Week 14 Journal Response 4/23 – 4/27
This week we are starting with “real” monsters. Keep an eye out for real monsters. If you come across any of the topics we have discussed this week, analyze and write a short response to it.
You can also continue with your monster analysis and connect our theory to something from popular culture.
Make sure to include a link, summary, and analysis. Minimum 250 words. Comment below.
Professor Ramos' Blog 
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/judge-revokes-bond-for-nashville-shooting-suspect-after-outcry/ar-AAwi2hL?OCID=ansmsnnews11
In today’s society, our real life monsters are the men that believe using AR-15 assault rifles and shooting up our schools, churches, movie theatres and our communities is okay. On Sunday, at approximately 3:30 in the morning, a naked man named Travis Reinking came into a Waffle House restaurant in Tennessee and shot and killed 4 people and injuring many more.
The NRA and many Republicans are going to say this was another “mentally disturbed man” and send all their fake “thoughts and prayers” to the families and the victims even though this incident could have been totally avoided with a change in gun reform. Fighting for the right to bear arms with an argument based off the second amendment is outrageous. The amendments were put in place when African Americans were still considered three fifths of a person. It is absolutely monstrous of our politicians to turn a blind eye on us and leave us with the unsettling feeling of “am I going to be okay leaving the house today? Going to school today, or church, or work, or even just out?” It is time for gun reform before more unnecessary “thoughts and prayers” are sent out to even more families.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/suspected-golden-state-killer-shocked-arrest-told-police/story?id=54746113
https://www.ranker.com/list/golden-state-killer-facts/natalie-hazen
This is about a 72-year old man named Joseph DeAngelo, or better known as the “Golden State Killer.” He committed 50 rapes, 12 murders, and 100 burglaries between the years 1976-1986 in the Sacramento area and Orange County area. The search for him continued for 40 years and he was finally caught last Tuesday through DNA tracking of a relative using a genealogy site and testing his discarded DNA. Before his crimes, he would voyeur the victims house to learn details about them. He would also break into their homes to learn the layout and set up for his attacks. He would tie up his victims, brutally rape and kill them. If they weren’t home alone the other would be tied up face down with dishes on their back and he would threaten to shoot them in the head or kill the woman if he heard the dishes. He was a serial rapist before he turned murderer, so the victims that were not killed got threatening calls before and after. He was finally arrested at his home in Citrus Heights Sacramento. When police arrested him, he stated he had a roast in the oven, just going about his daily life. The people in his neighborhood said that he had a temper, but they never thought of him like a killer and they felt safe. I chose these articles because he is a “real” monster. It reminded me of class discussion how anyone can be a monster and we just don’t know it. This man raped and murdered people for ten years, and then went about his life for another thirty before he was caught. He obviously did not stand out.
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For this week’s journal post we will be looking at real monster in the US society. There are a lot of what we can call “real monsters”. The one that I am going to be focusing on for this week’s journal post is a current person that has brought up a lot questions amongst his actions. His name is Nikolas Cruz you might seen him in the news lately as he was arraigned on murder charges for the killing of seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. I along with many other will feel that Nikolas Cruz could be determined as a real monster for his actions in the mass murder in Parkland, Florida. Yes, Nikolas Cruz was deemed to be under psychiatric care under the supervision of a licensed psychologist. He still committed a heinous crime. I believe this crime could be related to the fact that Nikolas Cruz was in fact bullied during his adolescent years at Marjory Stoneman high school. Bullying can be defined as; is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate or aggressively dominate others. There are many forms of bullying and they are; physical, mental, verbal, and cyber all of these are forms of bullying and have a negative impact on a person. I’m not saying that it is ok for Cruz to do wat he did because of this. I am saying that we need to start deeply looking into bullying as a whole and find out what can be done so that this doesn’t happen again. Mass murder rates have drastically increased in the US and it can be considered that a contributing factor has led to the perpetrator being bullied at some point in their life.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-complete-history-of-monsanto-the-worlds-most-evil-corporation/5387964
In E. Hanzal’s article, “The Complete History of Monsanto, ‘The World’s Most Evil Corporation’,” the author reviews the negative history of Monsanto, a chemical company known for creating military chemicals, pesticides, food additives, industrial chemicals, drugs, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Majority of the chemicals developed by Monsanto are toxic to humans and the environment. In addition, Monsanto has been known to lie about the safety of their chemicals, bribe, and falsify research. This article blatantly acknowledges that Monsanto is a real monster due to their criminal activity, corruption, chemical creations, and desire for “control and greed.”
Personally, I strongly believe Monsanto and other similar companies are the real monsters in today’s society. I am very disturbed that Monsanto has created pesticides and GMOs because most pesticides are known to be toxic. Based off Monsanto’s history, I do not fully trust that GMOs are safe. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote the book Silent Spring, which studied the dangers of pesticides (i.e. DDT) and help started the first environmental movement. Carson’s research proved and illustrated the damaging effects from using pesticides. Currently, the United States needs to research the safety of GMOs, specifically the long-term health risks and toxicity of chemical combinations. In thesis four of Cohen’s “Seven Theses: Monster Theory,” Monsanto’s creation (GMOs) demonstrates that it is different because it is not a normal crop because it can pollinate itself (does not need bees). For most people this could be seen as very difference and unusual; however, Monsanto depicted those against GMOs as monsters by using propaganda and declaring that we need GMOs in order to have food stability. I believe that food stability is a possible problem in our future, but GMOs are not the only option. With further research, I believe there are safer alternative to protect the environment and human health and provide food stability.
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http://www.galesburg.com/news/20180427/tom-loewy-shedding-light-on-golden-state-killer
In the article, the author Tom Loewy discusses the many horrible “real” monsters that have existed in society for many years and even decades. He mainly talks about the Golden State Killer also known as the East Area Rapist and mentions two serial killers that we have heard of that have never been caught like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer. He then lists the names of many killers that have made the headlines and gotten news coverage when he states “Through the years, one unsolved case was always obscured by the headliners like Jack, Zodiac and the slew of apprehended killers like Bundy, Gacy, BTK and the Green River guy.”(Loewy) he states this to show many of the names that would pop up on the headlines of the news which create terror and disgust in society as a result of the killer’s actions. In the article, he mentions the foul and disgusting actions that the alleged Golden state murder suspect has done and shows that just by the action that he had committed he could and is deemed a real monster, but the Golden state killer didn’t just stop there. Loewy stated, “conducted a series of terrifying phone calls to law enforcement and — incredibly — victims”(Loewy) he uses this to support his claim of naming the Golden state Killer as a real monster and create disgust in his audience to continue supporting him thus building his credibility. The Golden state killer can be deemed a real monster because he instilled terror, fear, disgust in people as stated in another news article by Laurel Wamsley “During that time frame, everybody was in fear. We had people sleeping with shotguns. We had people purchasing dogs” that shows that he was truly feared by the public and not forgotten.
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In the recent movie I watched “The Frozen Ground” based on a true story had a real monster. The movie was based about a real murderer that went by the name Hasen . He seemed just like a good normal guy. He had children and a super religious wife. Know one suspected him to be a killer. In the movie he raped, took advantage of, and killed women in horrific ways. He would pay for a photo shoot or many others things and pick them up. When he picked them up he took them to his place. Where they were traped and no one was around to save these poor girls. He later would take them to the woods and kill them. It was difficult for anyone to find these bodies. He final got noticed when one of his girls escaped and told the cops it was him. No one wanted to believed her, because she was a prostitute. After much investigation he finally was sentenced to life.
In this week’s lecture we are discussed how monsters don’t just have to be these made up creatures. They can look just like us and seem normal, but hide their dark secrets. Hasen seemed like a regular guy, but his actions and morals made him a monster. He has a sick mind. He did all these things to those girls for his own pure pleasure. It is scary to think how this goes on too often in our society. The movie makes me more aware of situations like Hasens. The poor girls did nothing to him, but Hansen murdered them in the worst ways possible.
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joseph-james-deangelo-golden-state-killer-suspect-due-in-court-live-updates-today-2018-4-27/
In this article, by the Crimesider Staff, goes into depth about the Golden State Killer and ex-cop, Joseph James DeAngelo making his first court appearance and how they found him after all his years of hiding. He murdered over a dozen people, raped over fifty people and committed over one hundred burglaries. Police found and arrested this man for his horrible crimes. A gruesome man who got away with his crimes for over thirty two years has finally been caught. He was tracked down using genealogy site ged match. They found him through a DNA database like ancestory. com. He made his first court appearance earlier today. The Golden State Killer is indeed a monster. This is because of all the people he killed and hurt. He caused fear and terror among most because of the things he has done. He committed all these horrible crimes for 10 years and after that, he was able to run and hide living his life as if nothing happened. He is a monster because he is injured innocent people who did nothing to deserve what they went through.
