2021 Conference: It’s a Wrap

This weekend was our joint Australian and New Zealand conference, Skepticon 2021. Thank you so much to those of you who joined us, it was an amazing weekend with fascinating talks and I hope you enjoyed it all as much as I did.

Craig will give you his thoughts on our conference next weekend, but for me personally it was great to be able to work closely with the Australian Skeptics and bring together such a diverse group of professionals to speak on topics they were passionate about.

Day one started with Dr Mahmood Hikmet talking about self-driving cars and ethics. In relation to the trolley problem, and many similar quandaries that a self-driving vehicle might find itself in, Mahmood pointed out that often the safest option available is simply to apply the brakes! However, when it comes to more real-world options, things get more complicated.

Later in the morning Dr Siouxsie Wiles talked about how her name became attached to a COVID conspiracy about Bill Gates and a company she started to make science communication videos called Lucy Ferrin. It reminded me of another conspiracy about her I heard this year, on the Counterspin conspiracy show. Damien De Ment claimed that Siouxsie’s work in bioluminescence was going to be used in the COVID vaccine so that we would not need a vaccine passport – instead, the authorities would just be able to shine a special light on us, and if we glowed they would know we had been vaccinated.

At the end of the first day, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz gave a great talk about Ivermectin – detailing why people believed it was useful for treating COVID, how the evidence quickly came to show that it was not efficacious, and how some anonymously run websites like IVM Meta continued to support Ivermectin use even after it became obvious it was a dud.

On day two Dr Marc Wilson walked us through some of the research on what leads certain types of people to reject scientific evidence.  I particularly liked an image he shared which illustrates the correlations between different beliefs.

Sherrie D’Souza told us about some of the dangers of cults, and detailed her journey leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She played a particularly odious video from the JWs which tells kids why they won’t be allowed to celebrate their birthday.

Our conference came to a close with a fantastic talk from Judy Melinek and her husband TJ Mitchell about forensic pathology in the US and New Zealand. Their talk was informative and entertaining, and it was obvious from their talk that Judy is a consummate professional with real passion for her career, and that her husband has a keen interest in her work. They’ve even collaborated to write a biography, along with two fictional crime novels that don’t mangle the science.

Our Annual Awards

Craig Shearer announced the winners of our annual awards at the beginning of the second day of our conference, and it was accompanied by the following press release:

Every year the New Zealand Skeptics presents its awards to people and organisations who have impressed us or dismayed us, and this year it’s been hard to pick our winners because there have been so many choices!

The Bent Spoon Award is given to the organisation or individual which has shown the most egregious gullibility or lack of critical thinking in public coverage of, or commentary on, a science-related issue. In the age of the COVID pandemic, there have been many candidates, but one individual stands out:

Dr Simon Thornley, this year’s winner, is a Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. Dr Thornley stands out as an academic who has opposed NZ’s approach to dealing with COVID. He was one of the founders of the COVID PlanB group which opposed lockdowns, and signed onto the Great Barrington Declaration.

Dr Thornley has associated himself with fringe elements in NZ’s anti-government and anti-vaccine movements (such as Voices for Freedom) and has appeared as an expert witness for lawyer Sue Grey’s cases challenging the government’s rollout of the COVID vaccine. His comments have included personal attacks and threats of legal action against other NZ scientists, and has claimed they’re corrupt and will be convicted of crimes against humanity.

Most recently, Dr Thornley promoted the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID, and co-authored a paper which tried to link mRNA vaccines with miscarriages and other pregnancy complications, strongly recommending against vaccination for pregnant persons. Happily, this paper has now been retracted.

As an academic, we would expect he would know better. May he suffer the shame of being awarded the Bent Spoon! 

The New Zealand Skeptics recognises excellence in the media or in other high-profile people with our Bravo Awards. The pandemic has provided a fertile breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation. But many journalists and academics have stepped up and written pieces which explain the science behind COVID, the response to it, and also calling out those promoting misinformation and pseudoscience. The NZ Skeptics have chosen to award a record number of Bravos this year.

Siouxsie Wiles from University of Auckland, for making national and international appearances on the science behind COVID.

Toby Morris, cartoonist at The Spinoff, for creating animated explainers with Siouxie Wiles – with some great examples of effective science communication. These tools have been shared extensively, including being used by the World Health Organisation.

Charlie Mitchell, from Stuff, for a variety of investigative articles on pseudoscience promoters.

David Farrier, who runs the popular Webworm blog, for his commentary on people and groups promoting conspiracy theories; Billy TK, Sue Grey, Peter Mortlock of City Impact Church, the Tamakis from Destiny Church, and more.

Michael Baker, from the University of Otago Department of Public Health, for his science communication around COVID.

Hilary Barry, of TVNZ’s Seven Sharp, for her promotion of vaccines and for being a thorn in the side of anti-vaxxers.

Keith Lynch, of Stuff, for some great articles around COVID, explaining complex science in an easy to digest manner.

Helen Petousis-Harris, of the University of Auckland, for her great written responses to COVID vaccine myths.

Alison Campbell, blogger and retired lecturer from the University of Waikato, for her efforts helping journalists respond to COVID misinformation, her blogging and her constant presence on social media, calling out and correcting pseudoscience in the comment threads.

Finally, the Skeptic of the Year award is given to the skeptic who has had the most impact in skepticism within New Zealand. The award comes with a year’s free membership to the NZ Skeptics, and $500 of prize money.

This year the award is being given to a group rather than an individual – FACT Aotearoa.

The FACT group describes themselves as a grass-roots information organisation, working as a resource base for media, health professionals, activists and educators. They’ve been quick to jump on misinformation being promoted online and in public.  A few of their prominent wins include contacting venues to shut down in-person anti-vaxxer events, and initiating a complaint to NZ’s Law Society about anti-vax lawyer Sue Grey.

Were Satanists involved in the Travis Scott tragedy?

Astroworld is an annual music festival run by rapper Travis Scott in Texas. There was a tragedy at this year’s festival, a few weeks ago, when a crowd surge caused a crush and resulted in the deaths of 10 people – the latest being a 9 year old boy who died a few days ago from his injuries.

