Sentence Variety Exercise

Sentence Variety Exercise
Last year, I went on a field trip to my Advance Placement Biology class to the Potomac River. (Medium) Simple

The plan was we were going to get a boat and a tour guide that would lead us down the river and we would test the water to see if it was a good ecosystem and also we would just observe the creatures that lived in the river. (Long) Compound

My impression of the river was the color the river. (Short) Simple

It was dark brown in most of the river and in some spots black. (Medium) Simple

I really thought this wasn’t right, but my guide said this was because of all the runoff being produced from the neighboring construction of new buildings. (Long) Compound

3.1 Help the Environment

All of this arguing about global warming and the cost of fixing the global warming problem I feel is pointless. This is because I feel the majority of the people who are attempting to solve this issue of global warming are trying to do a quick fix. Yes, it might delay the effects of global warming, but I feel the majority of the efforts to fix global warming should be redirected towards saving the environment and reducing the amount of pollution we are producing that will effect our environment.

Last year, I went on a field trip to my Advance Placement Biology class to the Potomac River. The plan was we were going to get a boat and a tour guide that would lead us down the river and we would test the water to see if it was a good ecosystem and also we would just observe the creatures that lived in the river. My impression of the river was the color the river. It was dark brown in most of the river and in some spots black. I really thought this wasn’t right, but my guide said this was because of all the runoff being produced from the neighboring construction of new buildings.

When we started to test the water for PH test and also a turbidity test, I found out that the river was not healthy. The PH test told me that there was very little oxygen in the river, which resulted in a low population of fish and other creatures that lived the river. Also, the turbidity test was to test the clearness of the water. It was just so surprising how unclear the water was and it made me wonder how did this all happen? Our guide told us that the drainage water from the city, runoff produced from the construction, and some illegal dumping of trash produced this almost toxic river. When we went further down the river, I saw huge semi circle gates that were all lining the side river. My guide told me this is were the trash and also the drainage water from city flows into the river. Right at that point, I saw an island of trash just sitting in the river. The after affects of illegal dumping could be increased “crime activities” in places that allow illegal dumping, contaminates in the drinking water, increase tax payer dollars to fix the river and many other side affects of dumping(Facts about Illegal Dumping). With this being some of the serious side affects of illegal dumping, I wondered who would take the serious end of all the problems that were caused by the illegal dumping. There was Mcdondaldes wrappers, soda cans, and many more items of trash.

After this sight, we decided to go fishing to observe how all of these problems to the river affected the life of the creatues living in the river. After attaching a net to the end of the boat and sailing around for a couple of minutes, we had pulled the net up and we saw some fish. I was surprised we even caught a fish. The guide said told us “Don’t be surpised if you see some deformed fish”. I thought he was kidding because he seemd like a funny man, but whne I picked up some of the fish, I saw random bumps on the sides of the fish. Also, there were some fish that had closed eyes and missing fins. The guide went on and told us that the river we were sailing on was very toxic and these deformations were a result of thes fish get cancer. The one thing I took from this field trip was that this river was toxic and basically a place where you wouldn’t want to go skinny dipping.

But when looking back on the field trip, I found it ironic that the river so close to the Capital was in this type condition. The place were laws are being passed to protect the environment is right next to a river that is uninhabitable and basically toxic to any creatues living in it. I feel that more legalization and more attention needs to be shined on the environment because soon enough, our backyards are going to be toxic to a point where we can not even go near them. Since the environment isn’t an issue that is clearly in trouble to most people, people always put “saving” or “helping” the environment in the back seat to other issues such as unemployment rates and tax issues. But people don’t realize what the environment produces for us. Without the environment, there would be no human race.

The environment and human beings live coincide with each other. If we had no rain forest, we would have terrible air qualities that would force us to take extreme measures to produce a solution. Also, with no rain forest, we would have no materials to create buildings, houses, and shelters; which we need to survive. Another aspect that humans need from the environment is organism. To protect animals that humans consume would be helping the environment because if we were to allow animals that we eat to toxic food that we produced, we would be eating toxic because these animals are toxic. There are so many situations that clearly explain our need for the environment, but the main problem is that we are not protecting the environment essentially need everyday.

