Welcome to the NZ Skeptics weekly newsletter. This week, you’ve got me, Craig Shearer, Chair of NZ Skeptics.

Continuing COVID

The world continues to be gripped by the COVID pandemic. Given that most of us are unable to travel internationally it’s difficult to experience first-hand exactly how the rest of the world is operating. Cases continue to rise at an alarming rate. My favourite site for watching the stats is the Worldometers site. 

I don’t want to continually bash the USA, but it does seem that those countries where large chunks of the population value their personal freedom over the safety of others are faring (and now fearing) the worst. As I write this the daily new case count in the US has exceeded 200K cases, with around 2K deaths.This really does illustrate the quote from Joseph Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

Vaccines on the horizon

This past week has seen the news of development of successful vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The vaccines have a claimed efficacy of nearly 95%. This is good news, and a triumph for science and medical technology that they’ve been able to be developed so quickly. There are other companies that have vaccines in the pipeline so it’s likely that there will be several more vaccines available in the coming months and years.

But the availability of vaccines doesn’t necessarily mean an end to the pandemic. While it’s great news that the efficacy is so high – which will contribute to a successful “herd immunity” effect – at this stage the performance of the vaccines in “real world” populations is unknown. For example, the vaccines have been tested on mostly young people – it’s not known how well they will work on older (and typically more susceptible) population groups. Also unknown is how long immunity will last. Will we need to get an annual booster shot?

And they have to be distributed and delivered. The newly developed vaccines have some fairly stringent temperature requirements around transportation and storage, and of course, all this requires infrastructure and training to be set up to allow vaccines to be successfully deployed.

Feeding into this will also be the inevitable vaccine hesitancy that has become prevalent in recent years in some population groups. Herd Immunity is, of course, reliant on significant penetration of the vaccine into the population. Sean Carrol wrote a great article in Scientific American which draws parallels between various forms of scientific denialism – it’s well worth a read.

While the news of the vaccines is undoubtedly positive I think skepticism is warranted as to whether life is going to return to the pre-COVID normal anytime soon. The advent of the vaccines is just the first step along the path.

Have a great week, and stay skeptical!

It was show weekend here in Canterbury. Another long weekend to squander in the garden and pottering about the house. I’ve also been thinking about why on the Xbox game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla my son chose to stand up for the seemingly uninformed and offended peasant, rather than the man of medicine (aka warlock) who was bemoaning the general distrust in knowledge. Perhaps it was the jaunty animal skull head-piece the warlock was wearing that made him look more like the bad guy, or perhaps it was just the promise of better loot…

Jess Macfarlane

The case of the missing VHS – FOUND!

Good news! We have found someone who has a copy of the video (VHS tape) taken of James Randi speaking at Canterbury University back in 1993. Next steps will be to check if it’s good to digitise, and if so, we’ll look to publish it to our YouTube channel. Keep posted.
 

NZ Skeptics is hereby the most skeptical society

On 6^th November this year, after the US president used the word ‘hereby’ to claim, without any evidence whatsoever, that he had won the state of Michigan in the US election, NZ Skeptics thought, to heck with empirical data, hereby is a magical word, how can we exploit its power?! The answer, a boldly worded tweet by @NZSkeptics: “I hereby declare the NZ Skeptics Society is the most skeptical society”.

The tweet was sent to a number of different skeptics societies around the world, to keep them in the loop about the new pecking order.

The Edinburgh Skeptics replied saying “New what? Never heard of you. It’s an obvious fake name. Zeal land? C’mon.”

To which we replied, in a reference to map-gate, “Ha ha ha ha ha. You may not find us on the map, we may not exist, but we still won.”

Skeptical Inquirer replied saying “We doubt it”, a tweet inexplicably liked by nearly a half-dozen random tweeters so far, and the wonderful Brian Dunning of Skeptoid podcast fame replied to say “Skeptics? So you’re the people think 9/11 was an inside job and global warming was a hoax?”.

We couldn’t let that go without comment so replied “Actually we’re just skeptical of marmite sandwiches. Thinking face emoji. Wow, that election there Brian. Kia kaha. I’ll just leave some snaps here of the day we supported a march in Christchurch for #ClimateAction That day was our 9/11, but with white supremacist terrorism instead. #March15”

The subsequent tweets consisted of our @NZSkeptics and @BrianDunning bonding over a mutual appreciation of vegemite and cheese toasties.
 

Elections, ghosts and cranks

Another newsletter, another election. This time the US appears to have, narrowly, come to its senses and chosen to vote out their current science-denying leader – and my guess is that most skeptics are breathing a sigh of relief. Those of us at Wellington Skeptics in the Pub on Friday certainly did a thorough job of dissecting the election, along with its many rules, regulations, polls, predictions and polemics.

I for one am feeling a modicum of schadenfreude having learned today that Rudy Giuliani’s team appear to have messed up when booking a venue for a press release to talk about Trump’s plans to mount a legal challenge to Biden’s win on Saturday. Instead of booking the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, someone instead booked the car park at the back of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company. Good on them for sticking with it, though, as it made my day to see Giuliani speaking in front of a garage door in the middle of an industrial estate.

Anyway, without any further ado here’s some of what’s been happening of skeptical interest in the world in the last week.

Mark Honeychurch.

WWG1WGA

I’m sure most skeptics will have heard of QAnon by now – the anonymously named Q who posts online about shadowy organisations, and talks about how president Trump is fighting dark forces in the US. QAnon tends to use lots of code names and obscure references, including the oft used acronym used as the title of this section – it means Where We Go 1, We Go All. Here are a couple of examples of QAnon messages:

@Snowden
Twitter rec 24D.
Bravo-2gKVT.
[24]RR

Why is Hussein traveling the globe?
$$$,$$$,$$$
Acct # xx-XXXxx-x-39670
Acct # XXXxx-XXXx-2391
Where did the MONEY come from?
How do you destroy the most POWERFUL country in the world?
Direct attack?
Covert OP by [CLAS-59#241-Q] to infiltrate at highest level to destroy from within?
Think GAME.
Who are the PLAYERS?
What are the REWARDS?
AMERICA FOR SALE.
PATRIOTS in FULL CONTROL.
We will make more public.
SA was strategic.
“We know” “Do as we say or face consequences”
These people are stupid!

Early on in the Q timeline, an IT security analyst performed an analysis of the codes Q uses, and found that they were consistent with someone just alternating tapping keys on the left and right sides of the keyboard, much as someone would do if they were just trying to type in random text (see the heatmap image below). QAnon’s ramblings remind me of the writing of Nostradamus – obscure and vague enough that readers are left to join the dots themselves, and make their own narrative out of the mess he writes.

However the influence of Q’s rabbit hole shouldn’t be underestimated – it’s even reached our fair shores, with a conspiracy involving the trafficking of children, a secret Antarctic base, adrenochrome and several yachts docked in the Viaduct in Auckland. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a firm believer in the QAnon conspiracy, won the nomination for Georgia’s 14th congressional district – so as of January there will be a QAnon believing conspiracy theorist in American politics (although Trump has at least flirted with the idea that QAnon is real, refusing to disavow the theory).

Weirdly, and thankfully, since election day in the US QAnon has gone quiet on the internet. We can only hope that this is the end of Q, although it’s early days yet and I suspect we’ll be hearing from them again. It would not surprise me to see Q, whoever they may be, try to foment unrest among Trump supporters who are unhappy with the election result.

Can a jade amulet protect against COVID?

The above title is my paraphrasing of a recent paper published in an Elsevier-owned scientific journal, Science of The Total Environment. The paper’s actual title is:

Can Traditional Chinese Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis

If I were being trite, I’d simply counter this by invoking Betteridge’s law of headlines – “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”. Unsurprisingly this paper is total nonsense, and it’s disappointing to see that it’s been both peer reviewed and published. More details of this paper can be read at Retraction Watch – and the title of that website gives you a hint as to what’s happened to the paper. It’s been withdrawn, at least temporarily, and the paper’s title now has a prefix prepended to it – TEMPORARY REMOVAL.

If you take 10 minutes to read both the Retraction Watch article and some good detective work that has been going on in the article’s comments, it becomes clear that this is not a one-off slip up for the paper’s author – it appears that he has a history of writing pseudoscientific papers, such as:

Stonehenge as a public health intervention device for preventing lithospheric magnetic field-induced emerging diseases and megadeath during periods of severely weaken geomagnetic field

A novel hypothesis for the Havana and Dominican Republic syndromes in which severe geoelectromagnetic perturbations in the Caribbean plate induces aberrant health in North Americans

In the author’s defence, he replied to Retraction Watch’s concerns, saying:

I kindly suggest you read the article and examine the evidence provided. I also suggest you read the history of science and how zealots have consistently attempted to block and ridicule novel ideas that challenge the predominant paradigm from individuals that are deem not intelligent enough. I not surprised that this article has elicited angry responses. Clearly the idea that a black scientist can provide a paradigm shifting idea offends a lot of individuals. I’ll be very candid with you; my skin color has no bearing on my intelligence.

I’m pretty sure that Ivan at Retraction Watch didn’t know that Moses was black when he asked for confirmation that Moses was the author of the paper, and to me the argument of zealots blocking and ridiculing novel ideas sounds like the Galileo Gambit. It may well be the case that in the past some have mocked people who have had paradigm shifting ideas that eventually turn out to be correct, but that does not mean that everyone with a crazy idea is right. For every Galileo there are a thousand or more people like Deepak Chopra, Ken Ring, Andrea Rossi, Daryl Bem, Rupert Sheldrake, Christopher Monckton, and so on – the list goes on!

NZ’s Luminate Festival is moving away from reality

The Luminate festival, held each year outside of Nelson, has always been a little out of touch with science. But, as David Farrier shows, things appear to be getting worse. The festival has been flirting with conspiracy theories and woo peddlers, in a list they published on the Luminate website called the “13 Crystal Seeds of Positive Change”. The list included the names of people who have inspired the festival’s organisers. You get one point for each of the following names you recognise:

• Pete Evans – celebrity chef, peddler of bad food ideas
• David Icke – lizard man
• Rashid Buttar – friend of Billy TK, US osteopath and vaccine denier
• Bruce Lipton – DNA denier
• Tom Cowan – 5G conspiracy theorist
• Dave Asprey – supplement seller
• Gerald Pollack – structure of water scientist, winner of Emoto prize
• Zach Bush – gut supplement seller

Each of those people is dangerous in their own ways, mostly through promoting conspiracies or recommending/selling unproven medical therapies. The organisers of the Luminate festival appear to have taken the list down for now, presumably in response to backlash from the article, and have replaced it with a blog post defending their choice of mentors. They say, in part:

“Our theme for Lunasa is bio-optimise and thrive- enhancing our internal biology, our external environment and power of the mind to achieve optimal health.

The people that we listed under the themes of the 13 Crystal Seeds are a range of doctors, scientists, researchers and others that we hear speak directly on these topics.”

I can assure the organisers that the “power of the mind” will not allow them to achieve optimal health, and that most, if not all, of the people they have listed come under the category of “others” and are not actual, trustworthy doctors, scientists or researchers.

David Farrier in his article wonders whether, much like Billy TK, one or both of the organisers of the festival went down the online conspiracy theory rabbit hole over our lockdown period, when they were stuck at home and at a loose end. Although this appears to be guesswork, it at least seems plausible.

Not everyone loved Randi

If the US election hasn’t caused you enough stress, you could read a recent “take down” of James Randi titled The man who destroyed skepticism, published soon after his death on the popular Boing Boing blog, that is sure to make your blood boil. I for one was very surprised and disappointed to see the Boing Boing website, which normally has a reputation for good quality reporting, hosting this hit piece written by Mitch Horowitz. Mitch is a believer in the spiritual realm, and his own website describes him as “a historian of alternative spirituality and one of today’s most literate voices of esoterica, mysticism, and the occult”. The article includes such gems as:

“In the end, the feted researcher was no skeptic. He was to skepticism what Senator Joseph McCarthy was to anticommunism — a showman, a bully, and, ultimately, the very thing he claimed to fight against: a fraud.”

“Randi’s legacy should serve as a cautionary tale and a call to restore sound practices when discussing or writing about contentious topics in science or any field”

The thrust of Horowitz’s argument seems to be that Randi wasn’t polite enough when debunking fraudsters, and that sometimes he preferred using witty soundbites when talking with the media rather than using more nuanced, and technically correct, wording.

From my perspective, it looks like Randi treated these people, who were attempting to con others out of their money and trick them into believing in nonsense, with all the respect they deserved – not much. Anyone trying to make a claim that purports to invalidate swathes of known science is lucky that people like Randi even give them the time to critique their outlandish claims. It’s certainly often the case that scientists don’t have the time or patience to carry out the kinds of investigations that Randi was famous for.

Thankfully the comments from regular Boing Boing readers attached to the article restored my faith in humanity. The vast majority of commenters took exception to the extremely biased nature of the article, and just how much it misrepresented James Randi’s legacy.
 

The Missing Files: Randi caught on tape

The NZ Skeptics, many years ago, used to run a VHS lending library of tapes with topics of skeptical interest on them. Unfortunately, when someone checked the box of dusty old tapes the other day, it was found that the tape of James Randi’s talk given in Christchurch in the ‘90s was not among them. This is a bit of a long shot, but if anyone still has that tape (or their own copy of the talk on video) we’d love to get our hands on it so that we can digitise it and post it to YouTube.

Randi, hauntings, and more…

Hello fellow skeptic – and welcome to November. For me, this year has both shot by and dragged. And what a tumultuous year it’s been!

Randi
This week saw the passing of James Randi (aged 92), a noted Canadian-American magician and skeptic. Most of us in the skeptic movement will be aware of the major contributions he made and in his popularisation of skepticism itself. He certainly called out many con-artists who made their livings out of fooling the public. People such as Sylvia Browne (purported psychic medium), Uri Geller (spoon bender), and Peter Popoff (faith healer) were targets of his debunking activities.

Randi, through his educational foundation (The James Randi Educational Foundation) also set up the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge (now terminated), which has been a powerful device against those who claim to have paranormal abilities but never seem to be able to produce the goods when actually tested.

Randi visited New Zealand, lecturing at Canterbury University back in 1993, and no doubt spurred many people to join NZ Skeptics at the time. We are on the hunt for the original videos of the presentation,and intend to get them up onto our YouTube channel in due course.

As skeptics we should question hero figures (and indeed the concept of heroes). No person is without their flaws. Randi had doubts about climate change (though updated his position), and was less than critical about some bad actors in our movement. But, Randi was a product of his age. There have been plenty of obituaries praising Randi, but it’s interesting to read the opinions of his critics too. From what I’ve read, many take a tone of broadly praising his work but taking issue with a particular sacred cow of their own.

On the whole, Randi encouraged critical thinking and, I think, had a positive effect on the world.

Big cats in Canterbury

This week saw another claim of a big cat in Canterbury. And by “big cat” I’m not talking about an over-sized domestic feline, but a real wild animal variety big cat – such as a Puma or Black Panther or Tiger. Over the years there have been several claims of anomalous wildlife, including Moas and Mooses. 

It seems unlikely that a population of large wild animals could exist and not be discovered by the scientific community. We should seek more prosaic explanations until evidence shows otherwise. According to experts, it’s quite possible that well-fed feral cats can grow to quite a large size. From a distance, it’s easy to mistake the actual size of an animal. 

The evidence we have so far is mostly anecdotal or distant grainy photographs where it’s difficult to determine actual scale. For these cats to be real would require a breeding population. Most big cats are endangered species in other parts of the world. It seems particularly unlikely that a population would be able to establish itself here and without the widespread notice of people.

NZ Skeptics Merchandise

Have you visited the refreshed and redesigned NZ Skeptics website yet? You certainly should – it’s got a nice, clean design, done by Weka Web Design. And now, we’ve got some great NZ Skeptics branded merchandise for sale. Take a look at our special merchandise page. There you’ll find some fun items which you can use to advertise your skeptical mindset.

We think these items would also make great Christmas gifts for the skeptical and not so skeptical people in your life.

Feedback

We hope you’re enjoying our newsletters. There’s a team of three of us taking turns in writing the newsletter, and you’ll probably find that each of us has a different style of writing and a different set of opinions and values that seep into our writing. We hope you welcome this diversity of thought.

The committee of NZ Skeptics is always interested in hearing feedback from our readers. If you’ve got anything to say, or would like to contribute or help out, please get in touch by emailing us.

Have a great week!

Craig Shearer,
Chair, NZ Skeptics Inc.

Conversion therapy on the way out, The Amazing Randi trolling psychics, and terrorism in France.

The NZ Skeptics newsletter email, out to you after Labour day. Have you planted your tomatoes yet? Keeping you up to date with the latest skeptical news from around New Zealand and overseas.

After the very sad news of The Amazing Randi’s passing, The Onion let us know he is already bothering psychics from beyond the grave. We would expect nothing less. Also, ha ha ha ha ha ha!
On a New Zealand tour back in 1993 he gave a lecture at Canturbury University. Were you there? Do let us know!
This writer’s other half was lucky enough to have attended the lecture, as he was studying at Canterbury at the time. It turns out NZ Skeptics actually had recordings of the event, on VHS, and were mailing them out to people on request. On learning this we’ve begun an investigation to see if we can find a copy of the recording and from there see if it’s possible to get it into some type of form that would be publishable online. I’m very curious to see it, and to see if my now husband, who would have been just 18 at the time might have been captured on camera too. Watch this space.

According to issue 29 of New Zealand Skeptic James Randi’s talks were so well received, NZ Skeptics received a bump in membership and had the best attended conference up till that point. We were also very excited that he came to thank us in person for our small contribution to his efforts to fight a legal battle with Uri Geller. The case was brought by Geller who was offended to the tune of a cool 15 million dollars, by Randi’s suggestion that Geller’s tricks were “the kind that used to be on the back of serial boxes when I was a kid”. The court sided with Randi, and Geller was made to pay 120,000 in fees.