Cheat-o Jesus's Prosper-ity gospel, #Lexit, and other wacky Whirled matters

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy, and as summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the political season both heat up, it is almost certainly going to get even crazier. But just for the sake of putting in my two-cents' worth on some of the craziness, here are a few tidbits and aggregated links.

Salty Droid and Daily Kos dig into Drumpf U's Prosper connections
In case you were worried about the little fake robot's prolonged absence, there's no cause for concern. Salty Droid returned earlier this month with a teaser about the yuuuuge scam formerly known as Trump University, which he had exposed years ago for the massive fraud that it was/is. In the teaser he took a potshot at Donald Trump's obnoxious, tone-deaf self-congratulations in the immediate wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida on June 12. Salty also put together a short video that competently demonstrated the cynical lie that was Trump U.



That was just the appetizer. A few days later Salty came back with the main course, a post focusing on the intimate connection between Cheat-o Jesus' phony institution of liar education and notorious Utah boiler-room company Prosper Inc.

As many of you may know, Salty has been on Prosper's and Utah's case for years, being one of the very first to call out that "rotting vortex of fraud," as he put it. Salty's postings inspired me more than once to add my own voice to the (still-too-small) chorus too. One reason I found the matter of such interest was that Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale, a frequent snarget on this Whirled, "partnered" with Prosper years ago for his extravagantly overpriced "Miracles Coaching" scheme. Over the years, others such as In the Limelight blogger Jonathan Timar, as well as The Verge, have also nabbed Joe for Miracles Coaching and its dependence upon the Prosper-generated hard sell. There have been consumer complaints about Prosper's "business coaching" as well -- see here and here and here, for instance.

Apparently, though, Prosper's co-founder Ethan Willis got out of that racket and into another one. If I'm reading things correctly, it appears that Prosper changed hands a couple of years ago and morphed into something called Achieve Today LLC. But according to their website, Vitale and his McMiracles machine are still"partners."

At any rate, Trump U is far from the only scam in which Prosper has been involved. But it seems clear that Trump U got a lot of help and enabling from the Willis boys -- not just Ethan but his brother Damon -- back in the day when Prosper was still Prosper. The bottom line, according to Salty:

It’s not enough to call this fraud. It’s intentional manipulation :: a full degree darker than deception … and it works like a motherfucker. These guys are so good at it :: scary good … which is why they generally contract to take more than half the money in these deals.

Trump University didn’t slide gradually into scam after being confronted with the reality of the web’s unprofitable profit model … as happens to so many companies. Trump came to this game partnered with Prosper … because he was always going straight for the jugular.

That sounds pretty accurate.

By the way, Salty isn't the only one on the Prosper/Drumpf U connection. Lenny Grover put some good info together and published it on The NewsHub and on Daily Kos. Here's the Kos link.

But as I noted on my own very long post about the Drumpf U playbooks -- a post that totally overlooked the Prosper connection, I'm sorry to say (and really, there was no excuse for that, since Prosper was mentioned in the playbook PDF to which I linked) -- I don't think that knowing that Donald Trump is a scammer will make any difference to the hatriots and scammer wannabes who are pushing for a Drumpf presidency. For the scammer wannabes, in fact, it will just be a selling point.

LoonyC gets out of Facebook jail, and he's loonier than ever
Another frequent snarget on this blog, Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell, was recently sprung from Facebook jail. I wrote about his most recent 30-day suspension in late May, detailing his whines about being "banned" because, according to him, he was writing posts in support of Donald Trump. More than likely, however, he was suspended for hate speech -- not that it stopped him from posting on Facebook. The only account that was actually suspended was his main English-language page, but he continued to post on his main German page, as well as several other pages he maintains, and he even created a new fake account under the name "Eyn Rand."

Well, Lenny has been back on Facebook in full force now for a few days, and he hit the ground whining that he is probably going to be blocked again. Even more amusingly, he is boasting that he has a huge fortune of 100 billion dollars... or maybe euros; he doesn't seem to be sure which it is. And he is going to use that fortune to create his own sovereign nation. Now, where/when have we heard that before? Oh, yeah, here -- back in April 2013 when he was boasting about having purchased 130-plus acres in South Carolina, near the Georgia border.

Anyway, Bernie at GINtruth had some fun with Loony's latest claims.

As I noted on my comment on Bernie's blog post, in all of the posts that Lenny wrote immediately after getting out of Facebook jail, he hasn't made one mention of having been “banned” because of his pro-Trump posts. Yet his Trump advocacy was the excuse he gave at the beginning of his 30-day suspension. Post-suspension, he is only blaming the New World Order, or NWO. Maybe, I suggested, he just doesn’t remember the lie he told previously. Then again, that was 30 days ago, and probably (at least 30) bottles of bourbon ago as well.

And it seems that Lenny hasn't learned his lesson about hate speech, or perhaps he is simply trying to bait Facebook so he'll get suspended again, and can whine about it and gather more names and email addresses for his "exclusive" newsletter. On his German page, under the name "Dr." Leonard Coldwell, there's this, from June 23, 2016.

In that post he links to this awful German-language site.

Here's a link to the Googlish-translated page.

And even before that -- while he was still suspended from using his main English language Facebook page -- he shared a link to this atrocious anti-Semitic work.

Post-suspension, and writing as Eyn Rand, he shared one of his favorite links -- again. And again:

Which makes his former lawyer's "eternal vocational suicide" defense of Lenny seem all the sillier. 

Indeed, judging by some of his Facebook posts, it would appear that Coldwell actively identifies with Hitler. This is from his German page:

A translation of the caption under the Hitler pic:

And then there's this: a clip from Lenny's June 28, 2016 interview with one of his long-time buddies, conspiracy nut and hate-monger Jeff Rense. This isn't the entire segment but it's enough to clearly call Lenny out for a particularly vicious form of anti-Semitism, marked by Holocaust denial and expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler, whom he and Rense both portray as the egregiously misunderstood hero of history. Vocational suicide, indeed. Lenny's rants are the words of a maniac who has no real vocation left to destroy.



In light of the above, I'm all for Leonard Coldwell forming his own sovereign nation, but I hope it's far, far away from the United States. Actually, I'm thinking that the location for Loonyland might be somewhere in Russia, since Lenny has such a mad man-crush on Vladimir Putin and is supposedly going to be talking to him soon about how to save our world.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Russia would be a perfect place for Lenny, because overall people there are even more gullible than they are in the US, as I noted in this September 2009 snarkfest.

In any case I had been wondering about Lenny's letter to Putin. I didn't have to wonder long; on June 26 he posted this on his German page:

Here is the link he shared to the letter to Putin. It's in German, but if you don't speak that language, you don't have to mess with Google or Bing's awkward machine translations. Here is the page in English.

If I'm reading his garbled garbage correctly, it appears that Lenny did not personally reach out to Putin; he merely signed an online letter. So are we to believe Putin is singling Lenny out of the 93,000-plus other souls all over the world who supposedly signed the same online letter, and that Vlad is going to be meeting personally with Lenny?

I think we all know the truth here: Lenny is just another silly Putin fanboy, as are millions of other conservative wingnuts in the US, UK and elsewhere (e.g., Donald Trump, UKIP leader Nigel Farage, et al.). Perhaps Lenny even has a big poster of a shirtless Vlad on horseback taped to his ceiling. And so what if Amy doesn't like it? She's just a woman, and real men like Lenny don't let their wives tell them what to do.

Perhaps Lenny fantasizes about himself and Vlad prancing shirtlessly on horseback together, parading around the new sovereign nation of Loonyland, supervising drills of Lenny's Pinkshirt troops, overseeing the Lenions toiling in the organic gardens or attending the animals. Possibly he envisions Vlad and him hunting and shooting shirtlessly together like the man's men that they are.

Now that I've spoiled your appetite for dinner, let's get back to that sovereign nation notion. Like his idol Donald Trump, Lenny has been a big and mostly ignorant advocate of #Brexit. Lenny has also gotten behind #Amexit (the US leaving the United Nations) and #Texit (Texas seceding from the United States). Well, I'm here to get behind what I hope will be a
#Lexit.

Goodbye, Lenny, and good riddance.

Burning soles redux: it's not the firewalk that's the main problem
Nearly four years ago, the Emperor of Scamworld Tony Robbins' firewalking shtick made the news because some folks at a California event got their tootsies burned. I blogged about it here. Well, it has happened again, this time in Dallas, Texas. (My pal Steve Salerno at SHAMblog was invoked by ABC News to provide insight, but they apparently did a piss-poor job of it; they ran a mere snippet of a prolonged comment he'd made after the 2012 incident.)

Not surprisingly, Robbins' faithful followers claimed that the injured people got burned because of a lack of focus. But at least one participant said that it appeared that staff members didn't allow the coals to cool enough before adding more to the pile.

Maybe convicted, formerly imprisoned and now freed killer James Arthur Ray can get a job with the Robbins scampire.

In any case, as Salty Droid noted back in 2012, after the California burning soles event:

bad things that scale + the internets = very scary

6000 people walking down 10+ lanes of hot coals for 90 minutes :: seems like a big bad … but it’s not the big number we should be worried about. Each one of the those 6000 people represents approximately 100 other people who were offered the opportunity to Unleash the Power Within in San Jose July 2012 and declined. Hundreds of thousands of sales messages constantly spammed across all mediums :: to the whole world … generating the contrivance of attention.

Tony Robbins will never stop telling you that the way to move forward with your life is to keep giving ever larger amounts of yourself and your life to Tony Robbins :: but he’ll never give it back … because he is a nothing and a nobody so he can’t. As shallow a god as ever there was.

But he is a shallow god who is still able to collect millions from the hopeful and the vulnerable.


Update 27 June: Salty Droid weighed in on the latest Tony's toasted toes episode, and as usual nailed it.

The media doesn’t do stories about the huge harms done by Tony Robbins. But they love the shit out of the #footburn #ambulance thing.

Yep. But the problem goes deeper...

People want solutions for their unsolvable problems … and scammers are allowed to use deception and manipulation to take advantage of that.

It wouldn’t be possible without buy-in from liars at every level of our completely corrupted :: propaganda based … power structure.

The problem isn't just with Tony Robbins and Donald Trump. When someone as influential as former President Bill Clinton (whom I have supported, as I now support his wife) calls Tony Robbins a "very good friend," you know the malaise goes all the way up.

Sez Salty:

We best Awaken the Revolutionary Within … before there’s nothing left of our great democratic experiment but lies and burnt feet.

Update 30 June: And here is Steve Salerno, who also gets the big picture in relation to Robbins, Trump et al. and America's "Positive Mental Attitude-mania" -- a mania that has eroded common sense.

Trudeau diet book scam: come, thou long awaited refunds
Finally, and for what it's worth, many months after U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman approved the Federal Trade Commission's proposal to start compensating purchasers of Kevin Trudeau's fraudulent diet book, it appears that the refunds are finally being issued.

My friend Julie Daniel has shared this redacted screen shot of one person's huge refund.

Judging by its news releases, the FTC seems to be patting itself on the back for this one. Small victories, I suppose. It's nothing, though, compared to the millions that Trudeau scammed out of members of his mega-scam,the Global Information Network (GIN).

That's it for now... more soon.

Live wrong and Prosper

We return today (and somewhat belatedly) to Utah, aka The Beehive State, which, apart from its reputation for bee-ing a honey producer, is also a busily buzzing hive of scammish boiler-room businesses -- some of the most insidious, efficient, and ruthless machines ever created for parting people from their money. Apropos of the latter, I have previously described Utah as the land of bilk and money, but I am painfully aware that my lame little stab at cleverness hardly does justice to what is really going on out there. My blogging colleague Salty Droid has been much more direct than I over the past couple of years and, holding his nose but keeping his eyes open, he has dug deeply into what he described in a recent blog post as "Utah's rotting fraud vortex."

In the opening salvo of his June 8 post, The Prosper Chronicles 451, Salty manages not only to pay passing tribute to the late great Ray Bradbury, but also to make another direct hit at Utah and one of its most notorious boiler- room operations, Prosper Inc.

Something wicked this way comes :: let’s be blunt … it’s Utah. You’d think they’d be extra not wicked :: what with even their underwear wearing codified and regulated :: but no … they’re totally wicked. Utah is the heart of darkness ...

Well, in the interest of accuracy, not everyone in Utah wears codified underwear. Only just a lot of Mormons, and for that matter, not only Utah Mormons. It's possible that even presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wears "the garments." Not that I want to think of Romney in any kind of underwear. Not that I want to think of Romney much at all.

But I digress.
 
I've made no secret of the fact that Salty Droid is kind of one of my heroes because he has boldly gone where few bloggers have gone before. Salty's Prosper Chronicles post is particularly significant because he slams the not-not-evil Google for the insidious ways in which Google enables Prosper and other scammy boiler rooms and their "strategic partners" to continue flimflamming the unsuspecting. Google accomplishes this through their AdSense program, which the little fake robot describes as... 

... a dirty f---ing trick :: and one that Google has run on f--king millions of vulnerable Americans during a horrible time for us … and a f---ing sweet ass profitable time for them. Yes that sentence has three f---ks :: but I mean … come on!

For the Google commentary alone Salty's post is well worth reading.*

As of early last month, another one of my journo heroes is Joseph L. Flatley at The Verge, whose May 10 piece, "Scamworld: 'Get rich quick' schemes mutate into an online monster' caused quite a ripple in the online world. If you have not yet read it I urge you to do so. Or go back and read it again. I'll wait.
 
On June 8, Joe Flatley came out with another piece, "Mitt Romney goes to Scamworld: Prosper, Inc. and its powerful friends." This newer piece is a continuation of the same theme, with a few additional features and benefits, one of which was that it pays loving tribute to one of this blog's favorite snargets, Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale. But its real focus is Prosper, which, as it happens, is the company that currently handles Joe's Miracles Coaching program.

Who is this man (and his heroes)?
Joe Vitale, as many of you no doubt recall, is one of the "stars" of The Secret, and among his many other accomplishments he is also The Buddha of the Internet, due to his rare combination of spiritual and marketing acumen. At least that's what his marketing material says. One of the things that this rare combination has delivered unto Mr. Fire is the knowledge that spiritual figures such as Buddha and Jesus want us to be rich. Or at least Joe V has figured out that convincing people that Buddha and Jesus want them to be rich -- and that he, Mr. Fire, has the secret to helping them do so -- is a way to get him richer. In one 2009 blog post tantalizingly titled Buddha's Money-Making Secret, Joe praised a book called The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach, which, he wrote, mirrored Joe's own views about the Buddha's teachings on wealth.

Roach, as you may or may not be aware, was recently in the news for a grisly death associated with an extreme retreat he was leading. Unlike James Arthur "Death" Ray's infamous Spiritual Warrior retreat, this one did not involve a phony sweat lodge, but another type of trendy indigenous -- or trendigenous, if you will (I LOVE making up words) -- structure, a yurt. This snippet in the piece tells you pretty much all you need to know about Roach's brand of Buddhism:

The monk who ran the retreat, Michael Roach, had previously run a diamond business worth tens of millions of dollars and was now promoting Buddhist principles as a path to financial prosperity, raising eyebrows from more traditional Buddhists.

But Roach's teachings apparently didn't raise Joe Vitale's eyebrows, at least not in the you've got-to-be-sh-tting-me way alluded to above. Joe does not claim to be a Buddhist himself (he's more of a Transcendentalist, he says), and in fact in his blog post about Buddha's Money Making Secret, he confesses that he is not Buddha either. But he does apparently believe that Buddha would approve of his apparent obsession with material wealth.
 
But I digress again. The misappropriation of Buddhist teachings is not what Joe Flatley was targeting in his piece. Rather, he wrote about Joe Vitale's Miracles Coaching program, for which, as noted above, Joe V. partners with the aforementioned Utah boiler room Prosper. You will probably not be surprised to learn that I thoroughly enjoyed the piece.
 
Granted, Joe F. is more than a little snarky (my kind of guy!), basing his snarkasm upon some of the things Joe V. has most proudly promoted. Apparently he did not interview Joe V., which Joe V. may very well jump on as an example of poor journalism, as he did when Barbara Ehrenreich snarked him out in her book, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. Joe V was not pleased about his write-up in that book. But I am thinking that the point of Joe Flatley's piece wasn't really to present an in-depth portrait of Mr. Fire (any more than it was Ehrenreich's purpose); rather, it was merely to give some perspective of Mr. Fire's role in what Salty Droid has often called "the big, sick machine." In any case, I suspect that when the article came out there was some heavy drinking in Wimberley, Texas that night.

Politix, schmolitix
Joe Flatley's article isn't just about Joe Vitale and Miracles Coaching. It also touches on a couple of Prosper's other "gurus," and tells the story of a former boiler-room salesman who says he worked at Prosper. Then the piece gets into dodgy Utah politicians, such as Utah's Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who has accepted many thousands of dollars of campaign donations over the years from Prosper and other Utah boiler rooms. Flatley mentions another matter that Salty had previously written about -- that of Utah's Chief Deputy Attorney General, John Swallow, who is running for AG and has vowed to change things so that the AG's office will have control over Utah Consumer Protection. Talk about a case of the fox guarding the henhouse....

