It feels like the new National/Act/NZ First coalition government has been pushing through a lot of changes to legislation in their first term, and much of it has been done through Urgency - a way of fast-tracking important, time-sensitive legislation.
Clavicular, better known to his mum and dad as Braden Peters, is a 20 year old internet influencer who promotes an extreme beauty regime known as “looksmaxxing”.
The Auckland Deep Thinkers is a group on the MeetUp website that meet both in-person and online. The group's description states:
Louis Theroux's latest documentary, Inside the Manosphere, dropped on Netflix on March 11th. In it, Theroux hangs around a few notable influencers to see what's really going on.
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:
It has been a bad week for anyone who takes a birth control pill as a contraceptive or an abortifacient. Well, specifically a bad week for people in America or whose health care is impacted by the decisions of the President of the United States.
I have an out-of-town meeting, and the other party is bringing a lawyer. I print a recent court decision that I think could be very relevant. I read it, this takes a while, but I come to the conclusion that nope, it's not relevant to my case. Time wasted. I'm in a rush and there is no recycling bin near me, so I put the court decision in my bag and start driving.
I realise this is pretty old news now, and I apologise for that, but just in case some of you missed it when it happened, or you didn't feel it was attention-worthy, I wanted to discuss this thing that happened a month ago.
Over the past week or two, I've been having email conversations with a person from the other side of the skeptical fence. This person I'll refer to as Mark - which is his real name, but I'll not give any more information about him. (By the way, our skeptical newsletter writer Mark Honeychurch has sworn he's not running some elaborate joke on me!)
As I've commented in previous issues of the newsletter, I listen to the excellent podcast Be Reasonable, hosted by Michael Marshall (Marsh, as he's colloquially known). In the latest episode (#083, released Wednesday 26th July), he interviewed Nyjon Eccles, a “functional medicine” doctor from the UK. He's a promoter of thermography, which is an Infra-red imaging technique used to scan women's breasts in an attempt to screen for differences in temperature from which, it is alleged, they can infer a possible tumour - that is, breast cancer.
In her “purest form”, a traditional wife (or the more hashtaggable Tradwife) is a woman who takes a traditional gender role in their marriage and household, and forgoes a career to focus on their family and raising children. One could be forgiven for wondering what makes tradwives different from housewives, for which the answer is the emphasis placed by tradwives on submission to their husband, as well as a heavy dose of 1950s aesthetics or rural landscapes, along with a variety of homey and benign hashtags like #homemaker or #cooking, and the occasional scripture if Jesus is on your speed dial.
In just a few days a curious annual internet event will begin: No Nut November (NNN). For those not in the know, nutting is a colloquial term for a man ejaculating - and No Nut November is the idea that it's good for people to take time off from ejaculating during November. At places like Reddit's “NoFap” group (fapping is a slang word for masturbating), people talk through November about how well they're doing with the challenge, which has somehow morphed from being an internet joke to something that many young men are taking seriously.
I'll preface this by saying that this is a topic I'm certainly not qualified to talk about.
A.C.E., or Accelerated Christian Education, is a Christian based curriculum used in New Zealand - both in some Christian schools, and by parents who homeschool their children. The curriculum boasts that it covers from kindergarten to year 13, and that it is recognised by New Zealand universities.
As one of the tweeters for NZ Skeptics, I've helped accumulate a diverse collection of followers, who inspire and educate me. However, lately, people with very different, and, frankly, misogynistic viewpoints have jumped into my bubble. This has also been an interesting and educating experience, because there is nothing like having your ideas challenged to get you to examine them critically. I've also impressed myself at my ability to live by the mantra “don't feed the trolls”.
On the 12th May, 2009, so-called psychic Kelvin Cruickshank of 'Sensing Murder' fame came to Wanaka to wow the locals with a one night show in the local town hall. It sounded like an interesting educational night out for my wife - Coleen and me, so we booked a couple of tickets.
The NZ Herald has published a story about a woman whose terminal cancer was cured after she took cannabis oil. Of course, there's more to this story - isn't there always. In this case, the woman used both cannabis oil and chemotherapy to fight her cancer - no prizes for guessing which of those two will have helped her more. It also turns out that cancer was only "terminal" if the woman had not received any treatment. This is not what is normally considered to be a diagnosis of terminal cancer - terminal usually means that the cancer is not treatable with medicine, not that the cancer is not treatable without medicine.
A claim has been made by Noel Hilliam that European settlers beat Maori to settling NZ, and that reconstruction of skulls from a woman and man have shown that they originated in Wales and the Mediterranean, respectively. The woman had blue eyes and blonde hair, and the
An Australian woman with a newborn has passed whooping cough onto her daughter, and now wishes she'd taken the vaccine she was offered:
The Dalai Lama has spoken about his successor, and suggested that if it's a woman, they would have to be attractive.
I'm a men's health promoter working out of Christchurch and have some reflections after reading the discussions about the Cartwright report.
Linda Bryder responds to an article in our last issue.
Concerns over animal welfare issues on farms have seen Rural Women New Zealand and Fonterra rapped with the Bent Spoon, the annual recognition of gullibility and a lack of critical thinking awarded by the NZ Skeptics.
This article is a response to 'Truth is the daughter of time, and not of authority': Aspects of the Cartwright Affair by Martin Wallace, NZ Skeptic 96.
While in the gym, Alison Campbell considers some health issues.
The 'Unfortunate Experiment' at National Women's Hospital has entered the national folklore as a notorious case of medical misconduct. But there is still disagreement about what actually happened.
Yet another Sensing Murder veteran struts her stuff.
Stuart Landsborough has an interesting night out with one of the Sensing Murder mediums.
An Auckland University study reveals the costs-financial and emotional-of telephone psychics.
Four Papua New Guinea women, believed by fellow villagers to have used sorcery to cause a fatal road crash, were tortured with hot metal rods to confess, then murdered and buried standing up in a pit (Stuff, 25 January).
As skeptics, we fight to uphold certain freedoms: freedom of enquiry, freedom of speech, academic freedom. The battles are worth waging to enjoy the blessings these principles bring, including knowledge and understanding, and because the alternative is darkness.
A female photographer was banned from flying with the Romania socccer team because of superstitions that women bring bad luck, according to Romanian sports daily Gazeta Sporturilor.
In the wake of the green-lipped mussel debacle, the Australian Menopause Society (AMS) convened an expert panel of doctors to discuss controversial areas of menopausal medicine. Alternative therapies are a boom industry in Australia and New Zealand (worth in excess of $1 billion in Australia) with menopausal women the highest users.
One of the arguments presented in favour of this year's Bent Spoon award was that the NZ Skeptics increasingly provide an early warning system against strange notions from abroad. For example, Skeptical activities helped New Zealand develop some early immunity to the worst excesses of the "repressed memory" virus. While many members supported the Hitting Home award on similar grounds, some members may have wondered whether Hitting Home was no more than a local aberration and that we were seeing international demons where none existed.
The results of a study of women attending the Bristol Cancer Help Centre have concentrated a few minds. The findings published in The Lancet last week may be baffling, but they are undoubtedly disturbing: women with breast cancer who attended the centre in addition to having conventional treatment fared very much worse than a control group of women who received conventional treatment alone.
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!
A HAMILTON woman claims the predictions of a computerised horoscope she subscribed to were so accurate that she had a nervous breakdown.
—in the New Scientist, 21 January 1988
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.
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.