LIVE AT FIVE: 06.10.13

Why did the “Free Kate” movement flourish so rapidly after May 17? Some people have attributed this to the gay-rights angle in the case — Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, 18, has admitted having sex with a 14-year-old female — and the claim of “homophobia” stirred sympathy for someone who admits committing a felony under Florida law.

This angered people because it looked like an attempt to create a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for gay sex offenders, but there was also another factor to which I called attention: Kate Hunt is a young, attractive female and no one wants to think a pretty girl could be dangerous — certainly not a sexual predator. Well . . .

You’re wrong. In fact, you might be shocked how wrong you are, when you see how often sex offenders hide behind a pretty face.

Loni Folks, 24, was arrested in 2008 and charged with sexual battery of a 16-year-old male student in Mississippi.
Carrie McCandless was 29 in 2006 when she was arrested for a sexual incident involving a 17-year-0ld male student at the Colorado charter school where she was English teacher and her husband was the principal. In 2011, McCandless was sentenced to 60 days in jail after a judge revoked her probation when she tested positive for morphine.
Heather Chiasson, 29, was charged in 2012 with having sex with a 17-year-old male student at the Louisiana high school where she taught math.

Angela Comer, 26, was arrested in Mexico with the 14-year-old boy with whom she ran away from Tompkinsville, Ky. The former middle school teacher pleaded guilty in 2007.
Marla Meek, 34, was arrested in 2006 and charged with having sex with a 15-year-old student. The former junior high school teacher was sentenced to prison in 2008.
Alison Peck, 23, was convicted of statutory rape for her 2008 affair with a 16-year-old boy at Greenfield High School, where she taught music. In 2011, her probation was revoked and she was sentenced to five years in prison.

Could I extend this list? Well, there are more than 195 cases compiled at “Women Arrested for Indecent Behavior With Kids,” and I’ve just pulled the first six examples I found of reasonably young and attractive women accused of sex offenses. It’s much more common than you’d expect, and good luck building a movement — “Free Alison,” “Free Carrie,” etc. — big enough to free them all.

All of these women were teachers, and the youngest was 23, whereas Kate Hunt was an 18-year-old high school senior. Also, their victims (consenting victims, but victims by law) were in all cases male, whereas Hunt had sex with an underage girl.

Beyond these differences, however, my point is that the law is the law, and the “Free Kate” poster-girl act — she’s too cute to be dangerous — doesn’t carry any weight with the law.

Also: “Beat her f**king ass, Emily! Beat her ass! Get that bitch!”

Dangerous? Let’s leave that to the judge to decide.

UPDATE: If you want to try randomly browsing through “Women Arrested for Indecent Behavior With Kids” without filtering for the young and attractive perpetrators, be prepared to encounter serious weirdness:

Melissa Balkcom, a 27-year-old mother, threw a sexually oriented slumber party for her daughter’s birthday and invited six of her daughter’s dance class friends, ages nine to 13, to the party.
Party games included Balkcom engaging in a game of “truth or dare” where the girls were dared to do such things as 10 jumping jacks while nude, demonstrating oral sex on a soda bottle, French kissing objects and lap-dancing on a chair or on each other.
Balkcom participating in some of the dares, including jumping nude in front of the young girls. She also explained what oral sex was to those who did not understand.

Guess she took the “Cool Mom” thing a bit too far, eh? But was Balkcom the weirdest case in the file? Not even close, my friends:

A former Michigan middle school teacher, Elizabeth Miklosovic, 37 . . . was fired after being arrested for molesting a 14-year-old student. The victimized student told friends the relationship with the language arts teacher began when she was in the seventh grade. . . . Investigation into the relationship determined the former teacher assaulted her victim from June to August 2004.
In June 2004, the victim’s parents granted permission for their daughter to go camping with Miklosovic believing Miklosovic was a trusted mentor to their daughter. However, while camping the two lit candles, chanted and exchange vows in a pagan wedding ceremony. To solidify their union, they traded a piece of braided cloth. It was after the “wedding” that Miklosovic sexually assaulted her young victim. . . .
The student testified, “She (Miklosovic) is a wonderful woman. She does not deserve this, any of this. I was not manipulated or taken advantage of. It was completely consensual.”

A pagan lesbian wedding. With a seventh-grader. “It was completely consensual.” Why are you bigoted haters so judgmental?

Anyway, why is this kind of bizarre stuff relevant to the “Free Kate” phenomenon? Because, in that case, Kaitlyn Hunt’s defenders are arguing that the letter of the law — which makes it a felony for anyone 18 or older to have sex with anyone 15 or younger — should be disregarded due to what they see as extenuating circumstances: Both girls were high school students who played together on the same basketball team — which meant they were “peers,” the defenders say — and because of what they claim are homophobic motives of the 14-year-old’s parents who reported the case to the cops.

