. And so, at the end of Season 1 after 10 weeks of weekly releases, Ky announced that she would be releasing bi-weekly interviews, called The Telepathy Tapes Talk Tracks, to bridge the gap to Season 2.

After 12 years of running a fortnightly Skeptical Activism group in Wellington, it's finally come to an end. We will look into the feasibility of running an online activism meeting at some point, but for now the in-person event, with a free beer for your first complaint, is no more. To give everyone a flavour of the kind of work we did at our activism meetings, we thought we could let you know what we got up to on our final night.

On Friday evening Bronwyn and I, rather than running our usual Skeptics in Cyberspace meeting, visited the Johnsonville Community Centre to experience the signs and wonders of a Christian Revival event, where we were promised healing, hope and miracles.

TikTok is an interesting social media platform. As a host of short videos that anyone can make these days pretty easily with just a mobile phone, an interface that makes it easy to scroll through hundreds of videos, and an algorithm that attempts to feed you content that will keep you engaged, many kids use Tik Tok as their main social media platform. The platform allows viewers to easily engage through not just their likes, but also through posting their own opinions in response videos.

The article from Aaron Davies about blind testing diet colas is a really interesting one for me. As a little background info for you, Aaron is an ex Jehovah's Witness and was a NZ Skeptics committee member a few years ago. In the article I'm the “Mark” mentioned in the testing. So, if you've read the article already, you'll know that when challenged with picking out my favoured beverage, Diet Coke, from a line-up of identical looking drinks in identical looking cups, I successfully identified the Diet Coke.

Nearly a decade ago, I was in a local pharmacy and noticed that they had a flyer for a Weleda product that was making some pretty strong claims.

Whatever the science may say, there's no lack of people who are chasing the holy grail of a longer life, often known as Extreme or Radical Life Extension, and who are keen to tell you that they've figured out the secret. Unsurprisingly, they often also have something to sell you. I decided to look into some of the more vocal and well-known of these advocates for extending our lives, to see whether their ideas stack up.

While trawling alt-med websites for nonsense recently, I noticed a particularly egregious claim made by Ben Warren's BePure company for their multivitamin product, BePure One. The advertisement claimed that it was essential, and that people need to take it every day. Now it strikes me as surprising that any product would need to be taken by everyone, no matter their situation - especially as alternative medicines are not only unproven, but they're often also pretty expensive. BePure One, for example, is $69 for a month's supply - not nice, especially as most people who eat a balanced diet don't actually need a multivitamin, as they're getting everything they need from their food.

Recently someone shared with me an article from the March 2025 issue of the “Brooklyn Tattler”, a monthly magazine for the residents of Brooklyn, Wellington. The article in question was written by someone from the Brooklyn Wellness Hub, a group of “natural” health practitioners local to the area. The obvious nonsense that I was being shown was part of a list of tips for growing vegetables and fruit in your garden, and it advised readers to:

John Campbell recently released a new TV show on TVNZ where he investigates the controversial Destiny Church and its leader, “apostle” Brian Tamaki. The show is called Under His Command, and it's quite short - running to five episodes, each only around 15 minutes long.

A couple of weeks ago I started seeing posts about how Google's AI was bending over backwards attempting to explain idioms that didn't exist. I didn't think much of it until a few days ago, when I was searching for advice on a level in the game “Consider It” on the Switch. The level in question involved a couple walking down the pavement together towards some dog poop, and I couldn't work out how to avoid stepping in it - so I searched for “consider it poop level”. Google's AI then tried to explain the phrase I had searched for as if it was a well-known saying.

Last weekend three of us intrepid skeptics attended a creationist talk titled “How Evolution Hurts Science and People”, given by Mike Collins at the Abundant Life church in Wellington. Mike is an aircraft maintenance engineer who, since leaving his real job, has shacked up with Creation Ministries International (CMI), the evangelical Christian group who run the creation.com website and is one of their regular speakers at churches all around New Zealand.

Committee member Hamish Dickson posted the above image to our committee chat the other day, along with the question:

Not all things connected to religion are bad - it's good to help the poor, feed the homeless, and strive for non-violence. But what if there's something that another religion has, but yours doesn't? Often when this happens to Christians, they'll simply label it as occult or demonic:

Last week I received a text supposedly from NZ Post (sent from linsystefanoq@resquar.help as an iMessage, rather than an SMS message):

The NZ skeptics mailbox recently received a request from a company selling breathalysers in NZ. They wanted us to help them game the system when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, so that they could increase their sales. Given that I wrote about SEO just a few weeks ago, I figured the email exchange might be of interest to our readers. I think the emails tell the story quite well by themselves, so here they are in chronological order:

A couple of years ago, I wrote about some of the most elite “High IQ” societies, and how they mostly seemed to be nothing more than vanity projects created by self-professed polymaths who had built up cult-like followings. The supposed pinnacle of these groups was the New Zealand based Tera Society; headed up by Roddy Young, and with an entry requirement of a one-in-a-trillion IQ. In reality I suspect Roddy wouldn't even manage to pass the Mensa IQ test.

The Christmas before last, I received a work email informing me of the holiday dates during which our office would be closed, and that for these dates I would need to book annual leave. I guess in an attempt to soften the blow of people needing to use over half of their annual leave on days outside of their choosing, management decided to let us know of the benefits of taking leave:

Microsoft released a video last week claiming they have created a new state of matter, a base building block for their efforts to make a new type of quantum computer using “topological superconductors”: