Search Engine Optimisation (known as SEO) is an IT discipline in which a website owner attempts to optimise their site in a way that makes it appear high up in google's search results, ideally on the first page. The factors that Google considers when ranking pages, through an algorithm called PageRank (and more recently other technologies), are something of an open secret these days.

A week ago I attended a talk given by Michael Connett, the son of long-time lawyer Paul Connett. Michael, like his father, lives in the US and has dedicated his life to fighting against the use of community water fluoridation. He's a lawyer, and specialises in civil lawsuits where there are claims of damage by toxic substances. He recently won a court case in the US where he argued that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) was not doing enough to address concerns about the risks of fluoride in drinking water.

The other day my eldest daughter shared an image on TikTok with me from an account called Genknowladge (@genknowledge1), claiming that sand looks like this under a microscope:

For those who have been around in skeptical circles for a while, you're probably aware not only of skeptic Brian Dunning and his Skeptoid podcast, but also of his conviction for wire fraud, in a case where he was accused of cookie stuffing. Wikipedia summarises it nicely on Brian Dunning's Wikipedia page:

I'm a middle-aged guy who likes to spend time talking with Mormon missionaries, and by now I probably get visited about once every month or two by any new missionaries who turn up in the Porirua area. I had two missionaries visit me at the beginning of the new year, and another two just last week. I enjoy talking with them - both hearing their perspectives on their faith and the Mormon church, and trying to give them food for thought when it comes to some of the worse parts of their church organisation.

Recently I was messaged by one of our “spies” - someone who was still in the Discord group for Global Flourishing, the claimed Rationalist group that looked more like a proto-cult that I'd looked into last year, based in Auckland. The spy let me know that the group's leader, Paul Bryant, was shutting it down, and had sent everyone this message:

Share International is an organisation that I've been interested in for quite a few years now. Whenever I see their stands at wellness events and local fairs, I make a beeline for them and have a chat about aliens, UFOs, crop circles and more. It's always seemed a little weird that their membership is predominantly retirees - I tend to associate UFO belief with younger people who have a passion for science and technology, but without the critical mindset or understanding of the complexities involved with interstellar travel to understand that their beliefs are implausible.

In part 1 of this article, I explained how I ended up being compelled to book myself a totally unnecessary colonic irrigation a few weeks ago, just before Christmas. After years of procrastinating, I finally managed to book an appointment after a new clinic opened up in central Wellington in October. In the lead-up to my appointment, the day before I had swallowed a teaspoon of green food-dye in the morning, and a teaspoon of yellow food dye in the evening.

Okay, the title's a little crass, but it was suggested to me as something that would help to tie my article in with the Alien/Space theme of this week's newsletter, and I've not managed to think of anything smarter since.

I'm sure many of you will have heard of the Free Speech Union (FSU), which formed in 2021 by registering as a Trade Union. They're a successor to the Free Speech Coalition, which formed in 2018 in response to problems Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux had with finding a venue in Auckland in which to spread their weird ideas on topics like immigration (I've watched a couple of Lauren's documentaries, and they're not exactly what I'd call factual).

I'm a fan of watching movies and documentaries that contain content that I, as a skeptic, disagree with. I like the idea of challenging myself to spend the time to give these pieces of media a fair shake, so that I can be more confident that I'm not just a skeptic because I haven't “seen the light”. Instead I like to stare directly into that light, watching anti-vaxx documentaries and trying out alternative medicine treatments.

The Go Green Expo is an annual weekend-long event that has been running for just over a decade. Starting in Wellington, the organisers have since spread to other cities in New Zealand, currently running events in Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and the Hawke's Bay. Although the event is slated to be a “sustainable lifestyle” expo, there's very little that's sustainable or eco-friendly being promoted at the event.

Our membership at the NZ Skeptics Society consists of an interesting mix of different kinds of people, and although we generally agree on a few core ideas about requiring evidence before making claims, there are members who hold a variety of views that other skeptics would consider fringe. One of these members, James (who has talked to us at one of our past conferences, and I'm Facebook friends with), posted on Facebook recently that he was running a paranormal investigation of one of Wellington's heritage buildings, Inverlochy House - which is currently used as an art school:

As part of my recent delegation of the task of finding newsletter topics, where I've started asking my kids for ideas, I was given the topic of anti-ageing, or anti-wrinkle, straws. I guess with the popularity of Stanley cups and other new-fangled drinkware, it was only a matter of time before innovation came to straws.

After finding out a couple of weeks ago that my kids were aware of “mewing” six months before I was, I jokingly berated them and asked them to let me know of any other nonsense they might come across online. This request was instantly met with a barrage of weirdness and nonsense, although one stood out immediately - Aura Points.

I was sent a link to an article in the Independent the other day, and asked if I'd heard of a new thing the kids are doing called mewing. I quizzed my children about it, as they're young and hip, and they told me that this was old news - “so 6 months ago”, apparently. But the story of mewing was more interesting that I'd first suspected it would be, and involves a good deal that's of skeptical interest.

