Showing posts with label Mormons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mormons. Show all posts

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Work-at-home scams

I was asked earlier today if I could give my opinion on whether the work-from-home opportunity advertised at the domain onlineprofitmasterssystem.com is a scam.  A quick bit of research produced some interesting results, my conclusion is that it is almost definitely a scam, by people with a history of promoting scams.

First, the domain registration:


Registrant:
   Phillip Gannuscia
   1780 W. 9000 South
   #315
   West Jordan, Utah 84088
   United States

   Registered through: Go Daddy
   Domain Name: ONLINEPROFITMASTERSSYSTEM.COM
      Created on: 04-Nov-11
      Expires on: 04-Nov-12
      Last Updated on: 29-Nov-11

   Administrative Contact:
      Gannuscia, Phillip  nate@essentmedia.com
      1780 W. 9000 South
      #315
      West Jordan, Utah 84088
      United States
      (801) 803-5769      Fax --

The very domain and URL and web content of the page are already screaming red flags, and there are more to be found in the above data.  It's a recently registered domain, and the contact physical address appears to be a private mail drop service.  Both the address and telephone number listed are associated with multiple other companies (e.g., BBB F-rated eVenture International, run by Richard Scott Nemrow, who was cited multiple times by the Utah Division of Consumer Protection in 2009) and domain names (e.g., makerichesfromhome.com, educationtrainingsonline.com, executivelearningonline.com, learningresourceontheweb.com, and lightlifemaster.com) which also look like scams,.  This particular company, Online Profit Masters, has an F rating from the BBB.  The named contact, Phillip Gannuscia, has an email address with someone else's name, nate@essentmedia.com, apparently Essent VP Nathan L. Kozlowski, a former Mormon missionary.  Does Gannuscia even exist, or is the name just an alias for Kozlowski?  The company whose domain is used here for the contact email address, Essent Media LLC, another Richard Scott Nemrow company, has a corporate registration which expired in 2010.

I'd steer clear of any business with these guys.  And if you come across this blog post because you've already been ripped off by them (like this guy reports), I suggest you file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center as well as contacting your local law enforcement agency.


Monday, July 13, 2009

Science-based medicine conference, part 2: cancer quackery

This is part two of my summary of the Science-Based Medicine conference at TAM7, which will be followed by a summary of TAM7 itself. Part one is here.

David Gorski, surgical oncologist and associate professor of surgery at Wayne State University, perhaps better known as Orac of the Respectful Insolence blog, spoke next on "Case studies in cancer quackery: Testimonials, anecdotes, and pseudoscience." He began with a disclaimer (he doesn't speak for his employer) and some disclosures (he receives no pharma funding and isn't paid to blog).

His talk was about misrepresentations by cancer quacks, who use exaggeration and misrepresentation and make false promises. To illustrate exaggeration, he showed a cartoon that described "three approved paths to the graveyard," "cut" (surgery), "burn" (radiation), and "poison" (chemotherapy) (the exaggeration is in the title rather than the descriptions, which are he admitted were accurate). To illustrate the latter, he showed a series of book covers by Hulda Clark--"The Cure for All Advanced Cancers," then "The Cure for All Cancers," and then "The Cure for All Diseases." She thinks that all cancers and diseases are caused by liver flukes, to be diagnosed with a "Syncrometer," a device similar to a Scientology E-meter, a galvanometer that measures electrical resistance of the skin, and cured with the "Zapper," a low voltage electrical device.

Some of the frequent claims of cancer quacks are that they are "wholistic" and treat the whole patient rather than a part or a symptom, that "we treat the real cause of cancer," that their treatment is "natural," and that "cancer is not the disease, it's a manifestation of something else" such as psychological conflict. And, of course, the ever-popular generic "toxins." They also claim that natural cures are being suppressed because Big Pharma can't make a profit from them.

Testimonials
Gorski next turned to the role of testimonials in cancer quackery, which he said are being used for several reasons, the first N of which are "to sell a product." Two other reasons are "to persuade others" and "to attack standard evidence."

He gave Gorski's Laws of Testimonials:

1st Law: When a believer in Alternative-Based Medicine (ABM) uses a combination of both science-based medicine (SBM) and ABM and gets better, it's always the ABM that gets the credit.

2nd Law: When a believer in ABM uses a combination of both SBM and ABM and dies or gets worse, it's always SBM that gets the blame.

He next described two cases of testimonials, the first of which was an example of a "not cancer" testimonial. This was a testimony of a man who felt a lump on his chest which he claimed to be breast cancer, which was successfully treated by some quack remedy. But this was never diagnosed as cancer, and Gorski noted that from the description it actually sounded like a case of gynecomastia rather than cancer. His second case was that of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma, who went through one round of chemotherapy with good results, but then stopped taking it because he and his mother wanted to use an alternative treatment from "Chief Cloudpiler." The judge ordered chemotherapy to be continued, and he and his mom took off, though ultimately returned and re-started chemotherapy. During the time chemotherapy stopped, the tumor grew to larger than it was originally, and when it was restarted, it again responded to treatment--but of course his mother gave credit to the alternative treatment.

The problems with testimonials are that there may not have been a diagnosis of cancer, there may have been a misunderstanding of the diagnosis (e.g., "I was sent home to die"), there may be important information withheld, the diagnosis may have been done by quack tests with no validity (e.g., the Syncrometer or live blood cell analysis), and there may be a selection bias. As an example of the latter, he noted that dead people don't give testimonials.

Questions for Evaluating Testimonials
He provided a modified version of Dr. Moran's questions to ask in order to evaluate testimonial evidence. These questions include:
  • Was cancer definitely present?
  • Did it go away?
  • Was the advocated treatment the only one used?
  • Was the alternative therapy a replacement for primary or for adjuvant therapy?
At this point, he distinguished primary, adjuvant, and neo-adjuvant therapies. The primary therapy for most cancer treatments is surgery, to remove as much of it as possible. Adjuvant therapy is designed to reduce the risk of recurrence, where radiation is used to reduce the risk of local recurrence (cancer in the same place, to make sure you get rid of it all) and chemotherapy is used to reduce the risk of a systemic recurrence (cancer that may have spread to other parts of the body). Neo-adjuvant therapy is designed to shrink a tumor prior to surgery, and may reduce complications and produce better results from surgery.

Suzanne Somers
To illustrate the importance of these questions and distinctions, he used the case of Suzanne Somers, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 54, probably at stage I. She had no positive lymph nodes and underwent a lumpectomy, radiation, and a lymph node biopsy, but refused chemotherapy with tamoxifen in favor of mistletoe extract and other supplements.

In her case, the answers to the questions were:
  • Was cancer present? Yes.
  • Did it go away? Yes--it was removed by surgery.
  • Was the alternative medicine the only or primary treatment? No.
He then examined her probable survival rates with and without chemotherapy, and noted that if the tumor was small, the benefit of chemotherapy for her 10-year survival rate could be as low as 1%. With a larger tumor, her 10-year survival rate improvement could still be as low as 4% (and would already be at 90% prior to chemo). But, Gorski noted, most women say that they would go with chemotherapy even for as little as a 1% increase in survival rate.

Surgery cures most cancers that can be cured, up to stage III, and the corresponding benefits of chemo and hormonal therapy increase with more advanced stages of cancer.

Gorski then observed that there may be cases where a person is diagnosed with cancer by a biopsy, declines further treatment, and has a good survival rate, where they fail to realize that the biopsy itself has been a surgical primary treatment that has excised all of the cancer--an excisional biopsy may be equivalent to a lumpectomy. He also noted that many people say to go ahead and take out the tumor but don't touch my lymph nodes, and he agreed that lymphedema, which can be caused by surgical or radiation treatment of the lymph nodes, is "not a fun thing." But the new standard of care is to use blue dye and a radiotracer procedure to find lymph nodes likely to be positive for cancer ("sentinel lymph nodes"), and treat accordingly.

Kim Tinkham
Kim Tinkham is a woman who saw The Secret, had stage III breast cancer, and declined all treatment. She now claims the cancer is gone, based on a quack blood test, even though the lump is still present, and has written a book about it. She is a follower of Mormon naturopath Robert O. Young, who claims that acid is the cause of all disease and alkalinization is the cure for everything. He says there is no such thing as a cancer cell, just a healthy cell spoiled by acid. Two years after her initial diagnosis, Tinkham is still alive.

Gorski pointed out that for a case like hers, expected survival for five years with treatment could be over 50%, but at ten years it goes way down. Data about untreated cancer comes from 250 cases of "large palpable tumors" from 1805-1933 at Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut. At 10 years, 3% were still alive, and at 15 years, 0.8% were still alive; the median survival rate was 2.87 years.

He noted that breast cancer biology is "highly variable in clinical behavior" and in some cases may be "indolent, slow-growing, and slow to metastasize."

The answers to the testimonial questions for Tinkham are:
  • Was cancer definitely present? Yes.
  • Did it go away? No.
  • Was the alternative treatment the only one? Yes.
Time will no doubt soon tell how (in)effective this alternative treatment has been, unfortunately.

Testimonials as Conversion Stories
Gorski suggested that these testimonies are really part of "cult medicine" and seem to follow a pattern like religious conversion stories. The specter of death comes like a "bolt out of the blue," the person repents and says "I brought this upon myself," they face temptation in the form of standard medical care, they search for enlightenment, and then they find enlightenment in the form of some alternate description of their ailment which they then want to evangelize.

Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert
Dr. Gorski concluded his talk with the story of Michaela Jakubczyk-Eckert (warning, graphic images), who was born on November 14, 1964 and died on November 12, 2005, just two days short of her 41st birthday. She had a T4 lesion eating through the skin of her breast, a case of "classic delayed diagnosis." She received neo-adjuvant chemotherapy treatment which shrank the tumor considerably, but then discovered Ryke Geerd Hamer, the inventor of German New Medicine, who argued that cancer is caused by psychological conflict rather than anything biological. She stopped her chemotherapy, and suffered a horrible relapse. As Gorski put it, she "died a horrible, horrible death" with her final days being subjected to the pain of a rotting-away body of skin and bones--a death far worse than chemotherapy. It was a vivid depiction of the alternative that cancer quacks can cause for their victims. Her husband has put up a website to try to dissuade others from being fooled by Hamer's theories (see link above to her story).

Dr. Gorski has written a blog post at the Science-Based Medicine blog on alternative medicine testimonials that covers some of the above subjects in more detail.

(Part three of my conference summary, on chiropractic, is here. Part four, on evidence-based medicine and homeopathy, is here. Part five, on chronic Lyme disease, is here. Part six, on online health and social media, and the closing Q&A panel, is here.)

Monday, July 06, 2009

Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen thinks the earth is 6000 years old

Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R-Snowflake), arguing in favor of a bill to allow uranium mining north of the Grand Canyon, casually says that the earth is 6,000 years old, and therefore a little uranium mining isn't going to hurt anything.

Snowflake, the home of the logging team that included claimed UFO abductee Travis Walton, also has a large Mormon population, and Mormons have power in the Arizona legislature far beyond their numbers.

The ignorant Senator Allen should step on over to the Talk.Origins Archive and read the Age of the Earth FAQ. (UPDATE: For a more readable introduction, how about Chris Turney's Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened, or G. Brent Dalrymple's The Age of the Earth.)



(Via the Bad Astronomy blog.)

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Utah Sen. Chris Buttars' Mormon Gulag

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out an account of a 15-year-old kidnapped from his grandmother's house at the request of his parents, and taken to the Utah Boys Ranch, then run by Utah Senator Chris Buttars. Apparently the mind-control treatment didn't take, and he started the Utah Boys Ranch Network to expose the abuse.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Post-Mormon billboard in Gilbert

A "You are not alone" billboard promoting a group for people who have left the Mormon religion is up in Mesa, put up by Paul Hahn of www.postmormon.org.

Unlike usual anti-Mormon proselytizing, this group isn't promoting evangelical Christianity--it's religiously neutral, and its website includes comments about Richard Dawkins' "Root of All Evil," the film "Jesus Camp," and a debate between Rev. Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens, along with criticisms of Mormonism based on DNA evidence and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which are good rational reasons not to believe in the religion.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Discovery Institute Fellow: Dumbledore is NOT gay

Young-earth creationist and Discovery Institute Fellow John Mark Reynolds has written a pair of articles arguing that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's outing of her character Dumbledore as gay doesn't make him so, since the text is silent on the issue. I actually think he makes a reasonable argument, except that he heads in a personally dangerous direction when he writes:

What if Rowling writes a guide to her characters in which she gives new “back story” to the characters?

That too will not matter . . . anymore than I care much about the “Lost Books” (really his notes) that the Tolkien family keeps publishing from the author of Lord of the Rings insofar as it could possibly change the meaning of Tolkien’s main work. The text is fixed and it is as it is. The fact that Tolkien had other ideas about Frodo, Merry, or any other characters is important to discuss how the story came to be, but does not change the meaning of the text, if there is no explicit (or even hint) of the “new” matter.

This seems to be at extreme odds with how most Christians view the Old Testament in light of the New (and, as an aside, how Mormons view the Old and New Testaments in light of the Book of Mormon). It's pretty clear that Christians do hold that the words of the Old Testament have different meanings than Jews attribute to them.

(Via The Panda's Thumb.)

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Mormons impose their bogus beliefs on Mexican archaeological sites

Today's Arizona Republic features an article titled "Mormon tourists travel to key sites of their faith," about Mormons from Utah and Arizona who are traveling with companies like Book of Mormon Tours, L.D.S. Guided Tours, and Liahona Tours to sites in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras to be told that Mayan ruins are sites described in the Book of Mormon as belonging to the Nephites and the Jaredites. The different tours are not only contradicted by real archaeologists, but the tour companies contradict each other about what sites correspond to which locations in the Book of Mormon--a book by a con artist, plagiarized from the Bible, the Apocrypha, Josiah Priest's The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed (1825) and Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews (1823) (itself lifting from other books such as James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775) and Elias Boudinot's A Star in the West (1816)), which also drew from Adair), which themselves are works of pseudo-history.

These tours are not so different in some respects from tours of some of the locations of alleged religious significance in the Middle East, where there are multiple claimed locations of the tomb of Jesus, the Garden of Gethsemane, and Noah's Ark. The difference is that the sites being visited are sites of real significance regarding real historical people who have nothing at all to do with the Book of Mormon.

Fortunately, these tour operators are treated with dismissal even by the Mormon church, as the Republic article points out with a quote from John Clark of the church's New World Archaeological Foundation at Brigham Young University: "I just see the tours as entertaining, and I try not to get upset that people are wasting their money doing foolish things."

If he cares about the truth, why wouldn't he get upset? Perhaps because encouraging his fellow Mormons to care about accuracy would be sure to lead to trouble if they ever carefully examined the historical foundations of their own religion, at least for any who were curious enough to look. But most aren't, as the article's quotation from one tour participant shows:
But whether the archaeological evidence backs up the Book of Mormon is irrelevant, said tour participant Dawn Frenetti, 28, of Milpitas, Calif. Just seeing such sites is inspiring, she said.

"It definitely helps me stay interested in learning more about the Book of Mormon," she said. "But, as far as confirming my faith, my faith has always been there."
If there were a religion based on the works of Mark Twain, a visit to Disneyland's Tom Sawyer island would no doubt be considered a pilgrimage to a holy site.

UPDATE (June 21, 2007): This Mormon response to plagiarism in the Book of Mormon is quite amusing, in that it completely fails to address the specific evidence of copying from the sources in question. It is no response at all to a plagiarism accusation to point out that there are also differences between the works! A more fair-minded LDS response also argues that the Book of Mormon is not entirely or mostly based on Ethan Smith's book, but states that "My analysis of Persuitte's parallels reveals that, with one exception, no single book in the Book of Mormon received more than 8.09% influence from View of the Hebrews (see chart 1)." But that is sufficient to refute Joseph Smith's claim of translating golden plates that predated Ethan Smith's book!

Monday, March 26, 2007

Anti-Mormon DVDs distributed to home across Arizona

An anti-Mormon Christian ministry, "Concerned Christians," has distributed 18,000 DVDs to homes across Arizona, mainly targeting areas with high Mormon populations such as Mesa and Snowflake. 15,000 DVDs were distributed to homes in Mesa, Tempe, and Gilbert, 2,000 in Snowflake, and 1,000 in Tucson.

The DVD, titled "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith," argues against the latter but not the former. The DVD was apparently produced by and distributed nationally by Living Hope Ministries of Brigham City, Utah, a Christian church that criticizes the Mormon religion. [UPDATE (July 6, 2007): My cousin and his wife inform me in the comments that this is not correct, contrary to the statement from the Arizona distributor in the Arizona Republic's report, and that this was produced and distributed by TriGrace Ministries and GoodnewsfortheLDS.com.]

That name was familiar to me--I suspected, and verified, that this is the same church that previously produced a DVD about how DNA evidence disproved Mormon claims about Native Americans being descendants of the lost tribe of Israel. In 2001, the pastor of Living Hope Ministries was Joel Kramer, who was the officiant at the wedding of my cousin Aaron Lippard, which I attended at their storefront church in Brigham City.

Kramer, a former Tucson resident, has authored a book, Beyond Fear, which tells the story of how Kramer and my cousin Aaron traveled across Papua New Guinea solely under their own power. I read the book after seeing my cousin present a slide presentation about his harrowing trip (and show off his septum piercing, which was pierced by a New Guinea aborigine with a bird bone, by sticking a meat thermometer through it). I found the book enjoyable, though preachy and annoying in spots. Kramer's voice as a writer struck me as arrogant and condescending towards my cousin, portraying himself as a Christian real-man and my cousin as an inexperienced, naive fellow who had much to learn about becoming a mature Christian male.

