Articles tagged with "government"

You probably remember a previous scheme for pumped hydro at Lake Onslow in central Otago, which was postulated by the previous government as being perhaps useful in New Zealand's low lake level dry years.

Buckle up for a deep dive on Sovereign Citizens and the law in New Zealand.

It's less than a week before my skeptical road trip to try to find the Kaimanawa wall, on the way up to Auckland to visit the new Mormon temple. We're looking forward to meeting up with people for brunch on Sunday, and we're also looking to see if there's anything weird and wonderful we can do on the Sunday afternoon or evening. Maybe a visit to see Brian Tamaki spout his vitriolic hatred would be fun?

Astute reader that you are, it has probably not escaped your notice that politics has taken a turn for the conspiratorial in the last few years. We've recently seen a rise in anti-vaxxers, sovereign citizens, and people convinced that They (whoever They are) made up a global disease in a bid for control over the populace.

I trust you all voted in our recent fractious election, even if your vote was “None of the above”, as democracy is more precious than some people realise. Democracy is under fire in many parts of the world, as people become sceptical about its benefits, or as some awful leaders and their parties come to power, or (as is the case in the US) threaten to. But there is another way of looking at the purpose of democracy, as proposed by the eminent philosopher Karl Popper.

Eastern Lightning began in 1991 as an offshoot of a Protestant church in Henan, China. In the late 80s and early 90s, other small independent Christian sects were sprouting up all over China that were warning that the apocalypse was coming, and claiming they possessed powers of healing and exorcism. In previous articles, Bronwyn has written on the history of the movement's leaders and presence in NZ, while Dan and Mark have both discussed their experiences within the group. This time round, I'm going to talk about how the Eastern Lightning church grew and survived in China. Most of the information is drawn from Emily Dunn's book Lightning from the East: Heterodoxy and Christianity in Contemporary China.

Today I'd like to bring something slightly different to this august newsletter, by discussing crank economics - something that exists in abundance, but can be a little difficult to discuss in venues like this. For one thing, it falls outside the standard set of sceptical skills, and for another it is essentially impossible to discuss crank economic ideas without implicating political beliefs, and that's a fraught exercise at the best of times.

This week's newsletter starts off (relatively) lightly, with an article from Katrina about p-hacking. Katrina's been writing some great articles for us recently, and it was a pleasure to have her on our podcast a couple of weeks ago. We're hoping to have her join us again to talk about her new article this week, and if you're both a listener and a reader you can get a sneak preview of what she'll be talking about.

On the 28th of April 2020 Dr. Yan Limeng, a virologist from China, arrived in the United States requesting asylum and claiming to have evidence that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered and released by the Chinese government. She was a legitimate scientist working in the field, having published articles on coronaviruses in reputable journals like The Lancet and Nature. The FBI interrogated her for several hours, and she was then permitted to stay in the US. Her safe passage out of Hong Kong was arranged and paid for by Chinese dissidents in the US allied with Steve Bannon (Breitbart news founder and former chief strategist to President Trump).

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.

I continue to monitor the emails sent out by the Voices for Freedom crowd. My reaction is usually a combination of disbelief and despair. My impression is that they're struggling to remain relevant. Now that the vaccine mandates have disappeared, they seem to be concentrating on all manner of whacky stances.

This coming week has the threat of action against the government with yet another protest organised by Destiny Church and its leaders Brian (variously adorned with the title of Bishop, or Apostle) and Hannah Tamaki.

This week has seen the introduction of the Traffic Light System to replace the COVID lockdown levels currently in place. This will take effect once all of the country's DHB's achieve a 90% fully vaccinated rate for their populations.

And speaking of anti-vaxxers, there's another one that's emerged from the woodwork.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

Of all the people who spoke publicly about this week's arrest, Amy Benjamin, a senior lecturer of international law at AUT, was the most surprising to me.

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.

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

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

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

I have a super-secret email account that I use to sign up to various mailing lists, including the Voices for Freedom mailing list. Boy do they put out some propaganda!

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

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.

A member emailed us this week to share an unaddressed letter she received in her mailbox. Thankfully the anonymous author of the document has put in the hard work of joining all the unconnected dots of some of the conspiracies I've mentioned above, and more, and has figured out that the overall aim of the New Zealand government is transhumanism - apparently we're going to be converted to Human 2.0 via the COVID vaccine. As a technology enthusiast I'm having a hard time seeing the downside to being upgraded, although I have to admit to being worried that, given Bill Gates' involvement, my new nanobots may be running a Windows based OS. Hopefully I'll be able to flash them to a more stable BSD or Linux OS, just as soon as I figure out where my serial port is.

The 'free speech' debate is not a new one for NZ. But the past couple of years have certainly brought it into the spotlight. The screening of the anti-vaxxer film Vaxxed, the racist cartoons of Al Nisbet, the visits of the controversial Canadians Southern and Molyneux – the contentious case studies seem just to keep on coming. Magnified through the lens of social media, these have broadened the discussion about important matters, but have also risked polarisation and at times confusion, as half-truths and memes have sometimes replaced informed discussion.

Vinny Eastwood has suggested that the new head of the Labour Party is in league with the Freemasons:

FYI is a great website for making Official Information Act requests. You can submit a request to a government department through the site and all correspondence is made public on the site.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/health/judge-to-sentence-parents-whose-little-boy-died-of-bacterial-meningitis-384237241.html

Tom DeLonge, the guitarist of a rock band in the US which was popular in the early 2000s has denied rumours that he's quit the band to focus on research into UFOs and aliens.

Dane Wigington, lead researcher for GeoEngineering Watch says:

Jesus Christ lives on Venus. Earth has narrowly escaped invasion by the Fish Men. Two machines pull in healing energy from deep space and spread it around Earth each night.