Esmerelda Gonzalez worked in ‘the adult entertainment industry,’ sources say.
Look, I realize “whore” is a strong word, but when a “model” (ahem) is described as working in “the adult entertainment industry,” it seems safe to assume she was engaged in, uh, commercial transactions. Also, she had breast implants and an Instagram account full of photos that were rather obviously intended to advertise her, uh, services. And did I mention that her family said she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that police say she was doing methamphetamine before she was killed? Furthermore, Esmeralda Gonzalez was a native of Michoacán, so you combine these facts and calling her a “Crazy Meth-Head Mexican Whore” is simply objective journalism. Like Joe Friday: “Just the facts, ma’am.”
The body of a Las Vegas woman who was reported missing in May is believed to have been found in the Nevada desert, completely encased in concrete inside a “wooden structure,” court documents reveal.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police were dispatched to a home on May 31 just before 7 p.m. concerning a missing person report. The victim, later identified by Las Vegas Review-Journal as Esmeralda Gonzalez, 24, had not been heard from for several days.
Several months later, on Oct. 8., homicide detectives recovered a body in the desert area just north of Las Vegas. Police said the body was found completely encased in “concrete and in a wooden structure.” Although police have not yet formally identified the victim, court documents obtained by the Review-Journal name Gonzalez.
Days later, police arrested Christopher Prestipino, 45, and Lisa Mort, 31, in connection with the discovery of the body.
According to a press release from the LVMPD, investigators believe that the victim had at some point been inside Prestipino’s residence. She was being held against her will and was subsequently “murdered.” . . .
The pair was arrested on Oct. 11 and Prestipino was charged with open murder, kidnapping in the first degree resulting in substantial bodily harm and conspiracy murder.
Mort was also booked into the Clark County Detention Center on the charge of harbor/conceal/aid a felony offender.
According to court documents obtained by the Review-Journal, Prestipino strangled the victim and then injected her body with pool cleaner after leaving her “tied up to a bedpost for an extended period of time.” After she was killed, he reportedly transported the body to the desert using a rented U-Haul.
The victim, who was said to work in the adult entertainment industry and had a large following on social media, lived about one-tenth of a mile from the suspect, according to the report.
Court documents also stated that the victim suffered from mental illness and was captured on surveillance the day she disappeared walking around her neighborhood in high heels and lingerie asking for rides.
Gonzalez had more than 300,000 followers on an Instagram page laden with partially clad glamour shots; her Facebook and Instagram pages say she was also a college student. . . .
According to his LinkedIn page, Chris Prestipino worked as a “stagehand-Audio Visual Technician” at Bally’s/Paris Hotel in Las Vegas from 1999 to present. . . .
Clark County online court records show that Prestipino is a felon. He has multiple drug cases on his criminal history, including one for manufacturing meth. Mort is accused of harboring, concealing or aiding a felon. Prestipino is accused of murder and kidnapping.
Mort also has a drug history. She’s Prestipino’s girlfriend.
His felony case for drug dealing dates to 2001 and resulted in a suspended sentence and probation.
So, you’re a drug-dealing felon and one day you spot a crazy Mexican whore wandering around the streets in nothing but lingerie and heels, and you do what any drug-dealing felon in Las Vegas would do. How many dead whores are buried in the desert outside Vegas whose bodies have never been found? More than a few, I’d guess. Decades worth.
Is there any real cultural or political significance to this story? No, but John Hoge keeps accusing me of failing to maintain Rule Five standards, and this seemed like a convenient opportunity to even the score.
“There is no personality lurking over there that is going to lay waste to the field by providing a fighting alternative. They pretended they loved Biden because he was the most electable, but now the two raving socialists are raking in all of the money in what could be the Mother of All Ironies.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) For the past few weeks, I’ve paid no attention to the polls of Democrat presidential candidates, because it dawned on me how irrelevant it’s likely to be. Once the debates began, it became apparent that Biden is not a viable challenger to Trump. He is simply too old, and has too much baggage — not least of which being his son’s deals in Ukraine and China — and cannot inspire the left-wing grassroots. The idea that Biden is a “moderate” who can appeal to blue-collar voters was, perhaps, wishful thinking for Democrats, who have become the anti-white, anti-male, anti-American party. If they nominated Biden, Democrats would be symbolically repudiating everything on which their identity-politics “social justice” agenda is based. Therefore, even if Biden could win the primaries, this would set up the Democrats for defeat in November 2020, because so many of their supporters — especially of the purple-hair feminist SJW variety — would not bother to vote.
So now look at the polls: Since July, Biden has hovered in the vicinity of 30% while Elizabeth Warren has zoomed from about 15% to around 25% — mostly at the expense of Bernie Sanders, who recently had a heart attack and is stuck permanently at around 15% support. Everybody else in the Democrat primary field is in single digits, and only Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris likely have what it takes to make it past Iowa and New Hampshire. Beto O’Rourke? Doomed. Corey Booker? No chance. By the end of next February, the choice for Democrats will be down to two or three candidates who have pledged themselves to the far-left agenda of the party base, and it’s far from certain that Biden will still be a candidate at that point. Frankly, his money situation may doom Biden worse than any other factor, because his campaign’s most recent cash-on-hand total (about $9 million) was less than half of the $23.4 million Buttigieg reported, and not even a third of Warren’s whopping $33.7 million. Everything now favors Warren to be next year’s Democrat nominee, and Trump will stomp Warren like Godzilla stomped Tokyo.
Elijah Cumming dead at 68. Baltimore City will not miss him. He participated in destroying that city and profited greatly personally for decades. @RepCummingshttps://t.co/brZ55Na881
I was trying hard to keep this about the honorable work Mr. Cummings did as a civil rights leader, but since you decided to bring up alleged corruption by Mr. Trump…
Mr. Cummings violated campaign finance laws, ducked child support and the IRS, and left Baltimore a mess.
What I recall about Cummings was that he never missed an opportunity to accuse Republicans of racism, while doing nothing to help actual black voters in his own Baltimore district. It was all scapegoating, all the time, with Cummings, and the same can be said of Democrats generally.
Well, don’t worry about Elijah Cummings. Like all dead Democrats in Baltimore, he’ll still be voting in elections for many years to come.
U.S. authorities followed a bitcoin trail to break up what they described as one of the largest dark web child porn marketplaces.
Federal prosecutors have filed charges against a South Korean man, Jong Woo Son, who allegedly ran “Welcome to Video,” which contained more than 200,000 videos displaying sexual acts involving children, toddlers and infants, NBC News reported, citing a criminal indictment unsealed Wednesday.
Bloomberg reported that investigators were able to track down Son and the location of his “darknet” server by targeting users’ bitcoin transactions.
Darknet involves encrypted online content that is not accessible through common search engines.
“Our agency’s ability to analyze the blockchain and de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions allowed for the identification of hundreds of predators around the world,” Don Fort, chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division, said, according to Bloomberg. “The scale of this crime is eye-popping and sickening.”
The website, which was in operation from June 2015 to March 2018, handled 7,300 bitcoin transactions, translating to more than $730,000, according to NBC.
NBC also reported that authorities discovered that Son ran the site as he serves an 18-month prison sentence for being convicted of child pornography-related charges. He was indicted on federal child porn charges in August 2018, but the records were unsealed Wednesday. More than 300 users of the website have been arrested in 11 countries, Bloomberg reported.
Ooh, there’s the story: Once the feds tracked down this Korean source, they used a sealed indictment — meaning that there was no news coverage of their investigation, so that users of this network didn’t know the feds were onto them. Brilliant work, because if the suspects had known they were being watched, they might have started destroying their hard drives, etc., and tried to disappear. Instead, they had no clue their network had been breached, and the creeps must have been surprised when they got busted — more than 300 of them! Also, there was big money involved, averaging about a quarter-million dollars a year over three years. One of the arrests related to this network, we now know, was a 26-year-old British man who was sentenced to prison in March:
A dark web film paedophile who raped a five-year-old boy and sexually abused a three-year-old girl has been locked up.
Kyle Fox, who had started abusing the little girl when she was still a baby, filmed his “shocking and dreadful abuse of children”.
He was snared after a video uploaded to a dark web website was traced back to him by National Crime Agency (NCA) detectives.
When officers raided Fox’s home in Epsom, Surrey, in the early hours of the morning, they found his male victim naked on a bed. . . .
The court heard there were 13,000 photographs and videos of indecent child images on the defendant’s computers.
Some of these videos showed his male victim being sexually abused, while others were of the girl. In total a staggering 4,743 images were Category A — the most serious kind of abuse.
Another creep arrested in this roundup, according to NBC News, was “a Washington, D.C., man who was caught with the equivalent of 50 years worth of video footage he had downloaded.”
Washington, D.C., you say? Did this involve pizza, by any chance?
In Australia, there has been an uproar since Pauline Hanson of the right-populist One Nation party asserted that false accusations of domestic abuse are a problem in child-custody cases. This is relevant to proposals to reform Australia’s family court system, and Hanson’s remarks have prompted outrage from feminists and the Left generally, where the Women Never Lie Myth is sacrosanct. This mirrors the Left’s position on “rape culture,” where mere accusation is considered tantamount to proof.
By actively creating a social order that incentivizes the removal of men from the home as the default. Look up the Duluth Model of feminism. We've socially engineered a society that shifted from marriage as the norm to child support as the norm.
Because of the desanctification of marriage in our secular, sexualized, feminist-dominated culture, wedding vows now come with asterisks next to them, pointing to footnotes that in essence declare, “We don’t actually mean all this stuff about ‘death do us part’ and so forth.”
Every couple now goes to the wedding altar under the threatening shadow of potential divorce, and it is generally acknowledged that divorce is a punitive procedure by which aggrieved women are authorized to obtain a sadistic revenge against their ex-husbands. Because accusations of abuse give women greater leverage in divorce proceedings, we should not be surprised that (a) such accusations are often exaggerated or even sometimes fabricated from whole cloth, and (b) anyone who expresses skepticism toward these accusations will be accused of being anti-woman, an enabler of male violence against women.