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In my history class earlier this week, we learned about Emmett Till, a young man who was murdered in nineteen fifty-five in Missouri. The murder, and the all white jury’s subsequent innocent verdict lead to a huge public shift in public opinion towards black people and several movements towards racial justice. Still, one moment stuck out more intensely. The horror unfolds around Emmett Till going to visit his uncle in Missouri and leaving the relative safety of Chicago suburbs in order to visit his cousins. While there a white woman accused Till of wolf whistling at her while leaving a gas station, later that same night two men came to Till’s Uncle’s home and demanded the boy be handed over. His body was found lying in a river, his throat slit, his head sliced on the coronal axis, barbed wire wrapped around his wrists, both eyes gouged out, and his body nearly falling apart due to submersion in water. The two men who killed him were found innocent, and due to the constitutional protection of double jeopardy, publicly flaunted that they murdered the boy for most of their lives. In the ultimate nausea inducing plot twist of all time, on her death bed, the woman admitted she made up the story.
My friend Maddy and I were leaving the class when she said something that stuck out to me, “that woman is probably in Hell.” I questioned who our society blamed for monstrosities, the person who did the monstrous thing, or the person who caused the monstrous action. It made me realize what we have discussed this whole week, which is that our society desperately wants to know what causes monsters, not simply condemn and destroy them. Because most likely monsters will always exist. And there is very little we can do to stop monsters from existing. But humanity does not enjoy lack of control, so we dig and dig and dig, condemning the whole way down.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/04/24/toronto-van-attack-suspect-alek-minassian/544944002/
http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/editorial-exchange-torontos-van-attack-has-revealed-something-very-ugly
The Toronto van attack suspect made posts about an “incel rebellion” on his facebook, incel being short for involuntary celibate, refers to an internet community of men who openly hate and blame women for their own inability to find dates. Their hate towards women has lead to the community being kicked off of multiple forums online. The suspect had also praised Elliot Rodgers on his facebook, the American mass shooter who shot up the UC Santa Barbara campus to take out his frustration on not being able to find a woman to date, and the so-called father of the incel community on the internet. The community themselves openly talk about violent revenge on “Chads” and Stacys”, the incel terms for adults who are able to find partners. Grown men who exhibit such behaviors are truly real monsters. These men who feel so entitled to women and their time obviously view women as objects, and not as people with free will. These men feel so entitled to a woman’s time, turn violent and throw a tantrum when not given what they deserve. It would seem funny if the result was not a body count of ten. I personally feel endangered knowing these men blame women for their own lack of sociable behavior. This behavior is a result of men not being held accountable for their actions, much like how people say a serial killer was spurred on by their (dead at the time) mother. No one forces adults to do anything, no one forces men to do anything. Men who commit heinous crimes, commit them because they choose to, not because all the women who rejected them pushed them to do it, not because their domineering mother pushed them to do it. Adults act on their own volition.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4477594/Horrific-images-tortured-Kansas-boy-Adrian-Jones.html
One of the saddest abuse stories I have come across is Adrian Jones’ story. Adrian Jones was a 7 year-old boy from Kansas. During the last nine months of his life, Adrian was subjected to horrifying abuse at the hands of his parents. His remains were discovered in the backyard where he lived with his father, step mother, and six siblings after a woman alerted the police. Heather, who called Adrian ‘the boy’, and his father, Michael, despised the little boy, for reasons still unknown. After Heather and Michael were arrested, Heather gave their landlady, Jennifer Hoevers, the password to her Apple iCloud account so that Jennifer could save pictures of her kids. That is when Jennifer made the gruesome discovery of the extent of Adrian’s abuse, because some were captured through photographs by Heather, who had them saved on her account. One heartbreaking picture shows Adrian standing in the shallow end of the family’s filthy swimming pool with the water up to his neck; he was forced to stand there for hours at night in January, when it was freezing out. Another shows his bloodied face after being jabbed with the stick end of a broom. His desperation is seen with a picture that shows his lips covered in lacerations which officers believe came from him trying to free himself from a plywood prison his parents made and kept him in. He went through a lot of other horrifying abuse, but the images are graphic so I would not recommend looking at them. After he died, Michael and Heather left his corpse in his plywood prison for two weeks. Michael then purchased feeder pigs and fed the pigs the remains of his son in an attempt to cover up the abuse him and Heather put Adrian through. Heather and Michael Jones are real life monsters. Parents are supposed to love and protect their children, but they did the complete opposite and put Adrian through hell. Michael was sentenced to life, and Heather was also sentenced to life with a minimum of 25 years.
