An Alaskan journalist's perspective on local and national issues

Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Cop Kills Unarmed Naked College Student?










We. Are. Watching you.


A Woman Judge Blames a Woman for Being Sexually Assaulted?!

Reading this story was a lot like reading about Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court Justice who grew up in the Jim Crow days and had to live with the racial segregation that that entailed, thinks that black people shouldn’t have rights.

Here’s the premise of what happened – a cop goes to a bar.  He is drunk.  He flashes his badge at the door so as not to pay the entrance fee.  Once inside, he goes up behind a woman.  He grabs a hold of her, puts his hand up her skirt, and starts rubbing his hands on her genitals.

As you can imagine, it was insane.  The cop, Robb Gary Evans, was immediately fired from the police force, and arrested.  At the trial, he was convicted of sexual assault, and sentenced to two years in prison, and to be put on the sex-offender registry, as is proper.

However, there was a twist.  The judge in this case, Jaqueline Hatch, said that sentencing this ex-cop to jail time was excessive, and instead sentenced him to probation, and 100 hours of community service.  Also, he is not going to be put on the sex offender registry list.  But it doesn’t end there.  Judge Hatch had some choice words for the victim of this crime –

If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened.

That offensive enough?  Well, she continues.

You learned a lesson about friendship and a lesson about vulnerability.

Or maybe this.


Yeah, a woman judge is who is actually telling a victim of sexual assault that she is at fault here.  Yeah, by that logic, if a person chokes on food, it’s there fault for eating.  If a kid gets caught by a stray bullet at a drive-by, it was his fault for being there.  If your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, it’s your fault for living there.

This is offensive.  This is totally and completely offensive on so many levels.  This is a judge, an actual judge, who gives this sexual predator a slap on the wrist, at best, and then decides to make this about a woman being in the wrong place, and painting her as not the victim, but the reason for this to happen.

Where does this judge get off?!  Where does this come from to believe that she has the right to tell this woman that this is her fault?!  The absolute LAST thing that a woman who was in this position needs to hear, from a person in a position of authority, is that this was their fault.  The levels of cruelty in that statement are unforgivable.

But beyond that, it is worse because think about this – she is advocating that men who sexually assault women shouldn’t be accountable for their actions!  How sick is that?  This is one of the most disgusting pieces of inhumanity that has ever been uttered by a federal judge.

Where do people like this come from?  People like Todd Akin, who stupidly enough said that if a woman is “legitimately raped,” the body will just shut it down, and that it isn’t that bad.  Sure, he said that was a dumb thing to say, but here’s the punch line – he never said he was wrong!  And the reason he did that is because of the next voting cycle.  He knows that if he admits that that was a stupid thing to say, his opponent will come in and say that it’s true that a woman who is raped doesn’t need an abortion, because that is what the morally backwards base wants to hear.

Judge Hatch is a disgusting human being.  She is a foul, venereal disease on the zeitgeist of America.  But here is the truly horrifying thing – she is in a position of power.  Her, and people like Todd Akin are getting into positions of power in this country.  Why?  It’s not because of a lack of liberal voting, though that certainly is an issue.  No, it’s because, and we need to accept this, the Republican Party, which makes up half (give or take) of this country’s voting block, is perfectly fine with electing and having these monsters represent them.  That is the kind of people they are.

This country is filled with voters who want to see women suffer, to see women get assaulted and raped, and when they are put in a position to justify their point of view, they will say – it was the woman’s fault, because she was there.  That is what America has produced.

These are the kinds of people who have a voice in this country.  America, there are a lot of days when I find you to be a disgusting place.  Can you blame me?

America and Creationism

There was a video that is getting a LOT of attention right now floating around YouTube.  In it, famous science celebrity, Bill Nye, has his opinion about a trend in America.

Denial of evolution is unique to the United States.

He’s got a very good point.  6 in 10 American do not believe in the Theory of Evolution.  For those who will come at us saying that it is just a theory, you need to understand the definition of a theory.  A lot of people confuse this with a hypothesis.  A hypothesis is when you have an idea about why something is, but have no proof for it, and you mean to test it.  A theory, on the other hand, is something that has been tested and has proof.  So why not call it a law?  Well, while there can be laws of physics, there cannot be laws of science.  We know so little about how the universe truly works that there is no way that we could say that evolution is a law.  We have a mountain of scientific evidence for it, so it is true, yet we cannot say that it is a law because there is always a chance that it could be proven wrong.

But, even with the mountains of evidence that exist for the theory of evolution, 6 out of 10 people in this country believe that it is not true.  So, what do they believe?  Well, in America, the bulk of them believe that a celestial being, either called God, Jehovah, or Yahweh created all the things in the universe.  It took seven days, and it wasn’t millions or billions of years ago, it was thousands of years ago.

They call this “creationism.”  Now, many will deny that, saying that the theory of creationism (which is there word for it.  There is NO proof of this) is that a being, an unnamed being, created the universe.  Or rather, could have.  But which being?  The Christian God?  Well, if that is the case, then your position becomes much, MUCH, more complicated.

For one thing – there is absolutely NO scientific evidence that suggests that the universe is only 10 or however many thousand years old.  The Theory of Evolution has a mountain of evidence, yet 6 out of 10 people believe in a story about the universe coming into being that has no evidence at all.

Another thing – if the “theory” goes that the universe was created, and we are going to say that this theory has proof, then which being?  Was it the Christian God?  Was it the Jewish God?  Was it Allah?  Was it Vishnu?  Was it Ra?  If they are going to try and prove that this universe was created by a heavenly being that left no evidence for its existence, how can you prove that it wasn’t another heavenly being that did it?  Through the course of human history, there have been countless religions and countless stories about the creation of life on Earth.  How can you prove one without proving another?

Bill Nye went on to say that if people wanted to believe that this world came to be from a heavenly being, and not through a process that has a mountain of evidence, that’s fine.  But the problem comes when people are trying to get that taught in classrooms.

Let’s be plain, here – this is not science.  Creationism is a theory in the same way that a tomato is a vegetable.  It simply isn’t.  There is no evidence for it.  But a very solid amount of people in this country want this “theory” to be taught in classrooms.  Well, that is just plain nuts.  Something that has absolutely zero basis in science doesn’t deserve to be in a scientific classroom, and anybody who thinks that they can argue that it does have a place there should see the previous problems.

There is no evidence of a holy being of any kind existing.  All secular evidence that exists about the universe shows that this universe is billions of years old, not thousands.  All secular evidence holds that life on this Earth did not get created at the same time, with humans playing on a swing hanging from a Brontosaurus.  It gradually evolved and changed over time.

Bill Nye is absolutely right.  Creationism has no place in schools.  And if we are teaching our kids that it is okay to ignore science, ignore evidence, and ignore facts, then what kind of future could they possibly have?  America is getting left behind by the rest of the industrialized world.

It amazes me that we don’t get it.

Chick-fil-A, the Muppets, and Gay Marriage?

Yeah, this is a set of things I bet that most people never thought that they would see together.  It all started when the fast food restaurant chain, Chick-fil-A took a hardline stance against gay marriage.  After this happened, Jim Henson pulled the Muppet toys from their kid’s meals.

Of course, so as not to have us all believing that they decided to take a really stupid stance on an issue that has really turned around in the last…30 years, they tried to pass it off as the Muppet toys were unsafe, hence and that is why they got rid of them.

After this sad attempt at damage control failed on Facebook, one of their PR people created a fake Facebook account, pretending to be a teenage girl.  Of course, since the internet is smarter than Chick-fil-A PR people, apparently, the internet realized that that the photo of the teenage girl, named “Abby Farle,” was a stock photo from Shutter Stock.

Now, after having taken a stance against gay marriage, lied about why Jim Henson ditched them, and then tried to cover up their lie with a fake person on Facebook, there is a Category 5 PR meltdown.  And to be honest, the people at Chick-fil-A have nobody to blame but themselves.

This is…dumb.  Really dumb.  This is like PR retardation.  It doesn’t get any stupider than this?  One must ask an honest question – where did the PR people who work for Chick-fil-A get their education?  I am a JPC student at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and even I could have told them that this is the stupidest thing ever.

Let’s take apart how stupid this is, because we are only a couple hundred words into the post, and I feel like it.  First, there is the stance against gay marriage.  Coming out against gay marriage is just bad business.  There has been a HUGE social change on this issue.  People who are against gay marriage are not the norm.  They are becoming more and more the social outliers.  The Westboro Baptist Church and the Mormons are every day making the anti-gay cause look worse and worse, the decent people are not playing ball.  There is still a large chunk that is against it, and against the LGBT community, but you can be that things are changing, for the better.

Second, you said that the reason that the Muppet toys were pulled was because of finger injuries?  Wow, what a pathetic lie.  I mean, really, that is about as bad as saying that the reason you don’t sell bananas at your store is because somebody slipped on a banana peel.  Saying that kids got their fingers’ stuck in the Muppet toys fooled nobody.  But this leads to the final point.

Third, you created a fake Facebook account?  As a teenage girl?!  Man, that is just pathetic!  I mean, that is literally the bottom of the barrel.  You can’t possibly come back from that.  It was so easy to fact-check this, because the account was created 8 hours before the post.  Did nobody at Chick-fil-A realize that that brain thing that their teachers said was so important actually can be used for something more than just space filler in the space inside the cranium?

All in all, this is the dumbest PR move in history.  Chick-fil-A, you aren’t coming back from this.  Whoever’s idea this stunt with the girl, using a stock photo, it was, they should be fired.  And I hope you learned something.  As bad as the Komen For the Cure debacle was, it pales in comparison.

But the biggest stupid mistake that this company has made is that they are going to lose business.  Big time.  Boycotts are already in place, and I am not one of those people who says that those are wrong.  If conservatives want to preach the free market, well guess what – here’s the free market in action.  People are given a choice, and they have made it.

Chick-fil-A, somebody, or a lot of somebody’s need to get fired.  I am with the boycott, not because you are bigots.  That at least makes some sense to me.  But being stupid at your business, that’s just unacceptable.

Lefty’s Special Comment: The Aurora, Colorado Massacre

I haven’t done one of these in a long time.  I haven’t thought about something this seriously in a long time.  After it happened, I did a post about the fact that before people even knew all the facts, they were jumping on the two major bandwagons that exist in this country.

The first bandwagon is the liberal one.  It says that this happened because there it is so easy to get guns.  If we make it harder for people to get guns, then these sorts of crimes won’t happen.  The second bandwagon is that if people had more guns, they could have stopped this.  That people with guns could have made a difference.

I want to be far more thorough in this special comment than I was in the other post.  Here’s the thing about the liberal argument – it’s lazy.  It is a lazy argument to say that if we get rid of guns, violent crimes will go away.  Because it deliberately ignores the investigation into why these things happen.  So many people just say, “he’s crazy.”  “The shooter was mentally ill.”  That is also lazy.  There seems to be a phobia among Americans when it comes to looking at things critically.

Violent crime doesn’t come from guns.  It has never come from guns.  Long before people had guns, people were killing people.  Of course, I am not one of those people who makes the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  That argument is as tired as it is weak.  But long before guns, murder was still happening.

The reasons why are many.  The first is because there is a part of human nature that is violent.  We are not beholden to it, but it is there all the same.  Before guns, we used swords.  The sword has killed just as many people, if not more, than a gun.  Before swords, primitive humans beat each other to death with clubs or primitive tools.  The violence of the human animal goes back to before we were human.  Violence is a part of nature.  And much as we like to deny it, we are animals.

The next reason is because there are a LOT of social problems in this country.  Before we look at regulating guns, here’s a thought – how about we end the drug war.  It is a safe bet that most violent crime in this country comes from the unbelievably stupid war on drugs, which is hugely tied into the existence of gangs and organized crime.  Where there is organized crime, there is violence.  These two things have gone hand in hand since day one.  If all drugs, not just marijuana, but everything was made legal, it could be controlled, taxed, and taken off the street.  You can bet that if all of the drug market was legal, the illegal market would be crushed in a matter of weeks.  In a matter of weeks, crime would drop because gangs would be put out of business.

If the liberals are going to argue for the making of having firearms illegal, then they have to be smarter about that.  Now, some liberals take a position that owning a gun should be a lot like getting a car.  I am not totally against that.  It is a fact that the regulations already in place are often ignored.  That is taking things from a measured perspective, but to say that we should outright ban them is foolish.

Another thing that must be taken into account is that how would getting rid of all guns be enforced?  It would be enforced by cops.  The police.  Honestly, the cops are far more dangerous than the average criminal.  The police have demonstrated, time and time again, how they will abuse authority and are accountable to nobody.  So, we want an armed and more and more violent force who has shown that cracking down on the public is not outside the purview of what is acceptable to have jurisdiction over what we keep in our homes?

Not only would the cops, who have been proven not to be trustworthy, have authority over average people, but if you take away people’s right to have something, guess what you create – a black market.  Another black market would be made, in addition to the one we have now.  Ironically, the one we have now would feed into this new one.  Neat little spiral of death, isn’t it?

Alright, so we’ve railed off on the liberals for a bit.  Don’t want to see one-sided.  The conservative position – that if all people had had guns, this wouldn’t have happened, is also flawed.

For one thing, it isn’t like people can’t get guns now.  Guns have less requirements to purchase than pretty much any other dangerous item in this country.  I am not for taking them away, but I have a great deal of respect for how dangerous these weapons are.  People in this country only have to go through a background check, and then they can have a weapon.