Rollo’s comment about the Child Support Model of family structure, where it is more or less assumed on the wedding day that the couple will eventually divorce, highlights how radically our society’s basic institutions have been altered. Between the startling rise in illegitimate births and the frequency of divorce, a majority of children in most Western countries will not be raised in a traditional family. This in turn has produced what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in her book The Divorce Culture, has called the “Love Family” ideology, a mentality in which the loyalties once demanded by permanent ties of blood or marriage are replaced by an imagined system of kinship based on mere sentiment.
The problem with the celebration of “love” as a basis for social organization is that human emotions can be ephemeral, and that “love” can be so easily exploited by selfish and dishonest people. For years, I have disavowed any accusation that I am a “men’s rights activist” (MRA) because, in the first place, I reject the identity-politics formula of group “rights.” Secondly, however, I recognize that most MRAs bring a particular axe to grind against women. Many MRAs — if not a majority, certainly an influential plurality — are men who have gone through the ordeal of divorce and custody disputes which are no part of my direct experience and, I pray to God, never will be. Yet while I am not an MRA, this doesn’t mean that they have not made important points about male-female relationships, especially in regard to how divorce has become a state-sponsored instrument to punish and humiliate men. And this is such a fundamental and relatively sudden shift in our culture that most older people (I’m 60 now, and certainly qualify as such) have no idea what absolute hell many young men now face in their relationships. Statistics showing a decline in men’s willingness to commit to marriage, accompanied by a significant drop in birth rates, testify to how the institutions of marriage and fatherhood have been made into something like a medieval torture device to inflict punishment on men. No matter how much a woman may profess to “love” a man, he must take into consideration that if his relationship leads to marriage and fatherhood, he will be at risk of personal destruction if her “love” ever fades.
Quite often, it seems, women seeking divorce view child custody as a weapon to wield in an all-out war to destroy their ex-husbands. It is not enough, for such women, to be free to pursue their own lives; instead, they develop an appetite for revenge against the man they once vowed to love until “death do us part.” Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid such a hell-on-earth are generally horrified to watch our friends or relatives endure the ordeal of divorce. We don’t enjoy the pressure to choose sides in the kind of interminable warfare that goes on between divorcing couples, but our court system seems to enable (and indeed, to encourage) the scorched-earth tactics so commonly employed in these disputes. Pauline Hanson has provoked controversy in Australia by saying aloud what everybody actually knows, i.e., that some women will invent or exaggerate incidents of abuse in order to “win” court proceedings against their ex-husbands. This threat hovers like a shadow in every divorce involving children: If her ex tries to dispute custody, or if he doesn’t make child-support payments in a timely manner, he may find himself facing accusations of abuse, and such accusations generally amount to a “he-said/she-said” conflict, where the real matter at issue is the credibility of the accuser. Feminists tend to deny that women ever make false accusations, or else contend that false accusations are so rare that we can disregard the possibility that a woman might be lying, and therefore feminists must destroy Pauline Hanson.
It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no objective reason why men and women should view each other as eternal enemies, but unless and until we are willing to take a hard look at how public policy now offers incentives for male-female conflict — especially including divorce — we are doomed to endure the continuing destruction of our society.
The very first time I heard Pete Buttigieg speak — during my trip to South Carolina in March — I was impressed by him. Of course, his policy ideas are all entirely wrong, but Buttigieg’s demeanor and delivery are excellent. He combines a policy wonk’s mastery of details with a folksy Midwestern manner in a way that would certainly inspire confidence if (and this is a very important “if”) his ideas weren’t the usual “progressive” prescription of vastly expanding the power (and cost) of the centralized Welfare State. During Tuesday night’s debate on CNN, Mayor Pete delivered a scolding lecture to Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, as Professor Glenn Reynolds observes:
He made mincemeat of Beto O’Rourke, who dodged a question from Anderson Cooper on how he would enforce a ban on assault weapons. Beto was left looking flustered and trying to claim that Mayor Pete was insensitive to victims of violence, which was a bad look for him. . . .
Numerous fellow candidates criticized him for his “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s” remarks. Between that and the drubbing that Mayor Pete administered, he had a very bad night.
We should be grateful to Buttigieg for his skill in demolishing the Great White Hope of Texas Democrats in front of a national audience.
If there is one thing that Tuesday night’s Democratic debate showed us — as if we didn’t know it in the first place — it’s just to what degree the media is in the tank for the Democrats. They’re not only in the tank — they built it, filled it with water up to the brim, and would turn up the temperature to boil Donald Trump alive if they could. And maybe they can.
You knew this from the outset when CNN’s lead moderator Anderson Cooper, along with his compatriots, one from the New York Times, opened the festivities with a round of leading impeachment questions, giving each candidate in turn a chance to outdo each other in bashing Trump.
This will do nothing to rescue CNN from the ratings basement, of course. There is no new audience to be gained by Trump-bashing at this point. CNN’s decision to become the “Clinton News Network” in 2016 was a strategic error, but instead of reversing course, they keep doubling down.
Meanwhile, Beto’s on MSNBC threatening again to take away your guns:
