Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 comments

"Using the legal standard of "reckless behavior" all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn't intend to lose the pregnancy. Drink too much alcohol and have a miscarriage? Under the new law such actions could be cause for prosecution." A new Utah law now makes intentional behavior leading to miscarriage or "reckless" behavior leading to miscarriage a crime punishable by life in prison.
posted by Avenger on Feb 24, 2010 - 88 comments

Home-brewing of biodiesel is under attack in Salt Lake.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Jun 11, 2006 - 25 comments

Little Jesse Koochin remains hooked up to a ventilator at Primary Children's Medical Center, oblivious to the controversy that has erupted around him. Doctors at the Salt Lake City hospital pronounced the 6-year-old cancer patient brain-dead this week and want to remove life support. Jesse's parents, Steve and Gayle Koochin, insist their youngest child is alive and believe they can bring him back to health with alternative medicine. Hospital officials maintain the boy is dead and has begun decomposing.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Oct 14, 2004 - 23 comments

Senator Orrin Hatch [R-Utah] , chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, favors legislation allowing copyright holders to remotely destroy the computers of illegal file traders. Hatch, an accompished songwriter in his own right, is quoted as saying that damaging someone's computer "...may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights." Apparently the good Senator is forgetting that our legal system is based on the presumption of innocence.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Jun 17, 2003 - 32 comments

The city of Enoch, Utah, population 3467, has an annual animal-control budget of $25,000. A budget this small means that Enoch's Animal Control must display some creativity when it comes to dealing with the problem of stray or unwanted animals. Mark Havnes of the Salt Lake Tribune describes Enoch's solution:

"No sterile lethal injections here. No pressurized bottles of toxic gas. Enoch attaches a hose to the back of a city-owned Dodge pickup and funnels lethal carbon monoxide into a shedlike death chamber. The unwanted, unadoptable critters then are placed inside...'We have no trouble sleeping at night,' says...the city's part-time animal-control officer... 'We can't see a darn thing wrong with what we are doing."
posted by mr_crash_davis on Jul 14, 2002 - 4 comments

Utahns expected to walk on water.
OK, not exactly. The slippery issue of whether or not a public easement for a river includes the right to walk on the bottom of the river has once again been sidestepped. Me, I'm playing it safe with this or maybe a pair of these.
posted by mr_crash_davis on May 4, 2002 - 2 comments

Utah Judge Rules Medical Pot is In via the Utahns for Compassionate Use. "During a preliminary hearing for three patients in Cedar City on Wednesday March 27, 2002 Judge Braithwaite bound patients over for trial and ruled that their medical marijuana arguments do count in a Utah Courtroom even though Utah has different laws than California." My question, of course, is: do you really spell it "Utahns?"
posted by massless on Apr 5, 2002 - 2 comments