Was the Michel-Low case just one of a "famous" rapper who didn't know right from wrong?

 

In this country there are some people of an “oppressed” group who have rebelled against the common notions of right and wrong for so long that they can’t tell the difference between them. They think they have a right to ignore accepted mores because they are used to “oppress” them. When such people come into money, fame and even political connections, they are not likely to understand concepts like “corruption,” “bribery” or “espionage” when it comes to dealing with foreign nationals who see them as gullible conduits in the exchange of “favors.” 

But a recent criminal case involving such as this also ensnared “celebrities” and Hollywood stars who seemed eager to exchange those “favors” for either money or merely for personal self-aggrandizement. Those “favors” included connecting with powerful politicians or unknowingly allowing foreign intelligence agents to gain a foothold in the country to conduct their business, and in one case at least, payment for services including the production costs of a major film. 

So That Umbrella Guy on YouTube has been particularly interested in this case; although while I agree that the lack of mainstream media coverage has been "strangely" weak given the players involved, I don’t agree that the Hollywood personages and rappers involved were actually aware of what they were involved in was precisely illegal, perhaps "only" just a tad unethical that might make them look "bad" if made public. 

But whatever he “thought,” Grammy-Award winning rapper Pras Michel of The Fugees (I admit I never heard of Michel or the group before) was convicted of charges of conspiring with a Malaysian financier who, according to Reuters, “orchestrated a series of foreign lobbying campaigns aimed at influencing the U.S. government under two presidents.”

Specifically, “Michel was charged with 10 counts of crimes including conspiracy, acting as an agent of a foreign government, witness tampering and falsifying campaign finance records. Prosecutors accused him of plotting with Malaysian businessman Jho Low to attempt to influence the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.” 

But that was the tip of the iceberg. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was allowed to escape prosecution by agreeing to be a prosecution witness, describing his own dealings with Low, which included Low helping to finance his The Wolf of Wall Street film. It is assumed that Low used embezzled money from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad sovereign wealth fund, generally used for global investment. Low—who is believed to be currently in hiding in China—is currently facing trial in absentia in New York for his embezzlement schemes, for which a former Malaysian prime minister is currently in prison for.

Michel apparently was “low” on cash when he heard that Low was a man who liked to throw parties with celebrities and threw money and gifts at them to show his appreciation if they showed-up. Since Michel was black, Low apparently thought he had an inside track to arrange a photo-op with Barack Obama, and along with arranging a $2 million campaign contribution paid Michel $20 million for his “services," in what Michel testified was what he thought was “free money.” 

It was easy to understand that jurors would not buy that story, but what came later was even worse. Michel—already compromised by his dealings with Low—somehow became involved with Sun Lijun, who was China’s vice minister of public security. Sun was angry that he wasn’t able to obtain a meeting with either Donald Trump or then Attorney General Jeff Sessions in order to force the extradition of Chinese nationals like real estate billionaire Guo Wengui for making statements critical of the Chinese government. Guo may end-up being extradited anyways, as he is currently facing charges of $1 billion worth of fraud himself in a New York court.

While the U.S. government was not necessarily opposed to extraditing certain individuals, it was not inclined to cooperate as long as Chinese intelligence agents were operating a secret unit in the U.S.  to spy on and intimidate their targets. The FBI discovered that Michel’s dealings with Guo including a “deal’ to release from custody a pregnant Chinese national who was a relative of one of those China wanted extradited as a show of “good faith,” and this was actually done. Thus Michel was acting as an unregistered foreign agent, although he was “unaware” of this, and his attorney apparently did not “advise” him properly in regard to the activities he was now involved in.

According to Bloomberg, the FBI had been on Michel's tail for some time, and Michel was making it a lot easier for them to build a case against him. Michel clearly had no real clue about the trouble he was getting himself into:  “It often takes years of painstaking work for FBI agents to identify people collaborating with foreign governments. But now, Michél had come to them, happy even to identify some of his contacts abroad.”

It seems that Michel really got himself into hot water when, still not realizing he had done anything "wrong," his motives were allowed to become "suspect." It seemed that he wanted to help Sun (himself currently facing the death penalty in China for corruption) get Guo extradited, and because the U.S. government—we are now talking about the Trump administration—was not being helpful, Michel decided to go to the FBI himself and find out why, which only suggested Michel’s complete naiveté about how deep he was in doo-doo.

That Umbrella Guy only talked about this case as if it was just about Democratic corruption, but the real corruption occurred during the Trump years. As Bloomberg noted,  

To investigate this wild tale of celebrity and political intrigue, Bloomberg Businessweek drew on legal filings, interviews with people close to the case and a cache of previously undisclosed FBI and Justice Department documents. The records show how Michél, at Low’s request, helped assemble a team of Republican influencers—including fundraiser Elliott Broidy, businesswoman Nickie Lum Davis and casino magnate Steve Wynn—capable of reaching the highest levels of the Trump administration as it took hold of the US government. Soon, all would be targeted by agents from the FBI’s international corruption division as well as federal prosecutors from Honolulu to New York. 

Low, of course, wanted "assistance" from the Trump administration to drop the embezzlement charges against him. But the list goes on and on about how Michel, perhaps through his own braggadocio about his political “connections,” became easy prey to become ensnared in this web of “espionage” and corruption. In his mind he wasn’t “stealing” anything, just providing services for a “friend.” 

And he wasn’t the only one receiving “gifts” from Low for being his “friend.” Kim Kardashian received a bag of over $300,000 in cash, supermodel Miranda Kerr received $8 million in jewelry, and DiCaprio received “donations” to his charity and  money to make his film—and who knows how many others Low lavished money upon. 

But it was Michel’s dealings with Chinese intelligence agents that really got him into the crosshairs of the FBI. Despite his conviction in court, his defense attorney seems to believe that the guilty verdicts will be overturned because he was just a “regular guy” who was in way over his head and had no clue about the kind of trouble he had gotten himself into. Michel thought he was just helping “friends” who were just asking for “advice” or a “good word” with people in government, and being paid whatever the going rate was for that.

And we can also see this as how certain politicians, particularly Republicans in regard to Trump's corrupt behavior and in the aftermath of January 6, have clouded people's mind what is or isn't "corrupt."  At the very least it has made it  difficult for “ordinary” people to understand the difference between ordinary "gifts" and bribery.

And of course with someone like Michel, everything is “relative.” What he was doing was, perhaps in his mind, was just something that people with “fame” and “influence” did. After all, he wasn't doing a drug deal, stealing money or arranging a “hit,” it was just a quid pro quo that wasn’t really hurting anyone. 

But he was arrogant enough to believe that he had “power” to be an influencer, or to help others gain access to influencers, and at this particular time dealings with the Chinese are certainly suspect. He was getting himself involved into intergovernmental intrigue in which he had no “license” to do, which could be seen as interference in intergovernmental negotiations for personal gain. But did he actually see it that way?

It almost sounds like the plot of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but unlike for the usual protagonist, there was no way out of Michel’s predicament, unlike what the prosecutors offered DiCaprio, who had gained the most with his association with Low—but was at least smart enough not to get involved with the Chinese.

Of course there is the question as to why the mainstream broadcast media has largely ignored the case. Why should we be surprised when certain social interest groups are being shielded from the revelations of such crimes, or for which both political parties could face embarrassment?

What? Can it be that a former Fox News "somebody" is trying to "silence" a nobody blogger like me?

 

So much to talk about, like the recent conviction of a rap artist with political connections accused of being a conduit for Chinese intelligence and bribery, what many suspect was a false flag operation that Russia is infamous for to set the stage for a mass raid in an attempt at Zelensky's life, Sen. Dianne Feinstein's insistence on refusing to quit despite serious illness as damaging as Ruth Bader Ginsburg's was to the "liberal" agenda, and a new Alex Jones-like far-right falsifier on the horizon with the assistance of Elon Musk.