OK, maybe you could grant leniency in one case, but if leniency becomes routine, so that the law is never rigorously enforced, you’re effectively voiding the law and 14-year-olds are fair game.

Well, what next? Shall we disregard the testimony of Elizabeth Miklosovic’s 14-year-old pagan lesbian “bride” (!) when she says that she was not “taken advantage of” by this “wonderful woman”? Is this “consenting” girl more of a victim than the 14-year-old who “consented” with 18-year-old Kaitlyn Hunt? Why? Because Kaitlyn is young and cute, and Milosovic is . . . well, not young and cute?

Start bending the law, and prepare for sexual anarchy.

Happy 14th Birthday! (Batteries not included.)

UPDATE II: Talk about taking the “Cool Mom” thing too far:

Donna Lou Sanders, 46, was a special education teacher and wife of the assistant principal of Magnolia High School in Magnolia, Arkansas, when she was arrested and charged with two counts of accomplice to rape, four counts of third-degree sexual assault, and six counts of permitting abuse of a minor. She was charged after an investigation determined she allegedly took a 12-year-old girl and 13-year-old girl to a motel so they could [have] sex with underaged boys and a 22-year-old man they met through Facebook.
According to the reports, Sanders also took her own daughter to the motels, provided alcohol to the minors, and sometimes drove the minors around in her car while they engaged in sex in the back seat of her car.

But . . . it was consenual!

UPDATE III: Good grief — a love triangle!

Linda Nef, 46, was one of two teachers from Bountiful Junior High School in Utah, accused of sexually assaulting the same 13-year-old boy. . . .
According to the Bountiful police, the two teachers were unaware of each other’s involvement with the same boy until recently when the boy told the other teacher involved, Valynne Bowers, about Nef.

Apparently, these 13-year-old boys nowadays are so irresistible to women, the teachers have to take turns.

UPDATE IV: Here’s practically an entire category of similar cases: Coach Reanna Jewell, 25, has sex with 16-year-old female basketball player; P.E. teacher Rita Brum, 24, has sex with 17-year-old female student; P.E. teacher Abigail Holloway, 33, arrested for affair with female student that began eight years earlier when the girl was 13.

But women can’t really be sexual predators, can’t they?

Category: Crime, Kaitlyn Hunt, Sex

What I’d Like To Hear From @DMataconis

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 66 Comments

by Smitty

Over at The Liberty Papers, we have what amounts to an intriguing anti-SoCon rant:

Perhaps my biggest problem with fusionism in its current incarnation, however, is the extent to which it demands that libertarians silence their criticism of their so-called conservative allies in the name of “unity.” Even if one accepts the argument that libertarians and conservatives are on the same side when it comes to economics, there is no denying that there are significant differences between the two sides on many issues. The most obvious, of course, are social issues such as gay marriage, the drug war, pornography, and, for some but not all libertarians, abortion rights. In addition to that, it’s generally the case that libertarians have a far more restrained view of what proper American foreign policy should be than conservatives do, even in today’s era where conservatives suddenly seem to have become anti-war when the war is being led by Barack Obama. Based on those differences alone, the idea that libertarians and conservatives are just two sides of the same coin is clearly false.

It is true that there are some Evangelical absolutists who have their hobby horses.

It’s also true that a more Federalist read of the Constitution doesn’t concern itself with activity below the state level. Absolutely, Amendments 13-15 ended slavery, but what’s occurred due to Progress, and the unratified Second Bill of Rights, is that we’re now One. Big. Honkin’. State. We can all be unhappy that personal sexual and relational matters have to play out in contentious, Procrustean struggles in DC.

And this is precisely the way the Ruling Class prefers things. Keep the proletariat all thumb wrestling over whether the government is in your (lady|man)parts, or in your wallet, while the Federal Reserve-fueled vote-buying schemes continue apace, and liberty dwindles.

I should think Mataconis has enough low animal cunning to sense the game afoot. While I’m a SoCon’s SoCon on a personal level, even the most “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Evangelicals have got to be honest about the Constitution: it was States delegating powers to a Federal government, not a tool whereby I can enforce my personal taste for post-infant baptism by full immersion on everybody, Christian or otherwise*.

What I’d propose in lieu of the poo flinging is:

A focus on areas of agreement on the enumerated powers that we need to drive back toward.
A de-emphasis on the personal hobbyhorse issues. Marriage management isn’t a federal task. I don’t need a federal law to know the score on abortion. I’d prefer libertarian indifference prevail toward those states that I could not live in for cultural reasons.
A sober realization that our government has become as odious as the British Parliament of the 1700s. We can hang together and prevail in time, or hold the divisive course and hang separately. The Josephus types who’ve already cut their deals will continue to be no help.

And to all of the new Tea Party folks, let me pass on a warning: the two ears, one mouth rule applies. There is much to learn about the sordid realities of our government, as it’s deviated well off course. Relax. Focus the passion on sober, positive deeds that advance the Constitutional ball. Screaming about Barack Obama’s Martian birth certificate and obvious status as a High Priest of Cthulhu is ONLY ABETTING HIM.

I know it seems counter-intuitive, but spend some time studying. The history of How Things Got So Jacked Up is important if you want to help in ways that are actually constructive.

It’s easy to get pissed off, disgusted, drop some F-bombs, and leave. But half the recovery battle is showing up; the other half is staying engaged. Your foe has massive endurance. Our task is to execute Gramsci’s Long March through the Institutions in reverse. Stand by for a multi-decade struggle. Homeschool your children. Teach them right from wrong. Teach them history. Teach them to reject the corrosive Postmodern piffle passing for thought these days.

But don’t expect instant gratification.

*Smoochies to everyone who recoils at my conservative read there. 🙂

Category: Blogging

The Five Million Dollar Idiot

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 18 Comments

Leftists who get worked up about the Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor really ought to organize an #OccupyChrisMatthews movement to protest this truthless waste of TV time whose NBC contract reportedly pays him $5 million a year. If I took notice every time Chris Matthews makes a complete idiot of himself, I’d never have time to write about anything else. He’s a human Stupidity Factory, with no internal mental filter that warns him when he is about to emit a steaming heap of senseless gibberish.

Look, this isn’t about ideology. Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow are more fanatical than Matthews, and I disagree with them on damned near any issue you could name. But Hayes and Maddow — and for that matter, the insufferably smug Lawrence O’Donnell — are intelligent, articulate people. Evil, yes, but intelligent and articulate.

On the other hand, transcending all partisan differences, no one with an IQ above room temperature takes Chris Matthews seriously.

How bad is he? I’d rather watch Martin Bashir, except for the purely comic value of Matthews’s idiotic utterances. And this past week, Matthews managed to say something so incomprehensibly stupid, it was remarkable even for him. The context was the swirl of scandals afflicting the Obama administration. Matthews first suggested that criticism of Susan Rice was raaaaacist:

“Here they are, the old white guys, kicking the hell out of another African-American candidate for something.” . . .
“The discourse coming from that side, I don’t use that word liar. I don’t like it being used. Because it gets to motive and you don’t know what is in another person’s heart. How do these people get away with talking like this, I mean anywhere, even on Fox?”

Keep in mind, it was Susan Rice who went on five network Sunday shows to peddle the administration’s deliberately false claim that the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was a “demonstration” inspired by a YouTube video. What do you call somebody who tells a lie like that, if you can’t call them a liar? But never mind, Mister Tingles never quits until he has made a complete fool of himself:

“Why do they get the idea, if it isn’t ethnic — and I’ll just leave the possibility that it’s not — why do they just assume evil on the part of Obama? I mean he’s raised — his whole life has been crystal clear and clean as a whistle and transparent. We know his whole life — through all the great excellent education he’s had, the good pro-bono work he’s done through his life. He’s never been a money grubber. He’s never done anything wrong in his life — legally, ethically, whatever. His family is picture-perfect. The way he’s raised those daughters. Everything is clean as a whistle. And yet, they just refer to him as evil. They just refer to him as a liar. I’ve got to believe it’s ethnic with these people. They just got a problem with this guy being president, is there any other evidence to justify why they keep calling him a bad man? And that’s what they do.”

“I’ve got to believe it’s ethnic with these people,” that is to say, Republicans — you know, the guys who impeached President Clinton?

Leaving it to commenters to remind us of anything about Obama’s life that is not “clean as a whistle and transparent,” here’s the video:

Five million dollars a year they pay for that . . .

Category: MSNBC

Obsessed? Who, Me?

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 20 Comments

Honestly, you start talking about this stuff, and readers in the comments call your attention to other related stuff, and it’s really pretty fascinating. But next thing you know you’re down the Rabbit Hole, lost in Wonderland. So I promise that after this post, I’m going to write something about NSA snooping or the IRS scandal, just to show that I am not personally fixated on this issue. Meanwhile . . .

Not to mimic the Marina Adshade, Ph.D.. method — i.e., nothing is valid unless empirically proven by social science research — but Clayton Cramer notes a bit of data that turns up almost coincidentally in a study that asks, “Why are lesbians usually fat?”

Correlation is not causation, and one sometimes finds two overlapping data points which are in fact both effects of the same cause. Which isn’t to say that I’m buying any particular single-factor causation argument. Having studied the phenomenon as a mere amateur — a journalist who spent years on the “culture wars” beat — I believe that much of what we now think we “know” about homosexuality is not actually true. But this is a criticism of the state of psychology in general.

Whereas once psychology told Americans to recline on the couch and talk about our mothers, nowadays it’s all serotonin-adjusting chemicals and theorizing about the adaptive value of different behaviors in primitive hunter-gatherer societies.

During the Freudian heyday of the mid-2oth century, homosexuality was explained in terms of family dynamics and “syndromes,” and now the brain-science/Darwinism psychobiology theorists have the upper hand among experts, and I think they all miss the mark.

There are different types of gay people who are gay for different reasons and, as a libertarian/conservative, I think all determinist theories of the phenomenon are misguided. For example, there is what I call the “Desire Is Destiny” mentality, wherein anything that stands between the individual and the satiation of his impulses is condemned as oppressive. And this mentality often marches alongside the “Political Identity” conception of sexual preference, where being gay isn’t something you do to get your rocks off, but rather a politicized mantle of victimhood that functions as a grievance “empowering” you to be self-righteously angry at people you don’t like.

You know the type: “Hater! Homophobe! Bigot!” Read more

Category: Gays, Intellectuals, Science, Sex

Why Aren’t You Homeschooling Yet?

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 10 Comments

The government school system is becoming a pathetic joke:

In what amounts to self-parody, an elementary school in California will hold a toy gun exchange — similar to the real gun exchanges run by police departments for real guns — in order to remove the, er, threat of toy guns at school.

Years ago, someone explained to me what’s wrong with the system: Government school bureaucrats are not interested in teaching facts.

What they are interested in teaching is attitudes.

Once you understand that, everything else makes sense.

Category: Education

‘Oh, My God. They Were Everywhere’

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 15 Comments

Young stars circa 1987: Corey Haim (left) and Corey Feldman

Apropos of recent controversies, Pete Da Tech Guy quotes a 2011 interview with former child actor Corey Feldman:

“I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry. … It’s the big secret,” Feldman said. . . .
“I was surrounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. . . . Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted . . . till I went, Oh, my God. They were everywhere,” Feldman, 40, said.

In that interview, Feldman was talking about his former Lost Boys co-star: “There’s one person to blame in the death of Corey Haim. And that person happens to be a Hollywood mogul. And that person needs to be exposed, but, unfortunately, I can’t be the one to do it.” I reacted to Pete’s post with my habitual sarcasm:

Pedophilia in Hollywood? Corey Haim could not be reached for comment. datechguyblog.com/2013/06/09/fre… – via @datechguyblog

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) June 9, 2013

But then I realized: Corey Haim can be reached for comment, via the “Corey Haim’s Notes on the Afterlife” series at Protein Wisdom. The dearly departed even offered his perspective on “Free Kate”:

I don’t usually weigh in on terrestrial politics, but the truth is, if I’d been arrested every time I got a hand job from some underage kid who wanted me to sign his Lost Boys t-shirt, there would be no Dream a Little Dream, much less its (in my opinion) criminally underrated sequel.
Sometimes the law is just stupid — especially when it threatens to get in the way of art. . . .
American society really needs to get over its sexual hangups.

Please excuse “Corey’s” attitude. Sometimes dark sarcasm is the only sane alternative to screaming rage. As to this oft-heard argument — that “hangups” about sex are our real problem — it was in a 1999 interview that A Return to Modesty author Wendy Shalit offered the best rejoinder: “I don’t have hangups. You’re just a pervert.”

Category: Celebrities, Crime, Culture, Da Tech Guy, Hollywood, Protein Wisdom

This Is What #OccupyResoluteDesk Meant By ‘Fundamentally Transforming The USA’

Posted on | June 9, 2013 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Insty points to Steyn, a must-read:

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.
Here’s another congressional-subcommittee transcript highlight of the week. Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he’s spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder answers:
“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

If you read End the Fed, “Zimbabwe” Ben Bernanke hoisted a similar digit to Ron Paul, asking after the Federal Reserve’s skullduggery.

This level of debt and corruption is the climax of 100 years of Progress.

It’s time for the GOP to either (a) morph into a full-throated reform party, or (b) just admit that all it craves is a swap on the nameplates there in the halls of corruption. Can the GOP stand and deliver? I’ve always argued that it’s better to work within the existing structure, as the start-up costs of a new party are really, really high. The longer the GOP appears feckless, the weaker that argument gets.

Reform!

Category: Corruption

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.10.13

You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Movement

What I’d Like To Hear From @DMataconis

The Five Million Dollar Idiot

Obsessed? Who, Me?

Why Aren’t You Homeschooling Yet?

‘Oh, My God. They Were Everywhere’

This Is What #OccupyResoluteDesk Meant By ‘Fundamentally Transforming The USA’

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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