The new Australian mini-series Apple Cider Vinegar was just released on Netflix. The series dramatises the true story of Australian Belle Gibson, who was a wellness influencer who falsely claimed to have cured her terminal brain cancer through diet and alternative medicine. She released an app, and later a recipe book, called The Whole Pantry, and pocketed $300K in donations meant for charity.
Our ongoing plagiarism project is going well - thanks to the people who reached out and offered to help with running the text we have through TurnItIn. We're now receiving reports from two different academics who are putting the documents through two different plagiarism detectors. Our evidence, and the website we're building to showcase it, is coming together well. It's been a lot of work so far, but there's a lot still to do, so we'll keep working until we've built the most thorough case we're able to put together - we really want to make sure we do this well, as it involves serious accusations.
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.
I once met Katherine Smith, the Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Natural Medicine (not a magazine I'd recommend reading - it'll make you angry!). We had an enjoyable chat, and as we were at a wellness and spiritual festival, WellFest, she had no idea I was a skeptic. She showed me her folder of photos and cuttings about the “synchronicity” she'd experienced in her life - a series of spirals, stretching from a spiral painting she made as a young child, through to photos she'd taken in the '80s with faint spirals in the background, and a recent picture of a weird glowing spiral in the sky she'd cut out from a newspaper. I told her that I recognised the sky spiral, that it was a picture from Norway of a Russian rocket booster. Of course she was having none of it - the spiral in the sky was a sign for her, part of a message the universe was sending her through a series of events too unlikely to be coincidence. And of course she wasn't interested in reading into this phenomenon any further - she'd decided what it was, and what it meant to her, and that was enough.
This week we take a look at the Broadcasting Standards Authority decision about a complaint from NZDSOS against Seven Sharp. We look at the Sovereign Citizen "Sheriffs" disruption of an ANZAC service, and Bronwyn continues her series delving into MLMs - this week looking at Arbonne.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, propaganda raises its head. Propaganda has always been a tool of war (and peace) but we're seeing escalation to new levels.
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.
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.
Cynthia Shakespeare, Tony Vignaux and I are proud to report that we held a remarkably successful winter lecture series in June. We had organised speakers for local Skeptics before, with attendances of 30 or so, but this time we decided to group three speakers a week or so apart at the same venue, and advertised them jointly. We did a broader-than-usual mailout of a nice professional-looking flyer that included a map. Door charges were $2 to cover room hire and refreshments, but even at that low price we made a modest profit.
An 80-minute cassette of excerpts from Hugh Young's "World of Science" radio series—ESP?, Astrology*, Creationism, Phrenology, and how to recognise pseudoscience.
The first Wellington psychic Mary Fry knew of her terminated contract with Radio New Zealand was when a friend rang up and said her husband had seen it in the newspaper.