As we’ve seen with recent tragedies, especially in the US, it doesn’t take long for conspiracy rumours to start spreading. Often claims are made that horrific events were staged in order to influence the public, using “crisis actors” rather than real victims. Or sometimes it’s that the real perpetrator is a shady government group, and that those accused have been framed.

However, in this instance, the rumour that has already started making the rounds on Twitter, TikTok and other social media sites isn’t that the tragedy was faked, or a covert op – it’s that the event was a Satanic ritual, and that the deaths were ritual blood sacrifices. In fact even celebrities have been in on the act, with KISS guitarist Ace Frehley sharing this conspiracy on Facebook.

And a controversial pastor got in on the act as well. Pastor Greg Locke has a history of spreading bad COVID advice in the US, telling people that the pandemic is fake, the vaccine is a scam and that he would kick parishioners out of his church if they wore a mask. Here’s Greg describing a “prophetic dream” he apparently had last month:

And he’s now been spreading the idea that Satanism is behind Travis Scott’s music, his stage show and the deaths. Supposedly there are hints in Travis’ music that he is a Satanist, and the stage Travis performed on is meant to have had many hints, including a portal to hell and inverted crosses. Although I couldn’t find audio of Greg’s sermon, I was able to find video from a popular Christian YouTuber called Tina Golik who usually makes arts and crafts videos:

Yesterday a Catholic priest got in on the act, telling Fox News that the event was demonic.

Obviously this is nonsense, but it concerns me just how quickly these silly rumours can spread in the internet age. One person’s video posted online can give rise to more and more videos, with nobody bothering to check the validity of the original claims. It’s a house of cards, where the entire rumour is built on a couple of anonymous social media posts.

This whole thing also has a real feeling of the 1980s Satanic Panic witch hunts – a dark stain on the US where innocent parents and teachers were locked up for committing both farcical and gruesome child abuse crimes that they did not commit.

Jacinda Ardern is not selling cryptocurrency

For those who use Facebook – you may have seen a video advert recently using Jacinda Ardern as a way to promote a cryptocurrency. Obviously this is fake – Jacinda does not want you to “invest” your money in any crypto currency, and it’s very likely that there’s not even a real crypto currency or crypto company – just a website that will get you to transfer your hard earned money to scammers. Even if there was a real cryptocurrency involved, you would likely lose most or all of the money you risked. I saw people talking about this scam on Facebook, but I have enough layers of ad blocking at home that it proved too hard to get Facebook to show me any adverts at all, so I don’t have a copy of the video.

It’s not even the first time Jacinda’s been used in this way. Back in 2018 Facebook carried adverts saying that Jacinda had decided to invest half of the country’s reserves in a Bitcoin company. The advert’s link took unsuspecting users to a fake CNN website that had a made up news article about the Treasury buying a bitcoin startup, presumably with the intent of getting people to “invest” in buying shares in the company. Again, any transferred money would likely never be seen again.

And in 2020, the same thing happened again but with a fake One News article. This one claimed that Jacinda told Jesse Mulligan on The Project:

“It’s the single biggest opportunity I’ve seen in my entire lifetime to build a small fortune fast. I urge everyone to check this out before the banks shut it down.”

And this doesn’t just happen with Jacinda. Facebook ads use the names of celebrities who are known for taking risks that pay off, making bold but sensible decisions, or just being outspoken and having a lot of money, such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. This scam went even further last year when many celebrities had their Twitter accounts hacked, and messages were sent out from their accounts telling people to send a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin to an account and they would receive more money in return. Of course, everyone who did this (totalling a few million dollars) never saw their money again.

Here’s one scam video capitalising on Elon Musk’s recent investment in Dogecoin:

Note the computer generated voice and a promise of a reward of thousands of crypto coins. If this was Bitcoin, that would be worth millions, but the Shiba Inu coin is currently trading at $0.00005, or point zero zero five US cents per coin. (That being said, its current price is up 10 million percent from last year!)

In the case of Elon Musk the water is muddied, because he really has dabbled in cryptocurrencies in the past, and each time he’s tweeted about his investments the worth of the currency – both Bitcoin and Dogecoin – has shot up. So now people scour his tweets, looking for clues as to which cryptocurrency he might be investing in next.

One consistent aspect of these scams is the bad spelling and grammar that they use. It makes sense that scammers in the kinds of overseas countries that are well known for these kinds of scams, such as Nigeria, Russia, India and China, might not have very good English.

However there’s another potential reason for this bad grammar that’s been floating around the internet recently – that the typos are deliberate. There’s an idea that scammers are only looking for responses to their phishing from those that are the most gullible. If they were able to trick a lot of people into engaging with a scam, but ended up with many of them backing out before transferring money, it would end up wasting a lot of the scammer’s time. So supposedly bad spelling would scare away the more intelligent potential victims, only leaving those ripe for the picking to respond.

I’m not sure if I really believe this hypothesis, as I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case. There’s an assumption here that those who fail to notice bad spelling/grammar are more likely to fall for a scam. I think there’s an unsaid third trait here – stupidity. The hypothesis seems to hang on the ideas that people who can’t write well are stupid, and those who fall for scams are stupid, and that this makes the two groups synonymous.

Although there’s likely some crossover between IQ and writing ability, it’s definitely not a strong correlation. I’m a bit of a grammar nazi, and I see some very clever people writing some pretty bad English at times! And I think the correlation between IQ and likelihood of being scammed is likely to be even weaker. As a good example, it seems from some of the profiles I’ve read of people who have been scammed by Nigerian 419 scammers that this classic scam (involving the promise of a windfall of millions of dollars from a prince, if only you can help out with a couple of cash payments to help clear the money) has fooled a cross section of the community – from those unemployed and desperate for cash through to tenured professors.

So, whether you receive an email promising millions of dollars or see a video on social media talking about the next big thing in crypto, the rule of thumb is that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

We’re very close to our annual conference which we’re running in conjunction with the Australian Skeptics. I encourage you to check it out – and we’d love to have you there.

This past week’s seen more drama around COVID and vaccinations, and worryingly, increased cases and spread outside of Auckland. 

Read on below…

Craig Shearer

What are you doing on 20th and 21st of November…

…or up to 3 months after?

Our fantastic online conference – Skepticon 2021 – in conjunction with the Australian Skeptics is fast approaching. 

We’re online on 20th and 21st of November, but if you buy a ticket you don’t have to watch it live – you’ll be able to watch the talks at your leisure for up to 3 months afterwards.

We’ve got a fantastic bunch of speakers from both sides of the Tasman, as well as a few joining us from other parts of the world – speakers such as Richard Wiseman and Siouxsie Wiles, Susan Gerbic and Richard Saunders.

Full details are at the conference website and you can read the full program of talks. You can buy your ticket here:

https://www.skepticon.org.au/product/2021-tickets/

Come join us for a fun and informative weekend!

So, we’re pretty happy with this. While some will view the numbers with some distaste, it’s good to get our message out to a wider audience.

My favourite response to our tweet was this:

Vax exemptions scam

In my last newsletter from two weeks ago, I wrote about the vaccine exemptions that anti-vaxxers wanted to use. They intended to use the wording of section 7A of the COVID response act to exempt themselves from the requirements to be vaccinated for work in professions where the vaccination has been mandated – teaching, healthcare, etc. 

The wording of the section allowed for “suitably qualified health professionals” to issue exemptions to vaccination. 

Last week, the infamous bunch at Voices for Freedom set up an event in Palmerston North at Newbury Hall where people could turn up and, for $10 (or $20 for a family), be issued with a vaccine exemption certificate. The event was eventually cancelled and people left empty-handed. 

Director General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, last week commented about the vaccine exemptions being handed out:

“If someone is offering to sell you an exemption or otherwise suggesting that you could pay a fee for the service of getting an exemption, they are trying to rip you off.”

The government has since removed section 7A from the legislation and tightened things up around exemptions, requiring that these will need to be approved by the Ministry of Health.

This has put Voices for Freedom into a bit of a flurry, urgently setting up a Saturday night “CRITICAL WEBINAR 8pm for all affected by “no jab, no job” + exemptions”. 

Sue Grey was in court a couple of weeks ago, as I previously reported, representing aviation security workers from Christchurch who had lost their jobs after refusing to get the COVID vaccine. 

Well Sue Grey is now the subject of a format complaint to the law society. There have been multiple informal complaints in the past – I’ve written one myself – but this one is being taken seriously. It was organised by FACT Aotearoa and involved doctors and other lawyers.

You can read the text of the letter to the Law Society here: (PDF link)

Sue had until 5th November (this past Friday) to respond. It will be interesting to see what transpires, but the fact that other lawyers were involved should make the case fairly strongly.

Protest – TFRC and the Tamakis

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. 

As you’re no doubt aware, Brian has organised a couple of protests in Auckland during lockdown, which earned him two charges from police, and some time in jail, for breaching his previous bail conditions. (Amusingly, Hannah complained Brian was “treated like a prisoner”, which he was!)

Brain is currently bailed, under strict conditions that he comply with COVID-19 level requirements and not attend or organise protests, and not access the internet for the purpose of organising or inciting non-compliance. It would seem that those conditions aren’t being strictly enforced.

Destiny Church has an offshoot – The Freedoms and  Rights Coalition. It’s not clear who the coalition is between though. They have a website which, incidentally, has some awful letter spacing! Quite offensive to the eyes. Anyway, the domain was registered by Jenny Marshall who is Director of Operations at Destiny Church.

The latest action is a protest at Parliament in Wellington on Tuesday 9th November. “It is 9/11 for Adern & the Labour Government” – obviously alluding to September 11 attacks, which is kind of shocking really, and sounds a lot like a threat of domestic terrorism. (David Farrier has a good write up on this with some quite shocking developments.)

They’ve issued demands which include revoking all workplace vaccination mandates, returning to level 1, and removing the Auckland border.

If the demands aren’t actioned they’re threatening a “gridlock” involving cars, trucks and tractors blocking roads until their demands are met. 

Laughingly, they’ve suggested

“We will ask Apostle Brian Tamaki and the TFRC [The Freedoms and Rights Coalition] executive team to head up any potential negotiations with the NZ Police and the government”.

Destiny Church has a reputation of being very cash hungry. Obviously, lockdowns and having to run services virtually are affecting their cashflow, which could be why he’s referred to as EFTpostle Tamaki.

Bruising from COVID vaccines?

It continues to amaze me the lengths science deniers and anti-vaxxers will go to to try to convince people of vaccine harm. This week, Daniel published some pictures from an anti-vax group on our Facebook page, purporting to show extreme bruising after the COVID vaccine. You can take a look at Daniel’s post here but here’s a taste of the claimed bruising

The screenshots in the post make fascinating if alarming reading. There are people who claim they can smell vaccinated people (well, yes they can but do they smell any different from unvaccinated people? I’d be intrigued to see this demonstrated in a double-blinded experiment!)

These people are clearly detached from reality, and possibly the group that these posts and pictures were from is encouraging some sort of mass delusion. I’m no psychiatrist but I have a feeling it’s going to end badly when some of the most extreme people are backed into having to get vaccinated or likely deal with the consequences of COVID once they’re exposed to it, as we’ll likely all be at some point in the future.

Dominic Bowden on WellBeings

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen articles about Dominic Bowden on a new podcast about “wellbeing” called WellBeings. Dominic Bowden is a bit of a celebrity – having appeared on The Bachelor NZ amongst other shows.

The podcast purports to be science-based on how to live an extraordinary life. While the podcast mentions science quite often, from my initial listen to it, it appears to want to use the mantle of science for credibility, but doesn’t really follow through.

This week, the podcast is embracing Wim Hof, who promotes the idea of extreme cold and breathing techniques as a means of improving one’s health. The podcast is being promoted by Stuff, who have partnered with Bowden. The write-up of this week’s episode talks about sceptics: 

His message to the sceptics? “Be very critical. That polishes the diamond of the truth. Be critical, but have your two feet on the ground, because I’m doing my science.

“If you are still a sceptic, just try it once, and if it doesn’t work, never do it again. But you will see if you do it once… you are hooked.”

Um, no, that’s not how to tell if something works. 

Having listened to the episode, there’s some strong claims in there which we should be very sceptical of! (for example, that his method cured a woman of her endometriosis and allowed her to become pregnant.) Dominic Bowden himself seems to be a true believer, revealing that he’s been doing the Wim Hof method of breathing for the last five years. (Actually, in the first episode he made mention of breathing too, so it appears that’s his “thing”.)

Harriet Hall wrote about Wim Hof’s claims in a Science-based Medicine article.

Oh No, Ross and Carrie did a series of episodes that experiences the Wim Hof method. It’s very good.

Stuart Landsborough feedback

Last week Mark published an item from Stuart Landsborough, from Wanaka’s Puzzling World about his recent epiphany about how we can deal with climate change. I found Stuart’s item contained some great points, and it resonated with me. I’m worried about whether we’ll be able to prevent catastrophic climate change. 

We’ve had a few responses to Stuart’s item:

Jeff Bryant wrote:

“I like Stuart’s lateral thinking.

 

Unfortunately, the spread of wilding conifers creates an ever-increasing threat of fire hazard with climate change.  Just ask the residents of Ohau village who lost their homes a few years back.”

 

Lance Kennedy wrote:

“Stuart talks about fighting global warming by permitting wilding pines to flourish.  I would like to point out the big flaw in that argument.

 

Pines are flammable.   When we get a very hot and dry summer (guess what global warming promises!) they become very, very flammable.  It is kind of obvious what will happen if NZ ends up with vast areas of these pines.

 

We have a wonderful native rain forest.   Surprisingly, most of our rain forest trees are highly resistant to forest fire.  The only very flammable native trees are manuka and kanuka.  NZ native trees generate a forest that is long lasting.  

 

I come from a tree loving family.  My father was the founder of the Tauranga Tree Society, and he planted tens of thousands of trees in his time, and established the McLarens Falls Park.  He has an arboretum inside that park named after him.  I have been strongly influenced by his example.   Where my father has planted tens of thousands of trees, my feeble effort amounts only to thousands.

 

My tree thing, though, is natives.   In my last home in Tutukaka, I planted out four acres of native rain forest, which is now growing well and absorbing carbon.   According to the New Scientist magazine, every acre planted, while the trees are growing, will absorb the carbon emissions generated by the average western adult.  So the four acres I planted there should be taking care of the carbon emissions of my wife and myself, and two other adults.

 

My recent project at my new home is just one acre.   The first planting is now complete, and those small native trees are growing.  Not too many manuka though!  Next winter, I will be planting more trees to replace the ones that died (inevitable but sad).   Given a few years, a new native rain forest will spring up.

 

Carbon sequestration, of course, is strong only during the years that those trees are growing.  It takes ten to twenty years before growth of our slow growing natives reach the point where they make a major dent in carbon dioxide.   But global warming  is a long term problem.  We will be fighting it long after I am resting in my grave.  But by 2050 the forests I plant will be doing sterling service.

 

It is also worth bearing in mind the added benefits.  Native forest brings and supports the native bird population.  It reduces flooding.  It increases precipitation (vitally important in the face of climate change driven droughts). It provides a joy to those of us who love the outdoors.

 

Pines may grow quickly.   But they burn even more quickly.  They are ugly.  They are poor supporters of our native birds and animals.  Any benefit from permitting wilding pines to flourish is short term and short sighted.   Let’s plant the native forests that will still be here after the passage of centuries.”

 

Mark and I love getting items for the newsletter. If you’ve got something to contribute, we’d love to hear from you. (Email us [email protected])

Book Review

Reviewed by Jonathon Harper

Covid-19 The Pandemic That Should Never Have Happened – by Debra MacKenzie 2020 (available on Amazon)
 

MacKenzie is a journalist who has covered infectious diseases for New Scientist for several decades. She certainly canvases expert opinion very thoroughly.

This book gives a very good recent history of coronaviruses and influenzas, and our efforts to control outbreaks. I learnt a few new facts – that is I was convinced by Mackenzie that these things are either facts (for all practical purposes true) or highly likely to be true given what the consensus of experts are telling us as reported by MacKenzie:

• China already had an early warning system when covid-19 broke out in Wuhan. The local officials failed to trigger the alarm when faced with clear evidence that human to human transmission was occurring.  
• Big Pharma cannot afford the huge costs involved in producing vaccines and treatments for viruses until it is clear we need millions of doses. By then, it may be too late to prevent a pandemic. So she is clear that governments must invest ahead of time. Trump had cut off this kind of funding in the USA before the outbreak.
• Covid-19 probably came from fruit bats, possibly through as traditional Chinese Medicine that uses bat droppings for an eye product (I refer to unproven “treatments” as products). Or, as a result of our encroachment into wild environments where bats used to live further away from humans.
• NIPAH is another bat borne virus is a likely candidate for  the next pandemic, which I’m sorry to say may not be all that far into the future according to Mackenzie. NIPAH has a higher mortality rate than the Covid-19 coronavirus (NIPAH is a Henipavirus). Should this virus acquire particular mutations, which have already been identified, it could become very contagious.

So although the book was likely cobbled together quickly in order to stay current; and it has a little repetition in places, I think it is a good source of background information to help understand the current pandemic.

Skeptics in Space!

On Friday evening we had a national online Skeptics in the Pub meeting (Skeptics in Cyberspace), which going forward will be happening every four weeks. If you’re interested in joining us, check your local Skeptics in the Pub’s MeetUp group, or the Wellington group if you don’t live somewhere with an active Skeptics in the Pub group. Although we usually talk about a lot of skeptical topics, because of our shared interest in science and skepticism we often end up recommending TV shows and movies to each other as well. We’re not 100% agreed on what’s good and what’s not, but there’s definitely a lot of cross-over. Documentaries and science fiction are both frequently recommended.

My suggestion for last Friday was the new TV series Foundation (sadly on Apple TV+ – yet another paid streaming service). The show is based on the Isaac Asimov books, which I read many moons ago, back when I was a teenager. I’m really enjoying the show, and the way that it venerates mathematics and science in a way that I think will resonate with most skeptics – even if we know that in the real world nothing is quite as clear cut and simple as it’s often made to look in fiction.

Back to skepticism. This week we have a bumper crop of news items of interest to skeptics. I’ve been lucky enough to have returned to my segment on Graeme Hill’s evening show on MagicTalk, now that he’s back from his stint covering Drive Time. So I’ve already had a chance to air some of these stories – on skeptical staples such as vaccines, QAnon and psychics, and the more weird and wonderful, like the trillion dollar US coin.

But first, before we hear more from me, we have a response from member Lance Kennedy to my intro from a couple of weeks ago, where I wrote about a classification system for skeptics I often find useful. And then we have some thoughts from committee member Jonathon Harper on Coromandel mayor Sandra Goudie’s decision to not be vaccinated.

Mark Honeychurch

What kind of Skeptic?

Lance Kennedy

There are many kinds, and some are, frankly, full of bulldust! So what am I, and what are the members of the NZ Skeptics?

My answer to that, is that we are science based skeptics. That is, we do not accept claims that lack credible evidence. So what is credible evidence? My personal standard is that which is published in reputable, and peer reviewed research journals. So when The Lancet published a metastudy of homeopathy, which showed that (viewing 110 good double blind clinical trials) homeopathy was no better than placebo, that is sufficient to gain my support. 

There are people who claim to be skeptics, who are simply deniers. We all know of global warming deniers, and more recently, those who deny that covid 19 is a serious pandemic. Members of the NZ Skeptics will not be this kind of skeptic.

Mark’s last newsletter suggested two ways of forming opinions. To inform yourself by reading up on the data, or to accept the views of those who are experts in their fields. My personal view is that both are required. Any person who wants to be a well informed skeptic needs to read, read, read, and read some more. Choose carefully what you read. I am sure we are all aware of the numerous crackpot websites out there, purveying total intellectual garbage. I subscribe to New Scientist, Scientific American, and to ScienceDaily. Those are somewhat popularised, but the writers tend to be double degreed people, with an advanced degree in science, and qualifications in journalism. They study the research results that come from more esoteric journals, and rewrite them in a more accessible form.

Now about experts. There is a widespread belief that appeal to authority is a fallacy. That is not entirely true. Appeal to the wrong authority is a fallacy. Appeal to the right authority is an argument. If I am discussing the role of black holes in cosmology and I quote the late Stephen Hawking, that is the correct use of appeal to authority, since Hawking is the greatest authority. If I am discussing covid 19 and I quote a right wing American journalist, that is pure fallacy. So I suggest to my fellow skeptics, that they should feel free to quote authority, but just be very careful which authority you quote.

Scientific consensus is a wonderful concept, but difficult to ascertain. Anthropogenic global warming is often said to be the result of a consensus of climate scientists, and that is true. But it is an unusual case, because most scientific issues are not the subject of proper studies to find out what the consensus actually is.

There is no magic bullet in any of this. I am aware of a historical study that looked at articles in peer reviewed and reputable research journals, over many decades. The conclusions drawn in those articles were weighed against later findings. The startling discovery is that approximately 30% of those conclusions were overturned later by new work. So even the gold standard, the reputable, peer reviewed research journals, is not the final word. Science is a work in progress, and the very best conclusions may still be incorrect. This is where a good skeptic must still keep an open mind.
 

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

One of our readers emailed us this week after Mark’s excellent editorial last week about skepticism and what type of skeptic you are.

Our Facebook page occasionally gets interactions from the non-skeptical public. Invariably they come to criticise – and often think that being a skeptic means being a contrarian, and automatically doubting mainstream views! We know that’s not the sort of skepticism we promote.

This week, one of our readers posted us an interesting comment:

“I’ve been thinking recently about the subject of belief, both good and bad and the relationship with the scientific method. If we “know” something to be true, do we automatically “believe” it’s true? I’m sure philosophers have written whole books on the subject, but I haven’t heard much about it from Skeptics.”

I’m not a philosopher, but I’ll take an initial stab at this, but I’m sure we could flesh this out with a much more nuanced discussion that I can do justice to.

For me, and I think any honest skeptic, belief should be supported by evidence. 

I bristle when somebody claims they “know” something, when, in fact, they don’t know that thing – they just believe it. 

Conversely, it annoys me when people ask about “believing” in evolution or climate change when, more accurately, we’ve understood and appreciated the evidence for evolution and climate change being so strong that it doesn’t require belief, but requires acceptance. 

But perhaps we can write these off to the colloquial use of the terms “know” and “believe”.

What about incongruities in what we believe and what the evidence shows? I think a good example of this is freewill. It seems that we live in a deterministic universe, and that freewill is an illusion. But I’d be fairly certain that most of us live our lives believing freewill to exist, that we’re in charge of our actions, that we choose to do what we do.  

What do you think? We’d be most interested in feedback.

Craig Shearer

Skepticon 2021 – November 20th, 21st

We’ve been promoting the up-coming conference in conjunction with the Australian Skeptics for a few months now.

However, we’ve got some news. After reviewing the situation with COVID on both sides of the Tasman, we’ve decided to abandon the idea of an in-person conference this year, and run it solely as a livestream event.

The COVID situation in Sydney is by no means under control, and holding an in-person event there would have been a challenge. 

On this side of the Tasman, we had hoped, in the spirit of national rivalry, to retain some moral superiority over our Australian cousins and be able to hold an in-person conference in Wellington. Alas, the Delta outbreak has made it just too risky to try to foresee the situation in late November, so the in-person event will not be happening.

But, we see this as a great opportunity! We’ve set a low ticket price of AUD $40, which amounts to NZD $41.86 as of this writing – a lot less than it would have cost to attend an in-person event. 

We’ll be live-streaming the event, with lots of interesting and thought-provoking speakers. It will also be available to watch after the event.

Now is the time to get your tickets booked. It’s on the Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st November  Please go here.

Part of the fun of a conference is being able to connect with like-minded folk. We’re still hopeful of being in a situation where local groups could gather for a Saturday evening dinner after the livestream has concluded for the day. Watch this space and hopefully we can make this happen.

Peter Ellis

This past week has seen an appeal of the Peter Ellis child sex abuse case being heard in the Supreme Court. 

The Peter Ellis case revolved around supposed ritual abuse of children at the Christchurch Civic Creche. He, along with a number of his co-workers were accused of various shocking acts against the children in their care. However, only Ellis’s case went to trial. 

The NZ Skeptics had quite a bit to say about the original case. Lynley Hood wrote “A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case”, Jarrod Gilbert wrote an excellent article about the case, and NZ Skeptics committee member Jonathan Harper has written extensively on the case when it was reviewed in the Eichelbaum Report in 2006.

Peter Ellis unfortunately died in 2019 of bladder cancer, but the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal on the basis of Tikanga Māori, meaning that his mana should extend beyond his death.

The appeal, set down for two weeks, started this week and Jonathan Harper has been attending, and reports in his own words:

“Peter Ellis was convicted of sexual abuse as a Childcare worker in Christchurch rather a long time ago.

The evidence against him came from children whose evidence had been seriously contaminated by parents, social workers, therapists and experts who frankly probably knew better than to take the evidence too seriously during a Satanic Ritual Abuse public panic.

 There were no spontaneous uncoached allegations. Many allegations against Ellis and several of his colleagues were bizarre and very unlikely, if not impossible. But the prosecution had hidden most of this from the jury, and focused on presenting the few credible allegations. Both expert witnesses were psychiatrists, and did not help clarify the real issues. At the current hearing the information is much more coherent as all six experts are psychologists. 

Lynley Hood’s massively detailed tome, A CITY POSSESSED is an excellent detailed account for anyone wishing to get more of the social background and history.

There are many excellent current media reports if you just google Peter Ellis Supreme Court; especially those by Martin Van Beynen who followed the original trial.

I have been attending the present hearings all week with Ross Francis. They wrap up at the end of next week. 

My impressions so far:

The three expert witnesses for the prosecution are, in my opinion, rather poor scientists who appear to be making excuses for the extremely poor forensic interviews and contamination of evidence through parental, police and social workers’ suggestions before the trial. 

All six experts do seem to be in agreement that the interviews were very poorly conducted. The defence experts (especially Harlene Hayne) are adamant all this made the convictions unreliable. The prosecution ones equally adamant that while there were serious errors, that doesn’t mean the evidence was not strong enough. 

It is pretty difficult to follow their arguments because they seem to start from the idea or assumption that Ellis was guilty. That is fair enough, but the opposite scenario seems rather foreign to them. For example, very few prosecutions, and even credible allegations resulted from the more than one hundred children interviewed. I always figured the small percentage is about what you get when you do experiments to see which children are susceptible to making false statements when false scenarios are presented to them by parents, police, social workers, etc…or anyone really. But no, Gail Goodman claimed those were somehow the ones resistant to suggestion and telling the truth. I still can’t quite follow the logic of that. Another witness for the prosecution, Fred Seymour in their space of about five minutes gave us the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy”, plus two more and a classic confirmation bias.“

We should hope that the conviction of Peter Ellis is righted as it seems to be a clear case of injustice.

COVID loons

In the last newsletter I wrote, I discussed an open letter, penned by Mary Hobbs. Since publishing one of our contacts wrote to supply some more details. It appears that Mary and her husband are Scientologists, and deeply involved in that organisation, even making regular trips to Sydney to clear out a few Thetans, or whatever it is that they do. They even hosted Tom Cruise some time ago on a visit to NZ.

I wrote to Mary Hobbs sharing our feedback on her points. Alas, though unsurprisingly, we’ve not heard back from her.

It seems that there’s always more doctors coming out of the woodwork. The latest of whom is Dr Cindy de Villiers, who is a member of the NZDSOS site. She was speaking at a protest in Nelson last weekend. Having viewed the video of her talk on Odysee (a YouTube clone site that seems to be a favourite place to host videos of a certain conspiratorial nature), I noted the following claims:

 “Our bodies are wonderfully made. We can resist this not so novel virus, as we have with many other viruses, without lockdowns, social distancing, and masks.”

“If we do get sick, whether vaccinated or not, there are many treatment protocols successfully in use across the globe preventing hospitalisation, long COVID and death.”

“In fact, COVID-19 is probably the most treatable viral disease in existence.”

At the start of the pandemic she put up a questionable post about COVID. To be fair, that was written back in April last year, and things have moved on since then, but it does make some pretty astounding claims, including the use of Intravenous Vitamin C as soon as virus symptoms appear, and earthing (where you walk around barefoot on the ground for health benefit from the flow of negative ions!)

The talk also clued me in on a new organisation set up to seemingly counter the World Health Organisation – the World Council for Health. It was set up by a bunch of doctors, including Dr Tracy Chandler, who is registered with the NZ Medical Council, but as is noted on her practising certificate entry – “Dr Chandler is required to participate in an approved recertification programme relevant to the vocational scope of General Practice.” and “Dr Chandler may work outside the stated vocational scope but must do so within a collegial relationship.” I wonder what that’s all about. She also runs a website Dr Wellness and has a certificate in homeopathy. Enough said!

But, back to the World Council for Health – they  have a slick website and unsurprisingly it concentrates on COVID 19. They have a COVID-19 treatment guide and, as you might have guessed, Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine feature prominently, as does gargling with mouthwash.

Needless to say, their advice is pretty worthless, and probably downright dangerous if it were to encourage people to avoid seeking genuine medical advice and treatment.

Our COVID response

Back to COVID seriousness now. It’s been a frustrating week where we’ve seen the Delta variant now escape Auckland and head out to other parts of the country. 

The government has been in a difficult position. This past week has seen some loosening of restrictions where people are now allowed to meet outdoors outside of their bubbles. There has been sustained pressure by the “open up” groups and, while it may have been advisable to continue the lockdown longer to attempt to stamp out COVID, they had to take account of behaviour of the public and its response to the lockdowns. 

The key to getting out of this COVID mess is to get everybody vaccinated. We’ve made some good progress, but we’re not there yet. 

@farmgeek on Twitter continues to put together great graphs. This one shows where we’re at with vaccination.

Remember the people who can’t be vaccinated – including around 700,000 children under 12, and the immunocompromised. Those are the people we put at risk by opening up too early and allowing the virus to circulate.

As I write this on Sunday afternoon, there’s 60 new cases today. This is not heading in the right direction, and unfortunately looks like it might be getting out of control. It’s certainly looking like the decision to loosen off might well have been a mistake. I certainly hope we can get things under control again, but at some point it becomes impossible.