Mitt Romney is arguably the pièce de résistance of the article, as Flatley wraps up with the mention of a fundraiser held in Utah for Romney on June 8 -- a fundraiser hosted and promoted by boiler-room and MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) heavyweights. All told, there's not a whole lot about Romney in Flatley's article, but there's more than enough smoke, in my opinion, to indicate that there's a real fire (as opposed to a Mr. Fire).

Nevertheless Joe F. got some flak for his article because some people thought the headline, which Joe himself apparently did not write, was misleading. Others criticized him because they thought he was insinuating that only Republican politicos are dirty. Here's how Joe addressed that on the discussion on Salty's Prosper Chronicles blog post:

...Sure, I characterized the people behind Romney’s Super PAC money as “super-rich supervillians.” Because they are. And because it has a nice ring to it. (One of the benefits of being a senior editor at The Verge is I get to indulge in wordplay from time to time.)

Do I have to even mention that neither the Republicans or Democrats have the exclusive on political corruption? Because I will if I have to, but I thought that was so patently obvious that to make a big deal out of it would be to insult the intelligence of my readers.

The obnoxious commenters at The Verge (who are a statistically insignificant number — something like .02% of our readership) perceive me as saying things that I did not say. Based on the fact that Mitt Romney’s name is in the headline. They’re ignoring the real problem, which is that these boiler rooms rip people off — and that they’re allowed to get away with it. Who allows them to get away with it? Exactly.

Someone on the same discussion reminded us that if anything, Joe Flatley understated the scammer-Romney connection. That person cited this article from the May/June 2012 issue of Mother Jones. The MJ piece emphasizes the Utah connection with MLMs such as Nu Skin. "By all appearances," the Salty participant wrote, "without [Romney's] personal intervention, Nu Skin wouldn't have been allowed to become an Olympic sponsor."


The MJ article attempts to explain why Utah is such a ripe garden for MLM schemes:

Utahns have a joke about multilevel-marketing companies: MLM really stands for "Mormons Losing Money." The notion of selling to one's friends and neighbors is so intertwined with the culture that the final season of HBO's Big Love featured an MLM subplot. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah has the highest concentration of such companies in the country.

There's a reason why MLMs, many of which peddle natural health products like Nu Skin's dietary supplements, have thrived there. Mormon scripture encourages the use of herbs as God's medicine, and the faith has a strong tradition of turning to alternative medicine. Its founder, Joseph Smith, reportedly shunned traditional doctors, believing a physician had killed his brother. The tight-knit Latter-day Saints community, and the trusting nature of its adherents, have made Utah a lucrative terrain for multilevel marketers. Mormons, who typically spend two years serving as missionaries, are also natural recruits for companies that need salespeople with a high tolerance for rejection. And finally, MLM firms often pitch themselves to women as a way to stay home with their kids while still earning substantial incomes.

You get the drift.

But let's get back to Prosper...
As I've noted, Salty Droid has written about Prosper's misdeeds on numerous occasions, and both he and Joe Flatley cited articles such as this one from Salt Lake City's "alternative" weekly newspaper, City Weekly, and this one from the Salt Lake City Tribune. If you haven't read the articles already, you should. Then go wash the slime off of your hands and come back to get re-slimed.

The knowledge of boiler-room shenanigans, and Prosper's shenanigans in particular, goes back for years. In the past Salty has also cited information such as that in this 2009 piece from City Weekly:

Prosper Inc., located in Provo, gained some notoriety on Feb. 28, 2008, when The Salt Lake Tribune reported that former employee Chad Hudgens had sued his former supervisor for using a method of torture on him that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition as part of a company exercise. The tactic induces psychological trauma by convincing the body it is drowning. Hudgens alleged his boss waterboarded him, explaining to watching employees that they should put the same amount of struggle into making sales as Hudgen’s body did as it struggled for air. Prosper, which markets business coaching to customers in areas such as real estate, investing and Web commerce also donated $15,000 to Shurtleff in 2008. Despite repeated attempts to contact representatives of Prosper, City Weekly was unable to obtain comments about an administrative citation issued against them by the Utah Division of Consumer Protection in 2007 for deceptive trade practices.