A few days ago I was scanning my spam folder, making sure nothing important had been accidentally classified as spam, when I noticed a cryptic email:

When Bronwyn said she was going to look into astrology software after getting a reading at a psychic fair the other day, I figured it'd be good to have a look into the software itself and see what I could find. So, with Bronwyn's help, I identified a few popular astrology programs and got to work installing them on my PC and poking around them.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing Reddit images (I guess it's my old-school version of Tik Tok), when I came across a post extolling the virtues of the Throckmorton Sign as a diagnostic tool. This tool is named after Thomas Bentley Throckmorton, an early 20th century American neurologist.

While looking into the prevalence of treasure seeking as a scam in the United States in the early 1800s (part of some preparation I did before talking to Mormon missionaries), I came across an update to a story that I first heard about a few years ago.

Recently two different mobile AI devices have been released, and given all the overhyping of AI these days they've fared about as well as you'd expect them to - which is not very well at all.

Paul Burns, a Catholic who sporadically emails us with inane arguments, wrote to us recently about our $100,000 challenge, in an email titled “_My own challenge_”:

Those of you who have been skeptically-minded for a while now may remember an Irish company called Steorn who had been promising since the early 2000s that they could make free energy. Back in 2006 they even took out a full page advert in the Economist, which used the Galileo Gambit and said:

In 1215 the Catholic Church's Fourth Council of the Lateran, which had been announced two years prior and so was very well attended, introduced many new rules. Many of these were focused on fighting corruption within the clergy, by limiting when and how clergy could charge fees for their work (e.g. no fees for reversing someone's excommunication, consecrating a bishop, or offering “superfluous services”), and banning certain practices like getting drunk and nepotism (specifically, priests handing their job down to their sons).

Given that I had dusted off my copy of Stable Diffusion to generate an image of a 500m tall Jesus, I remembered that I don't think I've yet shared a project I did last year where I generated a set of QR Codes all pointing to the NZ Skeptics website. Using Stable Diffusion, Controlnet and some other software, I was able to produce some fun skeptically-themed images that all function as working QR codes - or at least, I managed to get my phone to successfully read each of them at least once. Your Mileage May Vary when trying to scan these yourself, but for what it's worth here they are.

I've been in contact with a lawyer on and off over the last couple of years regarding one of our old members - old both in terms of when they joined the society, and in terms of their age. Jim Ring was a frequent contributor to our Journal, the NZ Skeptic, writing both articles on a wide range of topics and many Letters to the Editor. Sadly Jim passed away last year, and the conversations with the lawyer, who was a friend of Jim's in his later life, were about a collection of books of skeptical interest that he had collected over his lifetime and wanted to donate to the NZ Skeptics.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how we had one of our YouTube videos removed from YouTube, due to Google mistakenly deciding that it was promoting medical misinformation - a rookie mistake, given that it was critiquing medical misinformation. I expressed my doubt that an appeal would change the outcome, but I was pleasantly surprised just after we recorded our last podcast episode to receive an email from Google letting us know that they had reversed their decision:

Craig wrote a couple of weeks ago about a couple of strange ideas he was introduced to at a Matariki event he attended - the idea that Matariki's brightness can predict the future, and also an idea that the earth has apparently recently shifted on its axis by 20 degrees.

In preparation for my article this week about my visit to a creationist talk, I logged into the NZ Skeptics' YouTube channel to upload some videos of the event I'd recorded. When I logged in, I was greeted with a warning about how we had violated one of YouTube's Guidelines:

On Saturday afternoon I joined an old friend and fellow nonsense junkie, Tim Atkin, as we attended a creationist talk in Wellington, organised by Creation Ministries International (CMI - the group that run the creation.com website). Now, Tim has been spending a lot of time over the last few years learning mandarin, and this was to come in handy as the meeting was at the Wellington Chinese Methodist Church on Boulcott Street. We arrived just before the 4pm starting time, and were greeted by a large creation.com banner featuring one of CMI's favourite topics, dinosaurs (presumably this is seen as a way to capture the imagination of kids).

This weekend my kids and I picked up a 5 pack of face masks from KMart - a bargain (I think) at $12. My family, who were coming on this journey of discovery with me, each picked a mask that suited their personalities, or star signs, or something - Mermaid Feels, Super Star, Magic Mask and Radiant Glow. I chose Pearl Princess; after all, who doesn't want to feel like a princess on a Sunday night.

I've done a lot of book shopping recently, while working on our plagiarism project - and in this time I've found some real gems. And, by gems, I mean god-awful books. Thankfully my shopping has been done in charity shops and at book fairs, so these bad books have cost me just a dollar or two each - with the added twin bonuses that a) the money I've spent has gone to charity, and b) I've removed at least one copy of these books from circulation.

On Saturday (the 25th of May), our chair Bronwyn, long-time skeptic Tim Atkin and myself visited Practical Philosophy and Meditation, a group running out of a very nice building at the bottom of Aro Street in Aro Valley, Wellington. We were going there because, despite outwardly looking like an educational institution (until very recently the Wellington branch had been called the School of Practical Philosophy), a little investigation shows that the group runs “schools” around the world in a curiously cult-like fashion, offering cheap philosophy courses as the hook to attract adherents who can then be convinced to pour their money, time and devotion into the group.