Lastly on COVID this week, I’m wondering at what point the anti-vaxxers will break, and realise it’s in their own self-interest to get vaccinated. I wouldn’t mind betting that there are some prominent anti-vaxxers who are secretly vaccinated. Ironically, they’re been protected so far by our collective response to COVID. But I think it’s only a matter of time before one of them will become infected, as we’ve seen overseas. (At which point, I’ll have to suppress my schadenfreude! I wonder if there’s a drug for that?!)

Are you Skeptic A or Skeptic B?

When talking with people about skepticism, I’ve often used a convenient classification to separate what I see as two main camps of skeptics. In my oversimplified model there are a) those who are skeptical because they consider themselves to have read enough to be experts themselves on a wide range of topics, and b) those who defer to people who are the experts on any given topic – people who have relevant qualifications, decades of experience, and the respect of their peers and the wider academic community.

I’d like to think of myself as being a member of the latter group. Generally when I argue a skeptical position, I will do my best to find out what the experts are saying, and what if any consensus there is, and I’ll argue that as my position. And, of course, if there is no consensus, I will try my best to either argue that or just choose to not have an opinion. After all, I don’t need to pick a side on the topic of whether it will ever be possible to create a conscious Artificial Intelligence. And I have no horse in the race when it comes to the validity of the linear no-threshold model.

When I explain this type of skepticism to others, the skepticism where someone accepts the consensus of experts – I usually add a disclaimer that I’m comfortable with the idea of deferring to the experts, except when there’s an obvious issue with them as a group. This doesn’t mean that I can just write off a consensus I don’t like or don’t agree with, but it does mean that I won’t just parrot the mainstream view on every topic.

Obviously there’s a whole raft of topics where the “experts” in the field appear to be motivated by something other than an honest search for the truth. Pretty much every branch of alternative medicine would fall into this category, for example. I’m comfortable saying that we should not trust the conclusions of “scholars” of homeopathy, acupuncture or chiropractic. For alternative therapies there’s usually not a lot of good quality evidence out there – instead, there’s a surplus of bad quality papers describing poorly designed studies that don’t pass muster. Reading meta studies and systematic reviews for these therapies, it’s fairly normal to read how researchers found maybe one hundred relevant papers on a particular therapy, and out of those only four were of a high enough quality to be included. And, of course, these papers are invariably the ones that have much less in the way of positive conclusions than the ones not chosen for inclusion. When it comes to alternative medicine, the more rigorous the paper, the less positive the evidence.

There are other topics such as facilitated communication, hypnotic regression, Myers-Briggs personality profiling and polygraphs where the prevailing opinion amongst “experts” in the field seems to be at odds with the best quality evidence we have. But when I want to give people a good example of a discipline where there’s good reason not to trust the experts, I usually turn to Biblical Archaeology – a field where there are a lot of people with vested interests, and where many churches are willing to pay good money in return for evidence that their holy book is the real deal. This particular subject is the topic of our first article for today’s newsletter, courtesy of Alison Campbell (who shared details of this story on Facebook recently).

Mark Honeychurch

Alex Jones loses in court, again

I’m sure Alex Jones is no stranger to most skeptics. The Info Wars host has an illustrious history of pushing nonsense ideas about the US – from the ridiculous (chemicals in the water supply are turning the frogs gay) to the downright dangerous (restriction of gun rights will cause a second revolution in the US). And somewhere in the midst of all that nonsense, Alex Jones decided to start pushing the ridiculous theory that the Sandy Hook massacre of school children in the US was a false flag operation, secretly organised by the government as a way to push for tighter gun controls.

It’s been great in this case that some of the grieving parents have decided not to let Jones get away with spreading his hurtful conspiracy theory, and there have been numerous lawsuits brought against him. The courts are not having a bar of Jones’ lawyers’ efforts to avoid paying out the money from cases he’s already lost in court – and on Thursday a Texas judge gave a “default judgement” against Jones, citing his repeated inability to follow the court’s orders to hand over documents.

Jones is no stranger to being in court, and has tried to use a variety of arguments to wheedle his way out of facing the consequences of his reckless actions. For some of his Sandy Hook lawsuits he’s tried to argue that his falsehoods are protected under free speech. When his ex-wife fought for custody of their children during divorce proceedings, she cited his erratic behaviour on InfoWars as evidence that he is unstable and should not be trusted to look after their kids. Jones’ lawyers’ response was to claim that Alex Jones is nothing more than a “performance artist”, and that he doesn’t really mean the things that he says on InfoWars. If any of you are unsure what Jones’ ex-wife means when she calls him unstable, here’s a fun clip from John Oliver back in 2017 where he documents not only some of Jones’ crazy outbursts, but also his unethical pushing of dubious health products:

It’s great to see Jones finally having to face the music. I have no doubt that he will keep fighting to avoid justice, but I am hopeful that once all his avenues for appeal are exhausted, his rash words will have cost him dearly, and the people he has wronged will take enough of his money that his misinformation spreading media group will cease to exist.

You can do anything that you wanna do

Thanks to everyone who joined our online Skeptics in the Pub meetings over the last two weeks. We’ve had such a good time chatting with skeptics who we usually only see once or twice a year that we’ve decided to make our national online meetings a regular event.

We’ll schedule an online Zoom session from 6pm on Friday to run every four weeks, and I will post the event as a recurring meeting to all the Skeptics in the Pub Meetup groups. Please come along if you want to say hi to other skeptics, if you’re looking for a place to engage in fun, skeptical conversation (with beer), or if you just need to unload about something you’ve heard that’s annoyed you because it’s obvious nonsense.

We have two submitted segments in this week’s newsletter. Our first is from a regular at the Wellington Skeptics in the Pub meetings, John Maindonald, and follows on from a mention I made of Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword a couple of weeks ago.

The second is a podcast recommendation from member Stephen Hall, who has been writing to us about his thoughts on the transmissibility of the new delta variant of COVID. Steve wonders if maybe delta is no more transmissible than previous strains, and that the new variant might instead be spreading more because of differences such as changes in people’s behaviour, rather than due to a beneficial genetic mutation. Steve has heard this idea from a podcast run by Professor Vincent Racaniello, who has been promoting this view in the media recently. Given that most scientists don’t appear to agree with Racaniello’s thoughts on this topic, I will include a proviso that, as always, you should remain skeptical and use multiple sources to fact check any claims you hear.

Mark Honeychurch

Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.

This week continues the level 4 lockdown in Auckland where I live. It’s been interesting to watch the numbers and we should be encouraged by the shape of the curve. But still, there are those niggling cases popping up. It does seem unlikely that we’ll be out of lockdown anytime soon.

I’m off for my second jab late this week, so will no doubt be looking forward to a couple of days having a sore arm. Still, it’s a small price to pay for the reassurance that if or when I encounter COVID I’ll be protected as much as is currently possible.

In the last newsletter I wrote you might remember I wrote about a complaint from Evorich. You’ll no doubt be surprised to learn that we’ve not heard anything further from them. Their 5 days deadline lapsed without further communication. Watch this space, I guess! 

Craig Shearer

The news we share

As I’ve written in the past, NZ Skeptics often receive comments in our inbox and people often criticise us for parroting the mainstream media (usually abbreviated to MSM). Recent commenters have criticised us for sharing articles from the BBC, amongst others.

Is this fair criticism? I think not. All sources of information (including NZ Skeptics) have their biases and political leanings, so are never free from error or presenting information in a purely objective fashion.

However, we do try to present credible sources only. 

There’s an interesting website, with an accompanying chart, that shows the major media outlets and how politically skewed they are, and the reliability of their content. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the state of the industry. You can take a look at the chart here.

In our defence, the outlets we typically share are on the more reliable end of the spectrum, and mostly in the centre of the spectrum on the political bias axis. 

Speaking of political bias, there’s a perception out there that academia is full of left-wing liberal voices, and conservative voices are being “suppressed”. I came across a good video recently which nicely demolishes this argument.

Conversion Therapy Submission

This week NZ Skeptics submitted our view on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill. This bill proposes prohibiting so-called conversion therapies which aim to change a person’s sexuality, gender identity or gender expression. Curiously, the direction of conversion seems to be exclusively in the direction of becoming “straight” or identifying with and expressing the gender which aligns with the genitals you were born with.  

Our submission makes the point that there’s no evidence to show that conversion therapies actually work, and lots of evidence to show that they do harm. 

“As part of our mission to promote evidence-based policy-making and healthcare, the NZ Skeptics continually seek the advice of experts and findings of contemporary research with which to inform our positions on a variety of topics. The evidence is clear that conversion therapy is worse than ineffective, indeed it appears to be outright dangerous; provision of such therapies should be seen by New Zealanders as akin to fraud.”

If you’d like to read our submission, we have put a copy on our website.

Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword

During lockdown, the Wellington Skeptics in the Pub group have been meeting online every week. It’s been great to be able to continue our social meetings, but I also think it’s a good way to keep us all sane! That connection of being able to chat and have a fun social time with others seems to be really good at helping with the feelings of isolation and worry that lockdown can bring to some of us.

At our meeting just over a week ago, someone mentioned that they’d been reading up on “theological noncognitivism”, and wondered what everybody thought about the idea. Of course, we were all at our computers (after all, it’s a Zoom meeting) and someone shared the link to the Wikipedia page, so everyone immediately jumped on the page and started reading. After a few minutes talking about the idea that concepts of god may be necessarily nonsensical, someone noticed a much more interesting sounding idea at the bottom of the page: Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword.

Of course, we all loved the name of this philosophical razor, so named because a laser sword is supposedly sharper than a razor. If you’re interested in understanding this idea, that it’s futile to argue over something if it can’t be tested, I can highly recommend reading the original article written by Alder – it’s not only erudite, it’s also very funny. And Alder’s article ends with an important warning worth heeding:

“While the Newtonian insistence on ensuring that any statement is testable by observation (or has logical consequences which are so testable) undoubtedly cuts out the crap, it also seems to cut out almost everything else as well. Newton’s Laser Sword should therefore be used very cautiously.”

All of this is a very long-winded way of not only introducing this week’s newsletter, but also to invite all of you, wherever in the country you are (or overseas), to join our Wellington Skeptics in the Pub meetup group and RSVP for our next weekly online meeting. I’ll be there, with a beer or two, and if you’ve been to any of our events or conferences over the last ten years or so you’ll probably recognise some of the others there as well. We’re a welcoming group, so come along and join us if you find yourself at a loose end on Friday evening.

Mark Honeychurch

The Satanists are doing god’s work

Texas has recently introduced a draconian new abortion law, one that feels not only perverse (in that it allows for civil lawsuits where anyone can sue those who are involved in providing abortion services), but also seems to be yet another attempt to test the Supreme Court’s willingness to overturn Roe v Wade (the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion that has allowed for legal abortions in the US for many years). And, so far, it seems that the Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, is willing to court this kind of testing of the waters.

However, The Satanic Temple are doing what they can to help women in Texas who require abortion services. They have applied for a religious exemption that would allow them to purchase and distribute abortion pills to their members. It’s a weird way of going about trying to push for a change in law, but it’s far from the first time The Satanic Temple has attempted to use this kind of tactic to do good. I for one have been a big fan of their work for a while now.

The Satanic Temple has used some interesting tactics in the past to fight against religious privilege in the US. They have erected statues to baphomet on government property, as a way to force the hand of those who erected statues of the Ten Commandments, and they’ve also pushed for the inclusion of Satanic prayers to open state and city political meetings.

It’s obvious that The Satanic Temple is being used by its members as a tool to fight for religious equality, ensuring that the privilege often afforded to Christianity in western countries, especially the US, is challenged wherever possible. Rather than argue for Christian privilege to be revoked, the group argues for inclusion – that their Satanist beliefs are promoted alongside those of Christian groups by government organisations. I’ve even taken a leaf out of their book in the past, and organised a counter-protest when the Jesus for NZ group were arguing on the lawn of parliament that the name of Jesus should be re-added to the parliamentary prayer. Instead of us protesting for the status quo, we carried signs arguing for the inclusion of all gods in the prayer. After all, if Jesus is able to get a mention every day in our parliament, why shouldn’t Ganesh, or Thor, or Cthulhu?

If you’re still in doubt about The Satanic Temple, here’s a copy of their seven Tenets, which I honestly find hard to fault: