I've written before about how impressed I've been with the good work The Satanic Temple has been doing in the US and other countries, using the irrational fear of Satanism many Christians hold as a tool to push for secularism, and showing that the ability to do good things is not something that is exclusive to Christianity. Sometimes Christians in the US ignore the idea of the separation of church and state, and start up after-school Christian clubs or offer prayers at the opening of legislative sessions. The Satanic Temple will often counter these breaches by demanding the right to equal treatment - asking to open local government meetings with a Satanist prayer, or applying to run an after school Satanic club for kids.

This evening I attended a meditation session with the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis - an occult group made famous by Aleister Crowley). I'm not sure what I expected, but the session was advertised as a welcoming environment where it was okay to attend but not participate. This sentiment was echoed by the host when myself, Bronwyn Rideout and others arrived at the event. We were walked through several meditation techniques, starting with singing a song accompanied by a live guitar - Kiss the Earth by Ajeet Kaur (you can have a listen at the top of this article).

I recently had a clear out of my email inbox, as I'd reached about 20,000 unread emails. As a part of this onerous task, I unsubscribed from a large number of mailing lists. Many of them were from online stores where I'd never agreed to be emailed in the first place, but a bunch of them were from conspiracy groups where I'd signed up for more information, or filled in a form to get access to a series of nonsense videos (like “_The Truth About Cancer_” and “_GMOs Revealed_”, two truly awful video series). It was obvious that several of these mailing lists I hadn't even signed up for, so I assume there's some crossover and sharing of mailing lists between these groups. There are also some groups that I've decided to still receive emails from, such as Family First and Voices for Freedom, because I think it's important to keep an eye on them.

There's a new convoy driving through the country at the moment, and this time it's heading not for parliament, but to Marsden Point. Yep, a bunch of cars (and, from what I can tell, no actual trucks) are heading to Marsden Point for Operation Gaslight. The last report in their Facebook group stated that they've amassed 16 cars, two horse floats and a motorbike.

Arise church is near to my heart - when I first arrived in New Zealand back in 2005, my wife joined the church while it was still small, and before it was even called Arise. Since then it has grown to be a behemoth - every so often I check on Arise's annual returns, and it seemed that each year they would expand enough to make about $1 million more than the previous year. At the moment that number stands at $13 million in income for the last year. They also own several properties worth a combined $21 million, including a church building in Wellington worth $10 million or more.

We're currently putting together a calendar of historical skeptical events relevant to New Zealand - and we're aiming to have at least one event for every day of the year. It's been a lot of fun so far, and we've found a lot of fascinating stories about New Zealand that I'd never heard before, like:

Last week I had a couple of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Missionaries visit me. They called me a few days in advance to ask if it was okay to come round, and then I totally forgot about our meeting until I received a call saying they were having problems finding my house on the street.

I've recently been seeing mentions of NESARA and GESARA online, in conspiracy groups, and also on a badly painted sign at at least one local protest. So I did a little bit of reading to find out what it's all about. So, if you've seen these terms being used and, like me, have no idea what they mean, here's a quick description of their real world meaning and what the conspiracy theorists wrongly think they're all about.

Over the last few months or so, while I've been perusing the crazier corners of the internet, I've seen occasional mentions of a really interesting conspiracy theory - in Facebook feeds of COVID deniers, screenshots from private conspiracy Telegram groups, and videos from various protests and marches. The rumour that Jacinda Ardern's partner, Clarke Gayford, is secretly either under arrest, released on bail or imprisoned, and that this is for a drug related offence.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a video from a YouTube channel I keep an eye on for its coverage of cryptocurrency scams that looked interesting - the tale of Pixelmon, an NFT project that had recently sold over 7,000 NFTs for a grand total of around NZ$100 million. By the end of the week, Stuff and 1News had covered the story. Why did this project make the news here in NZ? Because the NFTs had been unveiled, and they were abysmal. And why did this story pique my interest? Because the person in charge of the project had been “doxxed” (had their identity revealed), and a screenshot of their LinkedIn profile in the video I watched showed that he had recently graduated from the University of Waikato - so it appeared he was one of our own, a Kiwi.

Although Bronwyn's put together this week's newsletter, I couldn't help myself and wrote a small piece about the protesters' obsession with Nuremberg.

I'm sure everyone is aware of the convoy that headed to Wellington on Tuesday. This collection of cars, campervans and the occasional truck has descended on our capital, supposedly as a protest against the vaccine mandates that our government has put into place over the last few months. On my way into work in Wellington on Tuesday I hit the motorway a little before the first of the groups of vehicles did, and was greeted with the depressing sight of a hundred or more supporters on the bridges between Porirua and Wellington, many of them holding signs created by Voices for Freedom.

The other day I noticed that the medical misinformation site NZDSOS - where a few anti-vaccine doctors promote their “alternative” COVID ideas - had changed its look. This is an issue for me, as a few months ago I created a spoof site called NZD-SOS which I made to look like the original site. My site pointed out that there are more doctors called Sarah, Michael or Kate, for example, that have signed an open letter in support of COVID vaccination, than there are doctors who have signed the NZDSOS open letter warning against vaccination.

It's funny how things come around. Last week I watched a fascinating documentary on the Bogdanoff brothers. For those not in the know, the Bogdanoffs are a fascinating case study - two brothers who became celebrities via a TV show promoting science, and then somehow bluffed their way into receiving PhDs in physics despite their theses being nonsensical in places. Many of you might recognise the brothers from their later years, where they used extreme plastic surgery to radically alter their look.

I'm not normally one for jumping on bandwagons, but when I saw friends posting on Facebook over the last few days that they were cancelling their Spotify subscriptions, I figured this was one cause I could get behind.

I'm sitting here writing this week's newsletter with music playing in the background - I've just listened to tracks by (and I'm name-dropping here) Malcolm Middleton, the Flashbulb, Madvillain, PJ Harvey, Mogwai and 65daysofstatic. I'm enjoying this music being played from Plex on my Chromecast, through my TV, via a Sony home theatre amp, to my in-wall 7.1 surround sound speakers. The entire setup might have cost me $1,200, if we exclude the cost of the TV (another $1,500). But could I be enjoying my music more if I'd spent more money buying reference equipment from high-end specialist companies?

I was scrolling through my emails today, looking to see if I had received any Why Are You A Skeptic responses from any of you. Sadly there was nothing I'd missed; no stories of how you'd found skepticism after an all-night bender where you'd snorted ketamine and met God, or how you've always been skeptical since the age of two.

Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, more commonly known as Baba Vanga, was a Bulgarian psychic. Although she died back in 1996, she was kind enough to leave behind some predictions that may or may not actually be about potential future events. Honestly, the Wikipedia Page for Baba Vanga leaves me suspicious about how much of what is attributed to her she actually said, and how much is just being made up by others (and it's also one of the worst Wikipedia pages I've ever seen grammatically - presumably it's mainly been written by people for whom English is not a fluent language).

I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the original and most "successful" of them, has not followed its creator's vision of being a decentralised currency that allows people to make payments to each other without having to go through traditional banking systems. Rather, instead of Bitcoin being used as a digital currency for purchasing online, people are using it as an investment, speculating on its price and hoping for “massive gains”. This is evidenced by both its high price per coin and its volatility. Hardly any Bitcoin transactions are actually involved in buying or selling goods, and the high price of Bitcoin these days means that the Proof of Work idea for securing the Blockchain (the shared list of transactions that records all transfers of Bitcoin) ends up using over 1,000kwh of electricity for each transaction. The promised decentralisation of Bitcoin is also mostly a myth these days. What Bitcoin has become is a way for greedy people to make money from other greedy people. Its creator, the enigmatic “Satoshi”, is probably despairing of what happened to his creation - if he's still alive.

The Lotus-Heart restaurant in Christchurch has chosen to take a stand against vaccine mandates, by refusing to let customers know if they require a vaccine pass, not promoting use of their COVID Tracer QR Code, and not having any system in place to check vaccine passes. As a result they have been fined $20,000 dollars by WorkSafe.

A surprising endorsement of COVID vaccines came out recently - from none other than Donald Trump. Trump has a spotty history when it comes to supporting good science, and he's well known to skeptics for touting several unproven cures (including that particularly confusing press conference where he talked about bleach and an internal UV light).

As a programmer, I love a good story about buggy software. Maybe it makes me feel better about my own mistakes! So when I recently heard about a fun bug in the strategy game Civilisation, from way back in 1991, I was intrigued. Apparently the fallout from this particular code error (no pun intended) was that the peaceful world leader Mahatma Gandhi would suddenly become very fond of amassing and using nuclear weapons - a quirk that has been named Nuclear Gandhi.

Last week Craig introduced a new section to our newsletter, which he's named Why Are You A Skeptic. We're keen to hear from each of you about why you're a skeptic, and to publish your stories in the newsletter. If you're up for it, please send your story to newsletter@skeptics.nz. For now, here's my story of how I came to skepticism, and why I'm involved with the NZ Skeptics:

But what is it, who's behind it, and does it work? Well, it turns out the answers to the first two questions will help us to figure out the third one.

I'm sure most people know the story of the Tiger King, a documentary series which became required viewing last year around the world when many countries went into lockdown. The series followed Joe Exotic, a flamboyant character who ran a big cat attraction and ended up behind bars for some of his questionable life decisions.

A couple of weeks ago I attended an online sermon from Destiny Church with a few friends. The sermon started off fairly tame, with Brian joking about viewers eating popcorn - so I went and grabbed a bag of popcorn for us to eat while we watched. I figured it was the least a group of heathens could do.

Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital made the news last week, with an 89 year old man being charged for his part in the abuse of children who were under the hospital's care in the 1970s. Dr Selwyn Leeks, who was the lead psychiatrist at the centre, has been charged with “wilful ill treatment of a child”, but due to his ill health will not be prosecuted.

The Australian Skeptics have spent the last few years working hard on an amazing project, led by Richard Saunders, to find and analyse as many psychic predictions as they could find.

I was talking to a friend last weekend who works as a tradesman. He asked me, as a skeptic, what I thought of the coronavirus vaccine - did I think it was dangerous? And was COVID real? He's pretty sure the scientists aren't lying to him, but he's talked with a lot of colleagues who aren't so sure. Most of my friends are fairly skeptical, and a lot of the time I breathe the rarefied air of skepticism, so it was interesting to hear a perspective that I don't really come in contact with in my daily life - a friend who's intelligent, but has heard enough misinformation from the anti-vaccine crowd that he's becoming a little unsure.

I was sent a funny article the other day about the benefits of aluminium foil on a website called Tips and Tricks. The website appears to be a prolific source of clickbait - articles with catchy titles that are designed to suck you in and get you to click the link to read more. This is because the company wants to take you away from social media sites and onto their website, to show you adverts and make money from them.

Rex Warwood sadly died late last week. He was a long time reporter, and later editor, for the Franklin County News, and was apparently well liked. However in recent years he appears to have succumbed to conspiratorial thinking, and he became a vocal critic of vaccination against COVID, saying things online such as:

So I want to talk about an interesting arrest that happened yesterday, but not the arrest of Brian and Hannah Tamaki.

Last night at about 1am a friend of mine sent me a link to a brand new COVID website called Wanaka Health Bridge. I clicked on the link, and saw that the site talks about the risks resulting from Wanaka being three and half hours from a major hospital, and what that means for COVID-19 treatment. The website says:

This weekend was our joint Australian and New Zealand conference, Skepticon 2021. Thank you so much to those of you who joined us, it was an amazing weekend with fascinating talks and I hope you enjoyed it all as much as I did.

Hot off the press, International Law lecturer Amy Benjamin has resigned from Auckland University of Technology this week. I wrote about Amy back in August, at the beginning of our second national lockdown, when she started up her YouTube channel called “American Spirit” where she posted videos about COVID and lockdowns. Her opinions seemed somewhat fringe, and she talked about how the threat to people's mental health in lockdown was worse than that of COVID, that Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID, and that the government had criminalised peaceful protest.

