Final paper topic

For my final paper I would like to write about assisted suicide and why it should be legal or why it should not be legal or the arguments for and against censorship, focusing on internet censorship, but also including education, and art censorship.

Journal 11

Abstinence education has done more damage than it should have been allowed to and has funded far too long. Teen pregnancy alone accounts for more than $9 million per year in costs to U.S. taxpayers (Hoffman SD. By the Numbers—The Public Costs of Teen Childbearing. Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy; 2006) and billions of dollars have been put into a program that has been proven not to have any great influence on teens sexual behaviors apart from reduced use of contraceptives. Too much effort has been put into teaching nothing, and it’s time we put that effort into teaching something.

Abstinence education is doing more damage than it should have ever been allowed to and American taxpayers have spent far too much money funding it. Teen pregnancy alone accounts for more than $9 million per year in costs to U.S. taxpayers (Hoffman SD. By the Numbers—The Public Costs of Teen Childbearing. Washington, DC: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy; 2006) and billions of dollars have been put into a program that has been proven not to have any great influence on the sexual behaviors of adolescents, apart from a reduced use of contraceptives. Too much effort has been put into an education system that goes out of its way to teach nothing, and it’s time we put that effort into an education system that teaches something.

Journal 10

In the American Progress article, Abstinence-Only Sex Education Programs Fail Teens, Olivia Ferguson argues against Abstinence-Only education in schools, and exposes some of the negative impacts it has had on American teenagers. The best example she gives in this article is the example of an investigation done by Texas Monthly.

This investigation found that Texas has the highest rates for Teenage pregnancies, educators are often not qualified in the way that they have no previous health education, those that did have health degrees also stated that the some of the curricula “did not contain a single fact” and that Texas is receiving $4.5 million every year through the Title V bill (more than any other state in the U.S.).

Ferguson cites many different studies, such as ones from the Centers for Disease Control that found that “although teenagers who take ‘virginity pledges’ may wait longer to initiate sexual activity, they are more likely to enjoy oral and anal sex, and they are just as likely as other students to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases” and “Eighty-eight percent eventually have premarital course”. She also cites a report from the Committee on Government Reform that stated only two out of the thirteen states gave accurate information about sex.

In this second report, Ferguson explains that abstinence-only education classes taught things such as, “Half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus”, “Touching a persons genitals ‘can result in pregnancy’”, “a 43-day-old fetus is a ‘thinking person’”, “HIV can be spread via sweat and tears”, “Women who experience abortions ‘are more prone to suicide,’ and as many as 10 percent become sterile”, and that “condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse” (Ferguson gives the correct percent being less than 3 percent).

Ferguson makes her argument against abstinence-only education very clear and operant that there are personal ideological motivations for abstinence-only education instead of compassionate motivation. In my paper, I would like to look up most of her sources and use more from where she got her info.

Journal 9

Chatroulette

Chatroulette is a fairly new website where one can get in a webchat with someone from anywhere in the world. However, this website is known to be highly obscene. People are beginning to panic over if kids are seeing these things or not.

CBS recently aired a segment on the new with Harry Smith, Ernie Allen, the President of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and Natali Del Conte about a new social network called “Chatroulette”. In this segment, Natali and Ernie over exaggerate the problems of this new website. To be clear, Chatroulette is just a website with a bunch of men masturbating and clicking the “next” button before viewers can report them. This is all that Chatroulette is for kids that know about it and the only people who think it’s a social network are people that wouldn’t use it in the first place and crazy CBS reporters. This is well known to teens because any time it is brought up in conversation it is always brought up with a story of something very gross someone saw.

Personally, I believe this is not a problem that merits any time on any news show. In fact, this is not a problem at all. As I said, any teenager who has heard about Chatroulette knows that it’s just a bunch of guys masturbating on the Internet. With this in mind, no child would want to go onto this unless they wanted to watch a bunch of older men masturbating on the Internet which makes it just like the other fifty percent of the Internet. If a child wants to search for a guy masturbating on the Internet, they’re going to find it and its not going to damage them in any way since they’re looking for it. Conclusively, there is no reason to act like this is a threat, and anyone who wants to use this social network without seeing anyone masturbating should get off the computer or try “Stickam”

Sex Education in Schools

Recently, laws have been proposed to offer sex education in schools K-12. Parents have become very distraught over the idea of their children learning about sex. However, much of the information about this law is cloaked under the commotion.

America currently holds the highest teen pregnancy rate in the entire industrialized world, and this rate continues to rise. Countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark, which have the lowest teen pregnancy rates, have had sex education courses for decades. These courses include having students as young as six write essays about sex, and middle school children watch teacher demonstrations on how to put on a condom. If one were to go down a list of nations teen pregnancy rates it would be very clear that the nations with the lowest teen pregnancy rates also have the most thorough and early sexual education.

Finally, I support these laws in belief that any person not in support of these laws does not know the facts and is looking at the problem only from a personal level.

Arizona Anti-Immigration Laws

Arizona has recently taken radical action to prevent illegal immigration. A new bill enacted in Arizona requires all citizens to have documentation of citizenship and give police the power to ask citizens for documentation if they suspect they are in the country illegally.

Personally, I think the way that American citizens are treating Mexican immigrants is despicable. Mexican immigrants aren’t coming here to cause harm, but rather because living in Mexico isn’t as good as it should be. We should be focusing more on how to help our neighbors rather than becoming separated from them.

Brains and Blood: A Comparison Essay Between Vampires and Zombies

Two of the most popular monsters of today are zombies and vampires. Fans of these monsters have become at heads with each other recently after the release of Twilight books and movies into mainstream society. However, these two monsters share many similarities as well as differences.

Zombies range in characteristics from being unstoppable, strong, and smart in movies such as Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead to being weak and stupid in movies such as Dawn of the Dead. Vampires also range in characteristics being strong and unstoppable in movies like Dracula or weak and stupid in movies like Blade. Both vampires and zombies are considered to be both living and dead, great in numbers, “infect” others through biting, and often associated with an apocalypse. However, there are many defining differences among these monsters.

A zombie is a decaying piece of flesh, dark skin, white eyes with a blank stare that looks past whatever it sees, and, most of all, a zombie isn’t a zombie without horrible posture. Zombies are always together and are always looking for brains. On the other hand, there are the more sophisticated vampires.

Vampires are pale, humans with fangs. Vampires can easily blend in with humans, and are known for doing so in the nighttime club scene. Vampires suffer from super strength, super speed, immortality, the ability to easily seduce woman and the inability to go into sunlight, touch crosses, or eat garlic.

Vampires have been portrayed as rulers that can farm humans (Blade 3) while zombies have been portrayed as animals and have been farmed (Dead Rising 2). Overall, zombies are often, in films such as Zombieland, or Return of the Living Dead, something that can be made funny yet scary, while vampires are made out to be more serious and are meant for suspense and action.

Inception is not Fight Club

A few months ago the Christopher Nolan movie, with star actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Inception, came out in theaters, and was immediately praised by most average citizens. The No. 1 box office hit, around the time of its release, made $43.5 million in only two weeks, according to reportnews.com. Inception has been compared to many great movies such as, The Matrix, Shutter Island, and any other great movie some idiot wants to punch down a couple hundred of levels by comparing it to Inception. However, Inception was just shit.

One of the more interesting movies Inception has been compared to is the classic Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club. Fight Club was an interesting film that came out in the late nineties about a guy who makes a friend with another guy and they start a fight club and then etc. (Fight Club has a great story line that I would never ruin for anyone like I will for Inception). If you have not seen Fight Club, you are fairly unlucky and need to go see it immediately to have some part of your life revolutionized.

Where on the other hand, if you haven’t seen Inception you are a fairly lucky individual to have not had to sit through two hours of overdone slow motion, distractions from how horrible the movie was, boring tricks, and, for lack of a better word, all around bullshit.

Christopher Nolan really out-did himself (or under-did, depending how you look at it) with a beginning that leaves the audience wondering “what could this mean?” and an ending that blows you away because its the beginning! Inception does really blow ones mind at the very ending until you step back and think to yourself about how they just showed a scene that they showed at the beginning of the movie except with a little more that left the question “ooooh is he in reality or is he in a dream?”.

To some up Inception very quickly, it’s a whole lot of dreams. The actors go into a dream in a dream thats in a dream that could be in a dream which just acts as a distraction from how there is barely any progress being made towards the ending where some guys supposed to get robbed and Leonardo DiCaprio gets what he wants. However, it seems all the hype from this movie comes from the movie itself.

The main characters in the film are in the future where people have created a way to put yourself in someone else’s dream (but be careful because if you screw around too much their zombie subconscious army will come kill you). This future technology was really intriguing, and it could have gone somewhere so much better. However, it appears that Christopher Nolan must have suffered some severe writers block as he only re-revolutionizes this revolutionary technology that revolutionizes theft that then needs to be re-revolutionized to be more revolutionary to make a revolution or something. But its a stretch.

Christopher Nolan seems to really love putting anything flashy in his movies even if it doesn’t have anything real to it, hence Leonardo DiCaprio. This flashy part of movies made to awe the audience is what I like to refer to as “bullshit”. Nolan includes a lot of “bullshit” in his movies going anywhere from soulless Leonardo DiCaprio to neat special affects that have become to normal in present day movies to really shock anyone, and even to neat slow motion scenes (it was cool when the matrix did it, Inception is just making a one minute scene into a twelve minute scene). However, if you sifted your way through all the “bullshit” you were left with the “plot”.

A guy is really good at dreaming, he’s so good that he can make people think they’re awake while they’re dreaming. Then, he gets an offer to get a bunch of guys and a little girl to kidnap and sleep with a rich guy to get some money from and go home to his children who he is not supposed to see, because he killed his wife with thoughts and got kicked out of America. At the end, the audience doesn’t know if he’s sleeping with his kids or if he’s just with his kids. And the moral of the story is thoughts are dangerous, reality is tricky, and don’t try to get your wife to kill herself (EVEN HYPOTHETICALLY). Overall, the movie leaves its audience with nothing but, for the easily tricked, it seems like something.

Outline

-Start with the "war"

-move on to various other preachers around campus (willard preacher)

-Quotes

-Is this a problem for students, teachers, and faculty here at Penn state?

-Preaching and counter preaching can be both offensive and/or noisey which could negatively affect the Penn State atmosphere

-Background- Sides of the war preacher vs. counter-preacher

-preaching is standing up to make a speech in the attempt to make a change

-counter-preaching is rebelling against a person or group of preachers

- go over preaching and counter-preaching background

(sorry it was late and I'm still not so sure that I did it right)