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in my critical thinking class and this class is all about sustainability. The professor always talks about how sustainability shouldn’t just be about the environment, but rather sustainability plays into almost every aspect of life. It is a system where one issue will affect all of the other issues as well. For instances, I went to California 5 years ago to a city called Torrance. It is right outside Los Angeles, but it is a more neighborhood style city verse the city feeling Los Angeles. A couple minutes away from the city is Redondo Beach. I remember I always swam at the beach and would always just stand and let the small waves hit me. Also, to my right was a huge pier that usually had a lot of people fishing the top as well as a couple of restaurants serving fresh sea food. Finally, I remember that beach always having a good majority of the people swimming in water and a lot of umbrellas set up with families sitting underneath them. I went back just last year and I found a totally different beach. It was empty. There were zero umbrellas set up, barely any kids swimming in the water and the pier was a lot less crowded from what I remember. Finally, I saw a sign near the water that read “Swim at your Own Risk”. I thought it meant there were no lifeguards on duty, so I stepped into the water. After coming out, I felt my foot was sticky. I found out there was oil on my foot.

I found out that this beach was toxic now because there was oil found in the water at this beach. There could be many reasons for the oil at the beach, but it just surpised me how the oil just floated to the beach. This situation reminded me of the Exxon Valdez incident in Alaska. I remember the scenes of the after affect of the oil spill where people would be cleaning off the seals and rocks with tooth brushes. The affects of an oil spill an the wild life surrounding the land are: dieses to many of the animals and their young, making animals more vulnerable to predators, killing many of the animals, and many more serious problems (The Effects of Oil on Wildlife). If I actually wanted to swim, I could have been harmed from the oil in water. This story just plays into sustainability I learned in my critical thinking class. If we don’t keep the environment healthy, it can bite us in back end and harm humans. We can be harmed from our solutions of removing trash or toxic waste from dumping in the oceans.

To have a successful life, every aspect of any life must be sustainable and balanced. Humans discarding trash and dumping waste into the oceans keeps landfills sustainable and available. But when the oceans are all dirty and toxic, the environmental aspect is not sustainable because after years of depending on the oceans as landfill, the oceans will be so toxic and so dirty that we can not even use the oceans to fish for food, swim for fun, or other activates. To keep and create ways to keep the environment sustainable for many other generations will provide a world where humans will be safe and world where the benefit of the environment will not harm humans in the process.

To protect the environment and create legislation to ensure that harm to the environment does not occur is necessary for this planet and our human race to survive. There are many issues that today’s world deals with and I feel the issue of the destruction of the environment always takes a backseat to these issues. But at the time, I feel the protection of the environment could be the most important issue of all because it has a long lasting affect on the future generations of this world. If we are solving all problems that plague this life time and in the process don’t protect the environment, it is for sure to spell out trouble for future generations. By creating legislation and ways to protect the environment efficiently, we are guaranteeing a place for our kids and their kids to live in.


CITATION LIST

1) “Facts about Illegal Dumping”. City of Dayton Serving the Community. 2008. April 15, 2010 Web
2) “The Effects of Oil on Wildlife”. Australian Government. April 15, 2010 Web

Rogerian Reflection 2.3

Thinking back on my times with the rogerian style of writing, I wondered why this method of arguing was rarely used. I felt this type of argument would appeal to the more educated and caring type of person who is willing to make a compromise in order to establish what is best for both sides. I felt this idea of arguing writing style fit me the best as well as my subject because I was really never on a side when it came to the death penalty. So, I wanted to write about both sides in order to understand each view point and to be able to choose a side. I felt the rogerian style allowed me to explain both sides in my own way so I could understand the whole issue. After writing two whole essays on the death penalty, I still feel I am not on a side nor can I choose a single side

2.3 Rogerian Against the Death Penalty, but Compromise is still an Option

I was raised to cherish all life, but at the same time I was taught at a young age that bad behavior will result in negative consequences from my parents and teachers. My childhood reflects these beliefs. I was always a good boy who mostly did what was right and after realizing some actions were wrong, did not do them again. My childhood learning of good and bad differs much from the real world. This can be seen within the death penalty. The death penalty takes what I have learned to the next level. The issue that covers the death penalty is what should a criminal receive for a serious case of murder? Do we as a state cherish life over justice? Or do we take a page out of the rules of Hammurabi and use the old saying “An eye for an eye”? I am a person who believes that the death penalty should not be used in the United States.