That is really just the tip of the slime pile, as you'll see if you read the article, which details more Prosper misdeeds from the early 2000s. If I were running a coaching program, I don't think I would want a company with Prosper's abusive record to handle it. However, to the best of my recollection, Mr. Fire began partnering with Prosper for Miracles Coaching in early 2009 -- quite some time after Prosper's problems had become public knowledge. Did he not do his homework about Prosper, or was their sales pitch just too sweet to resist? Word has it that his then-Director of Sales and Marketing (and now ex-Kevin Trudeau/GIN employee), Peter Wink, had something to do with pushing Joe into Prosper. If that's the case... nice work, Peter Wink!

Another story Joe Flatley tells in his Verge piece about Miracles Coaching and Prosper is that of Jonathan Timar, a friend of this blog who, in 2010, wrote on his blog about his own experiences with the Miracles Coaching hard sell. (Fortunately, Jonathan did not take the bait.) I've mentioned Jonathan here and on other forums before, and have linked to his article numerous times. I am glad Joe Flatley included Jonathan's experience in his piece too, because it accurately illustrates the boiler-room M.O.

In May of 2011 Jonathan finally confronted Joe Vitale about this matter on the latter's blog. I've also previously mentioned this on my Whirled, but it seems only proper to mention it again. Jonathan told Joe about the troubling experiences he'd had with Miracles Coaching. The dialogue begins here. Joe pleaded ignorance to any wrongdoing on the part of the sales team, but he did apologize to Jonathan for any negative experiences Jonathan had had.

I’m sorry for whatever the sales team said to you. The program has been around more than four years but I switched sales a while back. I believe all is fine now but again, I apologize.

Joe was correct about having "switched sales." Previously his Miracles Coaching cash machine had been handled by a Texas company called Northstar Ventures, about whom there had been numerous complaints, and not just regarding Miracles Coaching.

But, as I noted above, apparently Joe didn't do his homework when looking for a company to switch to. Or maybe he did do his homework (or let Peter Wink do it for him), and the potential bottom line looked so attractive that he was willing to overlook Prosper's little problems.

In any case, this is what Joe told Jonathan after doing some "research" about what Prosper was doing (you have to wonder why he didn't bother to educate himself about their methods before signing up with them):

Dear Jonathan, I appreciate your input regarding my Miracles Coaching program and how it is being sold. I did research so I could answer you.
We do have a two-step process that qualifies individuals for our program and then explains the different options that are available to them. My program isn’t for everybody and unless a person is willing to put in the time, effort and frankly the money, they won’t get the results they are looking for. Our interview process has been set up to determine if a person is serious. As you know, unless you are really committed to something, you won’t make the changes that are required in order to make a difference in your life. Our intent is to help individuals clear their blocks and limiting beliefs so they become what they really want to become. Thousands of people have found tremendous success in our Miracles Coaching Program and have ranked us an average of 4.3 out of 5 in whether the program has made a difference in their life.

I apologize if you felt you were being “high pressured” into our program. We often find it to be a fine line between encouraging people to make a change that they need to in their life and being “too pushy”. I hope you can understand.

Oh, yes, Joe, we understand. And thanks to the efforts of people such as Salty Droid and Joe Flatley, we now understand even better.

PS ~ I wasn't the only one who enjoyed Joe Flatley's Prosper article. My old pal at the Pyre, who had been away from his blog for months, popped back in with a post about it as well.

PPS (27 June 2012): More about Utah's hive of corruption and scum from another sharp journo, Eric Peterson at Salt Lake City's alternative newspaper, City Weekly.

• http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-77-16068-dialing-for-dollars.html?current_page=all
• http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-77-16096-phone-predators.html?current_page=all

* Yes, I participate in Google AdSense myself, and I blog on a platform owned by Google. My friends have been telling me for ages that I need to transfer my Whirled over to Wordpress, and perhaps I will. I've had the placeholder set up for years. As for the ads, I signed up for the free default version of AdSense a couple of years ago, which is why you often see ads on my blog for the very things I snark about. FYI, though, I've made a grand total of less than $105.00 since I've been with the program. I am but a minuscule part of the big sick machine, but even that is prolly too much. Mea culpa.
2015 UPDATE: I no longer participate in Google AdSense. I never made more than a couple of hundred bucks in the several years in which I participated in the program (which as noted above was was the free default version), so I canceled.

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