At the beginning of April I received a friend request from none other than Jason Momoa, star of the Aquaman movies, the Conan the Barbarian remake, and Jacques Villeneuve's recent version of Dune. Of course, this wasn't the real Jason Momoa - just another Facebook scam, something that's becoming more prevalent as Meta appears to have given up on even their half-hearted attempts to combat fraud on their platform.

We saw a few weird things come out of the Parliament protests, but one of the weirdest is the attempts to “save” Marsden Point. Some of the protestors, egged on by conspiracy agitators like Brad Flutey and Damien De Ment, travelled directly from the protest at parliament in Wellington when the police shut it down, all the way up to Marsden Point, half way between Auckland at the top of the North island and site of the country's only oil refinery, which was (and is) in the process of being decommissioned.

Last week I went to Australia for a holiday. Although tourist traps are not my idea of a good holiday destination, I have a family, and when you're a parent, holidays tend to be more about the kids than your own preferences. And so off we went to the Gold Coast - a place that was both warm and had lots of theme parks.

For those who were paying attention when reading the newsletter from two weeks ago, when I published a plea for help from an ex-member of the NZ Skeptics regarding a photo his mother had taken in Auckland, you may have noticed something odd. Despite claiming to be a skeptic, there was a strange sentence in the middle of the email we received. It read:

The NZ Skeptics were messaged last week by someone (no name given) who thinks they've found a paranormal event - a message in a piece of music from 1995 that predicted the 7.5 earthquake on New Year's Day this year in Noto, Japan:

We recently received an email from an ex-member who's now living in the UK, asking if our members might be able to help out identifying an optical anomaly in a photograph his mother took in Auckland recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus

A few months ago Bronwyn wrote an article about Sex.Life, a New Zealand podcast by Morgan Penn, a “somatic sexologist”, and Hayley Sproull, a comedian. The first season of the podcast is of interest to skepticism, as it details Morgan's 10 day visit to Highden Temple (outside of Palmerston North), owned and run by Bruce Lyon. Bruce claims to channel the spirit of a long-dead spiritual master, and also runs Sex Magic classes - part of the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA).

A couple of months ago a friend messaged me with an article from Glamour magazine that extolled the virtues of jade rollers. Although I have no idea how he ended up reading the article in the first place, I think it piqued his interest because the byline mentioned “skeptics”. Our conversation went like this:

I'm a bit of a fan of internet drama - at least the kind where someone is accused of wrongdoing. The to and fro of accusations, rebuttals, evidence, and eventual apology video, with a backdrop of hundreds of eager new YouTubers hoping to gain followers by creating reaction videos, giving their own commentary, or even adding to the investigation, is fascinating to watch, and its online nature means that everything is easily accessible from the comfort of my living room. I can watch half a dozen videos, then go searching for background information, piecing together my own picture of who the main players are, how they're perceived within the online community, and just how screwed their internet “careers” are.

We recently had a member decide not to renew their membership, because of concerns about our submission to the Therapeutic Products Bill. They told us:

Those who know me well know that I have a thing for painful, uncomfortable experiences - I'm finally planning to redeem my colonic irrigation voucher in the next few weeks, I've enjoyed stabbing myself with acupuncture needles and joining interminably boring cult meetings. So for some it's no surprise that I'm a big fan of bad movies - some of my favourites are Twisted Pair (or anything really) by Neil Breen, Champagne and Bullets, Jurassic Shark, Dangerous Men, Dolemite, Tammy and the T-Rex, and Birdemic. Yep, these movies are so bad that The Room doesn't even make the list.

A lot of skepticism these days involves battling against wrong-heading beliefs related to topics that are important to us, and to our world: whether an all-powerful God created us, and wants us to follow his strict, perversely specific and often nonsensical rules about how to live our lives; if climate change is real, and how much of a risk it is to our continued existence on this planet; the merits (or lack thereof) of alternative medicine, and the dangers they can pose to a misinformed public.

Thames-Coromandel mayor Len Salt

A few days ago the NZARH, an organisation based in Auckland that I help out with, received an email from someone looking to forge connections:

Several years ago I poked my head above the parapet by writing a letter to the NZ Medical Journal about crank medical treatments that they were happy to publish (see the bottom of this newsletter for a copy of the letter). Since then my details have obviously found my way onto some dubious contact lists, and as such I've been receiving the occasional request to review scientific papers. It's obvious these requests are for predatory journals, given that they usually flatter me by mis-labelling me as Dr Honeychurch, talking about my “expertise”, and asking me to review a paper that is obviously nothing to do with my day job and actual expertise.

At the Society for Science Based Healthcare, we spend a lot of time looking at dodgy therapeutic claims. Most of these claims are made by practitioners of alternative therapies. A few months ago Mark Hanna, a colleague of mine at SBH, messaged me with a curious thought: