I wrote a couple of weeks ago about lawyer Liz Lambert's effort to claim a small part of New Zealand - the Abel Tasman National Park - as her own property, which she's called New Freeland. Well, it turns out that she's worried about an organisation who have not just claimed Allodial Title over a piece of land, but have claimed sovereignty over the entirety of New Zealand. Liz has been warning anyone who will listen that this rival group, the Crown of the Mauri Nation, have secretly entered into an agreement with the government to hand over the keys to our country.

(In)famous German psychic Michael Schneider made the news recently when he claimed to know the exact coordinates of Madeleine McCann's body. Madeleine, aged 3, went missing in 2007 while she was on holiday in Spain with her family. Despite several leads over the years (and many psychics making predictions), there's been no definitive answer so far as to what happened to Madeleine - although there is one likely suspect.

Obviously India has been through the wringer recently with a huge increase in the number of COVID cases, and deaths, in the country. Thankfully the number of active cases is dropping, but at its peak around four and a half thousand people were dying per day, and there have been almost four hundred thousand reported deaths so far - although many experts fear the real total is likely to be much higher.

There's a lawyer in New Zealand called Liz Lambert who thinks she has hit upon a legal loophole that allows people to claim any piece of land as their own. As background, there are two main forms of land ownership in many countries - Fee Simple and Allodial. Fee simple is the type of land ownership you or I have access to. As archaic legal terms, Fee in this case means ownership, and Simple means without any kind of time limit (freehold rather than leasehold). Governments, on the other hand, usually have Allodial ownership of land, which is more of an absolute ownership without a requirement to pay anyone rates, etc (although in some cases there may be private allodial ownership, such as church land in some european countries). So, in New Zealand's case, the Crown has Allodial Title over New Zealand, and we citizens can then purchase a Fee Simple Title to part of that land. It still belongs to the Crown under their allodial title, but we've purchased a right to live on it forever (barring certain circumstances like compulsory acquisition).

Now that I've found out about Rebel Wisdom, I'm hooked. I usually have to go hunting for my nonsense, but the Rebel Wisdom website has everything in one place: Rupert Sheldrake (who has silly ideas about supernatural mental powers), Alan Watts (who has silly ideas about religion and philosophy) and Jordan Peterson (who has silly ideas about all sorts of things) are all featured.

US Senator Louie Gohmert, from Texas, has recently asked the country's Forestry Service if they can look into a thought he's had about how to combat climate change:

Someone called Daryl Trask has recently placed a petition on change.org asking people to sign their support for an overthrow of our government. The petition says:

I've watched a few videos online from a recent panic where people show themselves sticking a magnet to their arm at the injection site of their COVID vaccine. The same magnet pushed against other parts of the arm will fall off and not stick. Could this be proof that there's a metallic microchip in the vaccine?

I've seen adverts pop up recently on news sites, such as NewsHub and YouTube, that are selling a device which claims to be able to cut your power bill by 90%. Now, wouldn't that be nice - if it were true!

As promised, myself and another couple of skeptics recently visited the Theosophical Society's building in Wellington to hear their National President, John Vorstermans, give a talk titled “_The Ageless Wisdom_”. The Society has a great little building on Marion Street, with a comfortable library of esoteric mystical books at the front, and a large main room with lots of wood and painted mystical symbols. It has a particularly Masonic feel to it.

I've watched a few videos from a recent panic where people show themselves sticking a magnet to their arm at the injection site of their COVID vaccine. The same magnet pushed against other parts of the arm will fall off and not stick. Could this be proof that there's a metallic microchip in the vaccine?

Apparently a UFO was seen in Hawkes Bay late last week. Several people reported seeing a large rectangular shaped object in the sky at dusk, with green and red lights, moving strangely.

For a long time now I've been promising to take a friend of mine to a Christian Science church service. He's been interested in doing this because he was brought up in the church in America, but hasn't been back since he was a child. Finally, last weekend, the stars aligned and we managed to arrange a visit.

Over the next couple of months I'm hoping to visit a few interesting religious groups, to get a feel for them - what they believe, how they act, who attends their events. So, all being well, after this week's report into Christian Science you can expect to hear about the Theosophical Society, Druids, and maybe more!

There's a website in New Zealand promoting "Vortex Water". The front page of the site starts by saying:

Sue Grey, Nelson lawyer and co-leader of The Outdoors Party (an anti-vax, anti-5g, anti-1080 political party), had her day in court last week, taking the government to court over their COVID vaccine rollout. Although I was not able to spare the time to spend the day in court, I did manage to briefly visit the outside of the High Court in the morning, and when I got there Billy TK, who had decided to join the circus, was arguing outside with security guards. It turns out he had been kicked out of the court foyer for filming in a prohibited area, and of course his being removed was just proof that the system is corrupt. Go Billy!

A recent major report into herbs and supplements for weight loss has concluded that they don't work, and that not enough is known about their safety. Erica Bessell, the lead author from the University of Sydney, points out that in many countries no evidence is needed that these products actually work, and of course many companies are happy to exploit that failing and sell a wide variety of unproven products to buyers who hope for a simple solution to the hard problem of controlling their weight.

A video from “LADbible” has been doing the rounds recently, showing members of a Russian fitness group performing feats of amazing speed. The video shows several clips of them punching something or someone so quickly that you barely see any movement, punching in circles in front of their body with a speed that makes their arms blur, and repeatedly punching something in front of them at an unbelievable rate.

The website of an organisation called the Maori Ranger Security Division is currently selling ID cards that they claim can help you avoid being arrested by police, protect you from Child Services, make you exempt from fisheries quotas, and may even let you travel without a passport - and all for the low, low price of $50.

A week ago I opened the LinkedIn app on my phone, and noticed a comment on a post that was made by someone in NZ who was an “EvoRich Consultant”. His profile didn't seem to match what I'd expect from a corporate consultant, so I quickly searched Google for EvoRich to see what it was all about - with the suspicion that it might be some kind of Multi Level Marketing scheme.

On Monday night I visited parliament, where a group called Jesus for NZ had been invited by National MP Simon Bridges to hold a church service called the Power of One.

A recent article from Radio NZ did a great job of pointing out just how useless online polls are, and raising concerns about how often New Zealand media outlets, including Newshub, the AM Show and the Herald, rely on them as source material for news articles.

Normally I would be excited to hear that a prominent biologist is in New Zealand, but in this case the biologist in question is Dr Bruce Lipton - a figure who is well known to skeptics.

An “alternative” health clinic in Christchurch, which specialises in colonic irrigation and coffee enemas, has announced online that it will not treat anyone who has been vaccinated within the last 30 days.

A.C.E., or Accelerated Christian Education, is a Christian based curriculum used in New Zealand - both in some Christian schools, and by parents who homeschool their children. The curriculum boasts that it covers from kindergarten to year 13, and that it is recognised by New Zealand universities.

I've noticed an interesting, and worrying, shift with some of the more extreme online communities recently. On the one hand it's great to finally, and belatedly, see social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google hold people and organisations to account when they spread nonsense such as COVID vaccine misinformation. For example, just this week Advance NZ's Facebook page has been temporarily removed. Local conspiracy theorists such as Damien DeMent, Lee Williams, Vinny Eastwood and Karen Brewer are currently concerned over suspension of their social media profiles, because they are perpetuating dangerous untruths.

The Centner Academy in Miami, Florida has barred its teachers from being able to see students if they've been given the COVID vaccine, and will not be employing new teachers who have already been vaccinated. They argue that because the vaccines have not yet been fully tested, there is a risk that they could have unknown issues that may affect other people.

TV psychic Maurice Amdur, in the UK, has a video featured on his public Facebook page - Maurice's Psychic World - where he performs a psychic reading of a car salesman while he's picking up a brand new Jaguar XKS convertible, worth eighty thousand pounds:

Essential oils are concentrated extracted plant chemicals that have a strong smell of the plant they were extracted from - their "essence". These oils are often heated in a diffuser, or evaporated via a wick, in order to spread their smell. Of course, if nice smells were all these oils were about, there wouldn't be much for me to be skeptical about.

A friend sent me an article about a paper published recently in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion called:

There's been a lot of talk recently in "alternative" circles about vaccine deaths. This has been prompted by the massive global rollout of several different types of COVID vaccines - mRNA (Pfizer, Moderna), Viral Vector (AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson), Inactivated (CoronaVac, Covaxin), and others.

An article was published by Stuff the other day about cosmetic acupuncture - a discredited idea that sticking needles in your face can be an alternative to paying for a face lift. Half way through reading the article it started to feel really familiar, like I'd already read it but on the topic of a different unproven therapy. Sure enough, a quick search for the reporter's previous work turned up a recent article in stuff about reiki - a "therapy" where someone heals you by holding their hands near you.

The Exclusive Brethren is a "high control" church run from Sydney by Bruce Hales, the "Elect Vessel". "High control" is a term used to describe groups where the leadership exert a high degree of control over members' private lives, including their finances, friendships and sex lives.

Honestly, I don't think I could make up something this daft if I tried. Thanks to an astute member of our NZ Skeptics Facebook group, I now know about a New Zealand company - Hippo Health - who are marketing a fascinating sun block for animals.

Thankfully the claims in this pamphlet are pretty easy to debunk:

I'm a bit late to the party with this one, but there is footage on YouTube from last year where the pope gives a blessing from an upper floor window. After the blessing the pope turns around and starts walking away from the window. After a couple of steps, he suddenly just pops out of existence - disappears into thin air. Some people have taken this as evidence that the pope was never actually physically at the window, but instead had been replaced with a hologram - and that this hologram had been turned off prematurely, before it had moved out of sight. Maybe a decision was taken not to risk the pope's health during a pandemic. Maybe the pope is a lie? It does look pretty weird.

After chatting with Graeme Hill on Magic Talk recently about Sue Grey, co-leader of the conspiracy minded Outdoors Party, and her threat to sue the government, I found out that Sue was planning to give a talk on the steps of parliament the next day. So, during my lunch break, I wandered up to the Beehive to see more about why Sue thinks the government's rollout of the COVID vaccine needs to be stopped.

Disappointingly, despite the excitement, I'm sure many listeners will already have figured out what the rational explanation for this string of lights in the sky over Melbourne was: Elon Musk's Starlink, a company that is providing satellite based internet - with a few tens of thousands of satellites planned to be deployed over the next few years. There are valid questions about whether these devices are damaging to astronomy, and have the potential to clutter earth's orbit, but they're definitely not visiting aliens. If you are able to get out and see these satellites as they maneuver themselves into their operational orbits, I'd definitely recommend it. I saw them late last year, and it was an impressive sight - a real testament to modern technology.

After talking about Sue Grey's threat to sue the government last week, I found out that Sue was planning to give a talk on the steps of parliament the next day. So during my lunch break last Thursday I wandered up to the Beehive, to see more about why Sue thinks the government's rollout of the COVID vaccine needs to be stopped.

On the news of Prince Philip's death, my thoughts go out not just to the British Royal Family, but also to the members of the Prince Philip Movement in Vanuatu. This movement, a very small religious group, believe that Prince Philip is the son of a local mountain god who traveled overseas and married a powerful woman. The group has been described as a cargo cult, and there's even a suggestion that Philip was John Frum's brother - John Frum is a mythical American military man, around which a cargo cult religion started in the late 1930s.

A work colleague reached out to me the other day with an interesting question. One of his close family members has fallen down a conspiracy rabbit hole, and now spends a lot of time talking about QAnon, the "Deep State", etc. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with these kinds of rabbit holes, it's not entirely benign - the family member has now branched into COVID vaccine denial, which has a real chance of negatively impacting on their health.

The Secular Education Network, a group of parents and others who are passionate about ensuring the Education Act's promise of secular education in schools is realised, have just released a document reminding schools of their new obligations after the law was changed last year:

The Outdoors Party's health spokesperson recently shared a video clip from the TV show Dexter, showing a scene where the serial killer protagonist of the show remembers being rescued as a child from a shipping container - and, as you might have guessed, the container has EVERGREEN written down the side. Coincidence? Apparently not, if you're one of the many people who believe that the Ever Given, which was recently freed from the Suez Canal, was transporting children as part of a child sex trade run by Hillary Clinton.

Stuff published an article recently about the dangers of LED light bulbs, arguing that the blue light from LED bulbs disturbs our circadian rhythm and disrupts our sleep, with wide ranging knock-on effects to our health. My skeptical radar beeped at reading this, as I've looked into this issue in the past and found much speculation and very little actual science.

A new group called FACT (Fight Against Conspiracy Theories) has published an open letter to Plan B about their connection with Voices for Freedom. The letter calls on Plan B to distance themselves from Voices for Freedom and the group's anti-science stance on COVID related issues.

I recently heard about someone who signed up on the MeetUp website for a conversational English course in Auckland, and when they arrived they found out that the course was being run by Scientologists. This type of bait and switch sneakiness is about what we'd expect from Scientology, so I decided to search google and find the course in question.

On Saturday I attended one of several Freedom Rallies around the country. In Wellington, the rally was set for midday at the train station. It was a fairly low key affair, with flyers being handed out saying that masks and the vaccine are both ineffective.

On Thursday evening last week I visited Parliament to pray for the future of our country. Now I'm not a Christian, so I'm pretty sure my prayers aren't going to make a difference, but it's interesting to see what influential Christians think about what is wrong with our country and how it should be fixed.

A new astronomy paper suggests that the strange object named Oumuamua that passed through our solar system a couple of years ago was probably a thin disc of planetary matter, and not a piece of alien technology.

A UK company, Football Index, has financially collapsed over the last as its users have realised that the entire thing is nothing more than a pack of cards.