Abi Loeb, who went against the tide of the scientific community back when the asteroid Oumuamua passed earth, and claimed it was an alien artefact, has struck again. This time, YouTube alerted me (presumably because I've been watching the UAP nonsense unfold on credulous American news channel News Nation) to the existence of a News Nation interview with Avi about his recent discovery of small spherules of alien origin dredged up from the seabed.

Back in November last year, I wrote a critique of a Safe ICT questionnaire I picked up at the Go Green expo. We recently received a copy of Safe ICT's most recent newsletter where they responded to my criticisms. I'm not going to rebut their rebuttal, as this kind of to and fro rarely ends up being productive, but suffice it to say that Safe ICT's overly cautious advice for people using technology is not in alignment with our understanding of the science, and is not based on any scientific evidence of harm.

Since the recent launch of Liz Gunn's new political party, NZ Loyal, I've been loyally watching all of her new party political videos, where she's been laying out her ideas for how she will run the country when she comes to power. They're extensive and disruptive, and although I'm not an expert I'd wager that they're totally unworkable. Her most recent video was the second of a two part series, where she talked about her idea of a 1% transaction tax that would allow the party to close down the Inland Revenue department. Although this video was full of ideas that deserve skeptical scrutiny, I want to have a brief look at the previous video, part 1 of Liz's economic vision for New Zealand, and a particular idea she has about a supposedly secret group who are, in tandem with others, running the world - the Fabian Society.

I've already discussed in my previous articles about the Global Flourishing, or GloFlo/∑±, movement. A few months ago I joined this group, which was claiming to be rationalist and have the answers the world needs to survive. I had my doubts, and was there because of my concerns that the group was looking less like a social movement for positive change, and more like a cult. The group was run by Paul, who had changed his name online to Ui and then again to ∑±78c7e.

As a reminder of what we covered in my last article on the Global Flourishing movement, also called ∑±, it's a new group setup in Auckland recently by a member of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. The group claims to be aligned with skepticism, humanism and rationalism, but appears to have some concerning characteristics that make it look less like a group of skeptically-minded people, and more like a cult - at least to me.

Okay, this one has me stumped, so I'm looking for some help. Robin Capper, from the Auckland Skeptics in the Pub group, messaged us recently to ask about a weird thing he'd seen on Google maps recently:

When I last wrote about Eastern Lightning, the strange Chinese cult I joined at the beginning of this year, I celebrated the fact that I had managed to get my hands on a couple of copies of one of their books. Little did I know how much trouble this would get me in!

Back in early 2021, Paul (I won't give his last name), a member of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists in Auckland - known as the NZARH, or just the Rationalists - was entrusted with managing a Facebook group of around 500 members that was originally used for a University of Auckland group called the Reason and Science society. The group was renamed to SHARP - Student Humanists Agnostics Rationalists and Philosophers, and appears to have been re-purposed for students at Auckland University.

Max, one of our regular podcast listeners, messaged us to let us know that Groundswell NZ has recently sponsored a visit by climate denier Dr Tom Sheahen.

Dan Ryan wrote an article a few weeks ago about our visit to a Freedoms NZ event, where Brian and Hannah Tamaki, Sue Grey and others extolled the virtues of their new umbrella political party. Currently Freedoms NZ consists of the member parties Vision NZ (Destiny Church's political wing), Rock the Vote, New Nation, Yes Aotearoa and almost the Outdoors and Freedoms Party (Sue just hasn't signed on the dotted line yet).

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging around at my best friend's house. His family were committed Christians, and I was a young atheist. This was a time before I converted to Christianity, as a 17 year old, and I enjoyed arguing with Christians about the age of the earth, the fossil record, etc. It's weird that so many evangelical Christians hang their hat on the idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary that was so easy to grasp that even a clueless 15 year old like me could figure it out. Anyway, I digress…

About 10 years ago a friend asked me about binaural beats. I had to admit at the time that I was oblivious, and had never heard of them. He proceeded to describe a fun audio effect, one that only works through a pair of headphones. If you play an audio tone (frequency) in each ear, and make the tone in each ear a little different, the difference between the frequencies of these two tones - their interference pattern - can be heard as a third audio tone that sounds like it's originating from somewhere between your ears. So, if you play a 550Hz tone in your left ear, and a 500Hz tone in your right ear, you will also “hear” a 50Hz tone between your ears: 550 - 500 = 50.

I was in JB HiFi the other day and noticed that vinyl records have made a comeback. There were rows and rows of new releases on vinyl LP, selling for between $50 and $60 a piece. It reminded me of an incident a few years ago, when a friend of mine moved from the US to New Zealand.

As a skeptic I love a good mystery - the kind of puzzle that Arthur C Clarke would write a book or make a TV show about. A couple of weeks ago I found a set of YouTube videos about a contrived mystery - one that's been deliberately created, rather than many of life's “mysteries” that come about because of misunderstanding and a lack of scientific understanding - or real mysteries where there's nothing otherworldly, but just a lack of information that would explain the backstory to a situation.

I received a text from radio host Graeme Hill the other day, alerting me to a Newshub Nation piece on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial/Anomalous Phenomena) - the new, more “serious” name for UFOs. In the 10 minute video report, Rebecca Wright and Simon Shepherd interviewed Australian investigative reporter Ross Coulthart about his investigation into David Grusch. If Ross is to be believed, David Grusch is the most important whistleblower ever in the history of UFO/UAP revelations.

Dear Mark, > > I was so pleased to hear on your latest podcast that you are interested in becoming a scrapbooker and/or card maker! It's a great way to preserve your memories rather than have them languish on your phone, to be lost at Google or Apple's whim. > > You've picked a great time to sign up to be a Maker as for a limited time you can join for just $45- and get $45- in CTMH Cash to spend on the things that you will love immediately. > > -=-=-=- > > For a limited time, you can sign up to become a Maker for just $45 and instantly get $45 back in CTMH Cash! > > In addition to your CTMH Cash sign-up bonus, which you can use to purchase a variety of products of your choice, you'll also enjoy these great perks when you become a Maker: > > 25–45% commission on all orders, based on performance > > Sneak peeks and previews for new specials and products > > Performance-based product and cash bonuses > > E-commerce website for collecting customer orders > > Annual incentive trip opportunities > > Flexibility to work your own schedule > > -=-=-=- > > All sounds great right!!! When you are ready to sign up I'm happy to walk you through it! 🙂 Or take a look here (https://susanshearer.closetomyheart.co.nz/ctmh/join.aspx) for more details and I'll contact you again in a few weeks to discuss any questions you may have. Next time you are in Auckland I am happy to have you come along to one of my events, or I can hook you up with a group close to your home. > > Although Craig commented that men are not at my group, there are plenty of male scrapbookers and card makers. > > Cheers, happy to talk anytime, > > Susan...

Having published Al Blenney's article a few weeks ago about a local “School of Prophets”, and then talking with him on our podcast about how there are several groups in New Zealand that promote Christian prophecy and run annual conferences, I wasn't too surprised to read last week about “ReAwaken America”, a Christian event held in Miami at the Trump National Doral hotel. The story that caught my eye was about a “prophet” called Amanda Grace who warned the assembled crowd about mermaids. Specifically, she said:

I wrote an article a couple of years ago about a new group based on the Sovereign Citizen (or SovCit) movement. The group was planning to take ownership of Abel Tasman national park, using the Allodial Title legal “trick” that ex-lawyer Liz Lambert had been telling anyone who would listen, and create a new country called "New Freeland". Liz shared her trick far and wide; she's written in Facebook groups, told Kelvyn Alp of Counterspin Media on his online news channel, Counterspin, and talked on podcasts, etc. Here are some stills from Liz talking with Kelvyn on Counterspin, including a couple of pages detailing her deep understanding of the law.

Aleh Tsyvinski is a professor of economics at Yale who has been researching Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies over the last few years, in a bid to understand where the currencies sit within an economy, and figure out how to use them to make money.

Jonny Grady, a long-time committee member, sent an image he'd taken of a “UFO” to the committee last week:

A New Zealand focused anti-vaccine “documentary” has recently been released, called Silenced. It focuses on broadcaster Peter Williams, as well as ex-GP Anne O'Reilly and sociologist Jodie Bruning, with much of the talk centering around COVID vaccination, the mainstream media and alternative treatments such as ivermectin. It also talks quite a bit about Dr Simon Thornley, past winner of our Bent Spoon award, although the footage the documentary makers shot of Thornley is not used in the documentary beyond a couple of silent clips, as apparently his lawyers recommended after filming that he shouldn't be a part of it.

In my previous articles about Eastern Lightning, the Chinese cult group that I've joined to get an insight into how they operate, I've talked about:

Despite my regular attempts to unsubscribe from some of the more egregious nonsense I receive in my email, spam still gets through - at this point it seems there's a mailing list that I signed up to that is able to subscribe me to new lists quicker than I can unsubscribe from existing ones. And, to be honest, I don't mind that much. My spam filter is able to deal with most of the fluff, and the stuff that does get through is often great fodder for this newsletter. To that end, I recently received an email titled “The BUDDHA STONE Money Magnet Kit!” which intrigued me:

In my last two articles about Eastern Lightning, I've documented both the central tenets of the religion that they have been trying to teach New Zealanders over the last few months in their Level 1 and 2 fellowship groups, and some of the tactics, such as love bombing, that they've been using outside of the fellowship time to keep members invested in attending the group. Immediately after finishing in the Level 2 group, I was moved to a new Facebook chat group called “_NZ gathering in Almighty God-(10pm Mon/ Wed/ Fri)_”. As you can see from the title there was some blessed relief here, with a reduction from nightly meetings to just three a week. Thank God!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my experience of joining the Eastern Lightning group, a Chinese Christian sect that is currently trying to expand through spamming New Zealanders on Facebook, and running online fellowships to introduce new adherents to the religion. I detailed my first few days in the group, working through their “Level 1” lessons, and some of the conversations I had during the love bombing I received on the first few days from multiple church members.

I received a company wide email at work recently from a colleague, where they were recommending an app to help people concentrate during work hours by minimising distractions. What caught my eye, though, was a justification given for the need for this app. Apparently if you've been distracted at work, it takes people on average 23 minutes - or, to be precise, 23 minutes and 15 seconds - to fully regain your focus and get back to your work properly. Now, as a skeptic, the specificity of that number alerted me that this was probably nonsense. On top of the unlikely nature of that number, I wondered what relevance “fully” regaining your focus is. If your focus (however that may be measured) is 95% recovered in the first 60 seconds after a disruption, and the rest of the time is a slow crawl to 100%, I imagine that's not so bad. If it's a linear recovery, then it's not so great.

The proposed Therapeutic Products Bill is currently at the Select Committee stage in parliament, and the committee is looking for feedback via its submissions process. For the first time maybe since the repealed Quackery Prevention Act of 1908, this legislation will attempt to police “alternative medicine”. Almost everything about regulating Natural Health Products (abbreviated to NHPs in this legislation) is new territory. The main issue with this bill, at least from our reading of it, seems to be that the government considers evidence of historical use of an NHP treatment for a condition to be “substantiation” of any health claims about it. So, basically, if a natural health product has been used in the past for treating a medical condition, whether it actually helps or not, the government will just assume that it is effective. This, to my mind, is reckless and dangerous.

I was listening to Steve Hassan speaking on a podcast recently, A Little Bit Culty - hosted by ex NXIVM cult members Sarah Edmondson and her husband Anthony Ames. Steve is well known by now for his BITE model of control in cults, and I've written about this model and its usefulness before.

An article in Stuff yesterday, reprinted from the Telegraph, showcased the efforts of a scientist to bring statistics to bear on the problem of cryptids. Floe Foxen has supposedly written a couple of papers, yet to be peer reviewed, that look at the “probability” of Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings being something more mundane than a hominid and plesiosaur respectively.

To restate the question in a way that may make more sense to some, does the new conversational Artificial Intelligence chat bot from OpenAI qualify as an Artificial General Intelligence, able to perform a wide range of tasks as well as a human can - and could it even be self aware, or sentient?

I have a friend who I've written about before who, although she's always had pseudoscientific ideas (like giving her children homeopathic remedies), since the pandemic has fallen down the rabbit hole and is currently at the bottom of said hole, picking up more and more daft ideas as she sits there, wallowing. I haven't seen her in a while now - not since I bumped into her at the parliament protest in February - but I do hear about her recent high jinks, and I see her Facebook posts which suggest that she's given up any effort to think critically.

Recently I received an email that purported to be from the anti-virus company Norton that was blatantly a scam, but I decided to follow through as much as I could to see what the scammers were trying to do. There's often a side effect of doing this, which is that I can waste the time of the scammers - the more time they're on the phone to me, the less time they'll have for scamming people who are at risk of falling for the scam. Plus maybe, just maybe, the scammers will start to question their career choice if many of their potential marks end up making their life a frustrating misery. Below is a series of events that, all in, might have taken about an hour from start to end.

Craig wrote last week about his experience at the Auckland Go Green Expo, and I also mentioned that myself and Bronwyn, along with Daniel Ryan, attended the Wellington Go Green Expo a couple of weeks ago. As I mentioned briefly on last week's podcast episode, apart from the frustration of the fact that the vast majority of stalls have nothing to do with going green, one particular stall annoyed me more than any other.

On Wednesday evening I attended the Wellington leg of Franklin Graham's God Loves You tour at the TSB Arena. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because Franklin is the son of Billy Graham, who was quite possibly the most famous Christian evangelical preacher of the 20th century. Billy Graham was well known for his large revival rallies (known as Crusades), with claims of bringing millions of people to the religion. Bronwyn has previously written for us about one of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's projects, the Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes.

It seems like the answer should be pretty simple - Anne Frank, of course. But sadly not everyone seems to accept this. After a brief hiatus, I've returned to watching the god-awful series Europa, a pro-nazi “documentary” series about World War 2. Last time I wrote about a claim that the voice actor for Winnie the Pooh had secretly recorded most of Churchill's wartime speeches because he was too drunk to do it himself. This time the claim is that Anne Frank couldn't have written the diaries attributed to her because, among other things, much of it is written in ballpoint pen, and that type of pen wasn't invented until the 1950s. I've transcribed what the documentary had to say:

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Upper Hutt “Mind, Body, Spirit” Fair with Bronwyn, as well as Skeptics in the Pub regulars Alexander and Tim. We were there to gawk at the weird and wonderful stalls, and all that they offered.

Skeptic Steven Novella recently published an interesting open letter to cranks. In it he speaks in a very forthright, honest way about people who email him and pronounce that they have figured out something that overturns science, or have single-handedly solved one of science's many unsolved puzzles. Steven explains in the letter about the importance of peer review, and talks of the arrogance of those who think they're smarter than the combined wisdom of the world's experts. He makes a really good point that the proper route to making your claims public, and ensuring they are properly vetted and tested, is a lot of hard work - and it's this hard work that cranks are keen to bypass, often preferring to instead jump straight to making claims without designing experiments, and publishing books rather than writing scholarly articles.

A notorious religious group from South Korea called Shincheonji (also known as Mount Zion) has apparently been actively recruiting in Auckland recently. Shincheonji has a long history in New Zealand, with underhanded recruiting techniques used to pull people into the cult group. Many years ago, the church in Wellington was using university students to lure people in. I also found a warning from a popular evangelical church here in Wellington from last year, letting people know that a group member had been attending church services and attempting to convince people to jump ship and join Shincheonji. Apparently this process can start as “an invite for coffee” followed by an invite to a Bible Study, from where attempts are made to convince the mark that Shincheonji is the one true religion.