But that will all have to wait. I want to discuss something unusual that occurred beginning this past weekend on my blog. The number of hits I usually get suggests that most people just find it by accident; if you type in "to dare the gods" without the quotation marks, you'd never find it, although with quotation marks or running on the words it pops-up right away. Otherwise its either the few people who bother or if a search happens to connect with a post. 

By far the most "hit" post I have written was in regard to Laura Nyro's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, which still averages at least one hit a day; it was the sixth Google "find" when I typed in "laura nyro and hall of fame induction and son" without the quotation marks.

Anyways, Saturday and Sunday are usually the weakest days for “hits” on this blog, and to be honest, that isn’t saying much to start. But this past Saturday through through today saw more “hits” than I usually get for an entire month, and it “coincided” with Google notifying me that a post dated March 19, 2020 right when the pandemic was in full swing entitled “The craziness of Trump and his friends in the face of the mostly ‘political’ coronavirus problem” had been “flagged” by an angry reader for violating Google's "community standards." 

Google apparently thought it needed to put a warning acknowledgement for readers before the post could be read. It is located here, since Google has apparently blocked it from being "found" by any search term, even direct quotes:

http://todarethegods.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-craziness-of-trump-and-his-friends.html

You will likely encounter this from the link:

 

Frankly, I think that this was one of my better anti-Trump rants. But a lot of people rant about Trump, so what was the “big deal” about this one from over three years ago? I mean, it just shows you how few people actually read that thing, so why flag this out of over 2,200 posts I’ve written? OK, maybe I shouldn't have used a four-letter word not once but twice in the first sentence, but I suspect that it has something to do with  someone who is a little more "self-conscious" about their "image" than Trump is.

Who could that be?  Possibly Trish Regan, one of those “journalists” who once had an “award-winning” reputation at a network that had “community standards”—Bloomberg—before she skipped over to a network that doesn't (Fox News) for the big bucks where her reputation tanked like Maria Bartiromo’s did because of her apparent embrace of far-right lunacy (both should have kept to "business" and left their "opinions" to themselves). And yes, Regan is another one who is “shocked” by Fox News’ firing of Tucker Carlson, and is accusing the network of “abandoning,” what, the far-right extremist conspiracy views she has embraced?

The Google flagging does seem to suggest that there is some “silencing” going on here. But why “me”? I’m not the only one who commented on Regan’s ridiculous comments in regard to the coronavirus; before Fox Business News eventually fired her, The New York Times reported that even Fox executives felt compelled to “bench” Regan after the “outcry” over the same comments I talked about in my post; so why didn't Google "flag" both the NYT and Fox? Perhaps my view of the matter was a little too “personal”: people might come away thinking she really was just another one of those far-right fanatics who serves their corporate masters by feeding the ill-informed their daily meal of ignorance.

I rarely have anyone comment on my posts because, again, I’m just another anonymous nobody with an opinion, which everyone's "got." But apparently that doesn’t mean that another “nobody” might think that they might become “somebody” if someone read one of my posts. About 10 years ago just for the hell of it I checked to see if my name popped-up on the local court docket for some infraction someone was accusing me of, and sure enough there was my name. Some local woman had filed a complaint against me in small claims court, apparently because I had “defamed” her in one of my posts.

It seems that I had expressed an opinion about this person's comments that were printed in the Seattle Times. My commentary was only a paragraph long, within the larger context of homelessness in the city. Again, most people only encounter my blog by accident, so I figured this was just some self-congratulatory individual who was “eager” to find out how “famous” she had become for being in print; but outside the Times article, I must have been the only one who “cared” about what she said. And what she read was that I was unimpressed by this person with the Aryan-Nordic name, who spoke about how the homeless annoyed her in the usual bigoted, master race way of the self-important.

Of course I wouldn’t have known about this, because my address is a mail box, so if someone went there to serve me papers they were unlikely to find me, and the proprietors wouldn’t be inclined to be helpful, even if they did know where I could be found; hell, half the time I don’t even know where I am. I could see it now: a “liberal” judge laughing her out of court for claiming “damage” to her “reputation” by an empty chair for fair comment about her bigotry against homeless people, which she was conceited enough to be dumb enough to have in print in a major regional newspaper, even one that hardly anyone gets their news from anyways anymore.