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For this journal post I will be talking about the “real monster” that is the “Golden State Killer”. In this article by The Washington Post, they talk about who he is is and how he was caught. They say that “the trail of the Golden State Killer had gone cold decades ago” and that he was linked to more than 50 rapes and 12 murders from 1976 to 1986. The crazy part is that the way the police matched his DNA was through a website. People are now talking about whether or not it is ethical and admissible for law enforcement to use consumer DNA from websites and such. The scare comes especially from the fact that “they would have had to check a box online certifying that the DNA was their own or belonged to someone for whom they were legal guardians, or that they had “obtained authorization” to upload the sample.” This was not even against the site’s policies. I think this article made the Golden State Killer and law enforcement seem like monsters. Obviously the serial killer and rapist is a monster because of the heinous crimes he performed, but they also showed how scary the power law enforcement has is. They had to lie about the fact that the DNA was theirs so they could match the DNA. So they can access anyone’s DNA if they wanted to. However, putting the focus back on the serial killer, he reminded me of the class discussion because we talked about how Ed Gein did not really “look the part” and the Golden State Killer did not either. He was an ex-cop, so that makes him even scarier and “real”.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jttAd4iMUk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Mc048HVvs&t=1329s
Here are two documentaries I found on YouTube which talk about Ted Bundy and who he was as a serial killer. One of the documentaries literally begins with a man stating, “He was a monster, that everyone feared”.
Ted Bundy was a serial killer from Burlington Vermont, notorious for the many young women he molested and killed. He was recognized within police interviews as being highly intelligent and manipulative. Bundy was also said to have lacked the human quality of remorse for other people while having the ability to put on a caring face when necessary. An example of this would be when he was asked about a twelve-year-old girl that he killed. While on camera, it’s almost frightening how convincing he was at appearing upset, saying “I can’t talk about that right now”. Later, when brought to his sell, he was shown a picture of that twelve-year-old girl. It was reported that he threw the picture to the floor and said “what you don’t understand is that I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch that you’ll ever meet.”
This isn’t the only example of Ted Bundy’s convincing mask. Bundy went to law school in his early years and during his court hearings he served as his own lawyer. A judge claimed that “it looked like a trick,” as if Bundy had seen enough lawyers on TV to be able to uphold the common conduct of a lawyer. The documentary also identified him as a “showman” because even though he was a vicious killer, he would turn on his charm, appear as relaxed, and present a nice smile.
https://goo.gl/images/mXzEfE
Much like what is mentioned within Thesis IV of Monster Culture (Seven Thesis) by Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us.”
This intrigued people, so much that his court hearings were televised and young women would attend them to potentially catch the monstrous gaze hidden behind his human mask. As one lawyer put it, “he looked like someone that you’d want your daughter to marry.” While in jail, he would receive letters from girls about their sexual fantasies as well as nude pictures. This ties into Thesis VI of Monster Culture (Seven Thesis) by Jeffery Jerome Cohen which states that “Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire”.
The documentaries mostly cover theoretical reasons behind how/why Bundy had become this monster. One theory professes that he suffered psychological trauma after never meeting his father. It was also rumored that his mother had actually conceived Bundy from his grandfather. Another theory suggests that he had become sexually addicted to this terrible hobby after being exposed to DC Detective magazines at a young age which involved cartoon bondage type pornography. They think he was reenacting a lot of the images found within these grotesque comics.
Like a monster, Bundy claims to have an “entity” trapped inside of his body and when confessing to his murders, he would talk mostly in the third person. This is like a Werewolf in that the beast is unleashed at spontaneous times but is otherwise masked by its human alter ego. Ted Bundy is a perfect example of a “real” monster.
-Jack Adams
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Welp, we finally learned Bill Cosby’s fate this week as a jury convicted him with three counts of aggravated indecent assault. This week in class we talked about real monsters. This category includes, serial killers, racists, people who rape or murder, anyone who causes harm to others etc. We also talked about cause and effect. I’m not sure why Cosby felt the need to assault over 62 women. Maybe he just really enjoyed doing it? Maybe someone did this to him at some point in his life? I haven’t looked into his biography and I don’t want to jump to conclusions here but there’s probably something there that would help us understand why he committed all those crimes against women. It seems as though the people who get away this the most are people with great power. Cosby probably let all the fame get to his head and decided it was okay because he was famous. There are speculations stating he’s been doing this since the 60s. It’s possible that someone else in power could’ve influenced him and some how told him it was okay to do these things. If I had to identify this situation to one of the causal relationships concepts I could probably say “reciprocal cause”. Because at some point he learned this was okay. I can’t understand how this guy went decades without ever being caught and no one said anything it just really goes to show that it could be anyone and that monsters are everywhere and they truly do live among us.
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