Monthly Archives: May 2008

Drug Cartels Destabilizing Mexico

Posted on by

Mexico is in a losing battle with drug cartels whose escalating violence is providing cover for Marxist insurgents to become active. The newest cartel offensive raises troubling questions about the ability of the Mexican government to provide safety and security for its citizens, and heralds a future of bloody anarchy if officials cannot regain control of the streets. From WaPo:

MEXICO CITY, May 8 — Gunmen assassinated Mexico’s national police chief Thursday, blasting him with nine bullets outside his home in the capital and dealing a significant setback to the government’s campaign against drug cartels.

Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, the public face of Mexico’s offensive against drug cartels, became the highest-ranking law enforcement official to be killed since the launch of the effort 17 months ago. The assassination could give new confidence to drug cartels blamed for 6,000 killings in the past 2 1/2 years, and embolden other anti-government groups in this violence-plagued nation.

“This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability,” Luís Astorga, a Mexico City-based sociologist and drug expert, said in an interview. “It indicates terrible things, a level of weakness in our institutions — they can’t even protect themselves.”

Mexico’s drug and violence problem now engulfs the entire country, swamping cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and rugged drug cartel redoubts in the western mountains, and piercing into the heart of national power in Mexico City. The capital, once relatively immune to such brazen drug killings, has been the scene of four assassinations of high-ranking federal police officials in about a week.

[…]

The capital is also on edge because the once-dormant People’s Revolutionary Army, a rebel group that bombed oil pipelines last year, has been demanding the release of several jailed members. The rebels could see the killing of Millán Gómez as a sign of weakness, Astorga, the sociologist, said.

Federal police forces are stretched thin across Mexico, chasing an ever-growing number of suspects in drug killings. Last week, for instance, at least 17 people were killed in an attack on a ranch in the western state of Guerrero. This week, the military was engaged in a major battle with suspected cartel assassins in the central state of Zacatecas. That incident left three dead.

Fingers are pointing at the powerful Sinaloa Cartel which has its own military wing and has been known to contract MS-13 and Mexican Mafia to kill rivals. The Sinaloa Cartel has pushed well into the American southwest and has increasingly shown a willingness to engage Mexican forces and rival cartels in open firefights on the streets.

Mexico’s inability to maintain order has direct implications for American security, and this violence will spill into our country eventually. It’s only a matter of time.

British Judge Says 11-Year-Old Molestation Victim was Asking for It

Posted on by

I’m paraphrasing of course, but that is the essence of his verdict. From The Sun:

A PAEDOPHILE who groomed a girl of 11 on the internet before abusing her during a school lunch break walked free from court yesterday.

Jon Dixon, 20, admitted sexually assaulting and attempting to rape the youngster.

But a judge refused to jail him because the girl at first pretended to be 20 and sent explicit texts which “would make many twice her age blush.”

The girl’s mum cried and her dad said he was “not happy” as they left Manchester Crown Court.

Dixon pursued the girl even after she said she was 12 and asked her for pornographic pictures. They had met on a chat website in February last year.

He was assessed as “manipulative and predatory” and a “high risk” to children. But Judge Robert Atherton rejected the probation service assessment and said the girl “welcomed” sexual activity.

The British become more vile with every passing day. I say it’s about time we shut our borders to these pedophile-coddling Communists and replace them with Columbia.

Meanwhile the new Mayor of London has asked Bill Bratton to come help him put the house “Red” Ken Livingstone destroyed back in order. I’m thinking Bratton’s first bit of advice will be to start holding judges responsible for outrageous attacks on the fabric of society like this.

Illegal Immigrant Rapes and Impregnates 10-Year-Old

Posted on by

illegal-immigrant-rapes-10-yr-old-girl.jpg

Preliminary reports are that 37-year-old Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez is likely illegal, so my post will be much decried by people who will say I’m a racist and that it doesn’t matter where Gutierrez-Juarez was from in the first place. Aside from the fact that had our border been secure he’d never had access to the victim I would put forward that if a person comes from a country where children as young as twelve are allowed to “consent” to sex (like Mexico for example) it is reasonable to expect that without pressure to assimilate that person may well begin violating children.

From Fox News:

ST. ANTHONY, Idaho — A suspected illegal immigrant has been charged with raping a 10-year-old girl who later gave birth in eastern Idaho.

The girl gave birth less than two weeks ago by caesarian section at Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg, Fremont County Sheriff Ralph C. Davis and other authorities said. Officials would not disclose the gender, date of birth or paternity of the baby.

“I wouldn’t have believed a 10-year-old could conceive in the first place,” Davis said.

A hospital spokeswoman would not discuss the condition of the girl or the baby and would not say whether either was still in the hospital Wednesday.

The story was first reported by KIDK Television in Idaho Falls.

St. Anthony police began investigating on April 28 after medical officials reported a pregnant child, and Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez, 37, of St. Anthony, was arrested the same day, Police Chief James Smith said.

“We had good information from witnesses,” Smith said.

In documents that were filed April 29 in 7th District Court and obtained by The Associated Press, Gutierrez-Juarez is charged with one count of rape. He remained in jail with bail set at $250,000 pending a preliminary hearing May 13.

Authorities said Gutierrez-Juarez did not have legal documentation to live in the United States. His home town and nationality were not immediately clear, but police said they had received no complaints about him before investigating the pregnancy.

I’ve blogged before about Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin’s essay Importing Misogyny which talks about the relation to violent sex crimes like this and non-assimilation by immigrants from countries where women are sexualized early and considered property. Her essay covers misogyny from a variety of cultures including Islamic ones. But her analysis of South American misogyny is more relevant here:

First, take the concept of ‘rapto.’ This comes from Mexico where in some areas, it is socially acceptable for a man of any age to abduct a female of any age as long as long as he intends to marry her. That is right. Men can kidnap and rape females. This is acceptable in Oaxaca where the government continues to view rapto as a minor crime. One legislator even referred to this horrid violation as “romantic.” Lest anyone believe such garbage, note that 24 year old Mexican immigrant Eliseo Nunez snatched a 12 year old girl and took her to Mexico to fulfill his erotic desires. Isn’t that romantic?

The fact is that South American male attitudes toward females are often archaic and misogynistic. Thus it is not surprising that the U.S. is seeing more attacks against women and little girls committed by these immigrants. In August 2005, illegal immigrant Jose Ramirez from El Salvador was charged with the violent attack of a 15 year old girl who refused to respond when he whistled at her (Roh, 2005). Perhaps such primitive behavior stems from the homeland culture. El Salvador and Guatemala have had a string of unsolved brutal murders where young females have been abducted and cut apart. Authorities have found body parts, including heads scattered around. In one instance, two female heads were deposited right in front of a local police station, blood still oozing from the severed heads (Miles, 2003). Gangs are suspected in these crimes as it is often part of their initiation to kill.

[…]

If you are not yet disgusted, you will be. Not only are criminal immigrants coming from cultures that are misogynistic, but they are changing U.S. culture in response to their sickness. Many illegal aliens join violent gangs which take over neighborhoods and terrorize innocent citizens. These gangs are highly organized with tentacles spread through several countries. The mantra of the deadly MS13 gang is: blood in, blood out. And the chilling effects of the illegal aliens participation in these gangs are very far reaching. For example, on December 19, 2002, Victor Cruz, Jose Hernandez, Armando Juvenal, and Carlos Rodriguez were involved with the drawn out gang rape of an unsuspecting 42 year old New York woman. These illegal aliens were well known to police for their prior crimes of assault, attempted robbery, drug offenses, and illegal gun possession. No deportation followed their lesser offenses because of the sanctuary policy.

Looking the other way has consequences, and while America looked the other way a little girl had her innocence stolen by a person whose presence here stops law-abiding, American loving immigrants from Latin America from being able to obtain a visa immigrate here legally. While good honest people wait for years to to get to this county we let Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez cut in front of them, jump our border and rape a 10-year-old girl.

There’s much talk about compassion for immigrants, where is the compassion for the ones left out in the cold while child rapists roam the streets of our cities.

Lilo thinks it’s suspicious that the parents didn’t realize the 10-year-old was pregnant, which is a good point:

The investigation into the rape is ongoing and police have left the option for more charges to be filed open. There has been little released about just how a 10 year old could be sexually abused, become pregnant from it- and for it to go unnoticed until the child delivered the baby. I’m personally wondering where the parents were in all of this- and if charges will be pressed against any other individuals who may have either been involved, or who neglected to act when the child became pregnant.

Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit is preparing for the inevitable lambasting the right will get over “demogoging” this issue:

My deepest apologies to amnesty shills everywhere for even bringing his status up. Hopefully it’ll turn out he’s a citizen so we can all breathe a sigh of relief and be comfortably outraged by the crime; otherwise this is destined to end up on “Geraldo At Large” as one of those segments in which our fearless host spends six of the seven minutes devoted to it explaining why immigration politics have absolutely, positively nothing whatsoever to do with the matter — even though in theory stronger enforcement would have kept this guy out of the country in the first place.

Breitbart has a video report.

Victimless Crime File: Pot Smoking Degenerates Toy with Necrophilia

Posted on by

Well, technically they aren’t suspected of necrophilia per se but we all know these things happen in baby steps. From The Chon:

Two men and a juvenile are accused of digging up a corpse, decapitating the body and using the head to smoke marijuana, according to court documents.

Matthew Gonzalez and Kevin Jones have been charged with the misdemeanor offense of abuse of a corpse, said Scott Durfee, a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorneys Office.

According to documents filed in the case, Gonzalez, Jones and an unnamed juvenile on March 15 went to an Humble cemetery, dug up a man’s grave, left with the head and turned it into a “bong.”

Gonzalez told authorities about the incident Wednesday, and showed officers the defaced grave, including a 4-foot hole. Because of a heavy rain, officers were unable to determine whether the casket or the body had been disturbed.

Just good clean fun right tokers? But don’t worry, this has nothing to do with pot. After all Brian77008 says in the comments:

This is disgusting. But make no mistake. Pot did not make these guys go out and dig up a corpse and do this. They did it because they are inherently bad people.

Of course. I recall hundreds of cases where “bad people” dug up graves and stole skulls to drink beer out of or eat their cereal from. Getting high has absolutely nothing to do with what police suspect to be up to four people stealing a skull to smoke pot from. Nothing.

The Chron has a longer article on the story detailing how this ring of petty thieves ended up getting caught. Police believe the person who originally admitted tot the desecration, Kevin Wade Jones, thought it would distract police from questioning him about car break-ins. Really:

The Kingwood teenager’s story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.

Yet, Kevin Wade Jones Jr., 17, appeared almost indifferent as he relayed the bizarre description of his and two friends’ activities at an Humble area graveyard, Adkins said.

“I just doubted it because it’s very morbid, and I couldn’t see anybody doing something like this,” Adkins said Thursday.

Not until police went to the home of another Kingwood 17-year-old, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, did the officer believe the tale.

“He regurgitated in his plate of food when I asked him about it,” Adkins said. “So I knew there was some truth to the story.”

Now, Jones, Gonzalez and a juvenile whose name has not been released are each charged with abuse of a corpse, a misdemeanor. All three were arrested Wednesday night.

Police said a fourth suspect is wanted for questioning.

[…]

The teens first came to police’s attention during a vehicle burglary investigation. While being questioned, Jones told of desecrating the gravesite a month or two ago. Adkins said he believes the tale was intended to distract police from the vehicle break-in.

Jones claimed he and his friends used shovels to dig up the body and removed the corpse’s head with a garden tool, Adkins said. Jones also revealed he and the other two boys took the severed head to the juvenile’s home, where they used the skull as a “bong” to smoke marijuana, the officer said.

Read the rest. The grave the cops found disturbed belonged to an 11-year-old boy named Willie Simms who died in 1921 and the graveyard may or may not be set aside for Black WWI and WWII veterans who died. No one seems to know much about it.

Hmmm. Desecrating the grave of a child in a mysterious cemetery no one maintains or knows anything about. Sounds like a great idea unless you believe in vengeful spirits haunting the living.

Dartmouth Professor Sues Students for Questioning her Outrageous Claims

Posted on by

I’ve had teachers like this before, luckily none of them ever thought to sue me for not believing their nonsense. From The Wall Street journal:

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness,” a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan’s scholarly specialty is “science studies,” which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, “teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth.” She continues: “Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct.”

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan’s seminar, then, was to “problematize” technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the “problems” owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was “intolerant of ideas” and “questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways.” Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But “these weren’t thoughtful statements,” Ms. Venkatesan protests. “They were irrational.” The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student’s “diatribe,” several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was “fascist demagoguery.” Then, after consulting a physician about “intellectual distress,” she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Venkatesan’s insistence on her students’ acceptance of her fevered post-modernism reminds me a little of a class I took with in Narrative Non-Fiction with Lisa Jarnot, who is a very pleasant woman and an excellent poet but who literally spent a week of the class trying to convince us that there was no such thing as fixed gender. Not fixed gender roles mind you, which it can be reasonably argued by any rational person, but no fixed sex. It was an odd experience but actually not one that was as bad as many teachers would have made it and I actually quite enjoyed the class and my conversations with Lisa.

For her part though she no doubt sensed my skepticism of some of her ideas she graded me fairly and we parted amicably. I in fact did some of my best writing in that class.

The main difference between a Priya Venkatesan and a Lisa Jarnot is class. I’m sorry to say that on many a university campus there are students and faculty alike who are spoiled, thin skinned, and so utterly classless that the mere suggestion of criticism becomes ground for legal action, or at the very least a childish tantrum.

Stories like the one in the Journal would be amusing if it didn’t have such a deleterious effect on the academic environment:

That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan’s. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about “interrogating heteronormativity,” or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I “deconstructed” the MTV program “Pimp My Ride.” A typical passage: “Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined.” It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It’s effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

Indeed. And it is painfully obvious that the college student of today isn’t learning critical thinking, the scientific method or Gods forbid, to be an expert in a subject. Today’s students are learning that college is largely an exercise in irrelevance, boredom and hackery and we owe them much more than that.

h/t Don’t tase Me Bro!