Astroworld is an annual music festival run by rapper Travis Scott in Texas. There was a tragedy at this year's festival, a few weeks ago, when a crowd surge caused a crush and resulted in the deaths of 10 people - the latest being a 9 year old boy who died a few days ago from his injuries.

For those who use Facebook - you may have seen a video advert recently using Jacinda Ardern as a way to promote a cryptocurrency. Obviously this is fake - Jacinda does not want you to “invest” your money in any crypto currency, and it's very likely that there's not even a real crypto currency or crypto company - just a website that will get you to transfer your hard earned money to scammers. Even if there was a real cryptocurrency involved, you would likely lose most or all of the money you risked. I saw people talking about this scam on Facebook, but I have enough layers of ad blocking at home that it proved too hard to get Facebook to show me any adverts at all, so I don't have a copy of the video.

There's a rumour going around in conspiracy circles that the UN, and/or Italian soldiers, are due to come to New Zealand at the end of November, or that they might already be here.

QAnon is the recent conspiracy theory in the US that refuses to go away. Someone has been using the name QAnon, short for an Anonymous person with Q Level Security Clearance, since 2017 to post cryptic messages to the internet, pretending to be a government insider leaking secrets.

About a year ago Daniel Ryan and I wrote to Givealittle, an organisation in NZ that runs an online platform which allows people to fundraise for needy causes. We expressed our concerns about misuse of the platform:

The BBC (in its travel section) has an interesting article on the Skirvin hotel in Oklahoma, supposedly the most haunted hotel in the US. The article talks a little about the hotel and the ghosts that supposedly haunt it, and then details how the journalist paid for a ghost hunting couple to come and see if the hotel was really haunted. Things have changed in the ghost hunting world - where historically ghost hunters have used physical devices to record “anomalies” such as temperature changes, Electromagnetic Frequency (EMF) fluctuations and the like, these modern day ghost hunters have an app for that - or rather several apps, of which they mention the names of two of them in the article. So I figured that, as a skeptic, I really should take them for a test drive and see what they can do.

21th-21st November, Online

I'm sure everyone is aware of the protests that happened yesterday. I watched them from the comfort of my home, and didn't feel the need to visit this particular march on Parliament. There was one thing at yesterday's protests that really struck me. The protesters, under the banner of the Freedoms and Rights Coalition created by "Apostle" Brian Tamaki, have been asking for our best protections against people dying of COVID to be removed - lockdowns, vaccine mandates, MIQ, and all other restrictions. A frequent message throughout the day was about the government needing to listen to the public - the speakers outside parliament talked about how a government should heed the people.

One of the many effects of climate change is that the oceans are rising. This is going to be an increasing problem for coastal settlements and island nations. But one American political candidate who has worked for Trump in the past, Scott Pio, thinks he's figured out an answer to the problem, and posted his idea on Twitter:

Last week Craig told you all about a parody website I'd built, NZD-SOS, which copied the look and feel of an anti-vaccine site called New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science but changed the wording to point out that there are more doctors called Sarah (or David, Sue, Kate, Michael or Catherine) in NZ who support vaccination than all the doctors who have spoken out publicly about being distrustful of the Pfizer COVID vaccine.

21th-21st November, Online

Last week we talked about how the Doctors Stand Up For Vaccination group had released its list of names of six and a half thousand doctors who have signed a letter in support of COVID vaccination. This letter was in response to a declaration created by Voices for Freedom, casting doubt on vaccination, that was signed by 56 doctors.

Late last week NZ Skeptics published a spoof website built (NZ Skeptics Secretary and past Chair, and alternating newsletter author).

Mike Adams is well known to skeptics. For many years he's run the Natural News website, which started out as a source of medical misinformation paired with a shop selling expensive, useless supplements. Some of his sillier posts included using a microscope to take zoomed-in photos of McDonald's chicken nuggets as a way to make them look unappealing.

One of the signatories to the NZD SOS declaration, Dr Matt Shelton, is an interesting case - he made the news a few weeks ago when he sent a text message to his patients saying: