“Investigators at a special team at the Education Department have been reassigned, sidelined or told to concentrate on other work, current and former employees told the Times. The department has been whittled down from more than a dozen to just three people, who have been assigned to paperwork regarding student loan forgiveness.
“Betsy DeVos’ decision to gut investigation into for-profit colleges is a disgrace,” said Cody Hounanian of StudentDebtCrisis.org. “Years of work at the Department of Education uncovered fraud and abuse at all levels of the for-profit college industry. Yet the Education Secretary wants to hamstring this vital work.”
01) All of Mugshots.com’s alleged co-owners arrested on extortion charges
“Mugshots.com is a “business permeated with fraud,” California AG says.
Two alleged owners of Mugshots.com—Sahar Sarid and Thomas Keesee—have been arrested in south Florida on a recently issued California warrant. The notorious website publishes mugshots and then demands payment for their removal.
On Wednesday, the attorney general of California brought criminal charges against not only Saried and Keesee, but also Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie and David Usdan. The quartet has been charged with extortion, money laundering, and identity theft.
…
“This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else’s humiliation,” said Attorney General Becerra in a statement. “Those who can’t afford to pay into this scheme to have their information removed pay the price when they look for a job, housing, or try to build relationships with others. This is exploitation, plain and simple.”
In the same statement, Becerra’s office said that these defendants “extracted more than $64,000 in removal fees from approximately 175 individuals with billing addresses in California. Nationally, the defendants took more than $2 million in removal fees from approximately 5,703 individuals for the same period.”
It’s about time, this sort of bold faced criminal theft faced prosecution.
These sorts of extortion operations exist in multiple forms…You don’t even have to do anything remotely illegal or controversial…They just have their methods of grabbing people’s public information [name, home address, contact information, etc.], and publishing it on their own website without permission…demanding a fee to remove it…a “clerical fee”, for the five seconds it takes to delete their ill gotten entry.
…And they exploit situations where nobody would think this sort of thing would happen…and they know, nobody they target is going to be okay with it.
01) Trump Again Suggests Extending His Presidency Beyond Two Terms
“During a rally in Indiana this week, Donald Trump made a comment about extending his presidency beyond the Constitutionally-allowed two terms. This is the second time Trump has publicly said that he may stay in office longer than 8 years, suggesting that he isn’t really joking about the matter. And although he’s trashing the Constitution, the crowd of MAGA fools just cheered and cheered. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
01) Bernie Sanders rips John Bolton, Trump over Iran
“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ripped White House security adviser John Bolton over his role in US going to war in Iraq while criticizing President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Iran nuclear deal.”
Bolton: It’s ‘possible’ US would sanction European countries:
01) Daniel Dennett – A Thought Experiment on Religion
“Daniel Dennett’s talk at ImagineNoReligion3 2013 Kamloops, British Columbia
Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon &Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. He co-edited The Mind’s I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.
He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
01) Betsy DeVos Caught Getting Rich From FRAUD
