Articles tagged with "one"

Sara, one of our ex-committee members, messaged me last week, sending me a picture of a product she found in a shop in Wellington and saying “saw this and thought of you”. The picture was of a product called Pu$$y Power, by a company named MOOYAM. It's hard to read the label in the image, but the bottle describes the contents as “a crystal infused yoni and vaginal wash”, that contains “Rose quartz for the energy of love. Herbal & flower powered. Chemical free.” Underneath that it states: “Repeat after me: “My pussy is powderful”” (which I assume is a typo rather than a pun, as this is a liquid and not a powder):

Two newsletters back, I posted about Falun Gong visiting my local market and targeting children. I also posted a warning about the market on Reddit, in an NZ subreddit. The post got a lot of views, and then about two days later Falun Gong members found it and started posting all over it. Looking at the history of the accounts that were posting, most had been posted about their religion, and a number seemed to visit random subreddits to defend the group. Many of the same names popped up in similar discussions all over reddit.

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 weekend I roped (no pun intended) my kids into a fun little project, making a mystery/conspiracy board as a decoration for our house. For the low cost of $22 for a cork board, $4 for a pack of 200 pins, $4 for a box of 400 sticky notes and $4 for red yarn (all from The Warehouse), along with a bunch of free community newspapers and promotional brochures, we spent a couple of hours putting together a great looking board:

Last month I was at a market, helping my wife with a stall she runs. It was a lovely, sunny day at one of the biggest NZ markets I've been to, packed with stalls along the main streets and bustling with life. At my wife's request, I won't name the market or out any of the pseudoscience stalls making bad therapeutic claims*.

Before Christmas I suggested to one of our readers that they write an article for us about a visiting climate denier who was giving talks about climate change around the country, hosted by Groundswell. That person has done an amazing job of writing up the event, showing just how bad some of Dr Happer's arguments are. I'd love to thank them by name, but their article is written under a pen name so I will carry the secret of their true identity to my grave.

We're back to our normal schedule after taking something of a break over Christmas, so those of you who listen to our podcast should see our next episode come out next weekend. Given that we've skipped a couple of episodes there are quite a few articles to talk about, so it might be a long one!

I would like to make some general observations, and then review a recently published book which synthesises most of what Ben Reid (MEMIA) called a “polycrisis” in his book I previously reviewed.

If you are sick of being the skeptical 'voice of reason' in arguments, perhaps as an alternative to engaging in a proper discussion you could try using some logical fallacies, humor, or psychological tricks to confuse, disarm, or simply shut down your opponent.

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:

In the last newsletter, one of the articles that I said was included was a piece by Bronwyn, the third and final in her series about The Telepathy Tapes. Unfortunately I forgot to actually add the article to the newsletter! So, in this issue we have two articles about Facilitated Communication. The first of them is the second part of Janyce Boynton's article on whether FC has changed since the early days, and the second is Bronwyn's article.

Sometimes I get weird MSN 'News' landing pages that are chocka with adverts. One of the linked pages I saw recently was this one. It lists piles of gadgets that I apparently urgently need, and which are going to sell out soon. Being curious, I had a look.

There we go. There's that word we hear so often as skeptics, 'quantum'. It seems likely Ky is referring to a state called 'quantum entanglement' that results in entangled particles (and photons) having their states correlated over theoretically limitless distances, through tiny wormholes.

The Telepathy Tapes is a 10+ episode podcast series that was released in September 2024. Created and hosted by Ky Dickens, Season 1 is described as daring to… “explore the profound abilities of non-speakers with autism - individuals who have long been misunderstood and underestimated”. Dickens has a varied directing career in advertising and film. Her film work is predominantly documentary projects, where she usually serves as the writer, producer, and director. Issues around health equity have been her main output since 2017, so the topic of autism is not entirely out of left field for Dickens. However, the profound abilities that Dickens' refers to in this podcast are not the conventional tropes of Autistic savants or prodigies in the fields of mathematics or art. Instead, Dickens contemplates whether her subjects have paranormal gifts. Specifically (as the podcast name indicates) telepathy, but also astral projection (see episode 3), mediumship (see episode 2), talking to god (see episode 7), and pronosticating (see episodes 5 and 7).

On July 13th, paranormal investigator Dan Rivera died in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Occult news from the United States doesn't normally hit the NZ Press, but the NZ Herald did report this particular story in its Entertainment section.

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.

The story of the Commonwealth Covenant Church (CCC) has been hanging out in the chasms of my Google Drive for some time. A while ago I was asked about cults or sects that might be in the Wairarapa besides the 2x2s. This group came up in my search, although much of what I found about their activities was not based in the Wairarapa but rather in the Hutt Valley. The CCC is not the easiest group to research, as their numbers had thinned considerably by the early 2000s, and numbered just six by 2013. They were a long-dead congregation by the time anything would be recorded on the web. Archival records are limited (or restricted), and when the CCC does warrant a mention in a book or academic work, it's limited to one or two lines.

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

In part one I recapped the core beliefs of “Sovcits” (Sovereign Citizens) and where those beliefs come from, as well as some of the havoc being caused for local Councils and the Police. I really do recommend you read that part first if you are curious about the 'why' of Sovcits.

When cyclone Alfred hit Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the North of New South Wales recently, I was watching the news coverage closely. My sister lives on the Gold Coast and, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, she was going to be in the zone predicted to be hit with the most damaging winds. She was pretty sure this was no big deal for her, and fortunately she was right.

Okay, now I know my title is a loaded question. The answer could be that I'm a curmudgeonly old boomer who pays way too much attention to musical trends. Or it could be that I reject the premise. It's the latter, I don't really hate hip singing or vocal fry.

It's been a productive break for our newsletter contributors, and therefore we have another record-breaking newsletter this week, with a great set of articles for you to read. Firstly one of our members, Patrick, has put his hand up and offered to write us a series of articles on climate change - as he says, it's a serious issue that we can't afford to be complacent about, let alone try to deny its very existence - as some people do (sadly even some in our skeptical community).

_After 6 weeks of searching, the scammers gave to me…

A partial review of IMMINENT: INSIDE THE PENTAGON'S HUNT FOR UFOs by Luis Elizondo and William Morrow, August 2024

In part one of my delve into obscure local cryptids we looked at the Kabagon, which bore more than a passing resemblance to an elephant seal, the Roa Roa, which was likely a case of mistaken identity of livestock, and the Rotomahana Saurian, which may well have been a floating tree. Here are three more cryptids I found that appear to have rational explanations:

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).

Originally published in the November 2008 issue of our journal, The New Zealand Skeptic

Last weekend we held our annual conference in Auckland - this time co-organised with the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (NZARH). We started off the weekend on Friday evening at Rationalist House, the NZARH's building on Symonds street. The first event was a Skeptical quiz, hosted by me, as usual featuring some pretty tough questions:

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:

Is Going Green like Breaking Bad, where you take a wrong turn in your life and start making dubious life choices? Because the owners of the Go Green Expo, held at different locations around the country each year, seem to have made a really bad life choice when they decided to let alt-med nonsense into their Expo right from its inception.

I've been watching LifeWave for a while. Along with the Olive Tree People, LightWave has been one of the MLMs many ex-consultants of Monat, a hair and skincare MLM, have been joining since several key leaders and consultants were expunged from that company a few months back. It's hard to beat talking Olive Trees when it comes to MLM concepts, but this one really takes the cake.

Equine Touch (ET) is a horse therapy modality started in 1997 by Scotsman Jock Ruddock. Ruddock, who passed away in 2011, was an interesting character. Here's a brief list of his past occupations:

I stated on the podcast a few weeks ago that I think I could cover a different horse pseudoscience in each issue, and keep going for an entire year. That was before I looked into it…

A couple of weeks ago I talked with a journalist about psychics, as she was looking into a story that Kelvin Cruickshank appeared to have muscled his way into. As well as giving her some information about how psychics work, and a little about Kelvin, I had also suggested to her that she should visit a psychic to get an idea of how they operate. A day later she let me know that she was planning to visit a psychic fair that weekend, and I suggested that I could meet her there to brief her on what to expect. So, on Saturday morning two weekends ago, Bronwyn and I headed to Upper Hutt and met with Virginia.

Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow (2013) is a good starting point for thinking about the strengths and limitations of human thinking processes. There is no good substitute for the use of “educating gossip”, as Kahneman describes it, for training in effective judgement and in decision making.

At the end of Part 1 of this article, I did gloss over a fair bit of Premie lore once the schism happened between Prem and his family, and that's due to the absence of surviving or available objective sources.

I managed to attend the Spiritual Expo in Dunedin last month. A week later, I also went along to a two hour long medium session at the Dunedin Spiritualist Church. I will be talking about the medium experience later in this article but, first, the Expo.

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.

This was the first time to a Spiritual Church for me, and I had no idea what to expect. The service started at 6pm on a Sunday, at their own facility in South Dunedin. When I arrived, I found a small room that could probably seat 50, along with a small tearoom that opened out to the main part of the church. It was clean and tidy, and looked very much like any other church - apart from the absence of any Christian paraphernalia.

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.

Over this past weekend, we've been treated to beautiful displays in the sky at night, courtesy of space weather, and the sun ejecting some mass towards us - known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME.

As best as I can ascertain, Colin Amery has passed. I mean, I'm certain the British architectural historian named Colin Amery is dead, as he warranted multiple obituaries and “In Memoriam”s in 2018.

As we've just had two weeks of school holidays, I've just spent a week in Australia. Sadly during that time a new set of Mormon missionaries were unable to visit me at home to try to convert me. But, don't despair, they've already messaged me again and we've arranged to meet on Saturday. At this point I'm not sure if they seriously think they have a chance to win me over, or if I'm just a sport for them - but I enjoy the conversations, so I'll continue to let them visit me at home and take a couple of hours of my time.

I hope everyone's had a good long weekend, and was able to spend it doing the things they love. I was able to spend a day hanging out with friends, put some finishing touches to a fake tourism plaque I've been making for a prank in Wellington, and spent some time sorting and photographing my vintage necktie collection. As part of doing this I learned more than I ever needed to know about the history of tie manufacturers in New Zealand, including Parisian, John Webster, Klipper, Sander and Eskay.

Apologies for this week's newsletter being a little late - I was planning to finish it off last night, but I was hit by some weird medical issue where I had a horrible headache and ended up sleeping from 5pm to get rid of it.

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:

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.

After many months of radio silence, the odd Global Flourishing group that I wrote about last year briefly stirred before going quiet again. Rest assured, if anything comes of this, I'll be watching it closely and writing about it. Here are the messages that appeared on the group's Discord channel last week:

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:

Happy New Year, and welcome to our first newsletter of 2024. I've had a nice couple of weeks off work so far, and weirdly I've spent a few days this week staying at a religious retreat in the middle of nowhere! (For context, it was the best deal I could find on Airbnb, and I only found out the details of what the place was used for after I'd booked to stay there).

This is the cover image of one of NZ's own lightworkers, J. Lee Frisbee. He works at “Explore Daydreaming Inc”, and describes himself as “Multidimensional Navigator - I Am Light Zen Master”.

Apologies for the slightly late delivery of this issue of our newsletter - I'm currently tapping away on my keyboard on the ferry at Picton, waiting to start the final leg of our journey back home to Wellington from the conference.

This is the second part of an article detailing an online scam, which started when I accidentally accepted a friend request from a cloned Facebook account. This led to me talking to a second Facebook account named “Agent Patrick Smith”, and being offered up to $100,000 by Publisher's Clearing House in the US. At the end of part one, I showed off my 9 year old daughter's amazing forgery skills when I asked her to recreate my driver's licence so that I could send it to the scammers as proof of my identity:

In the past few months I've been watching a website that makes some quite extraordinary claims, at least in my opinion. It's immersioncosmetics.co.nz What has really piqued my interest is a new product recently advertised. It's Shungite, a relatively rare black stone with fairly high carbon content, usually 30-95% but often with many impurities and fullerenes, a spherical carbon molecule usually known as buckyballs. It was originally discovered in Shunga, in the Karelia region of Russia, but is more widespread than that,

As I've written before, we occasionally get people emailing the NZ Skeptics committee with their various “theories” about how things work.

I popped into the High Court last week to sit in on a court case where the Jehovah's Witnesses are attempting to argue that they should be exempt from the current Royal Commission enquiry in Abuse in Care. Sara Passmore and I (we're both NZ Skeptics committee members) visited for an hour, and we seem to have accidentally sat on the “wrong” side of the courtroom. Having sat down, we looked around and realised that our side of the room was mostly men in suits (including, I think, Alfred Ngaro - more on him in the article below), whereas the other side of the room was mainly women, including one with bright pink hair.

For the last few months, we've been asking if anyone has a copy of our missing NZ Skeptics Journal issues, and with the help of long-time member John Welch we were able to fill most of our gaps, with the exception of issue 5. Since then we've been wondering if maybe issue 5 didn't exist, that maybe the elusive number 5 was skipped as a joke to wind up future archivists - an urban legend, the mysterious issue that nobody could find.

Last week we saw a psychic spat between Sue Nicholson and Kelvin Cruickshank. These two alleged psychic mediums were once co-performers on the awful Sensing Murder TV show - you know the one that didn't solve any murders, despite running for 47 episodes over six seasons.

This week I'm concentrating on climate change misinformation through a bunch of slightly connected items.

Over the last week or so I've been approached online by two scammers and, I guess because of the amount of free time I have now that I'm not attending Eastern Lightning fellowship meetings, I decided to play ball with both of them and see where the scam leads. Neither has reached the point yet where I've been asked to give them my money, but in both cases it didn't take long to see where the con would eventually come. Once we get to that point, which is likely to be in the next day or two for both, I will have a couple of fun articles to write - I've already been meticulously copy/pasting all of my chat sessions with the scammers in documents, so that I have a record of everything that goes on. As a taster, here's a fun preview of one of the incidental conversations I had with a “Customer Care” representative for a company I'm now apparently working for:

It's been a very busy week for me, with various things happening, including recording the latest episode of our Yeah… Nah! podcast in which we interviewed Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Gwen Isaac about the Ms. Information documentary we've recently covered. It's well worth a listen (in my humble opinion).

One of our regular readers (Hi Ray... and Paul) has requested we put a date on our newsletters, so you'll be receiving this on 31st July, 2023.

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!

As some regular readers will have noticed, I've not been writing the newsletter over the past few weeks. Mark, Bronwyn, Katrina, and others have stood in for me, writing a great set of articles.

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…

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.

Something that has become a bit of a tradition for Mark Honeychurch and myself is attending the quarterly Prayers@Parliament event, where we join MPs and Christian leaders inside parliament to pray for our nation. We figured that last week's session would be an extra special one, as it would be the last one before the election and, having attended the Freedoms NZ roadshow, we were expecting some doozy prayer requests.

Following on from my last article, I decided to see if I could ferret out more “light workers” in New Zealand – the sort of people who worship Trump, and who believe the golden age is “coming real soon now, and we'll be able to laugh at the sceptics”. For the sake of clarity I'll refer to these people henceforth as Light Warriors – you'll see why in a moment.

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.

On the 26th of May Elon Musk's brain chip firm, Neuralink, announced that they had received FDA approval to launch their first in-human clinical study of a brain implanted device.

This weekend I think I may have finally managed to reach the end goal of my time in the Eastern Lightning (Church of Almighty God) group in New Zealand. Having been asking for months now if I could get my hands on one of the many books that the church prints, I finally have a copy.

You'd have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the rise of AI (artificial intelligence) technology recently. It seems that hardly a day goes by without some new announcement about it, or some controversy caused by it.

Sierra Roberts is a New Zealand-based ambassador for the Galactic Federation of Light. She is a dedicated “light worker”, committed to helping humanity ascend from a 3-dimensional environment to a 5-dimensional one (they always seem to skip the 4th dimension!).

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:

I've had a wee break off writing the newsletter for the past couple of weeks, as Brownyn and Mark have contributed lots of content, but it's my turn again this week - thankfully with some great contributions from the aforementioned Bronwyn - with a continuation of her look at the life of Christian Evangelist Ray Comfort, and also previous contributor Alistair Blenney, who takes a look at NESARA.

Bronwyn, being the troll that she is, asked if I'd be writing about EV fires this week, after seeing news articles, here and here posted about a fire on the Auckland Harbour Bridge, which involved an EV.

In this week's newsletter, I've published the text from a couple of oral submissions the NZ Skeptics and the Society for Science Based Healthcare (SBH) recently presented to MPs. One interesting part of this was a question asked of SBH, which allowed Daniel Ryan to detail some of the harms that Natural Health Products have caused in New Zealand. I've included Dan's email, and the short but promising response he received. I've also written about my time after graduation from the Eastern Lightning online fellowship meetings and my entry into the Level 3 group, as well as my brief foray into its leadership.

When we started the NZ Skeptics Calendar project last year, the first place Mark Honeychurch and I turned to was our own archive. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as fruitful as it could have been, as editors past had removed all references to dates and newspapers from the clippings published. Still, there was one story that intrigued me…

This week's been a busy one for me, with Skeptics in the Pub in Auckland on Tuesday night, recording and editing our podcast on Wednesday night, and various other activities.

It's hard to believe it's the end of February already, and the official end to summer, at least on a calendar month basis. With all the rain and weather events we've had, it's hard to think that this summer has been a classic one. Still, it may well have finally made some of the more sluggish members of the population wake up to the reality of climate change. And what a reality it is, with the massive destruction that took place in Hawke's Bay and other areas. The cost of replacing infrastructure seems that it place a big burden on our economy for some time.

Geoff Botkin is a man with many titles, labels, and accolades you could attach to his name. With a significant portion of his career lost to the pre- and early-internet times, his various biographies have, strangely enough, become more vague and even benign with time compared to the increasingly conservative and right-wing projects he either develops or becomes involved in.

If you listened to the February 8th episode of the Yeah…Nah Podcast, then this profile should not come as a surprise.

One of the most frequent questions I encounter, whether serious or not, is about driving an EV in the rain, or through a carwash. Of course, EVs are well built, and the normal expectation of driving is that they encounter wet weather all the time. Of what use would windscreen wipers be otherwise?

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.

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.

Today I satisfied one of my pleasures - watching horror movies - and viewed M3GAN (obviously pronounced Megan) which opened late last week. I'd categorise the movie as science-fiction horror with a lot of camp and comedy (mostly intentional, but some unintentional), and social commentary thrown in.

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?

At this very moment, there is a war going on in my body.

This article was written by one of our conference attendees. He blogs at Atheist Addiction. If you like his work, please visit his site. He'd appreciate a follow!

Our annual conference starts on Friday, and for those of you who plan to come but haven't bought a ticket yet, you'd better be quick. I spent yesterday afternoon with Bronwyn and Daniel, running through a sound check at the venue, testing that the technology works as expected, finalising our catering and trying out our Friday night "entertainment” (we also had enough time to grab a quick beer at the Welsh Dragon bar, our venue for Friday evening's event).

As I am in the early- to middle-part of my COVID infection, I've decided that my contribution this week is essentially a redirection to a New York Times Opinion piece by Dr. Elisabeth Bik. Dr. Bik is a microbiologist at Stanford University and the Dutch National Institute for Health with a better-than-average ability to detect patterns. While the NYT article makes it seem that she is the sort who reads scientific papers for fun, her special talent has not made her popular with some of her peers. Her particular skill is identifying image manipulation, whereby photos of blots, agar plates, bacteria from one experiment are flipped, stretched, or cropped to give the appearance of a proven hypothesis or novel finding. Admittedly, Bik doesn't just rely on her eyes for this task. Like other sleuths she utilises software to do some of the work for her, specifically the freely available 29a.ch, but argues that human eyes are still needed to weed out the false positives.

Yesterday I visited the Go Green Expo, along with Bronwyn, and Daniel and Lisa Ryan. Every year I go, and every year I despair at the almost total lack of environmentally friendly products and services on display. In its place there are alternative therapies and lots and lots of “health” foods promising they'll cure you of your ills.

One of our readers from the other side of the world, a Kiwi living in Ireland has told us about a Destiny Church in the UK.

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.

One of our skeptical operatives informed us of a Voices for Freedom flyer that's been turning up in mailboxes across the country. This one concerns masking.

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:

Back in the March 21, 2022 edition of the Skeptics Newsletter, I wrote about the scheme/scam of becoming a fake Scottish Lord (or Laird as the case may be). One of the new sales tactics is to take on a conservation mission to your purchase, the promise that you are saving some wildcats, creating a nature reserve, or having a tree dedicated in your honour. The impact of these add-ons is questionable, subject to lawsuits and allegation of funny financial dealings. Even more concerning is the lack of transparency about who is advising these companies about the reintroduction of nativa trees and the deforestation of invasive ones.

I've always been interested in IQ tests and how they work. There's an interesting, and deep, conversation to be had about the issues with IQ tests. Without going into too much detail, although IQ tests appear to have some utility, there are problems for example when it comes to cultural differences among the people being tested. If an IQ test has been written from a single cultural perspective, and makes assumptions based on that culture, people who haven't been brought up in that culture can do badly on tests because of their differences in understanding of the questions being asked.

As one of the oldest treatises on medical ethics, The Hippocratic Oath is understood to be a reflection of the beliefs and practices of the ancient Greek physicians for whom it was intended. The attention that the Oath has gained over the centuries has allowed it to assume a sort of authority in today's ethical debates and amongst modern doctors. However, the contradictions that arise between the oath and the remainder of the corpus show that the oath brings into question the appropriateness of that authority; its principles are presented as being based on ancient societal norms rather than fringe beliefs. It may be that the oath was as inapplicable and irrelevant to the lives of the ancient Greeks as it is today but you wouldn't know it from social media outrage.

This week I cover the sad news that a local psychic challenge has ended, but with some hope for the future. And last week, the Georgia Guidestones ended their existence after one of them was destroyed by explosives. Thanks to Mark Honeychurch for additional contributions for these items.

The title of this one's a mouthful, and it's an interesting one to pick apart - it includes some of my favourite technologies, one that I think is going to be an important part of our future and the other which I think is a storm in a teacup, and unlikely to disrupt anything of note.

On Friday night just over a week ago I went to a Save Our Children meeting. Now, most people will read that and think I've been a civic-minded citizen, going along to a charity meeting. Save Our Children is a good thing, right? To which the answer is no, because Save OUR Children is not the same thing as the established charity “Save THE Children”.

I apologise for my lack of inspiration in the title, but at least we have some interesting articles for you:

This week we're covering a few different topics. I look at some potential good news in relation to SIDS and look back at claims made about it in the past. We've got some bizarre claims of paranormal ability related to wind control (don't think I've ever come across that one before), and I look at the recent crash in cryptocurrency markets.

Now for a bit of an amusing item.

Most of us will know Ken Ring both for his claim that he can predict the weather by looking at the moon, and his supposed ability to predict earthquakes. Here's Ken talking about how you can supposedly also use rainbows to predict the weather:

This week's newsletter feels nicely well-rounded, like we've managed to cover several of the core areas that skeptics are interested in. I start with a topical story about a new psychogenic illness that appears to be affecting teens around the world, including here in New Zealand. Bronwyn then delves into the background of one of my most hated MLMs, dōTERRA. (I've talked to company reps for dōTERRA at several events over the years, and each time I've been told some of the most outrageous claims about the medical benefits of their essential oils. I even left one event smelling like a breath mint, after telling someone I had a headache and being treated with a liberal amount of concentrated peppermint oil smeared onto my forehead.) I was contacted on the weekend about a new scam I'd not heard of before, that appears to be an evolution of the classic Nigerian 419 scams, so you get to hear all about that. And finally I talk about a new branch of Satanism - and this one seems to believe in pretty much any nonsense you can think of, as well as being horribly anti-Semitic.

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:

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.

On March 13th Dr. Darren Saunders (Associate Professor of Medicine at UNSW, Cancer Biologist) made international headlines for his takedown of a new trend hitting social media: Methylene Blue.

It's nice to be reminded sometimes that the number of skeptics in society is likely to exceed the number of Skeptics in our Society by several orders of magnitude. I was reminded of this recently after seeing a couple of interactions on social media, one where a friend tackled misinformation, and another where it was the friend that was spreading misinformation. In both interactions, the misinformation was quickly and easily debunked, with references given to sources. The first one was about Ukraine's president Zelenskyy being a Nazi, as “proven” by a picture of him holding up a football (I'm from England, so for all you kiwis I mean soccer here) shirt with his name and a swastika on it. The second is about the recent parliament protest, with an image of a child who had supposedly been pepper sprayed by the Police.

I've written about Liz Gunn before. She used to be a respected broadcaster on TVNZ's One News, but has now gone well down the rabbit hole. Last year she claimed that an earthquake was Mother Nature's response to Jacinda Adern's Covid-19 response . She announced her FreeNZ movement, which appears to have political aspirations.

In Part 1, Sri Chinmoy (whose full name was Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, and who will herein be referred to by his initials: CKG) left his job at the consulate to seize an opportunity that awaited him amidst the growing appetite in America for eastern religions. He opened his first meditation centre in Puerto Rico, then one back at his home-base in Queens, New York.

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.

This week's newsletter is all about those sweet, sweet sounds. There's a story about Spotify, starring Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Joe Rogan. And one about expensive audiophile-level computer hardware. On top of this, some of you might be interested to hear that we're going to try something new with the newsletter soon, something audio related...

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.

Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for your support over the last year. We had a very successful conference late last year, and our membership has been slowly increasing, which is great! If you're a paid-up member, thank you for your financial support and you should be receiving a reminder to pay your (very reasonable) subscription soon. And if you're not currently a member, you can always rectify that situation by joining us.

Continuing on from Mark's item last week, long-time skeptic and former committee member Barry Lennox gives us his views…

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.

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.

We love getting feedback on the newsletter, and hearing others' perspectives. And, we think that others would like this too.

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.

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:

I'll preface this by saying that this is a topic I'm certainly not qualified to talk about.

Back to COVID seriousness now. It's been a frustrating week where we've seen the Delta variant now escape Auckland and head out to other parts of the country.

Last week I attended an I Ching meeting online, where I learned how to use the I Ching to help me to make life decisions. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a book of 64 different sayings which are meant to be used for divination.

Texas has recently introduced a draconian new abortion law, one that feels not only perverse (in that it allows for civil lawsuits where anyone can sue those who are involved in providing abortion services), but also seems to be yet another attempt to test the Supreme Court's willingness to overturn Roe v Wade (the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion that has allowed for legal abortions in the US for many years). And, so far, it seems that the Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, is willing to court this kind of testing of the waters.

It feels like it was inevitable that some of the conspiracy theorists, or “freedom fighters” as they call themselves, would end up protesting our latest level 4 lockdown. I'm not surprised that their shared delusion that lockdown is just a ploy by the government to permanently remove our freedoms would cause them to risk the health of all of us. But it has been disappointing to see a few hundred people around the country gathering to protest at a time when we've all been told to stay at home to limit the spread of a deadly disease.

One idea I've been given is to find a large set of Deepak Chopra quotes, and use that to train an algorithm to create nonsense quotes talking about quantum realities and the collapse of the wave function. All I need to do now is find a bunch of quotes in a format I can feed to the algorithm.

Sensing Murder psychic Kelvin Cruickshank is currently touring the country. He's been down in the South Island recently, visiting Christchurch and a lot of smaller towns, and selling tickets at $65 a pop. Next month he'll be touring the North Island.

As I've written before, one of the main purveyors of vaccine misinformation is the anti-vax, conspiracy theory group Voices for Freedom. You will have seen their distinctive branding with their blue, teal and green signs and professionally printed placards.

Did you know that NZ Skeptics is running an in-person conference again this year (after not running one last year because of COVID).

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

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?

Last week was a busy one. On Monday I visited parliament for a church service called The Power of One, along with another couple of skeptics. The event was organised by a group called Jesus for NZ (who formed back in 2017 when Jesus was taken out of the parliamentary prayer), hosted by Alfred Ngaro and facilitated by Simon Bridges. There was a lot of talk about Jesus re-taking the nation until everyone in this country is a believer, and restoring NZ to its “former glory”. Personally I'm much happier with NZ being a rational, secular democracy than a theocracy, but it turns out that not everyone wants a fair society and equality for all.

Essential oils are one of those trendy products that seem to be very popular at the moment, and they seem to be a great money-maker for their manufacturers and retailers, with the estimated market size of over $17 Billion dollars globally in 2017.

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.

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.

If you're in or around Christchurch, you may be interested in attending the Christchurch Skeptics in the Pub. One of our NZ Skeptics committee members, Jonathan Harper, is giving a talk about skepticism. It's at the Pegasus Arms, 6pm on Thursday 8th April. You can register your RSVP on the group's meetup page.

After some investigation it seems that this magazine (it's a stretch to call it a journal, a title which should be reserved for scientific publications) is being purchased by at least one public library (Titirangi).

Or, at the very least he's apparently quit politics. This one was a bit of a surprise to me, as the conspiracy minded Billy had only just announced that he was re-naming his Public Party to the Freedom Party. Maybe he quit because he realised that there had already been a Freedom Party in NZ, and that all of the most obvious domain names had already been taken? Alternatively, it might be that recent accusations of financial mis-management and fraud are making life in the limelight a little too uncomfortable for Billy at the moment.

Retraction Watch have written a nice summary of the year in retractions for The Scientist magazine. Unsurprisingly many of the scientific articles that have been retracted this year are on the topic of COVID-19, but there was one that caught my eye from the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences titled:

My personal journey into skepticism began back in the early 90s before the internet was publicly available, but podcasts now form a significant chunk of the skeptical content that I consume. My particular favourites are The Skeptics Guide to the Universe (a great weekly roundup of science and skepticism), Oh No, Ross and Carrie (weird and often humorous investigations into fringe groups and claims of the paranormal), and Sawbones (fascinating medical history of dubious devices and cures, but firmly science-based). But there are many others, and tastes vary.

I've been binging on Netflix again and am looking forward to the next series of Ratched, a psychological thriller based on a character from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a book by Ken Kesey. Be warned, the fashions may be fabulous, but the skull crunching gore is pretty grim.

In Homeopathy news, Edzard Ernst, retired academic physician and specialist in complementary and alternative medicine (and skeptic hero) has created a “challenge for all homeopaths of the world”. In a similar way to the James Randi Educational Foundation's one million dollar paranormal challenge, Ernst has come up with a scientific way for homeopaths to “prove” their worth. What entrants need to do is identify the contents of 6 homeopathic solutions that they have chosen, but that have been transferred into containers marked 1 – 6 by a notary and sent back to them.

Here are some common medical myths that are easy to dispel:

Alpha was hunting. He was rushing through his jungle at break neck speed, close behind the giant grazer. He realised there was a massive series of meals in the beast. As he dashed, he worked on his poem to celebrate the hunt. Already it was several hundred stanzas long, with descriptions of many other hunts, and it was polishing up to be a masterpiece. When he passed it on, to others of his kind, it would make him famous.

This is an opinion piece. That is, it is my opinion. Some of you may feel that I am wrong. If so, you are welcome to disagree. Please feel free to express your own views in the next issue of this magazine.

Recently, I was in conversation with a couple of people here in Tutukaka. The topic was the local tourist map which I produce and pay for with a series of small advertisements. I was asking them to advertise their business. One of them said she was not happy to do so since the tourist map was not environmentally friendly. My eyebrows went up, and I pointed out that the map was on card board, which was biodegradable. She agreed, but said her problem was the ink which was full of chemicals. Again, my eyebrows went up, and I suggested that everything was full of chemicals, including the human body. She disagreed vociferously. Only synthetic evil products contained chemicals.

In early January 2019, NZ Skeptics were alerted by an eagle-eyed supporter in Wellington to the almost unbelievable sight of a city-infrastructure employee apparently dowsing for water pipes on Willis Street! The employee was clearly wearing a 'Downer NZ' hi-vis jacket. Downer is an infrastructure company contracted by Wellington Water, the arm of the Wellington City Council which is responsible for maintaining the city's water system as a whole. Initially, we contacted the Wellington City Council, and were told they knew nothing about the dowsing. Our phone number was passed onto Downer, who contacted us, and seemed pleased to field enquiries which appeared to be other than complaints about noise. Downer eventually confirmed that the person really was an employee, and that they were indeed 'dowsing' for water pipes!

Wellington ratepayers foot bill for pseudoscience

The other day I received an ominous email telling me that I have malware installed on my PC as a result of visiting porn sites, and that I need to cough up £850 so that my sordid life isn't made public:

This weekend was the Humanist Conference in Auckland, with some great international and local speakers.

New Zealand's first flat earth conference has just been hosted, last Saturday in Auckland. Around 30 "flat mates" crowded into the Backyard Bar's function room to listen to conversations about how the earth is flat, including live streaming of speakers from overseas.

In the past, searches have been conducted for Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, using technologies ranging from men with binoculars to underwater video cameras and sonar.

Kelvin Cruickshank, one of our famous local psychics who has appeared on Sensing Murder, has "helped" a family to locate the body of "Curly" - an elderly gentleman called Raymond Stirling who went missing in Hamilton in January. A police search had been halted after 11 days with no luck, and then Curly's daughter in law ended up at one of Kelvin's paid shows (at $65 a ticket).

Raw water - the latest foolish fad to hit people's screens, pockets, and in some instances I'd guess their toilet paper expenditure as well.

A friend recently contacted the OTO to ask about us attending one of their services, and last night we went to their Gnostic Mass in Wellington.

In a recent article Cracked dot com has pointed out flaws in several popular conspiracy theories.

Reviewed by Jessica Macfarlane, Editor

I enjoy a good coffee, a bit of light astrophysics chat with Neil de Grasse Tyson, and spring with its blossoms and daffodils.

I decided to dip my spoon further into the benefits (or not) of turmeric after reading this issue's bio-blog by Alison Campbell and ended up learning about how food safety methods are being dropped due to consumer pressure based on unscientific thinking.

A series of reports in the New Zealand Herald in late 2016 and early 2017 covered the domestic violence offending of Pakistan-born Mr. Yasir Mohib and the sequence of Mr Mohib's court appearances. As a Humanist marriage celebrant, my interest in the case, and perhaps that of some other Humanists, lies in Mr Mohib's marital arrangements. He has a family consisting of five children born in New Zealand to their two New Zealand-born mothers, who are referred to in the newspaper articles as his “wives”. I wondered how such a situation could have arisen as the procedure for obtaining a marriage licence for the second marriage would have required Mr Mohib or his “wife-to-be” to have made a false statutory declaration about Mr Mohib's marital status when applying for the license. Had a license been issued in such circumstances and the marriage taken place, Mr Mohib would have committed bigamy, a criminal offence. In an interview conducted by TV 3 (1) it was made clear that while his first wife was married to Mr Mohib according to Australian and therefore also NZ law, the second “wife” was not. Only a religious ceremony has taken place (2). She calls Mr Mohib her husband but admits that she is not married to him according to NZ law.

An article in the Herald this week talked about several innovations that were showcased at the Hamilton Fieldays event. Unfortunately, one of the products, DermaShield, appears to be very much pseudo-scientific.

Homeopathic products are made by diluting a substance that causes similar symptoms to the condition they're meant to treat. In the case of Hyland's Teething Tablets, that substance is belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. Wikipedia says that it's "one of the most toxic plants found in the Eastern Hemisphere".

Robert Hunt spoke on behalf of Creation Ministries International this morning at Upper Hutt Baptist Church.

Superfoods are foods that are touted as having high levels of one or more nutrients, with claims made that these nutrients can heal the body. These superfoods, such as kale, goji berries and chia seeds, are often sold at very high prices.

Australian Ken Ham's Creation "Museum" has opened its newest attraction, the Ark Encounter, on Thursday.

Bobby brown has spoken out about having sex with a ghost!

Family first have confused correlation and causation in a recent report, and stated that unmarried couples are a major cause of child poverty.

Rush Limbaugh, US radio talk show host, has used a conversation about Harambe the gorilla to argue that evolution does not work.

From the NZ Skeptics Conference November 2015...

The internet is a seething pool of 'stuff ', and one of the challenges faced by those using it is to distinguish useful information from foolish fantasy. And there surely is a lot of the latter! Thus we find that...

With its scenic miniature railway, the National Rugby Museum and the country's second-largest ball of string, Palmerston North is often wrongly described as “the Armpit of New Zealand”.

HOW TO FIND THE APOLLO LANDING SITES

Shepherd Bushiri has claimed in a video that he is walking on air.

A blood moon is a new name for a lunar eclipse, where the earth travels between the sun and the moon. The full moon turns red.

Sunday 26 April's Life/Style section in the NZ Herald (see Newsfront p6) brings us the latest 'beauty trend' to hit our shores: the snail facial.

Warwick Don will be sorely missed by New Zealand's skeptical community. He was the last of the active founding members of the New Zealand Skeptics, and took pride in recent years to be the only one to have attended all our conferences. He served as Chair from the founding to 1992, and continued to show an interest in things scientific and skeptical well after having handed the torch on.

Luke Oldfield discusses the art of engaging with a 'Non-Opinion'

I note the raft of letters in the last magazine on anthropogenic climate change (ACC). While I, on the committee, am perfectly happy with the position statement and scientific consensus. (ie, Mankind is generating large quantities of CO2, - this entraps solar radiation and causes temperature to increase) I don't understand the massive spread and uncertantity of this increase: 1 to 5 degrees. Hundreds of percent? In fact you can easily find other scientists that say 0.7 to 8 degrees, and even a couple more that claim these figures are half what they should be! They all claim they have good data. Who to believe? Can't climate science please do a little better?

Matthew Willey has a series of discussions about big questions.

Author and journalist Ian Wishart claims Taranaki could be the last resting place of a giant lizard- like "dinosaur" and is issuing a challenge for it to be rediscovered (Taranaki Daily News, 10 May).

Two psychic mediums have been credited with helping to find the body of a Stratford man who drowned in the Patea River last September (Taranaki Daily News, 1 April).

Martin Bridgstock worries about a new trend which might, in the long run, threaten both science and skepticism.

Matthew Willey finds Skeptics in the Pub hasn't been as much fun lately

"Alkaline and hydrogen-rich" water is being touted as the latest cure-all.

A 'Wellness Festival' provides a couple of hours' entertainment, if not much more

The dramatic rescue of three women kept prisoner for 10 years in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, came too late for the mother of one of them (NZ Herald, 9 May).

Stuart Landsborough conducts a small experiment which may land him in big trouble.

Some Skeptics have been surprised that our organisation has been so restrained in its response to the purported moa sighting near Cragieburn. As we see it, the whole issue is fraught with difficulty.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

Michael Edmonds reflects on the 2012 NZ Skeptics Conference.

A fiasco over a 'Natural Therapy Clinic' at Wanganui Hospital was finally resolved satisfactorily - but for the wrong reasons.

If the beliefs of a sizeable number of people turn out to be correct, this will be the final issue of the NZ Skeptic. According to a survey of 16,262 people in 21 countries conducted by market research company Ipsos for Reuters News, two percent of respondents strongly agree, and eight percent somewhat agree, with the proposition that 21 December 2012, the end of the current cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar, marks the end of the world. Perhaps surprisingly agreement is highest in China (20 percent), while the Germans and Indonesians (four percent) are relatively dubious. One could perhaps question the representativeness of the sample (comprised of people who have agreed to take part in online surveys), but there must be a lot of people out there who are really worried about this.

Darcy Cowan takes another look at a subject that just won't go away.

All children are psychic, according to one of the stranger items to appear in the NZ Herald (30 May) for a while.

How should a skeptic relate to those who have other belief systems?

Pictures don't lie, right? Of course they do. And they were deceiving us long before Photoshop made the manipulation of images almost child's play.

Adam van Langenberg gives practical suggestions on how to run a high school skeptical society, based on his own successful experience.

Some time back I noticed that I was getting the first signs of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). I'm a web developer and spend way too much time in front of a keyboard and mouse. It's a common enough thing among people in my industry. From what I can tell one of the best 'treatments' for it is to just stop for a bit. So I am.

Massive changes are transforming the skeptical movement.

The NZ Skeptics cast the net wide for the 2011 Bent Spoon.

After almost 15 years of intermittently tagging along with her parents, Iris Riddell reports on her first official attendance at a NZ Skeptics Conference.

Prominent physicist and science commentator Sir Paul Callaghan is resorting to vitamin C megadoses and Chinese medicine to treat his terminal cancer (Dominion Post, 22 September).

The paranormal field contains both con artists and the well-intentioned. It's often impossible to tell one from the other, but in the end it makes little difference. This article is based on a presentation to the University of the Third Age.

It's not a hopeless cause to engage with proponents of the irrational - but some ways of doing this are more effective than others. This article is based on a presentation to the 2010 NZ Skeptics conference.

Alison Campbell reviews a study of why so many struggle with scientific concepts.

His name is Gold, he describes himself as a post- goth Discordian web developer, and one day soon he hopes to be homeless. He' s also the new chair entity of NZ Skeptics. Annette Taylor finds out more.

One of the main reasons for the success Al Qaeda has had in getting bombs past checkpoints in Iraq is that the main device used to detect explosives is a uselss fake (NZ Herald, 24 July).

When creationists try to harmonise their worldview with certain inescapable facts of geology, the result is chaos.

When Richard Dawkins made a flying visit to New Zealand in March he attracted people from all over the country - including three from this household. Tickets to all events were quickly snapped up, but fortunately friends in the Auckland Univeristy Alumni Association put some aside for us.

Noel Townsley continues our series on the psychic roadshows touring New Zealand.

At last year's NZ Skeptics conference Bob Brockie reflected on his career as a newspaper columnist and explained why he has no future with the Mormon Church.

Twelve years after it induced panic among parents world-wide, a paper linking the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism has been withdrawn (NZ Herald, 4 February).

NZ Skeptic editor_ David Riddell finds Kelvin Cruickshank less impressive in person than he appears on Sensing Murder_. A shorter version of this review appeared in the_ Waikato Times _on 9 December 2009.

The nzskeptics Yahoo discussion group has been very busy of late, with December 2009 registering more than 300 new messages - the largest number in the almost five years of the group's existence. In large measure this has been thanks to contributions from a couple of participants who hold views which I would assume most of our members don't share.

Some claim our society is too materialistic and lacks spiritual values. But what would it be like to live in a society that rejects materialism?

Yet another_ Sensing Murder _veteran struts her stuff.

THE 2009 annual NZ Skeptics Conference in Wellington was its usual mix of good times and thought-provoking material, though with some unique touches. The Kingsgate Hotel was a rather more luxurious venue than we're used to; the few problems that arose were mostly due to the high number of late enrolments, making this one of the largest gatherings in recent years.

Economics has been called the Dismal Science. But to what extent are economics scientific, and economists scientists? This article is based on a presentation to the NZ Skeptics 2009 conference in Wellington, 26 September.

Tim Hume (Sunday Star Times June 21) has written a good account of traditional Maori Medicine (Rongoa Maori). The Health Ministry provides $1.9 million annually for this nonsense. That money would pay for approximately 1000 hip replacements.

Having recently joined the happy hordes of mp3 player owners, our household has been getting an object lesson in the nature of random events. For those who have yet to succumb to the charms of these amazing little gadgets, they can hold thousands of songs in memory and play them back in many different ways. You can, for example, just play a single album, or make up a playlist of songs for a party, or to encapsulate a particular mood.

Stuart Landsborough has an interesting night out with one of the Sensing Murder mediums.

In an occasional feature we look back at issues from the early days of NZ Skeptic.

Ian Luxmoore investigates the claims for BioMag underlays.

When the Sunday Star-Times decided to survey the nation on how superstitious New Zealanders are and about what, Vicki Hyde got used as a guinea pig. Part One of her responses was published in the last issue of the NZ Skeptic. This is Part Two.

February 12 is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, and the old guy, or at least his ideas, are still in pretty good shape. While evolutionary theory has been broadened and elaborated extensively in the 150 years since The Origin of Species was published in 1859, Darwin's fundamental concept of natural selection remains central to our understanding of life's diversity.

When the Sunday Star-Times decided to survey the nation on how superstitious New Zealanders are and about what, I got used as guinea pig. Having done a lot of survey design and analysis during the course of my hodge-podge of an academic career, I often end up writing more about the questions than answering them. Add to that the tendency for being, as Margaret Mahy once characterised our group, "a person in a state of terminal caution", and you can imagine the result.

Annette Taylor learns it's not enough to have your cake, you have to test it too.

If students are to pursue careers in science, they need to be able to see themselves in that role. One way to encourage this may be through the telling of stories. This article is based on a presentation to the 2008 NZ Skeptics Conference in Hamilton.

A visit to Lake Rotoroa in Nelson Lakes National Park is rewarded with a remarkable sighting.

Ian Wishart is one of New Zealand's more prominent creationists. In a recent book he takes on evolutionary biology, a task for which he seems ill-equipped.

The Intelligent Design (ID) movie Expelled (Editorial, NZ Skeptic 86) has scored a spectacular public relations own-goal at a screening in Minneapolis (New York Times, 21 March). University of Minnesota developmental biologist PZ Myers, best known for his blog Pharyngula, was one of many who took up the offer to register on-line for the pre-release public screening.

It always helps keep matters in perspective to read about skeptical episodes from days gone by. I've recently been reading The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman; Houdini, of course, is regarded as one of the godfathers of the modern skeptical movement. Though he made his reputation from his magic act and, particularly, his miraculous-seeming escapes, he devoted much of his later life to an ongoing battle with fraudulent mediums. Always open to the possibility of communicating with the dead, he nevertheless knew better than anyone, from his background in magic, how easy it was to fool an observer unversed in the techniques of deception. Indeed, in his early years, struggling to put food on his table, he had performed a spiritualist act himself, before developing a full appreciation of the ethical issues involved with preying on the bereaved.

Intersecting as it does sex, religion, blood, medicine and masculinity, circumcision is a subject that is hard to discuss rationally.

Those of you with broadband might enjoy one of the latest shots in the US 'culture wars' over creation and evolution. Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, is a two-hour documentary on the famous Dover, Pennsylvania trial which ruled that Intelligent Design was merely creationism repackaged, and that teaching it in a school classroom violated the US's constitutional separation of church and state. It can be viewed on the Public Broadcasting Service website (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html).

Religion Gone Bad, by Mel White, Penguin, 2006. Reviewed by Bob Metcalfe.

The call for UFO sightings from the Tauranga-based UFOCUS group caught the attention of the Waikato Times (July 28) which ran a two-page feature on alien visitations in this country.

Some risks in life are distributed throughout a population, others are all-or-nothing. There's a big difference. This article is based on a presentation to last year's Skeptics Conference.

An article in the Listener makes much ado about very little.

An Auckland University study reveals the costs-financial and emotional-of telephone psychics.

It's often said that scientists long rejected the idea of meteorites, but the evidence for this assertion is far from convincing.

After a bloodless coup, the NZ Skeptic has a new editor. This doesn't mean much in practical terms; for many years I've been working closely with previous ed Annette Taylor. She will now take on the roles that I used to-subediting, proofing, making cups of tea, cooking dinner and the like. It won't be long before we can enlist the daughter into the production of this fine publication.

During a short visit to Texas, my wife Hazel and I caught a session of Larry King Live, on which 'psychics' battled skeptics. It was clear from the outset the production was heavily biased towards the psychics. Three of them were in the studio with King, shoulder to shoulder. The two skeptics were on video feed, separately.

Garfield was right-there's nothing like a piping hot lasagne on a winter's night. Especially when eaten with good wine and fine people.

It was an eye opener. Under the stern glare of past headmasters of Kings College, the NZ Skeptics were holding their annual dinner that always goes with the annual conference.

Jim Ring's article, Lamarck's ghost rises again (NZ Skeptic 80) does an excellent job in laying Lamarck's ghost, and its recent revival, but it is bitterly unfair to Darwin and to one of the fundamental concepts of evolution when he attacks group selection and sociobiology. He is also wrong when he claims that social behaviour does not influence genetics.

Louette McInnes found a talk by Richard Wiseman at Canterbury University well worth braving the winter cold for. Professor Wiseman holds the Chair of Public Understanding of Psychology at Hertfordshire University.

Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin, by Robert M Hazen. Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, USA. Reviewed by Bernard Howard.

New Zealand's Amazing D'Urville Artefact and Equations of Life, by Ross Wiseman, Discovery Press, 2004. Reviewed by Hugh Young.

There is little doubt there are criminals who are prepared to drug women in order to sexually assault them. History records the commonest drug used was chloral hydrate in an alcoholic drink (Mickey Finn). The modern equivalent is rohypnol, a drug discontinued in New Zealand owing to its abuse potential. However, as Ogden Nash observed "liquor is quicker" and alcohol remains the most likely cause of incapacity leading to unwanted sexual activity.

Debunked! by G Charpak & H Broch, translator BK Holland. Johns Hopkins University Press, Reviewed by Bernard Howard.

"There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents and only one for birthday presents, you know."

I had a dream. One of those ones which are slightly alarming in that they come true. In my dream a friend happily announced she was pregnant and when I chanced to bump into her the next day, she told me -- excitedly -- the good news.

Early in 2005 Professor Kaye Ibbertson, the relentless grand vizier of the Marion Davis Library and Museum, asked David Cole to offer the Medical Historical Society some comments about the history of unorthodox medicine. He was in the process of assembling several convincing excuses, when Ibbertson turned off his hearing aid and any excuses were set aside. This article is based on the talk which resulted.

Research scientist Hamish Campbell spoke of his experiences as Te Papa's museum geologist at the 2005 NZ Skeptics conference.

Demands for equal time cut both ways.

In retrospect, it was a cunning move to give us each a Hopi ear candle. Wrapped in pretty cellophane, the little beeswax treats - if used correctly - would ensure people would be in prime mental health. This is essential if you're attending the NZ Skeptics annual conference, as we were. The candles are an amazing elimination technique which improve mental clarity, energy and wellbeing. By inserting them - lit - into the ear canal, they allow glucose and oxygen to enter the brain, restoring neural functions. Of course, expecting a bunch of skeptics to follow instructions was perhaps asking too much. They put them on the ends of their noses. They twirled them and flung them. Anywhere but lit and inserted in the ear.

Surfing on the massive wave kicked up by the craze for things paranormal is Dunedin's spookiest entrepreneur, Andrew Smith - host of Dunedin's Hair Raiser Ghost Walk. Is it all nonsense, or is there something mysterious afoot?

What a great Skeptic the winter edition is, thorough forethought all around, with even a hint of hope about the clairvoyant decision. Which is good because although I enjoy reading the magazine it's often quite depressing.

Since I wrote my piece (NZ Skeptic 75) based on Bruce Flamm's article in Skeptical Inquirer concerning a research paper on the efficacy of prayer, Dr Flamm has reported 'significant development'. Lest you jump to the conclusion that the authors, journal and university have acknowledged their serious error and have retracted the paper, be at once disabused. The significance of these developments, to my mind, is their minuscule and peripheral nature; nothing has really changed. One could reasonably grant a significant development to Wirth; he pleaded guilty to a 46-page indictment and is in jail for five years. Concerning the 'lead' author, Lobo, the journal later printed, at the bottom of the back page, an Erratum, that this name had been included 'in error'. Young researchers often complain that senior colleagues insist on their names appearing on papers unjustifiably. In the topsy-turvy world of this journal, people find their names put unknowingly on papers they have had nothing to do with!

The product Body Enhancer, marketed by the Zenith Corporation, costs $95 per bottle and is "claimed to assist fat burning, muscle growth and liver detoxification." A judge, however, found that the product offered 'bogus benefits' although the couple behind the company remained defiant and claimed that they were "scapegoats for the natural remedy industry."

Bob Metcalfe (Skeptic No 75) might have been reading New Zealand Tone magazine: Bringing Technology to Life, Sept-Oct 2004. The front cover promises "Hi-fi cables: science or hocus pocus", and on page 46 there is an interview with Bob Noble, "sales manager for respected cable manufacturer Chord". On page 47 there is a review of three Chord cables. The only science in the interview is the importance of screening to cables since cheap electronics in homes today are "leaking interference back into the same mains power ring that supplies the hi-fi. This degrades the final sound considerably. If you don't believe me, turn all those other appliances off and see what it does to your hi-fi sound." Nobody puts the case that there is any hocus pocus to cables.

It is with sadness that I see that the Skeptic is still accepting articles and letters with political bias. I would like to spend much of this letter countering some of Owen McShane's arguments from his article "Why are we crying into our beer?", but I see we are still arguing in the pages of our magazine about science. It would be really nice if Jim Ring or C Morris could explain to me and I'm sure others who are puzzled by this whole affair, as to what legitimate arguments between legitimate scientists have to do with scepticism.

If you don't get the answers you want from a Government inquiry, press for another inquiry. Vietnam war veterans have continued such a campaign and have produced a map to confirm that they were present in areas that were sprayed with the defoliant under the US Army "Operation Ranch Hand".

A new star on the psychic circuit impressed the makers of TV3's 20/20, but not the NZ Skeptics

One of our members (who was supposed to be teaching carbon chemistry at the time and wishes to remain nameless!) used Jeanette Wilson's TV performances as a resource for teaching critical thinking to her year ten class. The results were encouraging, and very educational.

Occasionally, the NZ Skeptics receive correspondence from members of the general public. Recently, Chairentity Vicki Hyde took the time to reply to one of these. Portions of the original letter are indented.

Few events have so captured the local imagination as the search for a thermal bore near Methven. Word of the search spread after a drilling rig appeared in a paddock. Nothing unusual in rigs -- they dot Mid-Canterbury in the eternal quest for reliable sources of irrigation water. This rig, though, was not after cold water, but hot.

A couple of months ago we were visiting my brother, and got talking about a friend of his, who had enrolled in a counselling course. It turned out that the course had come to be dominated by some rather staunch Maori elements, and my brother's friend, as one of only two non-Maori on the course, was embroiled in a dispute in which racial lines were very clearly drawn. But he was confident he had ammunition which would knock the course leaders off their perch, in the form of a book, Ancient Celtic New Zealand (see Feature Article). This purported to show that Europeans had in fact colonised this country thousands of years ago, and had established a thriving neolithic culture, until they were displaced by Maori early in the last millennium.

It had to happen, I guess. A new book, Sextrology: The Astrology of Sex and the Sexes, written by New York astrologers Stella Starsky and (wince) Quinn Cox gets a fair amount of column inches in the Dominion Post (July 8.)

One of our members almost spots a UFO

Consumer response to the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy has involved a complex balancing of risk and price

Two fortune tellers apparently failed to foresee the end of their alleged scam in Christchurch (The Press, January 29).

It was a dark and stormy night. But (almost) without flinching we set off to hear Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Kevin Grazier speaking about the Cassini mission to Saturn.

One possible source of the outlandish reports given by children in cases such as the Christchurch Civic Creche affair was described at the 2003 Skeptics' Conference.

Although I have been receiving free email alerts for a long time, I am a (very) new member. Among the goodies which I received a couple of days ago was the Spring, 2003 newsletter, number 69. Obviously, free speech is the first requisite of such an organ, but I was rather taken aback by contribution in Forum from Lance Kennedy of Tantec, an organisation in the biocide industry, on the subject of global warming. Its content is highly selective, and it contravenes all the principles outlined in the Skeptics Guide to Critical Thinking. He writes of a "sound and healthy reluctance to subscribe to anthropogenic greenhouse... warming". He says that the Scientific American is committed to "greenie (a pejorative term which has no place in a serious discussion) nonsense".

The young earth creationists have been active again ... the Australian-based group Answers in Genesis (AIG), has been doing the circuit in New Zealand. Warnings on the Skeptics email list had alerted us to the fact that Carl Wieland, the head of AIG, was coming over to pollute young Kiwi minds so this was an opportunity we couldn't and shouldn't miss. Wieland is very influential in creationist circles, having produced many books, pamphlets and videos, and is really the driving force behind their main publications Creation Ex Nihilo and the impressively, but inappropriately, named Technical Journal (or "TJ" as they lovingly refer to it). It thus promised to be a good chance to see Wieland in action first hand and to get some clues as to how to handle him next time he appears on our shores.

Had an email the other day from someone we hadn't heard from in a while. Among other things, he took the opportunity to ask why we heard so little from the Skeptics in the media, and made unfavourable comparisons with the Consumer's Institute. Given the breadth of that organisation's support base and consequent level of funding, that hardly seemed fair.

These books are all subtitled "A Reference for the Rest of Us!". Perhaps I'm prejudiced but as far as I'm concerned, dummies is a better term for anyone who uses alternative medicine. Having said that, this book, written by a chiropractor and a science writer with a PhD in the history of medicine and science, is not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

From the path we gaze down at them. From their grassed mound they turn an occasional incurious gaze back - primate watching primate. I have seen very few chimpanzees. For them we are just part of an eternal procession of their depilated, camera-toting, child-accompanying, gawping kin. Behind the idling chimps, beyond the grassed enclosure with its climbing poles, beyond the zoo, rise the hills and houses of Wellington.

This book thoroughly demolishes the pretence that laboratory experiments in ESP have produced statistical evidence for the phenomenon's reality. But like almost all writers on the subject, Hines treats telepathic communication and precognition as merely alternative forms of the same thing. ESP does not exist. But telepathy conceivably could exist, if there was a "fifth force" explain it, whereas precognition would require that information travel backward in time -- an absurdity that can be refuted by the reductio ad absurdum it would produce.

This article was originally presented on National Radio's Sunday Supplement

In New Zealand Skeptic No. 64, Warwick Don critiqued Ian Wishart's article Walking with Beasts, published in Investigate, June 2002. This is Wishart's response.

Skeptics - always in two minds about something…

What name do you give to a quirky bunch of people who are scientifically literate, who question fads, and who want their beliefs to rest on evidence from the material world -- the sort of evidence that does not require one to ignore or reject all the laws of physics and other knowledge we have and that we rely on daily when flying, taking antibiotics or using the computer?

This article is based on an address to the Skeptics Conference 2002. A condensed version has also been produced for the NZ Listener.

A Hamilton doctor is facing two charges of professional misconduct and one of disgraceful conduct after one of his patients was left looking "like something out of a horror movie". The Marlborough Express (August 21) reports Yvonne Short had gone to Dr Richard Gorringe in 1998 looking for a cure for her skin problems.

Vicki Hyde reports from the 4th World Skeptics Conference

Hamilton is a progressive place where the difficult issues are tackled. Rather than being a cow town (we're not! we're not!), we sit around of a Friday evening and debate the Big Questions.

John Riddell learns to his cost that fishermen can be as easy to catch as the creatures they pursue

When I spoke at the conference two and a half years ago, argument was rife as to when the next millennium would begin. Now, there is no doubt we are well launched into the third thousand-year period since something important was supposed to have happened.

It wasn't a dark and stormy night but a gaggle of skeptics got together recently to listen to ghost stories in Hamilton. Professional story teller Andrew Wright sent shivers down the groups' skeptical spines as they listened to his rendition of one of the oldest known horror stories, Lord Fox, a BlueBeard variation.

Is there anything on television worth watching? Maybe.

Because Cowards get Cancer too, by John Diamond, Random House, 1998

I enjoyed Jim Ring's "the Spectre of Kahurangi" (Autumn 2001). In Kahurangi National Park there is a bridge called "Brocken Bridge", quite close to Ghost Creek. Could this be an indication of supernatural forces emanating from this enchanting region?

A Colorado colour therapist was jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of causing the death of a 16 year old girl. It must have been quite traumatic for the jury who watched a videotape of the session in which the girl begged for air and screamed that she was dying". What we need in New Zealand are equally tough laws that protect children from acts of omission, particularly where children are denied safe and effective medical treatment in favour of ludicrous quackery. (Dominion June 20th, Hokum Locum #59)

My brain hurts. I haven't used it in some years, so there's no surprise really. After managing to avoid external employment for a goodly time, a job has finally got its teeth into me and won't let go. Which is not to say I've been totally lazy at home these past years, there's been free-lunch work to do and projects such as the NZ Skeptic to help pass time. But all of these could be done in the privacy of one's own home, dressed in striped jarmies if the mood took and it often did.

I would've thought the main hazard from mobile phones was the increased risk of accident when using one in the car. No-one seems to worry about this, however, instead many are deeply concerned that a few milliwatts of radio waves are going to fry their brains. This has opened tremendous opportunities for the enterprising.

Bernard Howard reports from the Skeptics' World Convention, Sydney, 10-12 November 2000

Another year, another millennium. We saw the old century out in a very quiet manner, watching Stanley Kubrick's 2001 with friends in Auckland. A few fireworks exploded from the top of the Sky Tower -- and then it was bed time. Given that this was the day when the old century really ticked over, there was far less hooplah this time -- the cockroaches were especially quiet.

The following is an abridged version of a paper presented at Skeptics 2000, Dunedin, New Zealand. The author would like to thank NZCSICOP and NZARH for sponsoring this visit to New Zealand.

Vicki Hyde presents the year 2000 chair-entity's Report

Taking a leaf from the UK Skeptic, we're turning our news clippings into a column. Which means I get to read them - never used to before! Many thanks to all those who've sent in material, and please keep it coming.

Wherein intrepid ace reporter Vicki Hyde spills the beans on what Skeptics get up to at their annual meetings…

The risks of third-generation contraceptive pills have been much in the news. But assessing risk can be a tricky business.

John Welch started writing for the magazine in Issue 16, but a posting with UNSCOM to Iraq meant he had to relinquish responsibility for the column. He is delighted to once again have the opportunity to indulge his interest in bizarre medical beliefs and wishes to thank Dr Neil McKenzie for his efforts to date.

Many moons ago I packed into a dimmed lecture theatre along with 400 other keen-eyed stage I psych students to listen to a presentation on psychic ability.

John Riddell has a few confessions to make.

Numerology, or What Pythagoras Wrought, by Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America, Washington DC, 1997

In which John Riddell continues his pub night discussions.

As a born-again skeptic, I find it hard to write about an experience which challenges my entire values system; dead men don't talk, dreams and premonitions tell you nothing except, perhaps, something about your body chemistry, the whole body of scientific knowledge in all the different fields of hard science hangs together, so if crap like creationism and flat-Earth geography are true, then everything else we've discovered in the last 500 years must be wrong... Still, I must be brutally honest.

I didn't wish to begin a debate about the issues surrounding religion in the 16th and 17th-century, nor would I ever wish to stop anyone from taking in interest in history. All I wanted to do was to point out that history is an academic discipline the same as any other, and it is dangerous to make pronouncements of such a dogmatic nature in the subject in which one has not been trained.

IT IS WELL, at the start of a discussion, to declare an interest. So, I begin by admitting that my fascination with the year 2000 was aroused nearly 70 years ago. Like many mechanically-minded lads of the 20s and 30s, I was a keen reader of "The Meccano Magazine". One issue of about 1930 looked forward to the distant future, and to what life would be like in 2000. I have forgotten the text, but a picture remains in my mind of tall, elegant buildings lining a wide street, along which glided, speedily but noiselessly, clean streamlined trains. The pictures and accompanying description appealed to the young Howard, and I dreamed how wonderful it would be to grow so phenomenally ancient as to be around at that splendid time.

More from last year's Skeptics conference.

Winter is here, and it's time for all good skeptics to heed the call and flock to Auckland for the annual conference, where illuminating conversation and inspired addresses await. And then the same good skeptics can generate battle strategies to cope with all the fuss about the Millennium and the imminent end of the world. In the meantime, here's a copy of the Skeptic to read while making these important plans.

Research is revealing how people can develop memories of things that never really happened.

New Zealand was recently treated to a visit by what was proclaimed as "probably the best known archaeologist in the world", a chap by the name of Ron Wyatt. He was claiming to give us evidence that he had found the site of Noah's Ark, among many other things.

Chances are, you're worried about all the wrong things.

IT'S a damned rotten trick, I know, but I rang up my mum and asked her a simple question, does the Earth go round the Sun, or is it the other way around? She wasn't sure, but felt the most obvious, correct answer was that the Sun orbits the Earth.

When I was young enough to think Dr Who was scary, I remember thinking it was good to live in times when people didn't believe in superstitions anymore. Recently, US taxpayers coughed up US$350,000 testing the effectiveness of Therapeutic Touch. It's one of those alternative therapies. The practitioner waves his hands over the patient, without touching them, while thinking gooey thoughts.

Annette Taylor spends an afternoon checking out the alternatives.

Another "I've seen the light" American quack whizzed through New Zealand recently, spreading his own magical brew of antioxidants, lacto-vegetarian diets, bioFlavonoid herbs, and, wait for it, Maharishi Ayurveda compounds. Hari Sharma, Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University, says that physicians are becoming pathogens, they are creating diseases. Like most saviours of the human race before him, he mixes scientific half truths and anecdotal stories to rubbish hundreds of years of painstakingly researched evidence-based medicine (GP Weekly, October 1997)

In the first of a new series, Tauranga GP Neil McKenzie comments on recent examples of pseudoscience relating to medicine.

AS MOST readers will now be aware, the Ian Plimer/Allen Roberts court case has been adjudicated, and the results for Ian were not as he had hoped. The case was brought under federal Trade Practices legislation and state Fair Trading legislation and concerned two issues. The first was a breach of copyright action, where Ian's co-applicant, David Fasold, alleged that Roberts had used a diagram, Fasold's intellectual property, without permission. The second issue alleged that, in his lectures and sale of tapes, etc, Roberts had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in pursuit of trade.

IN an article entitled "Unravelling The Indian Rope-trick", in Nature, English researchers Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont describe their systematic investigation of one of the world's best known paranormal exhibitions. There are many accounts, some first-hand, yet when investigators have searched for performances of the trick, even offering rewards, no one has come forward with a demonstration.

THE concepts of God and evolution are inextricable. In the beginning God created the Universe. The series of events that followed produced man. This imperfect product needed a higher authority (scapegoat, infallible architect, benevolent headmaster, king of quiz) so before long the concept of God evolved. This God created the Universe. The series of events that followed produced man. This imperfect product needed a higher authority etc, etc.

About the time this issue makes it to the letterbox, those Americans not glued to chat-shows or the latest update on alien abductions will be treated to a documentary on recreations of ancient monuments, in which New Zealand's infamous Fridgehenge features.

Carl Sagan, one of the world's greatest popularisers of science, died on December 20th at the age of 62, after a long battle with a bone marrow disease. Sagan was one of America's pre-eminent scientists, educators, skeptics and humanists. He was also a founding member and Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and a member of the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism.

NZCSIOP does not take a stand against religious belief, per se, and many Christians are committed Skeptics. While Mr van der Lingen's essay may appear to contradict this stance, he is not arguing that religious belief is incompatible with being a Skeptic; he is only challenging some claims and methodologies adopted by those who take a particular set of positions regarding the relationship between evolutionary science and contemporary Christian belief.

A conversation off the Skeptics newsgroup.

One of the interesting things about the Skeptics is the wide range of opinions that can be found in our group -- not to mention the ever-readiness to express them. So I was interested to read Frank Haden's column on the conference and how he found it.

This year has seen one of the most significant discoveries ever made -- the announcement that there are solid indications of life having once existed on another planet. The implications for us all, whether scientific, philosophic or religious, are tremendous.

This is the second half of the article begun in the last NZ Skeptic

The Mysterious Origins of Man showed earlier this year on TV3 as a "documentary". It is likely to be a contender for this year's Bent Spoon Award.

A physicist with hidden motives writes something unexpected for a "cultural studies" journal.

This article originally appeared in the excellent US magazine_ Skeptic_, edited by Shermer, (Vol 2 No 3) and also forms Chapter 4 of Shermer's book_ Hope Springs Eternal: How Pseudoscience Works and Why People Believe in It_. It's a thought-provoking piece which should be handy reference for any skeptic's library. This is part one of three.

Skeptics can take an active stance in their daily lives, according to this abridged version of the Chair-entity's after-dinner speech from the Conference.

Since the call for responses to the awarding of the Bent Spoon to the Justice Department's Hitting Home report, we've received responses from 16 people, some of which of which have been published in this and the previous Skeptic. Others were in the form of private commentaries or conversations. One member contacted the authors of the report directly for clarification and further comment, and passed on the correspondence that ensued.

An article in NCAHF reminded me of past activities with respect to joint manipulation. Following a one week course I embarked on a short-lived career in spinal manipulation which is very easy to learn and causes a greatly inflated belief in one's ability to "cure" spinal ailments.

Australian creationist Peter Sparrow toured New Zealand recently.

Back in March, when the police seemed to be making no progress in hunting down South Auckland's serial rapist, a community newspaper ran a story effectively chiding the police in general and Detective Inspector John Manning in particular for taking no notice of the advice being given him by one of Auckland's leading clairvoyants, Ms Margaret Birkin, who has her own programme on Radio Pacific.

Recent issues of the Skeptic have contained expressions of puzzlement at some subjects being taught to tertiary students in New Zealand. The worst example is the Degree in Naturopathy planned for Aoraki Polytechnic. But is this really all that surprising?

When author Arthur Koestler and his wife died, they left money to found a university Chair in Parapsychology. Edinburgh University accepted this gift after some hesitation, and Robert L. Morris has occupied the Chair since 1985. In a university hundreds of kilometres to the south, and some hundreds of years younger, Dr Richard Wiseman has also turned a scholarly eye on the subject. This book is a result of their collaboration.

Recently I had a UFO experience in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Or rather, I would have had a UFO experience if it had been a UFO. Unfortunately, however, I found a rational explanation for it, which means this story's not nearly as interesting as it could have been.

This is a Feynman Commencement Address given by Richard Feynman at Caltech in 1974. This message is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago, especially for those who add their committed "science" to the cause of apocalyptic environmentalism.

An abridged version of the Skeptical Enquirer's report of the session dealing with "alien abductions" at the Seattle CSICOP Conference on "The Psychology of Belief"

When the short list for the Booker prize was announced there was much chortling about the fact that Jill Paton Walsh had been unable to find a publisher in Britain for Knowledge of Angels. She had to publish it herself.

Lately -- my last few airline flights -- I've been listening to the in-flight comedy channels. This was how I discovered Bob Newhart and his monologues. These are things where he takes one side of a conversation and leaves you to imagine the rest. There's one that shows up quite often, where he takes one side of a conversation with Sir Walter Raleigh, who has just discovered tobacco and is sending eight tons of it over to England as an early sample.

Seeing shouldn't always be believing, as a Nelson skeptic discovered thirty years ago.

One of the perpetrators told the story behind the Grand Interplanetary Hoax of 1952 to the 1994 Skeptics' Conference.

A friend of mine once visited a faith-healer, one of the religious variety from the United States who periodically come to New Zealand to swell their bank balances. She attended the meeting because of a persistent pain in her elbow. Despite my suggestions that it was only tennis elbow, she was worried and thought perhaps the pain was serious. She had an aisle seat near the front and during the proceedings the "healer" approached her and asked about the pain in her arm. Apparently she hadn't told anyone why she was there. She was impressed.

I am writing in the hope that your readers may be able to help me in a little research I am doing, in my position of Publicity Officer for the Wairarapa Archive.

Our intrepid correspondent finds himself suffering from that most fashionable of psychological afflictions, Multiple Personality Disorder!

The account of the meeting between the Moa hunters and the Christchurch Skeptics was interesting, but contained some very odd statements. How many skeptics had done any hunting, I wonder? The account reads as though there were no experienced hunters present who could challenge some of the statements made. That is rather like examining key-benders without a magician present. However, the account, like many UFO sightings, contains several inconsistencies which are not obvious to the inexperienced.

What is it that keeps superstitions going in the face of our increasing knowledge about the world?

Attempts to interpret the results of quantum mechanics in ways people can understand can themselves lead to confusion.

That arbitrary slice of the continuum of time known as 1993 has been a busy one for the New Zealand Skeptics. High spot of the year was the visit of James Randi in early July. Unfortunately, his timetable allowed only four public appearances, one each in Christchurch and Auckland and two in Wellington.

Award-winning author and long-time Skeptic Margaret Mahy delivered the after-dinner speech at the 1993 Skeptics Conference. This is an abridged version of her talk.

The New Internationalist Review, a magazine not normally known for gullibility beyond the political, decided not all that long ago to examine the paranormal. Our intrepid reporter Peter Lange decided to have a look.

Some Skeptics have been surprised that our organisation has been so restrained in its response to the purported moa sighting near Cragieburn. As we see it, the whole issue is fraught with difficulty.

The article on creationism by Barend Vlaardingerbroek (Skeptic 24) contains much with which I would agree, but there are also several points that could be contested.

An American study reported in the GP Weekly (2 Sep 1992) found that chronic fatigue syndrome was indistinguishable from depressive disorders. (Refer also Skeptic 21) Patients diagnosed as having CFS were likely to believe that their illness had a viral cause, but it is more likely that CFS is a new age variant of the 19th century neurasthenia.1

Dr J.F. De Bock gave the 1992 Conference an update on the study of UFOs.

Sometimes feeling better isn't a good sign at all... Carl Wyant recalls an occasion when faith healing showed itself better at handling symptoms than causes.

After seeing a demonstration of cold reading at the Skeptics Conference in 1989 I thought this was something I could have fun with, so I boned up on the list of commonplaces provided at the time:

The Bent Spoon Award this year created more controversy than usual when it was awarded to Consumer magazine. Why did we feel it necessary to bite our consumer watchdog?

The abuse of the Skeptics as "arrogant, narrow-minded bigots" by defenders of Consumer is annoying, but it doesn't yet surpass an art teacher who wrote an article for a Wellington paper in 1986. Overseas -- or rather underseas -- skeptics, he warned, had once tried to disprove ESP by going down in two submarines. In one, skeptics rushed baby rabbits to death, while in the other submarine skeptics measured the reactions of their mother to see if she was getting the terrible psychic vibes. Despite her pathetic shudders, delivered on cue, those awful skeptics still wouldn't believe in ESP!

Isaac Asimov, one of the great explainers of the age, died on 6 April, aged 72.

Creationists are winning hands-down in the publicity stakes, despite, one presumes, no real assistance in the form of Divine Guidance.

Simon Upton, the Minister of Health, recalls a childhood and adolescence without television, and warmly welcomes the "Great New Zealand Television Turn-Off"

There is something in the German psyche which has a peculiar fascination for the medieval...

Sacred Sex is a seat-squirmer of a film — one of the most irritating films I have ever seen. I went along with my wife hoping for entertainment, maybe a bit a spice, and came out so cross I couldn't get to sleep for all the wrong reasons.

Myocardial infarction (heart attack, coronary thrombosis) is commonly caused by a blood clot blocking one of the three coronary arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle. It is the commonest cause of death (4,000 p.a.) in New Zealand and other Western countries. Specialists have long wondered whether early administration of a fibrinolytic (blood clot dissolving drug) would reduce mortality.

In the arguments for and against being definitively skeptical, the social climate and moral responsibilities of skepticism are often overlooked. This is an abridged version of the after-dinner speech given at this year's NZCSICOP Conference.

On the National Programme recently, Vicki Hyde mentioned a claim that a bird had changed one element to another inside one of its vital organs.

Armed with rope and stick, Matt Ridley went out at night on his Northumberland farm and within minutes came up with an answer to a recurring summer puzzle.

A quick perusal of the shelves of your local library can show you where the purchasing priorities lie — and they're not in the science section.

Among the papers at the Skeptics conference were Bill Malcolm's four. entertaining "illustrated truth kits" — short two-projector slide-shows on topics like fad diets, the New Age, fringe therapies, and scientific method. This one is the New Age primer.

Most people have great difficulty in conceptualising low frequencies and low concentrations. Pesticide concentrations are reported in parts per million (ppm), parts per billion (ppb) and parts per trillion (ppt). One television personality accused an industrial spokesman of releasing effluent with "15 parts per trillion" (his emphasis, implying a very large, rather than a very small concentration).

Gaia is alive and well in New Zealand, as the following abridged Department of Conservation report shows. It was prepared for a meeting of the Engineers for Social Responsibility by DOC botanist Philip Simpson. The full report is available from DOC.

The following is a letter dated May 11, 1991 from magician James "The Amazing" Randi to friends, sympathisers, and the skeptical community. It came to us via the international skeptics computer bulletin board.

by Carole Potter. Michael O'Mara Books. $39.95.

Englishwoman Doris Stokes was a medium — by which I don't mean that her dress size was between small and large. She claimed she spoke to people "on the other side," to use the euphemistic jargon of the darkened drawing-room. She was a sort of cosmic Telecom operator, only I suspect her charges were a good deal higher than 99c a minute plus GST.

A strange phenomenon is again manifesting itself in the pastoral areas of our borough. October has once again brought appearances of what we Mt Eden Skeptics call "Crop Rectangles" — bare, rectangular patches of earth amongst the normally verdant parklands. They have no reasonable explanation, but they do have a common, peculiar feature, which leads us to believe that they are associated with some sort of meteorological cult.

Popular books on the paranormal often source their supporting evidence from all over the world. While this may seem to enhance an argument's credibility by giving the impression the phenomenon in question is universal, I suspect it is more because of the paucity of evidence that the net is cast so widely. When on occasions the net reaches as far as New Zealand I find I am especially skeptical. To take a recent example, in Jenny Randle's "Abduction" a New Zealand encounter of the third kind is described thus:

At the 1989 NZCSICOP conference Dr Denis Dutton generalised that women's magazines contained horoscopes and men's magazines didn't. A female voice rightly objected that Broadsheet was horoscope-less. There is also a dubious exception to the generalisation about men's magazines (see box). Nevertheless, what Denis said was largely confirmed by a quick survey I made of women's magazines at a Whitcoulls newsstand. New York Woman doesn't carry horoscopes, neither does Moxie (but it does carry an advice column by a so-called psychic). These were the only additional exceptions I could find. However I discovered Australian Elle has not only horoscopes but a numerology page as well.

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1985.

Nearly everyone knows that in Old Testament times Sodom and Gomorrah were pretty naughty places to be and that the Lord, after negotiations with Abraham, was moved to spare any good people that could be found in them. In the event, it seems that only Lot, his wife and his two unmarried daughters fitted the bill. It is true that his two sons-in-law-to-be were invited to leave with Lot and his family, but they scoffed at the idea that two angels were going to destroy the city of Sodom with little obvious help.

The New Zealand Woman's Weekly has been the recipient of a New Zealand Skeptics' Bent Spoon Award. Does Broadsheet, "New Zealand's feminist magazine", make a more intelligent response to matters of interest to Skeptics?

Anabolic steroids were in the news during the Commonwealth Games and Dr Michael Kennedy has been studying their use by athletes for the past ten years. His conclusion is that "anabolic steroids have no effect on aerobic sports, such as running and swimming, but may lead to a small improvement in the performance of trained weightlifters." He quotes a 1972 study that showed when athletes were given placebo and told they were steroids, they got stronger and trained harder.

(From the London Sunday Times Supplement)

A talk given to the 1989 NZCSICOP Conference, Christchurch

The Skeptics have been saddened by the deaths of two of our most lively and engaged members.

We want to be active Skeptics but there is always something real to do and anyway the lunatic fringe aren't daft enough not to charge admission. (Our scepticism has financial limits.) But, one hot holiday evening, a free talk sponsored by the "Emin Foundation" was announced. With joy in the feeling of joining a jihad we went along—only to fail!

Dr Campbell's lecture at the 1989 Conference was an excellent piece of science education. The following article has a little physics, but is mainly a behind-the-scenes exposé of scientific show biz. It was prepared for The New Zealand Physicist.

Massey University Palmerston North August 17,18,19, 1990

The following article appeared in The New Zealand Herald of 6 September 1989. It was the most comprehensive coverage of the 1989 Conference to appear in the national press.

One of the highlights of the 1989 Conference was an entertaining history of the paranormal and pseudo-science in New Zealand. Part of Dr McGeorge's talk follows, beginning with his account of an attempt early this century to control quackery by legislative means.

This will be the last editorial that I write as in September, my wife and I will leave for Thailand, where we shall be doing voluntary work. The first issue of the Newsletter went to 80 members, the last one went to 180 (with another 55 going in bulk to the U.S.A.). Such growth in just over 3 years is very gratifying and the credit for that belongs to our members who have so faithfully sent in articles and cuttings. (Especial thanks to Malcolm McCleary who has just sent me more material on the infamous Time Life series of loony books. $35 a throw). I am not naturally efficient, and if I have failed to use your contribution, I apologise. It was my policy to use everything sent to me and if I failed in this it was not intentionally. Thanks are also due to Mark Davies and his gang at Vic who, apart from the first few issues, typed out the material, duplicated it and stapled it together. If you look back over the past issues, you can immediately tell when Mark took over by the startling improvement in the layout and appearance of the newsletter.

I wonder if scepticism toward pseudoscience has any contribution to make to the abortion debate?

And there was the perhaps inevitable clairvoyant, offering to point out the location of the gold for a share of the spoils (he eventually told Kelly that he was looking miles away tom the right place). Kelly had never placed his faith in clairvoyants and he was not likely to now, but he allowed himself to be convinced that this one, a young African man, should be allowed a trial. In the event, all they got out of it was a memorably hilarious day.

Keith Lockett, our hard-pressed and indefatigable Editor, has particular difficulty in getting good material for the NZ Skeptic and it turns out that he is not alone in his editorial problems. One overseas skeptics group editor has offered a free subscription to the US Skeptical Inquirer to anyone who agrees to write a regular column. Another editorial, from the Iowa group, complains that "material was in short supply, as was time" and that "sometimes the time involved in putting together a newsletter like this can become large". These problems, which Keith will recognise readily, meant that their Fall issue was late and had to be combined with the Winter issue. Even then it was about the same size as one of our regular issues.

" 'Alternative' medicine is usually defended by a 'skeptical' argument, that we should keep our minds open." Petr Skrabanek in his article "Demarcation of the absurd"1 looked for guidelines on quite how open we should leave our minds and for how long. As he put it "Anything is possible. 'You have to keep your mind open'—until your brains drop out." He argues that we should be prepared to express unbelief because we can always change our minds, but by being gullible or keeping the mind too wide open we "lose reason from the very beginning."

Reprinted from the British and Irish Skeptic.

Sometimes a programme really makes one think about how television defines what is important for us to know about.

God forgot to make, and which, therefore,

Extract From Act of God by F. Tennyson Jesse, a novel published in the 1930's.

The Creationists' tactics in getting their ideas accepted are not to promote their own (the biblical) version of creation but to attack the "orthodox" scientific view. A constant barrage of criticism of evolutionary theory and of geological theories on age and origin of the earth (and universe) is levelled with the aim of discrediting the theory or theories. Then, with a nimble leap sideways, it is concluded that "The Alternative" explanation is just as likely to be true, "the alternative" being of course the Genesis account. This ploy cleverly presents the biblical account as a viable alternative to an existing scientific theory thereby conferring upon the account the status of an "alternative scientific theory" and obscuring its real nature—that of a religious notion. This constant attack forces scientists into a defensive position—defending their theories by rebutting the creationist arguments.

In your November 1987 issue, Dennis Dutton (page 3) asks whether it matters that sick people, especially cancer sufferers, are not discouraged from using "alternative" or "complementary" treatments, The answer of course is the one that he himself has given: it does and it doesn't.

Nostradamus and the Millenium. By John Hogue. Bloomsbury/Roulston Greene. 1987. 209 pp. Illustrations. $45,

Doris Stokes, the medium superstar, was a fraud, says a British author, Ian Wilson, in his book, "The After Death Experience."

I had intended to make this issue one devoted to the conference and was going to reprint all the talks and discussions there. However the conference was such an overwhelming success and there was such a fine attendance, that it would be a waste to reprint what so many had heard in person. I therefore asked all those who spoke to give me their second thoughts on their talks, the things they meant to say but forgot, the replies they would like to have made in the discussions, the witty rejoinders that came to them in the middle of the night after we had all gone home. Most of the speakers have had nothing to add but I should like to make a correction to the impression left with my hearers.

Do you have any small quotations or one-liners (even two-liners) that you think other members might appreciate—send them to the editor.

"Critical thinking" is the name given to a way of reasoning, in everyday language, which is a great benefit to everybody who uses it. It is a tool which can be used to improve our understanding of other people's arguments, to improve our own reasoning, to improve decision making, and to aid communication. It is especially useful for skeptics and debunkers. It is also a new idea, since in the past people have never been taught how to reason properly using everyday language, which is how most of us reason most of the time. Most of us could improve our thinking considerably by using critical thinking methods. I would like to see the Skeptics involved in the promotion of this subject.

Rhodes, which gave the classical Greek world one of its seven wonders, also gave it Cleobulus, one of the seven wise men. The recent search for the lost 100-foot bronze Colossus, prompted by the visions of an Australian clairvoyante, revealed nothing except, perhaps, that there is little wisdom left on the island.

With a magician-like sleight-of-hand, British faith healer Melvin Banks delivered joyful smiles and apparent cures to many who queued for his healing at Hamilton's Assembly of God Church last night.

No two American faith healers are exactly alike since they are competing in a crowded market place, but they do have enough features in common to make a general survey possible. This account of how 'big name' healers work is put together from reports by skeptics who have attended their meetings.

Faith healing, like the fundamentalism it is often associated with, is a generic term, rather than a specific one. The New Guinea tribesman consulting a witch doctor for a potent spell to cure him, the quiet prayer meeting for a friend in hospital, the Indian girl who immerses herself in the waters of the Ganges to aid her infertility are all exercising faith healing. The oft- reported efficacy of placebos on people suffering from chronic pain serves as a reminder that the power of faith may sometimes outdo rational, modern medicine.

This issue contains three varied articles on medicine, all by members. They are meant to be provocative and I hope that members will respond. Member Jim Woolnough of Auckland kindly sent me the October issue of "The N.Z. Psychic Gazette". At only 80c an issue it is value packed and I urge all members to buy one copy. This issue is worth the money for the front page poem about one's best friend, the dog (I'm clumsy and sweet and get under your feet, etc). There are articles on numerology, the psychic aura of animals and photographing ghosts. There are also the advertisements for psychic counselling, postal psychometry, Karma destiny, holistic spiritual massage, for pendulums and reflexology balls (no jokes now, please).

This tape was very intermittent and parts of this account will seem disconnected and bitty. In addition, Gordon had some excellent slides and diagrams which obviously we can not reproduce here.

By all accounts the first annual meeting of the Society at. Dunedin recently was a great success. This edition of the Skeptic has been designated as a conference special as we thought that members would welcome a permanent record of an historical occasion. The timing of the conference was determined by David Marks' departure and this meant that several of us were unable to go. 1 could not go because I had to supervise the dress rehearsal of the school play (If you want to know, Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco and a great success).

I wedged the car between two others. We'd found a park at Jast. It was an orderly suburb. Street lights flickered to life. A boy swished past on a skateboard.

Thank you for your letter of 21 August and your expression of concern about our "Tonight Show" broadcasts by Mary Fry.

Pseudoscience in its various manifestations is now enjoying enormous popularity, is increasingly well organised and politically powerful. We can not identify pseudoscience by its errors. Seven hundred years ago Astrology was as wrong as now but was not pseudoscience, we might call it protoscience. The discovery of Polywater and the rush of confirming experiments was not pseudoscience. We know now that it was due to contaminated apparatus and wishful thinking and no one now has any evidence for it, so eventually its errors became known,

I would like to thank Dr David Marks and the Committee of the N.Z. Skeptics for inviting me over and to Dr Dennis Dutton and Ricky Farr for their hospitality. I am glad to be at the first convention of the New Zealand Skeptics. Having organised the first two conventions in Australia, I know how much work is involved and am glad someone else, Dr David Marks, is organising this one.

I return this born-again spoon to you as a symbol of the power of the press. I assure you I have no knowledge of what sleight of hand unbent it. I only left it in the newsroom for a few moments, too.