Articles tagged with "service"

I've been a little slow to pick up on this one, but there's a company in the US, Reflect Orbital, that is offering services based on having mirrors in space. Given that the company's previous name was Tons of Mirrors, it would seem that their aim is likely to be to imitate Elon Musk's Starlink by launching thousands of mirrors into low-earth orbit, and pointing them back at earth. One article reports that the company plans to have 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, with the eventual aim of launching a quarter of a million satellites.

Personal VPN services are all the rage now, and you may have watched or heard a lot of “host-read advertising” for them on YouTube and popular podcasts. They purport to provide fantastic advantages, while also making alarming claims about who is out to get your personal data on the internet. Today I'm going to analyse some of those claims, using my 20-something years of Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry experience.

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:

I've written about Voices for Freedom many times in the past. For review, they're a group of anti-vaxxers and “freedom” lovers and generally anti-government agitators. They started back in 2020 during the first year of the pandemic. They claim to have quite a following, though of course, that's unverified.

Last Friday I attended a service for Robert Woolf. Long time members of NZ Skeptics would recognise Robert's name as a committee member, and conference attendee. He also attended Skeptics in the Pub in Auckland back when it was first running.

Back in April's newsletter, Craig talked about David Farrier's investigative work uncovering alleged harms that happened within Arise Church.

Highden Manor House (Source)

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.

Arise church is near to my heart - when I first arrived in New Zealand back in 2005, my wife joined the church while it was still small, and before it was even called Arise. Since then it has grown to be a behemoth - every so often I check on Arise's annual returns, and it seemed that each year they would expand enough to make about $1 million more than the previous year. At the moment that number stands at $13 million in income for the last year. They also own several properties worth a combined $21 million, including a church building in Wellington worth $10 million or more.

The population of New Zealand is changing – and not just because there are more of us, including many new immigrants, or because people are living longer. The other great change is that fewer people are religious and New Zealand is increasingly secular.

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

I told you all three weeks ago that I was going to visit the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosicrucians, and I can report that I survived the meeting intact. My friend Tim and I had a great chat with three of the group's members about their beliefs, and about the history of the organisation. Much of what we heard sounded very familiar, with an organisational structure that reminded me of Scientology (making your way up the “Bridge”) and a belief in visualisation that was akin to Rhonda Byrne's “The Secret”, where if you imagine something enough it will come true for you.

Last week (December 10th) TVNZ's Seven Sharp programme had an item featuring a Ponsonby-based psychic medium by the name of Kimberly Stewart. The story was based on the premise that because 2020 has been such a stressful year, that people have been seeking the services of psychics more. Business is booming! As is typical of these items, they offered a psychologist's opinion for balance.

Back in March through April, a petition was raised by naturopath Autumn Falk at change.org to: “Ask the NZ Government to include Natural Health as an essential service during Covid-19”

We've all heard and seen the marketing hype of supplements and alternative medicine in various media. They promise so much, how could anyone survive without them? The global supplement market alone is was worth USD $96 Billion in 2017 according to Research and Markets July 2018 report. The global Complementary and Alternative Medicine Market is estimated to be worth $196.9 Billion by 2025 by Grand View Research in their November 2018 report. In the same report they claim nearly two thirds of the developed and developing world have used one form or another of complimentary or alternative medicine.

We are proud to mention the honour our regular contributor Siouxsie Wiles received this year.

This morning I went along to two church services with a visiting academic, Hamed, who is over in New Zealand from Iran. He had never seen a Christian service before, and had been told to ask me about taking him along to a service. I decided to show him two extremes of what church can be. We started at the Cathedral of St Paul, and then went to Arise evangelical church.

Last Sunday I went to church - not once, but twice. Arise is a large evangelical church that started in Wellington about 15 years ago, and has grown and spread to several other cities.

Family First may be de-registered as a charity soon. They have been sent a notice of de-registration from Charities Services, but plan to fight it in court. They have previously defended against an attempt to be de-registered last year.

One of New Zealand's most senior journalists, and a long-standing member of the NZ Skeptics, has announced his retirement (Dominion Post, 2 December, Sunday Star Times, 3 December). Frank Haden has been best known in recent years for his columns in the Sunday Star Times, but his 50 year career in journalism has included time as editor of the Sunday Times and assistant editor of the Dominion.

I was interested to read a recent article in the NZ Skeptic on Healing Touch, as I am a consultant anaesthetist at Wellington Hospital.

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.