The Rise and Fall of Shaggy

The Ruler Known as The Rock
11/06/2015

The year is 2492, 1000 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue. There is a new blue to be sailed and her name is space. Space is an unforgiving ice bucket (Metaphor 1), and in this ice bucket it is as cold as what used to be Antarctica (Simile 2).

 Back in 2016, the conservative agenda lied when it said that global warming was a myth. Soon after a haughty, newly elected, slightly wealthy (Understatement 3), President Donald Trump (Antagonist 4) took office he canceled all environmental protection legislation and everything went down hill. Donald deduced that since the planet had only gone up fractions of degrees over the years leading to 2016, that global warming was a myth (Deductive Reasoning 5). He was fatally mistaken; it was in actually theAntithesis (6) of a myth, a fact. The planet rose about one billion degrees (Hyperbole 7); volcanoes erupted with “bangs” (onomatopia 8), and millions died. Donald, however, survived and issued an apology (9) for canceling the legislation saying, “He was dumb, arrogant, and ignorant to the goings on of the real world.” The remaining citizens then assumed that all rich people were evil and they all must pay (Generalization 10) for the death of the planet. The citizens made a conclusion that since Trump lived in a nice house, then the rich people all live in nice houses (Inference 11). They stormed the nice neighborhoods and took out the rich populations “A Tale of Two Cities” style (Allusion 12).

Through all of this, the non-wealthy citizens looked to one thing for the motivation to keep fighting: A Rock (Symbol 13). Rocks are forever, even if they are smashed, they just make more rocks. Over the next millennium, people came and went, plants came and went, but the rock always stayed. In the present time of 2492, the earth is dead and people are deciding its time to leave her to rest. The Rock (Protagonist 14), current leader of the earth, had its council devise a way to get the remaining population off the earth and onto a safer planet.

The people weren’t (Contraction 15) all able to fit on one space ship; they would need to make two trips. The system of determining who would be on the first ship and who would be on the second ship was a mere riddle, the riddle was as follows: “who was Peter Piper and why did he pick a patch of pickled peppers?” (Alliteration 16).

The Connotation (17) of the riddle was really quite cheery and happy, however Peter Piper had died a horrible death by bees while picking his patch of pickled peppers. He had stated prior to going out onto the patch of pickled peppers to pick that bee stings were super fun to get (Irony 18). History and the horror movies (Genre 19) of the past tell us that Peter Piper made a horribly wrong move by going out and picking pickled peppers in his patch after badmouthing the bees. When he got to his patch of pickled peppers, the bees just swarmed and swarmed and swarmed and swarmed. It was terrifying. Peter Piper never picked another patch of pickled peppers again.

            The riddle had done its job; the people were divided equally between trip one and trip two of the space ship to get them off the baron planet they used to call earth. The citizens of earth had successfully made it onto another planet and had a potluck to celebrate. One distasteful person brought a pile of pickled peppers freshly picked from their patch. With all of the commotion and the food, the citizens of this new planet didn’t realized what was going on just beneath their feet. The ground rumbled as a hungry stomach would and suddenly split in half, swallowing all of the former citizens of earth; the planet was hungry (Figurative Language 20). Everyone died.

            The end.

Or was it? One humble and very lucky boy managed to climb onto the carnage and corpses. His name was Norville Rodgers, but his friends called him Shaggy. Shaggy was a special boy and not many people knew his story.

Shaggy Rodgers was born in 1969 into a loving family. He had many friends Daphne, Fred, Velma, and most importantly, his best friend Scooby. They had a club growing up where they would solve paranormal mysteries for the town and the surrounding area. Eventually, as all friendships do, they drifted apart, Scooby, being a dog died long before the others. Shaggy went to College and became a scientist, but not just any scientist, a scientist that was on the frontline of the research efforts trying to find all the beneficial effects of Marijuana. Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s Shaggy was a pothead, to put it lightly, and was very passionate about the plant.

Fast-forward to 2012 when the legalization of marijuana debate was really lighting up, no pun intended. When many states decided against legalization and essentially threw away all of Shaggy’s hard work and research, he decided that he could not live in a world where he was under appreciated, so he did the only thing that a rational scientist would do. He cryogenically froze himself. He figured that the legalization would happen eventually and he would just wake up when it happened.

Fast-forward again to 2492, when the earth had to be evacuated. Shaggy, having not woken up yet, was revered as a relic in this futuristic society so the leaders decided to take him along on the first spaceship traveling to the new world. They placed him on a cart with wheels so he could be rolled easily. When they all arrived, and at the potluck, Shaggy was still sleeping, not until the earth began to tremor did his wheeled cart start to move from the vibrations because someone forgot to set his brake. He rolled and rolled, away from the potluck where everyone was being devoured by the planet. Eventually his cart crashed into a rock and finally woke Shaggy up.

After stretching and yawning for a bit, he gained his bearings and heard people screaming, it was the people at the potluck. By the time he got over there everyone was dead. After self-deliberation, he decided that he would take over as ruler. As new ruler, he immediately legalized marijuana, and luckily for Shaggy he stored a plethora of weed on his person when he put himself to sleep. He smoked so much that he eventually began to warm up the planet to make it more conducive to life. Being a scientist, Shaggy knew that if he warmed up the planet enough, evolution of preexisting biological material would eventually evolve to intelligent life forms.

So Shaggy smoked and smoked and smoked until he smoked himself to death. He was the first and last recorded death from marijuana. In smoking so much he warmed the planet enough to begin the life cycle all over again and over eons and eons, humans came to power again. Before Shaggy died however, he laid out the mapping of a utopian society of the future for the future rulers of the planet to find and base their government off of. In the end, Shaggy paid the ultimate price for something he believed in and gave his life for the greater good of future generations. Norville “Shaggy” Rodgers is a role model for all.

Women Employment Argument

Boys: Pro equal hiring 
Girls: Leave it how it is

Pros:

• Out of the S&P 500 companies women only hold 4.4% of the CEO positions. That equates to only 22 out of the 500 companies on the list
• Men and women each make up about half of the population, so it is logical for women politicians to be more prominent for equal representation of the citizens’ needs
• Only 14.2% of the top five leadership positions at the companies in the S&P 500 are held by women
• Progress in just letting the problem work itself out has been extremely slow over the last 80 years and is almost nonexistent
• This article examines many explanations for why women have not risen to the top, including lack of line experience, inadequate career opportunities, gender differences in linguistic styles and socialization, gender-based stereotypes, the old boy network at the top, and tokenism. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1006226129868 - to overcome basic differences, women should be put in higher management positions so that firms can get acclimated to the changed climate
• Maggie Wilderotter, one of the 24 women in the top five highest positions in any company is being replaced by a man and therefore progress is going from next to nothing to backwords
• Stereotypes of women are one of the main things holding them back and as society we are not dropping the stereotypes anytime soon so action needs to be taken
• Women do make it into management and board rooms, but with such an overpowering ratio in favor of men, it is the same as not having any women at all, as the men can speak over women and get recognition from their “good old boy” attitudes
• Companies with women in upper level management positions significantly outperform those with all men in the upper level positions so there should be a push for more women in upper level positions

• “As there were more women, the first woman became more active. They were all more active as the number of women increased. It's a group dynamic. When you bring on one of any demographic group, they’re trying to figure out how they fit. With more, that's not an issue. They were more vocal, more willing to push their issues when more women were added to the board. More relaxed” (Male CEO). -competency is rarely the issue, it is only a factor of upper management selecting only who they want.
  
  
  Cons:
  • Women have caught up with men in terms of education. In fact, in the United States and a number of other countries, women now actually surpass men in educational achievement. (Harvard Law School Blog)
  • So there is not a problem with female achievement. The problem enters in when young adults try to balance work and family, and women end up carrying nearly all of the caregiving responsibilities. (Harvard Law School Blog)
  • Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force climbed during the 1970s and 1980s, reaching 60 percent in 2000. (International Labor Organization)
  • One in five women are working part time... while at the start of the recession less than one in ten women were doing so. (International Labor Organization)
  • The overall unemployment rate for women is lower than men’s and they are also less likely to be among the long-term unemployed. (International Labor Organization)
  • The March 26th issue of Time Magazine proclaims on its front cover “The Richer $ex- Women are overtaking men as America’s breadwinners.
  • “Almost 40% of wives make more money than their husbands…Women today make up almost 60% of U.S. college students and earn the majority of doctorates and master’s degrees…In the majority of U.S. metro areas, single, childless women in their 20s make more per dollar than their male peers.” (Time Magazine)
  • Even more importantly the percentage of managers who are women has risen from 35% to 38% of the last twenty years
  
  
  • Cindy Padnos, entrepreneur, found that women-operated, venture-backed high tech companies average 12 percent higher annual revenues. They also use on average one-third less capital than male counterparts' startups.
  • From a corporate perspective, there's a tremendous benefit to having a diverse workforce
  • "It's almost impossible to think a corporation can be successful in identifying the right products and meeting the market needs when the market is half women and half men."
  • Bryant said a company's workforce must reflect the market it serves.
  • "That's what makes it easy for corporations to rally behind 'let's grow the diverse population of our employee base'," Bryant said.
  
  
  "Con Argument is saying that women don’t need the laws to change in order to be hired because women are becoming increasingly educated, the workplace would benefit with diversity and if the employment rate of women continues, more women will be employed than men (The overall unemployment rate for women is lower than men’s and they are also less likely to be among the long-term unemployed. (International Labor Organization))."

The Ruler Known as the Rock

The year is 2492, 1000 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue. There is a new blue to be sailed and her name is space. Space is an unforgiving ice bucket (Metaphor 1), and in this ice bucket it is as cold as what used to be Antarctica (Simile 2).

 Back in 2016, the conservative agenda lied when it said that global warming was a myth. Soon after a haughty, newly elected, slightly wealthy (Understatement 3), President Donald Trump (Antagonist 4) took office he canceled all environmental protection legislation and everything went down hill. Donald deduced that since the planet had only gone up fractions of degrees over the years leading to 2016, that global warming was a myth (Deductive Reasoning 5). He was fatally mistaken; it was in actually the Antithesis (6) of a myth, a fact. The planet rose about one billion degrees (Hyperbole 7); volcanoes erupted with “bangs” (onomatopia 8), and millions died. Donald, however, survived and issued an apology (9) for canceling the legislation saying, “He was dumb, arrogant, and ignorant to the goings on of the real world.” The remaining citizens then assumed that all rich people were evil and they all must pay (Generalization 10) for the death of the planet. The citizens made a conclusion that since Trump lived in a nice house, then the rich people all live in nice houses (Inference 11). They stormed the nice neighborhoods and took out the rich populations “A Tale of Two Cities” style (Allusion 12).

Through all of this, the non-wealthy citizens looked to one thing for the motivation to keep fighting: A Rock (Symbol 13). Rocks are forever, even if they are smashed, they just make more rocks. Over the next millennium, people came and went, plants came and went, but the rock always stayed. In the present time of 2492, the earth is dead and people are deciding its time to leave her to rest. The Rock (Protagonist 14), current leader of the earth, had its council devise a way to get the remaining population off the earth and onto a safer planet.

The people weren’t (Contraction 15) all able to fit on one space ship; they would need to make two trips. The system of determining who would be on the first ship and who would be on the second ship was a mere riddle, the riddle was as follows: “who was Peter Piper and why did he pick a patch of pickled peppers?” (Alliteration 16).

The Connotation (17) of the riddle was really quite cheery and happy, however Peter Piper had died a horrible death by bees while picking his patch of pickled peppers. He had stated prior to going out onto the patch of pickled peppers to pick that bee stings were super fun to get (Irony 18). History and the horror movies (Genre 19) of the past tell us that Peter Piper made a horribly wrong move by going out and picking pickled peppers in his patch after badmouthing the bees. When he got to his patch of pickled peppers, the bees just swarmed and swarmed and swarmed and swarmed. It was terrifying. Peter Piper never picked another patch of pickled peppers again.

            The riddle had done its job; the people were divided equally between trip one and trip two of the space ship to get them off the baron planet they used to call earth. The citizens of earth had successfully made it onto another planet and had a potluck to celebrate. One distasteful person brought a pile of pickled peppers freshly picked from their patch. With all of the commotion and the food, the citizens of this new planet didn’t realized what was going on just beneath their feet. The ground rumbled as a hungry stomach would and suddenly split in half, swallowing all of the former citizens of earth; the planet was hungry (Figurative Language 20). Everyone died.

            The end.

Pro's and Con's of GMO's

Jack - scribe

McManus - moderator
1) Why not just give impoverish countries the technology to help?
- because the USA is capitalistic
2)  If the world doesn't want them, then why give them to poor countries.
3) If they prolong shelf life of food, why would someone want a month long orange.
4) If plants can resist weed, what happens if the weeds become resistant.

Pro - Abigail
- With GMO's you get more food
- It'll help the extra 2 billion people that will fill the world by 2050
- All from WebMD
- Farmers can grow more food as these foods can grow in droughts and are less likely to die from disease
- Not using these tools will push us back in 20-40 in food production
- causes less stress on the environment
- gets rid of weeds
- help grow better crops faster, more food for consumers
- lower risk of crop failures
- better resistant to extreme weather, example cold winter
- longer life, allows easier transport
- helpful to send food to impoverish countries
- less chemicals that reduces pollution
- better nutrition
- up the amount of minerals in the vitamin, which is more nutritious

1)      Insect Resistance - Some GMO foods have been modified to make them more resistant to insect pests. The University of California in San Diego reports that a toxic bacterium can be added to crops to make them insect repellent, yet safe for human use. This can reduce the amount of pesticide chemicals used on the plants, thus potentially reducing exposure to pesticides.

2)      Environmental Protection - Oklahoma State University reports that the increase of GMO crops and animals often requires less chemicals, time and tools, and may help to reduce environmental pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and soil erosion. This can improve the general beauty and health of the environment surrounding farms and contribute to the sustaining of better air and water quality, which can indirectly benefit your personal well-being.

3)      More Nutritious Foods - The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that some GMO foods have been engineered to be more nutritious in terms of mineral or vitamin content. Not only does this help you get the nutrients you need, it can also play a significant role in battling malnutrition in the developing world. The United Nations advises that vitamin A-enhanced rice is helping to reduce global vitamin A deficiencies.

4)      Better overall quality and taste - Through the modification of foods, the flavors can be enhanced. Peppers can become spicier or sweeter. Corn can become sweeter. Difficult flavors can become more palatable.

5)      More resistant to disease - Plants and animals that have been genetically modified can become more resistant to the unexpected problems of disease. Think of it as a vaccine for that plant or animal, except that the vaccine is encoded into the genetics instead of a shot given to the immune system.

Con - Andrew
- have been banned in most other major countries
- 60% of countries banned - they aren't safe
- no benefactor
- food grows at same rate of time
- caused many super strains of insects and weeds - according to Brown
- pesticides are still used and stronger are used to kill these new weeds and insects
- pattonable - so they have the risk of putting hard working farmers out of work
- 80% of processed food in the US
- significant increase in diseases and cancers

1)      Allergic Reactions - GMO foods can present significant allergy risks to people, according to Brown University. Genetic modification often mixes or adds proteins that weren't indigenous to the original plant or animal, causing new allergic reactions in the human body. In some cases, proteins from an organism that you're allergic to may be added to an organism that you weren't originally allergic to, prompting the same allergic reaction experienced from the first organism.

2)      Decreased Antibiotic Efficacy - Some GMO foods have had antibiotic features built into them to make them immune or resistant to diseases or viruses, according to Iowa State University. When you eat them, these antibiotic markers persist in your body and can make actual antibiotic medications less effective. The university warns that such ingestion of GMO foods and regular exposure to antibiotics may be contributing to the decreased effectiveness of antibiotic drugs that is being noticed in hospitals around the world.

3)      Gene Transfer - A constant risk of GMO foods is that the modified genes of the organisms may escape into the wild. Brown University warns that herbicide-resistant genes from commercial crops may cross into the wild weed population, thus creating "superweeds" that are impossible to kill with herbicides. A related risk is that the escape of genetically enhanced animals and vegetation can create new super-organisms that can out-compete natural animal and plant populations to drive certain species into extinction.

4)      There is no economic value - GMO foods take just as long to mature and take just as much effort to grow, meaning that there is no real economic value to growing GMO foods when compared to non-GMO foods.

5)      Environmental damage - By growing plants or raising livestock in environmental conditions that normally wouldn’t support them, there is the potential of irrevocably damaging that environment. This is often seen through GMO crossbreading – weeds, for example, that can be crossed with GMO plants can often become resistant to herbicides, creating the need for more GMO efforts.

Counters:
- Yes, GMOs help impoverished nations, but not best for the US
- Thought they make the food cheaper, but is it cheaper if you have cancer

Links: 1)      http://www.livestrong.com/article/213053-pros-cons-of-gmo-foods/

http://healthresearchfunding.org/pros-cons-genetically-modified-foods/

WINNER: Andrew

The Dilemma

Flip:

·             Most people choose this option because it is the “better thing to do”

·             Good of many comes first

·             Reduce the number deaths if you can

·             Saving more lives is the most important thing

·             Push the fat man off because he is saving more people

·             Healthy patient can be killed to save the other people because one death is better than 5

Don't Flip:

·             Natural selection- sitting on train tracks playing cards and eating lunch. They don’t receive sensory input

·             The weaker species will die out because they can’t survive (don’t understand to move off of train tracks)

·             Maybe they want to die- there for a reason

·             Don’t push the fat man off, push a bunch of skinny people off- he isn’t unintelligent like the people just sitting there

·             Don’t kill the healthy patient, the other people are closer to death

o   Unethical to kill just the one man