Since 1973, when the death penalty was reinstated in a majority of the states, a total of 135 inmates have been released from the death row and are now considered innocence (“Death Penalty 101”). All of these verdicts were overturned due to new DNA evidence that revealed the criminal was innocence to begin with. It is easy to feel remorse for the criminals that spent a good portion of their life in jail, but no one realizes the problem of these people wasting their life in the correctional system. This is due to the people who made the mistakes of conviction not admitting to their flawed decisions. As a result, no one will ever be blamed when a situation like this occurs. This brings up new ideas about how inaccurate the death penalty process can be.

The supporters of the death penalty will state that my views of the death penalty are inaccurate or highlighting the wrong parts, but the supporters themselves have a wide range of credible reasons for supporting the death penalty. First of all, supporters will believe that the use of the death penalty will produce lower crime rates and in result produce a safer society for families to live in. The Death Penalty Information Center has collected data since 1990 that the murder rate has been higher in states with the death penalty verses states without the death penalty (“Murder rates nationally and by state”). This shows that supporters of the death penalty will urge the need for the death penalty to fight back on the high murder rates by letting criminals know that a crime could lead to their death. Hopefully, this knowledge will make some criminals think twice about their actions. Secondly, supporters of the death penalty will make the claim that DNA evidence will prove whether someone is guilty or innocence. From the academic journal “Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over the Capital Punishment”, Jay Aronson, author of many books relating to the use and discovery of DNA, states that DNA evidence is “more accurate and reliable than other forensic sciences” (Aronson, 1). With the use of DNA evidence as a conclusive way to prove if someone is guilty or not, supporters of the death penalty will not have to fear an accidently execution of someone that is innocence. Finally, the people who support the death penalty will believe that justice must be served. To honor the victim’s families and to protect the reputation of the United States of America, many supporters of the death penalty will be in favor of providing justice to the victims’ families by taking the life of the criminal that harmed their own. Even though there are many more credible reasons why people support the death penalty, I feel the removal of the death penalty will result in fewer problems and less controversies.

My view of the death penalty is that it is not needed in the United States. The death penalty in my opinion does not cherish the life of criminals and does not make fair and equal judgments on all criminals that go through the judicial process. Also, I feel there could be bias within the people who run the process, which creates an unfair trial and could result in a wrongful verdict. The main reason why I don’t agree with the death penalty is because the people placed in prisons have a chance to change their views and ways of life. To give someone another chance to change their way of life seems like a better option than taking their life away.

First of all, I feel there is inconsistency with the consequences assigned for similar actions. For example, a person who commits murder can get 10 years in jail and another person who commits murder can receive the death penalty. Could that be due to the way the murderer killed their victim? Or could it have been the type of person the criminal killed? In the end, the result is exactly the same, a person was murdered. From the Charlotte Observer(A North Carolina Mainstream News paper) article “Death Penalty System irretrievably broken”, the authors stated “there was no way to ensure essential fairness and consistency of the system because it produces such widely varying results” (“Death Penalty system irretrievably broken, 2). It doesn’t seem fair that one murderer could receive the death penalty for killing a person and another murderer could receive 10 years in prison. This just frames some of the inconsistencies with the death penalty system.

Secondly, a person can only receive the death penalty by a jury of people making a unanimous decision in the United States. I feel people could possibility receive the death penalty through unfair trials because jury members could be bias or could have racial stereotypes in their mind before the court hearing. Jury members are screened and asked questions in order to prevent any them from having any bias towards a person or race, but in reality bias can never be prevented or eliminated. It is not that every human being is racists, but all people have some idea of a certain type of person or race. These ideas could be positive or negative ideas, but it is nearly impossible to find a jury full of people who are not biased. An example of bias towards African Americans from the Death Penalty Information Center states that the “odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black” (Dieter 3). Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center and attorney, explains that an existing bias towards African Americans in some regions in the United States does exist and could produce an unfair trial. In 2006, a total of 649 African Americans were executed in all the states that allow the death penalty (“Capital Punishment, 2006- Statistical Tables”). It is unknown if those African Americans received a fair trial with an unbiased jury. The idea that people can be bias towards other people and can result to a decision that produces a wrongful death sentence makes the idea of using the death penalty less appealing to me.

The death penalty has left this country divided. While researching this topic, I realized that a compromise can never be made with the idea of taking the life of a criminal away for their crime. However, things can be changed about how the criminal is executed and different sentencing for crimes. Rather than being executed, more people can be placed into jail with a life sentence. This is the only compromise that can ever be made with the issue of executing someone or not executing someone. Even though it will cost more tax payer dollars to keep these criminals in jail, it is the only way to satisfy both sides. Another compromise could be to eliminate some of the methods of execution. The current methods of execution are electric chair, lethal injection, hanging, firing squad and lethal gas (“Methods of Execution” 1). The best thing to do is to eliminate the inhumane methods of execution and to only use lethal injection. The lethal injection process was created with the intent to provide the criminal a painless death. The most moral thing to give to a criminal should be a humane and painless death. This also ties into the issue of public executions. The idea that the criminals know that many people are watching them die can make them suffer mentally before they die. From the academic journal “Neither Justice nor Mercy: Public and Private Executions in Rhode Island,” the idea of public executions and its history through the state of Rhode Island is explained. It explains that originally people were supporting the idea of public executions through “hangings” so they can see criminals suffer. But in the end, the novel explains how people decided to step in to abolish these “unruly behaviors” (Chambers 1). To eliminate situations where criminals are executed without suffering seems to be the most humane situation possible. By taking out cruel methods of execution and removing situations that will produce suffering to criminals during the execution will result in fewer arguments and more agreement about the death penalty from both sides.

When looking at the death penalty, we can realize that the issue of the death penalty will never be completely solved in the United States. This is because the extremes of both sides can never be combined into one solution which will fully satisfy both sides. In my opinion, I feel that the death penalty should not be used because of its unfairness towards minorities and other situations. But with some compromise between both sides of the issue, I feel the arguing between both sides can be lessened. Maybe in the long run after all extreme issues are settled; the United States can cherish the life of criminals and use the methodology of Hammurabi simultaneously.



CITATION LIST

1) Aronson, Jay. “Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the Untied States”. Law and Social Inquiry. Vol. 34. Issue 3(2009): p 603-633. Print

2) “Capital Punishment, 2006- Statistical Tables”. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2006. Office of Justice Programs. Web March 10, 2010

3) Chambers, Stephen. “Neither Justice nor Mercy: Public and Private Executions in Rhode Island” New England Quarterly. Vol 82. Issue 3(2009): p 430-451. Print

4) “Death Penalty 101”. American Civil Liberties Union. April 7, 2007. American Civil Liberties Union. Web March 10, 2010

5) “Death Penalty system ‘irretrievably broken’”. Charlotte Observer. March 21, 2010. Charlotte Observer. Web March 10, 2010

6) Dieter, Richard. “The Death Penalty in Black and White; who lives, Who Dies, Who Decides” The Death Penalty Information Center. The Death Penalty Information Center. Web March 10, 2010

7) “Methods of Execution”. Prosecuting Attorney. The Clark County. Web March 10, 2010

8) “Murder rates nationally and by state”. Death Penalty Information Center. September, 2009. FBI Uniform Crime Report. Web. April 9, 2010.

Remember Room Exercise

A room I can remember is my living room in my old house. It was fairly big, or it could be because I was so small. It had white good feeling carpet on the bottom, and over the carpet has the mats of carpet, which in some places felt like dried glue. There was this one very big non flat television that took up the right corner of the room. Looking behind you while watching the television, you had a clear path to the kitchen. The kitchen always smelled like something was burnt, or someone had just cooked something good. Looking to the left side of the room, you had 3 windows and a door that exposed you to the back ground. It always looked like a jungle with all of the trees. But at the same time, it looked like a scene out of a horror film due to the spots that never got sunlight through the forest, the brown porch, and the rusty almost broken down jungle gym with the blue slide and pink swing.

New Narrative

Is it ethical for the government to “target” someone. In the New York Times article U.S approves targeted killing of American Cleric. It goes in to talk about how this person is not just being involved in terrorist attacks against the United States now, but rather is gathering support from these plan attacks as well. It also provides feedback on knowledge, quotes, and statistics about how previous presidents thought. The problem that is linked to this essay is that since this person is an American, he shouldn’t be allowed to be targeted by the United States, but he is.

Need to establish representiveness

Corrections that need to be addressed for final 2.3 Death Penalty Paper

Things to change with 2.3 Death penalty
-Must create a stand for opposite side (Give it like 2-3 sources)
-Make your idea in opening paragraph that you are against the death penalty
-Take out any idea about correctional faculties
-Maybe remove academic source on hangings in public
-Must work on improving incorporation and ending of sources (especially the first academic source)
-Look to recite the academic source
- Paragraph 10 is the other side. Maybe you should bring it forward
-Paragraph 5 is the transition from real life examples to reasoning
-Make ending longer. Make it play with the intro.