Month: January 2014

Lauren Harrington-Cooper and Other Teachers Arrested for Sex Crimes

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Lauren Harrington-Cooper likes teenage semen, allegedly.

If you pay attention to the news, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that America’s public schools are staffed by sex-crazed perverts, including this accused molester of teen boyflesh in Pennslyvania:

A married Pennsylvania high school teacher was arrested again on Thursday, accused of having sex with a second teenage student.
Lauren Harrington-Cooper, 31, of Wyoming Valley West High School, faces new allegations that she sent racy text messages and had sexual contact with a 17-year-old boy starting in October 2013.
This arrest comes just a month after she was charged having sex with a different 18-year-old student in December. Harrington-Cooper has been suspended without pay from her teaching job.
Harrington-Cooper, of Kingston, Pennsylvania, is accused of meeting up with the teenager on several occasions after they sent each other text messages, then kissing and having oral sex.
The Citizen’s Voice reports that the boy told authorities that he picked up the teacher at her home and they drove around for 90 minutes before kissing in the car outside her house.
After the pair continued to text they met up again and Harrington-Cooper allegedly performed oral sex on the 17-year-old student in a parked car. . . .
[Harrington-Cooper’s previous] arrest came after the alleged victim’s parents found a sexually explicit conversation on a laptop between Harrington-Cooper and the boy, 18.
The parents went to Wyoming Valley West High School and informed the principal of the material and Harrington-Cooper was arraigned on a single count of institutional sexual assault.
According to the Times-Leader, Harrington-Cooper, a ninth-grade English teacher at the school, told the victim’s sister she thought he was ‘hot.’
The boy obtained Harrington-Cooper’s phone number from his sister and the pair exchanged text messages.
They agreed to meet up and Harrington-Cooper picked the boy up near his home several times during which they had sex and the teacher performed oral sex on the boy in the car.

So, the blow-job-in-the-car appears to be Harrington-Cooper’s preferred modus operandi, but what’s the deal with this guy’s sister helping him hook up with the English teacher? I mean . . . yuck.

However, such crimes are far from unusual, as we have frequently observed, and here are just a few recent examples:

Roger French couldn’t resist teenage girl, allegedly.

COLORADO SPRINGS:

Just three months after starting a new job at a local high school, arrest papers allege a 31-year-old science teacher started a relationship with one of his students. . . .
Roger French Jr. first met the victim in one of the classes he taught at Mesa Ridge High School, then took the relationship a step further by stopping by her job in November.
That’s where the two allegedly kissed for the first time.
The arrest affidavit says things escalated into a sexual relationship after French asked the victim to babysit his roommate’s kids a month later.
When asked about the alleged abuse, the arrest affidavit says French called it a “judgment error.”
“It wasn’t good, I got too close to her. I made judgment errors … I kept pumping the brakes, I couldn’t stop, it’s like I am going off a cliff.”

Kimberly Brody got caught with a naked boy in a truck, allegedly.

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA:

A Clay County elementary school teacher was arrested early Monday after being found together with a youth without most of their clothes on, according to an arrest report from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
Kimberly Hillard Brody, 40, was arrested in the 7300 block of Westland Oaks Drive after police were called there on a report of a suspicious vehicle about 12:30 a.m. Monday.
Brody was in a pickup truck with nothing on but a sweater, the arrest report said. The boy was completely naked outside the truck. It was unclear what the boy was doing at that point, because the report was redacted. But it did say police interrupted them having sex.
Brody is charged with unlawful sexual activity with minor 16 to 17 years old.
She has been a second-grade teacher at W.E. Cherry Elementary School for two years, according to Clay County school district spokesman Gavin Rollins.

Bresnniel Mones boned a 17-year-old, allegedly.

MIAMI:

A South Dade Senior High math teacher was arrested late Wednesday and charged with having sex with a student.
According to Miami-Dade Schools police, Bresnniel Jansen Mones, 32, had sex with a 17-year-old female student. In one instance, he received oral sex in his geometry classroom, according to his arrest report.
Police say they confiscated Jansen’s phone after he also admitted to sexting with the student. . . .
Jansen was charged with two counts of sex with a minor and one count of transmission of harmful material to a minor. . . .
The incident is the second time in two years that a South Dade teacher has been accused of having sex with a student. In March 2012, police said physical education teacher Jimmy Francisco Vega lured a student off campus, gave her marijuana and then had her perform oral sex.

With all these teachers having sex with students, you may ask: “What about the school staff? Are lunch ladies getting any action?”

Cafeteria worker Janelle Foley did her friend’s 15-year-old son, allegedly.

WEYMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS:

A food service worker at a Massachusetts middle school is accused of raping a boy.
Janelle Foley faces four counts of statutory rape for allegedly sexually assaulting her friend’s 15-year-old son, according to the Boston Herald.
Foley, who was arrested Wednesday by Weymouth police, was put on leave from her job at Chapman Middle School, administrators said in a statement. . . .
The 36-year-old was arraigned Thursday in Quincy District Court. According to prosecutors, the alleged rapes took place during holiday parties at the boy’s family’s house in November and December. . . .
Foley’s attorney, William Sullivan, said his client suffered from depression and substance abuse, and that those problems may have resulted in a “lapse in judgment.”

Well, these are just allegations. Certainly, if a teacher were actually convicted of such offenses, the punishment would be severe, right?

Boy-raper Laura Whitehurst served four months behind bars.

REDLANDS, CALIFORNIA:

A California teacher — sentenced to a year in prison after she pleaded guilty to having sex with an underage student and having his baby last year — was released on Sunday.
Laura Elizabeth Whitehurst, 29, was released eight months before her sentence was to be completed. Whitehurst must register as a sex offender within five days of her release, and must wear a GPS tracking device, a district attorney spokesman told the San Bernardino Sun.
Whitehurst was arrested in July, two weeks after she gave birth to a baby that she conceived with a 16-year-old student, according to police. . . .
After the allegations were reported, two additional students, now adults, came forward and claimed they had sex with the former Citrus Valley High School teacher.
In August, Whitehurst pleaded guilty to having sex with three different students and was sentenced to a year in San Bernardino County jail, and five years’ probation.
Whitehurst originally faced 41 felony charges, which carried a maximum sentence of 29 years in prison. The remaining counts were dismissed at her sentencing.

She had sex with three students, gave birth to a 16-year-old boy’s baby and served a whopping four months in jail. That’s the kind of tough sentence that shows how serious they are about preventing sexual molestation in California, i.e., not very serious at all.

 

 

It’s Come to This: Plus-Size Models Just Aren’t ‘Plus’ Enough for Some People

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Not big enough? Plus-size model Laura Wells

Before we get to the latest lunacy, let’s ask an obvious question: Has anyone ever heard guys complain that the male models in GQ are “too rugged”? I mean, why must all male models be tall and muscular? Isn’t the male fashion industry’s insistence on using these mesomorphic freaks in their ads inflicting body-image issues on men? Why haven’t men started a protest campaign to insist on having more male models who are spindly geeks or chubby bald guys?

The very idea is absurd, of course, and yet the women who complain that fashion models are too thin have now begun complaining that plus-size models aren’t legitimately fat enough:

It’s hard to believe that the very women who are meant to empower plus-size ladies by showcasing body diversity might just be posing yet another impossible standard. But it seems even plus-size models are alienating their target demographic.
Alex LaRosa, a self-proclaimed “plus-size model who’s visibly plus-size,” stopped by HuffPost Live on Friday to talk about the impossible standards that plague her sector of modeling just as much as the size zero benchmark plagues the straight size industry. She explained:

“In a world where you’re telling women that plus-size is sizes 4 and up, you’re causing body image issues. You’re causing unrealistic expectations that every one — every woman — should be a size 4. To bring that into the plus-size community, where you’re using sizes 8, 10 and 12, when sometimes the stores don’t even start carrying the clothes until size 14, you’re telling women, ‘You want to look like these models. This is what you should look like, but it’s never going to happen.'”

Look, I’m sympathetic. Like a lot of guys, I don’t find anorexic scarecrows particularly attractive, and I’d be happy to see more fashion models with some biscuits-and-gravy appeal. But does anyone really expect designers to start sending plumpers jiggling down the catwalk just to placate a bunch of feminist ideologues? It’s never going to happen.

Get over it. And fix me a sandwich.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

The Christie GWB Scandal Bubble

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You could tell the mainstream media had already decided on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as the “designated loser” Republican presidential nominee for 2016 by the way they reacted to the George Washington Bridge scandal. To give you an idea of the saturation coverage, here’s the top of Memeorandum as of noon ET today:

Now, to an extent, this reflects the New York-centric bias of the media. If you think back to 2007-2008, the media gave excessive coverage to the GOP presidential campaign of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, even though everyone who knew anything about the primary process knew that Giuliani was hopelessly doomed. Ditto, Governor Fatso, but because (a) the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge were local news in the NYC media market and (b) liberal idiots think Governor Fatso is a frontrunner for the 2016 GOP nomination, the coverage of this scandal has been completely over-the-top. Here’s what the top of Memeorandum looked like as of 12:35 p.m. ET Friday:

Keep in mind, we’re still 10 months away from the 2014 mid-term elections, where Republicans will be trying to capture the Senate and strengthen their House majority, so that this early 2016 talk is just a distraction from more urgent political news. But the mindless fascination with the quadrennial “Road the White House” overwhelms everything, with Salon.com’s eminent idiot Joan Walsh volunteering to lead the lemming parade:

Christie proudly admitted Thursday that courting Democratic officeholders and winning their endorsement was part of his plan to “run up the score” and win a resounding bipartisan mandate in his race against Barbara Buono. He clearly planned to ride that reputation for crossing party lines and getting things done into the White House in 2016.
And, to be fair, there are shades of that guy, like the Christie who just backed in-state college tuition for some undocumented high school graduates. But most of the time, Christie is a teacher-shaming, Planned Parenthood defunding, crony-hiring, Koch brother-admiring right-winger. He is also a bully, despite claiming otherwise at his two-hour pity party.
Now, with reporters combing over every detail that could explain why the governor’s top aides rained vengeance down on Fort Lee, they will . . . encounter many stories that deserve a full airing. In the best-case scenario for Christie, in which nothing comes out to show he either ordered Fort Lee’s four-day traffic plague or knew about it, he will still endure national exposure as a fiercely partisan bestower of patronage and punishment. It will scare off some donors and, maybe more important, embolden rivals for the GOP establishment’s blessing — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, or Ohio’s John Kasich, or even Jeb Bush — to enter the ring.

Idiot. News flash for Joan Walsh: Scott Walker is almost certainly a “go” for the 2016 campaign, although he first must win re-election this November. As to whether he has “the GOP establishment’s blessing,” I can’t say, but Walker is a hero to many Tea Party activists who rallied to his support during the brutal 2011-2012 Wisconsin recall election fight.

The key for Walker, I believe, will be whether he can articulate a conservative position on immigration. To win over the grassroots in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, Walker must strongly oppose the “comprehensive” amnesty plans currently being discussed by Republican leadership in Washington.

Conservatives remember the way Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s 2012 campaign melted down after his infamous “you don’t have a heart” remark in the Orlando debate. Scott Walker must avoid any confusion as to his opposition to amnesty if he wants to win in Iowa and beyond. Basically, I’d say, Walker should vet his immigration policy with Michelle Malkin and Iowa Rep. Steve King, and mark a clear line between himself and the Wall Street Journal/Chamber of Commerce open-borders lobby.

But talk about 2016 is premature. First we must fight the 2014 mid-terms, no matter what idiots like Joan Walsh say.

 


R.I.P. Ariel Sharon, a Tough Jew

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When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, the endless nightmare of the Vietnam War was the nightly news. And it was therefore an astonishing thing to see the 1967 Six Day War, in which Israel decisively defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Six years later, at a time when the U.S. was withdrawing from Vietnam, Israel again decisively defeated the Soviet-armed Arab powers in the Yom Kippur War.

Ariel Sharon was a top commander in decisive battles of both wars and was justly regarded as an Israeli hero long before he became prime minister in 2001, amid Yasser Arafat’s Al-Aqsa Intifada, the deadliest terror campaign in memory. The Jerusalem Post:

Sharon was one of Israel’s legendary politicians and military leaders. He played an instrumental role in IDF victories in the Sinai desert in both the 1967 Six Day War and in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. His victories on the battlefield, immortalized by the image of him in an IDF uniform with a white bandage wrapped around his wounded forehead, earned him the title, “Arik, King of Israel.”
He was equally fearless in the political arena, where he was the father of two parties, Likud and Kadima. As defense minister in 1982, he oversaw the Lebanon War before he was ousted from office in 1983 as a result of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre for which the Kahn Commission of Inquiry found him indirectly responsible.
But he returned to politics. As construction and housing minister from 1990 to 1992, he was responsible for a massive building effort of 144,000 apartments to house the flood of Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union bloc. As the father of the settlement movement, he was also instrumental in building thousands of homes in Judea and Samaria and is famous for urging right-wing activists “to run for the hilltops.”

The anti-Israel voices will of course have terrible things to say about Sharon, but we who remember what he symbolized — in those Cold War days when Israel’s enemies were armed with Soviet weapons — will have reason to be grateful for that tough Jew.

 

Joblessness at Record Levels; So Why Does @BDayspring Still Have a Job?

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People Not In Labor Force Soar
To Record 91.8 Million; Participation
Rate Plunges To 1978 Levels
— Zero Hedge

U.S. job growth weakest in three years
— Reuters

With such grim economic news in the headlines, you might think that Brad Dayspring, communications director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, would try to avoid doing things as monumentally stupid as lying about Mark Levin:

Brad Dayspring, the communications director Levin described as an “idiot” and NRSC “hit man,” had earlier tweeted, “Fishy: Senate Conservatives Fund spent hundreds of thousands of donor dollars to make Mark Levin’s book a bestseller.” Dayspring’s assertion was completely false because he was referring to a paperback version of a book, published five years ago, that the Senate Conservatives Fund was merely offering to the group’s donors.
As Levin noted in a Facebook post in response to Dayspring’s smears, Liberty and Tyranny “is nearly 5 years old, sold nearly 1.3 million copies, and was on the New York Times best-seller list for half a year during 2009,” and “the Senate Conservative Fund (SCF) has been using the paperback version of the book in recent months to encourage donations in support of conservative candidates.” . . .
“Mitch McConnell’s National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) hit man, some idiot named Brad Dayspring, does not intimidate me and will not silence me with his sleazy inside-the-beltway tactics,” Levin wrote. “In fact, I am more fired up than ever.” . . .
“My opposition to McConnell’s re-election is underscored by pathetic behavior like this,” he continued. “Conservatives should not give a dime to the NRSC, money which is used to pay the salaries of these hit men and empower McConnell, et al.”

This circular firing squad behavior is profoundly discouraging, and is entirely the fault of the Senate GOP leadership.

My position on such matters has always been quite clear: The national party committees — NRSC, NRCC, RNC — should stay the hell out of contested primaries, period. If an incumbent Republican has a primary challenger, that’s his problem, and of no concern to the national committee, whose funds (and personnel) should be focused completely on defeating Democrats.

Deviation from that rule is tantamount to the national leadership controlling the party from the top down, which has the effect of discouraging grassroots involvement. And there is no good reason to believe that Senate GOP leaders know what they hell they’re doing when it comes to picking winners and losers in primaries. This problem with the NRSCC goes back at least to May 2009:

We were standing outside the Continental Lounge in Rosslyn, Va., while the young Republican operative explained it to me.
“All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there,” said the operative. “They don’t want to spend any money, so they were looking for a self-funder.”
“They” are Republican senators, and what my friend was explaining was the otherwise inexplicable decision of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to endorse Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate race — 15 months before the primary!

The NRSC’s meddling in the Florida GOP primary was a typical Establishment move, and resulted in the typical failure. I’ve tried to ignore the NRSC’s clueless blundering in recent months, but it’s 2014 now, the primaries are rapidly approaching, and if GOP geniuses like Brad Dayspring think they’re going to help their cause by picking a fight with Mark Levin, they’d better think again.

You Can Click Here and Donate to the
SENATE CONSERVATIVE FUND

You Can Click Here and Donate to
MATT BEVIN FOR U.S. SENATE

 And when you’re finished doing that, you could post a link to this item on your Facebook page or send it out via Twitter or e-mail.

If you haven’t been raising hell, now would be a good time to start.

 


Radical Despair

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My young Nietzschean friend Richard Spencer was at Duke University during the lacrosse debacle, and it is therefore easy to understand why he long ago abandoned hope in Politics As We Know It.

Spencer founded the Alternative Right in 2010, and there are a few other familiar names — Vox Day, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire — in a chart illustrating the “Dark Enlightenment” movement in a recent trend-feature article by Matt Sigl:

Blossoming on the Internet like a fetid rose, a mysterious new political movement has generated a serious and not un-terrifying critique of modern society. Its members are loud and growing in number, and they demand nothing less than the elimination of the democratic system. Mostly white, male and angry, they lie in wait for the imminent collapse of civilization.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dark Enlightenment. The Empire is striking back. . . .

Don’t be so tediously alarmist, Matt. The best descriptor of this “Dark Enlightenment” movement might be neo-paleoconservative, with an edge of philosophical radicalism among those who have forsaken hope of reversing modern decadence. They are mostly Young Paleocons of one sort or another. As radical as their ideas may be, they are intellectuals, not advocates of violence. Social criticism is ultimately just social criticism, and if the “Dark Enlightenment” perspective seems unmoored by any inclination to defer to popular opinion or political correctness, this is because it exists outside politics.

If your idea of politics begins and ends with the Official Conservative Movement, if you are gripped with concern about Chris Christie and the Great Bridge Controversy, this “Dark Enlightenment” thing is going to be entirely alien to your worldview.

Basically, they begin with the premise that we’re doomed, and proceed thence to contemplate the consequences of doom:

According to [Nick] Land and Moldbug [the alias of Curtis Yarvin], the Cathedral is a complex ideology network built atop the university system, the media (run and operated by graduates of the former) and employees of the bureaucracy, all of whom grow ever more dependent on the perpetuation of the Cathedral. The leveling mechanisms of democracy — with its race-to-the-bottom vote begging (buying) and illusions of social empowerment — remove any possibility of inventive political solutions, or, eventually, rational analysis. Inside the Cathedral, any questioning of democracy’s legitimacy is sacrilege. Before long, apostates will find penance by buying indulgences (like, say, Obamacare), whether they like it or not.

What this mainly is, of course, is James Burnham’s critique of the managerial elite, with a good bit of Richard Weaver and Oswald Spengler thrown in for good measure. And then there’s this:

Human biodiversity is the rejection of the “blank state” of human nature. Creepily obsessed with statistics that demonstrate IQ differences between the races, the darkly enlightened see social hierarchies as determined not by culture or opportunity but by the cold, hard destiny embedded in DNA. . . .
Cue the adherents of The Bell Curve, eugenics enthusiasts, believers in white supremacy and sympathizers of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the Dark Enlightenment, we seem to have stumbled across a place where pseudo-intellectually grounded racism is flourishing in a way it hasn’t since before World War II.

Meh. Again with the alarmism, Matt? It’s important to remind the reader that as radical as these people are in their ideas, there is nothing like an actual political movement involved. There is no legion of brownshirts marching to overthrow democracy and replace it with the Charismatic Leader’s blood-and-soil regime.

What we are looking at is a lot of bright young men who contemplate the cultural status quo and reject it as unworthy. They are temperamentally averse to compromise, and thus ill-suited for the game of politics. As such, they are marginalized, existing within an obscure fringe that neither influences nor intersects with Politics As We Know It.

They are deliberately aloof, and who can blame them? If being “political” in 2014 means caring about Fat Boy’s Bridge Scandal, then I guess I’m pretty apolitical, too.

Mortimer e-mailed me Sigl’s article and I don’t know if this is the reaction he expected. While I certainly understand the fundamental pessimism — you’d have to be a blind fool to be an optimist nowadays — my preference is for human-sized solutions. Instead of trying to reorganize the cosmos, just do your best to fix what is within reach, and let the universe take care of itself.