Articles tagged with "john"

When I wrote my article about the MENZ website a couple of weeks ago, I briefly mentioned John Potter, the site's admin, and his connection to the Centrepoint commune/cult as the son of guru Bert Potter. I provided a couple of links to further information, and mentioned that readers should look into Centrepoint if they weren't already familiar with the details of just how bad things became. Journalist and DeCult conference founder Anke Richter messaged me and suggested that readers might want to read her interview of John Potter, the “absent father” of the MENZ website, that came out in North & South magazine in 2021. It's a fascinating read, and gives some useful background that may help to explain why John runs a men's advocacy website full of misinformation and woman-hating rhetoric.

Patrick Medlicott published a piece in our last newsletter about a talk on New Zealand's response to climate change - about what we're currently doing, and what we should be doing. One of our newsletter subscribers, Mike, reached out to me after he received the newsletter, expressing his confusion about the article:

John Campbell recently released a new TV show on TVNZ where he investigates the controversial Destiny Church and its leader, “apostle” Brian Tamaki. The show is called Under His Command, and it's quite short - running to five episodes, each only around 15 minutes long.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing Reddit images (I guess it's my old-school version of Tik Tok), when I came across a post extolling the virtues of the Throckmorton Sign as a diagnostic tool. This tool is named after Thomas Bentley Throckmorton, an early 20th century American neurologist.

One of our members emailed us last week asking about a climate change denier's blog article.

The further I explore the rabbit hole of fringe groups, the more I find out about the kiwis who were a large part of the fabric of these organisations - men like William Chesterman (BOTA) and David Mayo (Scientology), who made significant contributions to their respective organisations. Or, the variety of kiwis who earned the appellation of first New Zealander to establish the first New Zealand branch of an overseas religion or spiritual group of their choosing

Skeptic Steven Novella recently published an interesting open letter to cranks. In it he speaks in a very forthright, honest way about people who email him and pronounce that they have figured out something that overturns science, or have single-handedly solved one of science's many unsolved puzzles. Steven explains in the letter about the importance of peer review, and talks of the arrogance of those who think they're smarter than the combined wisdom of the world's experts. He makes a really good point that the proper route to making your claims public, and ensuring they are properly vetted and tested, is a lot of hard work - and it's this hard work that cranks are keen to bypass, often preferring to instead jump straight to making claims without designing experiments, and publishing books rather than writing scholarly articles.

We've talked about purported psychic medium Thomas John before. He's a shady character whose real name is Thomas John Flannagan. Previously convicted of stealing security deposits from renters after posting bogus apartment ads on Craigslist, and having also worked as a drag queen, he's moved on to being a celebrity psychic medium.

John was Interviewed by CUSP regular and Skeptic Chair Craig Shearer

Six of us skeptics went along to Father John Rea's healing event on Tuesday in Tawa, Wellington. John is a well known healer in New Zealand, and he's appeared on my skeptical radar in the past for making claims about being able to treat cancer.

In December 1952, letters appeared in the Otago Daily Times reporting sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects across the length of New Zealand. The story was apparently quite convincing, as the correspondents were relatively respectable people scattered widely around the country.

John Welch seems to think that knee-jerk name-calling and immediate dismissal equates to scientific consideration. His constant ridiculing of many conditions with psychological components amounts to narrow-minded materialism. For those of us who have worked with severe cases of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) it seems bizarre to deny that the symptoms reflect a real underlying pathology of brain and emotional functioning. And of course, shell shock has been described since early in human recorded history. Denying its reality as a condition and disputing any need for treatment simply relegates those affected to ongoing suffering, but will not cause the condition to evaporate.

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.

Three sketpics go head to head with a creationist lecturer.

Around 300BCE there started a school of Greek philosophy called Skepticism. It continued for centuries, but was more like dogmatic doubt than the modern version. Bertrand Russell put their creed as "Nobody knows, and nobody can know". They may simply have a bad press. Carneades, one-time head of the skeptical academy, was accused of denying the possibility of all knowledge. In fact he seems to have denied the possibility of certain knowledge, a very different thing.

Some of you may recall Mike plugging the following two books at the conference. Both are concerned with the anti-science backlash, promulgated mostly by the academic left in the USA: post-modernism, relativism, radical feminist critiques of science, ethnocentric science, and so on. It's a movement that's beginning to assert itself here, and we should be informed.

When reading the latest issue of the NZ Skeptic, I was somewhat dismayed to find that both our worthy Chair-Entity, and our Hokum Locum failed to appreciate the difference between a chemist and a pharmacist/druggist. Although this is a common failure on the part of the general public I would have expected better from fellow Skeptics.

Researchers in Kansas City recently went to five professional astrologers with the horoscope of convicted serial murderer John Wayne Gacy. Without knowing to whom it belonged, they described him as having a "well rounded personality", that he could "offer a good role model" and that he would "be excellent for working around young people."