Here’s another thing – most theaters don’t have laws that prohibit people from having a weapon.  And plenty of people don’t listen to those laws anyway, just going where they go armed.  So, with that being said, would more weapons have made a difference here?  Well, if people could have guns, why didn’t they?  Why didn’t they shoot back at him?

The reason is because guns are dangerous.  They make loud noises.  They are known to kill people.  Most people don’t want to kill people.  Conservatives who talk about getting more guns have, and I think you can bet, almost never fired a gun at a real person before.  They have never had human life in their hands.  Being so cavalier about killing people is part of the problem of our culture.  We can talk about it easy as you like, but doing it?  That’s harder.

Here’s the reality – there is a lot of social change that needs to happen before we can even talk about gun laws.  And getting more guns to more people isn’t going to change things anyway.  But the real tragedy is that not one person is trying to get into the underlying issue that got us here.  Or rather, not one person who is in the mainstream media.  That’s how America is now.

It’s sad, really, when thinking about something is just too hard.

Guns, Gun Control, and The Dark Knight Rises

One of the worst parts of society is how people will exploit just about anything if they think that it will get them ahead in a position that they have.  For real, anytime that there is an incident with guns, the left immediately runs to the “get rid of the guns!” argument.  And the right, meanwhile, runs to the “get more guns to people!” argument.  Both sides talk with such fervor and both sides are completely ignorant.

But it is absolutely, positively, every single time.  Every time that something with a gun happens, those are the only two arguments.  Virginia Tech shooting, those were the arguments.  Gabbie Giffords shooting, those were the arguments.  Columbine, those were the arguments.

Are people just afraid to examine the issues in a critical nature?  For real, instead of saying, “why did this happen?  What got these people to this point?  Were they mentally deranged?  Were they confused?  What happened?”  Instead of asking any of those questions, they decide to simply look at guns.

Case and point – at the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” in Aurora, Colorado, there was a man who came to the theater.  He was armed to the teeth and he opened fire on the people waiting to see the film.  He killed 12 people, injured 50 more.  The identity of the shooter hasn’t been released, by the making of this post.  But before we even know who did it, or why, the talking heads of the left and the right are assembling, ready to debate this.  And you know what the debates are?

The Left –

We need to get rid of guns!  If people didn’t have guns, this wouldn’t have happened!

The Right –

We need to get more guns!  If those people had had guns too, this wouldn’t have happened, because they could have shot back!

To both sides –

You’re idiots.

Let’s attack the liberal position on this first.  Do you really think that violence is going to stop if people don’t have guns?  Let’s take a look back through history.  Throughout history, people have been violent.  Before they had guns to kill people with, they were using swords.  Before swords, they used clubs.  That is because there is a part of the human animal that has propensity to kill other people.  We have a violent side to us.

Now, it isn’t like we are beholden to this side, but we have to acknowledge its existence.  But do the people who look at these tragedies do that?  No.  Of course not.  To do that means to shine a rather unflattering light on America and humanity itself, and we are such a self-pitying species that we can’t do that.  It’s just too hard.

But back to the issues – getting rid of guns isn’t going to stop violence.  In fact, getting rid of guns would create even more.  This is because if we ban guns, it would make another black market.  We already have one ridiculous and pointless black market with drugs.  We shouldn’t have any drugs illegal, because it is pointless and doesn’t help anything.  If it were legal, it could be controlled.  So, with one black market which leads to incredible amounts of senseless violence in the form of gang violence, you want to add another?  It would absolutely cause more harm than good.

And in the case of what happened at this theater, that man could have just as easily come into the place with a machete as he could with a gun and killed people.

To the Right – don’t you realize that these people already had the ability to have guns?  Most theaters don’t have a policy that says that you can’t bring in guns.  People have the ability to get a gun if they want to.  There really is nothing standing in the way of them getting a gun, other than a registration process that checks to see if you have a criminal history involving guns.

So, they could have had a gun and fired back at this guy.  Why didn’t they?  Because most people aren’t horribly violent and want to have guns on them to potentially kill an attacker.  Your obsession with people having guns really does confuse/annoy me, because it’s like you all don’t have a firm grasp on reality.  Well, you are conservative, so that isn’t too surprising.

It all comes down to this – America refuses to look at these issues like they are a bigger problem.  They want to simplify it down to “it’s guns.”  That’s lazy, ignorant, and stupid.

Wow, all terms to describe America.  Convenient.