A film Kramer has produced is called The Bible vs. the Book of Mormon, which is reviewed here by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. This review makes a point that I've made about Living Hope's Mormons & DNA DVD and about Richard Abanes' One Nation Under Gods--they don't seem to apply the same standard of criticism to Christianity that they apply to Mormonism.

I'm sure the same is true of "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith."

Monday, February 19, 2007

Mitt Romney defends Mormons, slams atheists

A heckler took on Mitt Romney for not "stand[ing] for the Lord Jesus Christ" because he's a Mormon (video clip). This resulted in boos from the audience. Romney replied by saying that "one of the great things about this great land is that we have people of different faiths and different persuasions, and I'm convinced that the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country." This led to audience applause and a standing ovation.

Radley Balko observes: "Romney and his supporters have already deflected as religious bigotry (correctly, in my view) the idea (supported by polls) that America isn't ready for a Mormon in the White House. But Romney has no problem declaring that America isn't ready for an atheist or agnostic in the White House. Frankly, that's offensive."

I agree, but also note this comment from the above video link:

As a Mormon, here are some more of Mitt's specific covenants:

1. God was once a man. He is currently living on a planet near the star Kolob with his wives. 2. Jesus and Lucifer were once spirit brothers. 3. In the afterlife Mormon men will live as kings their own planets and rule over all their heirs. 4. The Book of Mormon was written on gold tablets revealed to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni. These tablets are now lost. Joseph Smith translated the tablets by putting a magic rock in his hat and sticking in face in it. 5. American Indians are the lost tribe of Israel. Jesus ministered to them in his trips to America. 6. Donny and Marie Osmond were great musicians.

But seriously folks, all you people who are trying to pretend Mormonism is just another branch of Christianity, like being a Presbyterian or a Baptist, are fooling yourselves. Someday maybe Republicans will be making excuses for a Scientologist candidate - they're even more nuts than Mormons, but only slightly.

Hail Xenu!

It's not religious bigotry to point out the facts about religions.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Atheist missionaries

Part of the Australian series "John Safran vs. God," this video shows Safran ranting about Mormon missionaries bashing on his door before noon on Saturday, then him and his director seeking revenge by flying to Salt Lake City, putting on matching white shirts and "ATHEIST" badges, carrying some atheist tracts and a copy of Origin of Species, and going door to door.

(Hat tip to Pharyngula.)

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Female soldier committed suicide over interrogation techniques in Iraq

The third woman to die in Iraq, Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, from Flagstaff, Arizona, was reported as having died from a "non-hostile weapons discharge." A reporter who dug further, Kevin Elston, found that she committed suicide on September 15, 2003, after becoming distraught from working in an interrogation unit known as "the cage." Peterson, a devout Mormon who was working as an Arabic translator, was upset by the methods of interrogation being used on Iraqi prisoners. After two days in the unit, she refused to participate further, was reassigned, and was sent to suicide prevention training.

Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques that Peterson objected to, and say that all records of them have been destroyed.

Friday, August 11, 2006

How to get a charitable donation tax deduction and get the money back

The Leavitt family gave $443,500 to the Dixie and Anne Leavitt Foundation, which gave it to the Southern Utah Foundation, which gave the money to Southern Utah University (along with another $135,000 from Leavitt Land and Investment), which gave the money to students in the form of scholarships that could only be used for housing at apartments owned by the Leavitt family. The Leavitt's Cedar Development Company got $578,000 from the student rent payments.

The Leavitts specifically asked the Southern Utah Foundation (whose board member Steven Bennion was also president of Southern Utah University) for the arrangement.

The really interesting part? One member of the Leavitt family involved in these decisions is Mike Leavitt, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration (and former Governor of Utah).

The Leavitt Foundation had already been under scrutiny because the Leavitt family had made large donations but the Foundation had paid out little to charity until last year.

The IRS is investigating. The Leavitts, the foundation administrators, and the university say they see nothing wrong with the arrangement, and a Leavitt spokeswoman says that the Senate Finance Committee reviewed this arrangement as part of Leavitt's confirmation last year.

This kind of arrangement is not surprising to me given what I've heard about other Mormon business arrangements, which commonly use family-owned companies and partnerships to do business with each other in order to gain tax advantages.

(Hat tip to Trent Stamp at Charity Navigator.)

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Mormon theology

Via Deep Thoughts, here's a short (six minutes or so) animated film about Mormon theology as made in the 1970s by a Christian group designed to debunk the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I find the South Park episode more entertaining (on YouTube in three parts: one two three). There's a description of this episode (712, "All About the Mormons") at the website Rethinking Mormonism.