Methbot

Back in early July, I noticed an unusual number of hits to this blog coming out of the small island of Mauritius ... then later in the month this activity shifted to Russia. At the time I attributed this surge to political intelligence gathering by the Ruskies ... see: From Russia with Love. Next my Verizon e-mail account was tagged for issuing spam ... all very suspicious! In a few weeks this spurt of Russian activity disappeared and I assumed I had been tasted by the bear and spit out.

Not so fast oh naive one ... for the Russian surge has returned in the last few weeks and today I think I found out why. It seems that there is a grifting group in Russia (and Mauritius too?) that are using a robotic Internet agent called "Methbot" that runs around the Internet referencing sites to artificially run up advertising revenue for some mysterious third party ... see: Fortune Magazine Story. I'm not sure that this is the bot jazzing up the impressions on this site but I am reasonably sure it is a bot because of the syncopation and magnitude of the references. And I also am seeing more originating in the United States of late. And all this for this blog that does't carry ads!!

The site of this blog is run by Google (in a rather haphazard and unprofessional manner). I would like to believe that the software and network talent at Google would be able to thwart such scammers. But maybe the technical talent there does not match their reputations or compensation? Or maybe all this phony bot ad revenue also benefits Google too? (We're talking about as much as two billion dollars of fake annual ad revenue from this one bot.) Just maybe the disincentive just isn't there ...

And just maybe Methbot was used to throw the presidential election? (Tongue in cheek.)

Ignoble Laureate

I know ... I know ... Donald Trump is a scumbag and he fleeced hundreds of students who wanted to become real-estate moguls like The Donald ... and he is being sued by some of them. And Trump has accused the judge in this case of being biased.

However, did you know that, not to be outdone, the Clintons also had their own pedagogical slippery scam going ... making Trump's grift seem like penny ante? In exchange for about a $55 million gift from Hellery's State Department, Laureate International University kicked back to Bill Clinton $4 million a year for the position as Honorary Chancellor ... plus a donation to the Clinton Foundation ... all for a total of $16.5+ million of soap-suds covered lucre.

Rather then ship you now off to this revealing news story, I've decided to quote most of this heretofore under-reported blockbuster New York Post story here:

For all the hundreds of stories on Trump University, nothing’s been written about the huge payments over 2010-2014 to the potential future first gentleman to serve as “honorary chancellor” of the vast for-profit education firm. 

Nor about the $55 million that Hillary Clinton’s State Department sent the way of groups run by Laureate founder Douglas Becker — who happens to be a major donor to Clinton campaigns and the Clinton Foundation.

One Laureate component, mostly-online Walden University, even faced its own class-action lawsuit. In that, as Turley notes, “Students alleged that they were repeatedly delayed and given added costs as they tried to secure degrees, leaving them deeply in debt.”

Perhaps it was all on the up and up — though “honorary” jobs rarely pay $4 million a year, and Bill did quit just before Hillary began her latest presidential run.

Now I am sure that the Clintons will have their riposte talking points mimeographed and distributed to their Praetorian guards by this weekend. Watch and learn how the Aegean stables can be cleaned and sanitized in short order. (If the Clintons bother to respond to this story at all since the media usually has their backs). To read the full original Jonathan Turley scoop see: NY Post Story.

But I won't let this story go. Watch for more on this miasma in the future.

Afterthought: One more instance of the lesser of two evils ... Trump