Lefty’s Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

First things first – don’t see this movie in 3D.  I hate so much that almost every film nowadays is in 3D.  This film doesn’t need it, and you shouldn’t have to pay for it.  3D is a cheap marketing gimmick that Hollywood has whored out to.  This film is awesome all on its own.

Going in to the first film of the original series, I had very high expectations.  It was a Spider-Man movie, after all, and I had had a little bit of love for the character.  Sadly, I was incredibly disappointed.  The dialogue was awful, the effects were crappy, and the villain looked so bad that I laughed every time that he was on screen.  It was a corny and silly and outright ridiculous movie.

You won’t find any of those problems here.  This film is, quite simply, better than the first film of the original series in every conceivable way.  This is what a Spider-Man film should be.  But let’s take a closer look.

The story is of Spider-Man’s beginning.  He is starting out as a superhero, and is learning who he is.  The film opens with his parents leaving him with his aunt and uncle, and leaving, obviously afraid.  They are killed, and Peter grows up with his aunt and uncle.  Through a series of events, he finds himself at Oscorp, and winds up being bitten by a genetically mutated spider.  This begins his transformation into Spider-Man.  Meanwhile, an algorithm that Peter finds that his father made helps Dr. Curt Connors find his own inner monster.

So, the good stuff first.  The first thing to talk about is the dialogue.  This movie’s dialogue and character drama flowed so much better than the first film of the original series.  It helped that Tobey MacGuire wasn’t playing the lead role.  Andrew Garfield did his role incredibly well.  He played Parker as an awkward young man, who isn’t some born hero, but just a guy.  And when he finds himself with powers, he doesn’t just immediately become a hero.

Now, there are a lot of plot points that follow the original film.  Uncle Ben getting murdered, Parker hunting for the murderer, but unlike in the original film, he never finds the man.  And the plot is a lot better handled in this film.  The original film was well-paced, and the story wasn’t bad, but the awful dialogue and the one-dimensional characters like Mary Jane Watson were just tedious and boring.  This film suffered from none of that.

Another improvement was the romance.  In keeping with the original comic, Peter isn’t with Mary Jane, but instead begins a relationship with Gwen Stacey.  Their relationship is believable, and very hard.  There is genuinely compelling drama when Stacey doesn’t want to keep in that relationship because she is afraid (after finding out his secret) of Parker dying, like her father, who is a police captain.  Stacey isn’t just a tease romance like Mary Jane was in the original films.  She has a lot of personality, and is pretty tough.

But by far the best improvements of this film, as opposed to the other film were the fight sequences, and the villain.  This film had The Lizard as the villain.  His look was amazing.  This villain was genuinely intimidating.  Unlike Green Goblin from the other film, who was a joke.  Everything from his look, to his voice-work, you were afraid of this guy. And the fight scenes in this movie were so epic.

Not just with Lizard, either.  Spider-Man fighting it out with random thugs, his first car-thief, and the battles with Lizard were just great.  For one thing, they were a LOT faster than the fights in the other film.  The pace of these fights was so fast that there were times that you didn’t want to blink.  For some movies, that’s a bad thing, but in a film about Spider-Man, that’s just perfect.  This is a guy who can move at split-second reaction.  He can shoot web and jump around.  You want a fight with him to be unbelievably fast and acrobatic.  You expect the enemies of this character to be annoyed fighting him, because catching him is like trying to catch a frog with your bare hands.

So, with all this great stuff, are there problems?  Well, yes, there are a few.  This is really nit-picking, but they are worth mentioning.  The first problem is that the Lizard is cool, and the fights with him are awesome, but it is a little bit glossed over in a way.  You do get into Connors’ head, but it could have been given a little more time.  Of course, the focus is kept on Parker and his adventures, as it should be.  So that really is a nit-pick.

Another problem is that the man working for Norman Osbourne, who is obviously a villain, is a very stereotypical Middle Eastern man.  Oh, and another one – they had ANOTHER scene with an American flag shoe-horned in there!  That got annoying by the third of the original Spider-Man movies.  Here, it was absolutely unnecessary, and kind of uncomfortable.

But to be honest, that is all just nit-picking.  There is nothing staggeringly wrong with this film.  It’s definitely a more serious Spider-Man movie.  We all need to thank The Dark Knight for showing that audiences want a more serious superhero movie.  And we got it in this film.  It is more serious than the original film, it is better acted and better scripted.  It flows organically, unlike the completely surreal and cartoon-y nature of the other movie.  The villain and hero are much better.  It is an overall improvement in every way.

Fans of this hero, or superhero films in general won’t be disappointed.

Final Verdict: 8 out of 10

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