Grammy-winning rapper Prakazrel “Pras” Michel of the Fugees was sentenced on Thursday to 14 years in prison for a case in which he was convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Michel, 52, declined to address the court before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sentenced him.
In April 2023, a federal jury convicted Michel of 10 counts, including conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The trial in Washington, D.C., included testimony from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Justice Department prosecutors said federal sentencing guidelines recommended a life sentence for Michel, whom they said “betrayed his country for money” and “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to carry out his schemes.”
Note he was charged prior to Trump becoming president.
If there were indeed foreign contributions to Obama – and back then I assumed it was probably true that there were such donations – I wouldn’t have imagined that a rapper would be the conduit. I didn’t see many details in the article about how all of this was engineered, but this piece has a bit more information:
US prosecutors said Michel received more than $100m (£80m) from Malaysian billionaire Jho Low that was used in two efforts to influence US politics. He was also convicted of lobbying on behalf of China’s government.
Prosecutors said Michel “betrayed his country for money” and for nearly a decade he “sought to exploit and deceive” various entities in the US government, including the White House and FBI, as well as his own co-conspirators, according to court documents. …
Businessman Mr Low, who funnelled money to Michel, was accused of stealing about $4bn from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund during the infamous 1MDB scandal.
The justice department reached an agreement with the fugitive financier in June 2024 to return more than $100m (£79m) allegedly embezzled from Malaysia’s state-owned wealth fund.
Michel was accused of helping to lobby officials in the first Trump administration to abandon their investigation into Mr Low’s part in it.
His co-defendants got very light sentences or were pardoned, and his lawyer argues that Michel only got such a lengthy sentence because he wanted a trial. I’m inclined to believe that; FARA violations aren’t being prosecuted so harshly anymore unless the behavior of the perps amounts to espionage.
In New York, a great many violent criminals with long rap sheets seem to evade incarceration for long periods of time. But this 67-year-old guy has gotten four years for a weapons violation, under the following circumstances:
A Queens senior citizen who shot dead a man who tried to rob him will spend four years in prison after admitting to toting an unlicensed revolver — as his lawyer ripped the city’s “draconian” gun laws.
Charles Foehner, 67, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal weapons possession Thursday in a deal to end his case more than two years after he fatally shot would-be thief Cody Gonzalez, who charged at him near his Kew Gardens home.
The Queens District Attorney’s Office chose not to prosecute Foehner, a retired doorman, for Gonzalez’s killing after he told cops that he’d defended himself from a mugger who lunged at him late at night holding what looked like a knife — but which turned out to be a pen.
So instead, they threatened him with a 25-year sentence for weapons possession, and he pleaded guilty in order to get only four years. As far I know, he has no prior arrests, although Gonzalez had “at least” fifteen arrests and a history of mental illness. Sounds familiar.
From Foehner’s attorney – the same one who defended Daniel Penny:
Kenniff called Foehner a “hero” who was put in an “impossible position” by what he called “draconian” Big Apple gun laws that make it difficult for “law-abiding citizens” to obtain permits to carry firearms.
“If this was a state and a city that had its affairs in order, Mr. Foehner would be getting a plaque, not a prison sentence,” Kenniff told reporters on the courthouse steps.
NOTE: Meanwhile, also in NYC, this lady skates because her case was initially assigned by Bragg’s office to a student, and then botched:
A conservative influencer who was slugged in the face by an unhinged pro-abortion crusader has accused progressive Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg of botching the case against her attacker, who won’t face charges after leaving her battered and bloodied.
Savannah Craven Antao, a 23-year-old pro-life activist, was sucker-punched by a woman while she was conducting man-on-the-street interviews in Harlem in April.
Her attacker, Brianna J. Rivers, was arrested and charged with felony assault, but Bragg’s officer later downgraded the charge to a misdemeanor — and then flubbed the “onerous” discovery requirements, leading the case to be tossed.
The victim is suing:
The suit also accuses prosecutors of refusing to refile charges as a felony and declining to pursue hate crime charges — despite evidence that Rivers’ attack “was committed in the context of her mockery of [Antao’s] Christian beliefs.”
One of the comments to the article says “I am surprised [Bragg] didn’t find a way to charge the victim.”
… when you keep trying to get to work, but distractions pile up? The phone keeps ringing with things you need to tend to, and each task takes longer than you think it will?
That’s today for me so far. Posts will be forthcoming, but I can’t believe how late it is already.
On Monday, Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools saw a tremendous number of absences, nearly 20% of students, shortly after ICE showed up in town and illegal migrant communities became afraid of going out in public.
Impressive. What does it mean, exactly? Plus “Wake County explicitly gave the okay for illegal aliens to skip school so that they could evade federal law enforcement officers.”
Trump advisor Stephen Miller revealed a few months ago that even the horrifyingly large number of 320,000 missing children was an underestimate, and that the actual number of unaccompanied children trafficked into our country under the Biden-Harris administration was 450,000. That’s right: it approached half a million kids.
The word “trafficked” is used there to mean “unaccompanied.” Some parents might send their kids to the US alone for bona fide reasons, I suppose – although such a practice would be highly suspicious. And how many of these unaccompanied children actually end up in horrific circumstances? I would guess very many – but once again, we don’t know.
Homan says we have now located 30,000 of these children, but I can’t find any data on how many actually were being exploited, sexually and otherwise, and how many were not. The point is, though, that it is unconscionable that so many children were allowed to go missing during the previous administration.
You may have read that Tucker Carlson recently criticized Dietrich Bonhoeffer in an odd sort of way. Here’s the clip, so you can understand what it’s about:
I then came across this – which takes it a bit further, shall we say:
But seriously – the first clip was taken from a discussion of Bonhoeffer’s life, by Glenn Beck. Now, Beck is not my favorite pundit, but in this case I think he does a good job of explaining how Bonhoeffer wrestled with the dilemma of what a Christian decides to do in the face of manifest evil. Here’s the entire clip, which is about fifteen minutes long:
I have a whole menagerie of pet peeves, and here’s one of them.
Way too many websites push some action or other with a choice to do it or not do it. Sounds reasonable and inoffensive, right? And it is, in theory. But all too often no simple “yes” or “no” option is offered. They get way too cute about it instead.
For example, the other day a website urged me to do something I have no intent of ever doing. But the options were: “Resolve now” or “Remind me later.” How about “Go away and never come back”? Or “Quit bugging me, pest”? Not available.
Sometimes you do get, “Do not ask me this again.” I’m grateful for those few times. But far more often there’s some cutesy forced choice. A trivial problem indeed, but annoying and very common.
At least most websites have finally stopped the highly highly annoying, “No, I don’t want to accept the deal and save tons of money; I’d rather pay more” option. Feedback must have been horrendous.
In this post I’ll be presenting the “Two Minutes Hate” excerpt from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I think the template for the passage’s physical description of Goldstein (the object of the Hate) may have been Trotsky, at least in part. Here’s a video of Trotsky in exile, speaking in English, of all things – and although he’s certainly not speaking about Orwell or about anti-Semitism, he’s speaking about something that’s relevant to Orwell’s book: the Moscow show trials:
Here’s the passage by Orwell, to refresh your memory. It’s masterful and still relevant, unfortunately, including describing the contagious group nature of the required Party exercise in hating [emphasis mine]:
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. … Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even–so it was occasionally rumoured–in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard–a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party–an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. …
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were–in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. …
… The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
That fits in well with this recent substack essay by Guy Goldstein (no relation to Emmanuel). He writes that anti-Semitism and especially the blood libel work as memes, and always have, even long before the internet began. Memes have a simple and effective emotional power:
The lecturer at UCL [University College London] did not revive the Damascus Affair [an ancient blood libel against Jews] because she respects history. She revived it because she understands narrative power. Blood libels do not survive for centuries because they are persuasive. They survive because they are built like memes. They are easy to grasp, easy to repeat, easy to weaponize, and perfectly engineered to bypass critical thinking.
Memes are some of the most powerful weapons in the cultural world our kids live in. A meme is not a joke. It is a piece of information designed to move through people fast. It spreads by emotion, imitation, and recognition. It crosses languages without effort. It does not wait for logic to catch up. That is why militaries study memes and why extremists deploy them. They are perfect carriers for ideas that need to hit hard and travel quickly. They succeed because they compress a whole worldview into a single format the brain can absorb in seconds. And blood libel was doing this long before the internet. It was a weaponized meme template built to trigger disgust, create panic, and spread without friction. …
The adults fighting antisemitism have not understood this. We keep arriving with facts. We bring timelines, context, nuance, longform arguments, citations, and appeals to reason. Meanwhile antisemitism arrives with images, punchlines, tropes, and emotionally loaded shortcuts.
Here’s the solution the author suggests:
If we want to counter the oldest hate, we need to switch languages. We need to teach young people to recognize the pattern of antisemitism the way they recognize a recycled meme format. Once they see the template, the narrative collapses. They do not need to memorize history to reject it. They need to understand the shape. …
… It is time to stop losing a battle that was never about facts at all.
I hate to criticize that suggestion when I certainly don’t have a better one. Nevertheless, I just don’t see how it would work. Maybe, just maybe, it would work as a preventative, but I really don’t see how it could possibly change someone’s mind who already believes the lies. It seems to me that “recognize the pattern” is also too logical, and that the counter to the memes would have to be memes strong enough and emotional enough to compete with hatred and fear.
Anti-Semitism – Jew-hatred, in other words – seems to fit a deep need in so many people. It’s one that Orwell understood and described, although his dystopian novel was not about that. Hatred spreads on a visceral and emotional level, and to counter it with logic, the teaching of history, and rational thought seems weak and ineffective. Suggestions?
And it’s a serious one; there’s been talk of possibly having to evacuate Tehran. So cloud-seeding was begun – and then came floods:
Rainfall caused floods in parts of western Iran on Monday, after months of drought led to the worst water crisis in decades and pushed authorities to begin cloud seeding over the weekend.
I’d heard of cloud seeding before, but it sounded to me like science fiction and I knew next to nothing about it. This doesn’t tell me much more, either:
Cloud-seeding is a process in which chemicals are implanted into clouds to increase rainfall in an environment where water scarcity is a concern.
However, the technique can only be applied when environmental conditions improve and can only be used as a stopgap solution.
“In addition to cloud seeding’s heavy cost, the amount of rainfall it produces is nowhere near what is needed to solve our water crisis,” Sahar Tajbakhsh, head of Iran’s Meteorological Organisation, told state TV on Sunday.
Not only that, but conditions in Tehran itself aren’t right for it to be used right now.
Most cloud seeding operations … use a compound called silver iodide (AgI) to aid in the formation of ice crystals. Silver iodide exists naturally in the environment at low concentrations, and is not known to be harmful to humans or wildlife.
When storm systems move through one of our cloud seeding project areas, a solution containing a small amount of silver iodide is burned from ground-based generators or released from aircraft. Upon reaching the cloud, the silver iodide acts as an ice forming nuclei to aid in the production of snowflakes. …
… cloud seeding requires the presence of moisture-filled clouds.
If you and I have lunch together, I would be DELIGHTED to discuss history, science, art, music, architecture, economics, aviation, archaeology, travel, pets, cinema, television, numismatics, literature, sports, ethics, food, genetics, fashion, gardening, weather, family, transportation, agriculture, dreams, computing, language, exercise, dance, or philosophy. The likelihood is vanishingly small, however, that I want to spoil a good plate of sushi, falafel, or vindaloo by hearing your thoughts on Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, Nancy Pelosi, J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Bernie Sanders, etc., etc. etc. …
When I discuss politics, it is usually done in writing (email or blog comments) …
In contrast, verbal, real-time conversations on politics in 2025 largely consist of angry, puerile TikTok-worthy hot takes, statements of the obvious, well-trodden complaints, mindless partisanship, and ad hominem attacks on all who disagree with the spittle-laced observer. The same is true of micro-form writing, such as text messages or social media posts. It is a story of friendships shattered over hasty, hyper-emotional, pointless political haranguing.
I haven’t had too much of that. But I’m not on social media, and I almost never talk politics in person – much like Graboyes. The people who would shun me have mostly done that already, and as for the rest they’re not inclined to push it.
More:
My least favorite lunchtime political statements, by the way, are the brief, hazy, passive-aggressive, in-and-out, plausibly deniable political eructations. “My kids are doing great, though I worry about their futures, given … what … is … going … on … in … the …country.” Such constructions halt the flow of meaningful conversation, forcing me to stop thinking about your kids and start thinking about your political obsession. But if I say that, you can deny that you said anything political—even though we both know you did. I’d prefer that you just say, “Trump is a fascist,” or “Mamdani is a Jihadist Communist.” Then I can say, “I really don’t want to talk about politics. Have you seen the landscape exhibit from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection?”
On that point, I differ.
I suppose for some people that would indeed be a passive-aggressive way to start a political discussion while remaining able to deny that they started one. But I think it often is actually something quite different. It can be a way for a person to say something unifying rather than politically partisan, especially if the person knows that the listener is on the other side politically. The idea behind the statement could be, and sometimes is, that each side feels the country is facing a crisis or several crises, and maybe the sides just differ on how to solve it and whether the current administration is tackling it correctly or not. On occasion I’ve said to friends of mine on the left something like: “One thing we probably agree on is that these are difficult times and a lot of people are worried and upset” – or something of that nature – in order to convey both a reluctance to discuss politics itself and a way to say “we share the fact of being worried.”
Is it effective when I say this? Sometimes – especially when I say it to friends who already know my politics and they know I don’t like to discuss politics in person. I sometimes say it to people I barely know but am talking with in a social situation, when I want to deflect a political conversation by issuing a statement I think is non-controversial and general rather than specific.