Anyways, after six days of days of considerably higher than normal traffic on my blog (again a "relative" proposition, given my low hit count to start), the question is where these hits are coming from. Most of them are identified "other" as the "referrer" or search term, whatever that means. Linux also has been the top operating system used, and we find out that Google has its own in-house Linux on its desktops. 

What is also apparent is that according to blogger information, my old posts seem to be being hit one at a time. Despite its claim it doesn't "review" posts for content, I’m thinking that Google has someone sifting through my 2,000+ posts to see if I have a habit of violating “community standards,” and if that is the case so far they haven't flagged any other posts. In fact, today I received an offer from Google Analytics for a $500 "credit" if I paid $500 up front to set-up a Google Ads account. Is it worth it? According to "terms and conditions"

To earn the Google Ads credit: After the promotional offer is applied to your Google Ads account, your advertising campaigns must accrue costs of at least $500 (excluding any taxes or applicable fees) within 60 days. Making a payment of $500 is not sufficient. The tracking of advertising costs towards $500 begins after the promotional offer is applied. 

Given my "hit" record of not making the "Hot 100" chart even on a "good" day, it sounds like a money-loser for me, and I've already put in countless hours for no fiscal benefit. I'm sure once the "investigation" is finished (if that is the case), then my "hits" will go back to "normal." Maybe I should be “flattered” that someone thought I was any different than millions of other amateur bloggers who are "thankful" that anyone is paying attention to anything they have to say.

Sifting out the fiction from the facts about MS-13 in the U.S.

 

The world is full of “tough guys” who just want to beat on people to prove that they are “tough.” The truth of the matter is that they are just weak-minded people who cannot deal with reality, who on one end just want to brow-beat you into submission with the threat of physical violence (like, say, “bullies”), and on the other end are the pathological issuers of violence, like gang members.

Some years ago when I was still working at the airport I was on my way to catch a 3:30 AM bus on a lonely road for the early morning shift when I noticed ahead of me there some large individual who looked like former wrestler-now-actor Dwayne Johnson loitering in the middle of the street; I thought he was drunk or something. As I got closer to him he moved to my side of the walkway and stood as if he was waiting for me.

I tried to walk around him but he blocked my path. I was wearing headphones, and he asked me what kind of music I listened to. Huh? I didn’t have time to tell him because he then sucker-punched me in the head—not real hard, but hard enough for him to tell me to stay down while he pulled the cord from around my neck and ran off to a car that was hiding in the darkness, which pulled away with the headlights off.

Alright, so what the hell just happened here? It must have been a gang “initiation” thing, with someone in the car watching what this guy was doing. For all of that it was an unfortunate haul for both of us: instead of the iPod he thought he was stealing, the guy ran away with my airport ID card, which happened to include a Department of Homeland Security stamp, which was required to work on international flights.

Now, if you lose your ID card you have to “prove” that it was stolen, or else you have to pay $250 for the first replacement, or $500 for the second, which at the time was more than my gross pay for a week. I reported the incident to police, and then repeated the story to ID access office. But they didn’t believe me, and then I found out the officer in charge of my case had taken a week vacation just then. I stood my ground, and when the officer returned to work I called him and kept him on the line, insisting that the ID people talk to him. 

But they refused, instead contacting my supervisor to come  down to interrogate me; he seemed to think that I wasn’t lying, and admitted that the ID access people had been playing games with me the whole time, because the person who stole my card apparently got “scared” by DHS seal and put my card in an unmarked envelope and into the “lost and found” slot the day after the theft—and they deliberately kept this information from me (by the way, at the time all the employees in that office were black, so you can speculate on how they transferred their own self-consciousness into stereotypes about other groups). What was stolen from me, then, was a week’s pay, and to me it was a "wash" about who was the real "thief."

So why am I bringing this up now? Because its my own story about an encounter with "gang culture" as we learn about a recent story where an Uber Eats driver in Florida was murdered and dismembered by an alleged MS-13 gang member, apparently to steal money; it appears that when the driver insisted he carried no money the gangster likely became “enraged” and acted in the “demonic” way we have been told the MS-13 gang members behave. But there has been some fiction mixed in with the facts about this gang in American culture, media and politics, although this incident could also be said to be typical when these “tough guys” decide to “prove” their “toughness.”

The basic facts about the MS-13 gang is that it was originally formed by El Salvadoran immigrants escaping the right-wing murder regime in their home country during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and apparently many didn’t see much improvement in their lives or safety in the tough barrios of Los Angeles, where the gang was born. We are not talking Gangs of New York here; there was no political organization that went out of its way to help brown-skinned immigrants to "assimilate" in order to eventually get their votes. In fact quite the contrary; they are more "useful" to use as scapegoats for political purposes.

The MS-13, which learned the "trade" from gangs already existing in the U.S. (no doubt also from the way Italian organized crime carried out keeping things in "order") only accounts for one percent of all gang membership in the U.S., and a similar percentage of all gang murders, which is why reports about them in the media and by politicians far exceed the “quantity” of their crimes relative to other gangs, and you only hear about them when they commit a particularly gruesome murder of someone who isn’t Hispanic, who in places like Long Island, New York are the principle murder victims, as if anyone outside of Long Island cares. 

The other reality is that those gang members who have been convicted of crimes and are not U.S. citizens are deported to Central America, where they have had the effect of terrorizing the locals and causing them to seek to flee to the U.S. In a post on The Crime Report website entitled “Calling MS-13 ‘Animals’ Isn’t Just Racist—It’s Dangerous and Counterproductive” by Stephen Handelman, insists that the MS-13 is more infamous for the way it commits murders than the actual number of murders it commits, that many gang members were people who were either threatened with death to either join or who were trying to quit.

Handelman also criticizes the way that certain politicians (Trump) demonize all immigrants—especially from Central America—as “animals” and violent criminals when the percentage of those in gangs in this country is miniscule compared to certain other groups, and the crime rates in communities where the MS-13 exist are far from the most crime-infested in the country. Estimates of the number of MS-13 gang members in this country tops out at 10,000—far fewer than the 350,000 “Crips” and 200,000 “Bloods.” 

But I’m not here to “defend” these gangsters, just to point out that everything is “relative” to something else; the level of brutality in the way some people kill is horrible whoever does it—we can look at the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world, and even that committed by white females, such as the gruesome killing, subsequent necrophilia upon and then dismemberment of her “lover” by Taylor Schabusiness, who “famously” attacked her own attorney in court.  

In the U.S. violent crime generally meets with swift punishment, but as The Guardian noted in the story found here https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/10/how-the-us-helped-create-el-salvadors-bloody-gang-war , the U.S. “export” of MS-13 gang members to Central America far out-strips the gang’s activities here in both in numbers, community terrorism, violence and even drug trafficking. While in the U.S. the MS-13 is like other gangs, protecting its "territory" and enforcing through violent coercion its "code," in many parts of Central America there are simple people just trying to live, which the new breed of U.S.-bred gangster find easy prey.  

In the absence of police protection (or as in El Salvador, security forces are no less to be feared by ordinary people than are the gangs), MS-13 forms the shadow "government" that "recruits" by force new members who have little choice (other than death) but to comply. Anyone who speaks against the gang or cooperates with law enforcement is likely to end up in a hole in the ground. 

Previously, "gangs" in Central America were strictly amateur affairs, but in the eagerness of administrations dating from Clinton to dump the hardcore refuse created by American social dysfunction into Central America where it didn't exist before (and we need not get into how America’s “addictions” have had a destructive impact on Mexican society over the past few decades) have made a mockery--and exposed the hypocrisy--of U.S. immigration policy, making it both worse and inevitable that the export of violence would lead to the escape from that violence, and in Central America there is no other place for those wishing to escape the violence to go but to head north.