In just a few days a curious annual internet event will begin: No Nut November (NNN). For those not in the know, nutting is a colloquial term for a man ejaculating - and No Nut November is the idea that it's good for people to take time off from ejaculating during November. At places like Reddit's “NoFap” group (fapping is a slang word for masturbating), people talk through November about how well they're doing with the challenge, which has somehow morphed from being an internet joke to something that many young men are taking seriously.

In preparation for our next podcast episode, where we plan to talk about Bronwyn's articles on Dr Bronner, I watched a documentary the other day called Dr Bronner's Magic Soapbox. The documentary used footage from another, much older documentary called Rainbow Bridge - a weird piece of experimental film about a hippie community in Hawaii. The end of the documentary contains footage of a live gig Jimi Hendrix performed in Hawaii soon before his death.

This week brings a welcome decision from the Supreme Court, in a case that the NZ Skeptics have been

In this day and age, with the internet as a handy tool, it doesn't take long for an offhand comment on Twitter or Facebook to become a rumour, and from there to mutate into a conspiracy. Sadly, much of the time these rumours are both extremely unlikely and very boring. However, the recent story about a stoush between veteran chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen and teenage newcomer Hans Niemann had me laughing when it was relayed to me at a recent Skeptics in the Pub event, so I figured I'd glance my skeptical eye over it. And now you all get to read my musings.

I'm English by birth, and in my youth had something of an unusual connection to the British royal family because of where I grew up, the Isles of Scilly. The islands are owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which means they're the property of the Prince of Wales. As such, as a teenager I was not so much used to seeing Charles, Diana or the Queen (although they did visit the islands regularly) as I was used to seeing paparazzi photographers turning up with their ridiculously long telephoto lens to get that exclusive photo of Charles and Diana relaxing on holiday.

For anyone who wants to groan about how bad our local press can be, there's an article from the Telegraph, reprinted by the Herald and titled "Scientists discover humans produce invisible aura of air-cleansing molecules", that talks about the idea of the existence of an “aura” around our bodies. The article uses a recent study that looks into a small amount of “free radicals” that are generated by our skin to argue that, technically, these chemicals could be considered to be an aura.

In the latest of my weird and wonderful ideas for websites that are fun and a little quirky, I've recently put together a page that has one simple purpose - to help you choose which god you should pray to when you next need something to turn out in your favour:

It's been a while since the Auckland skeptics met for an evening of socialising, but at long last there's an event happening this Friday. As Bronwyn and myself are hoping to be in Auckland on Friday after our visit, with Craig, to the Mormon temple in Hamilton, we figured it'd be good to meet in a pub afterwards and decompress over a beer or two.

On Tuesday, Freedoms and Rights Coalition members converged on Wellington for another protest about our “freedoms”, and of course I was there to see what was going on.

NASA recently held a press teleconference where they announced that they will be investigating UAPs - Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This is a new term being used instead of UFOs, given that UFO suffers from both not being very descriptive (Unidentified things people see in the sky might not be Flying, and they might not be Objects - planets, clouds and aurora are often mistakenly thought to be mysterious objects, but none of them are flying; and the Northern and Southern aurora aren't objects, just cool light shows caused by solar particles), and having a lot of baggage attached to it - when people read UFO, they instantly think aliens. Here's NASA announcing their project:

By which I mean I recommend watching a new documentary called “Gloriavale”, which focuses on the infamous religious group. I most definitely don't recommend converting to their religion and moving to the Gloriavale compound on the South Island. I went to a Film Festival viewing of the documentary yesterday, before general release to cinemas next week, and there was also a fascinating Question and Answer session afterwards with some of the filmmakers and subjects of the documentary. Here's the trailer:

It's nice to occasionally be able to talk about nonsense outside of New Zealand. In this case, the Sydney Morning Herald recently printed - and then retracted - an article about a supposed new form of water called hexagonal water, made up of H3O2 molecules.