Sample Short Texts for RWS200

Table of ContentsMichael Crichton, Excerpt from Intelligence Squared Debate....................................................2Brian Lehrer, Reply to Crichton (Excerpt from Intelligence Squared Debate)...........................4Kristof, War & Wisdom..............................................................................................................6Bleich, California’s Higher Education Debacle..........................................................................7Brooks, Poetry for Everyday Life................................................................................................9Bittman, “Junk Food ‘Guidelines’ Won’t Help” (sample WPA question).................................11Balko, “What you eat is your business” (sample WPA question)..............................................14Parry, The Art of Branding a Condition....................................................................................16

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Michael Crichton, Excerpt from Intelligence Squared Debatehttp://intelligencesquaredus.org/wp-content/uploads/GlobalWarming-edited-version-031407.pdf …It is, in fact, perfectly possible for the consensus of scientists to be wrong and it is, in fact, perfectly possible for small numbers of people to be in opposition and they will be ultimately be proven true. [APPLAUSE]

I want to address the issue of crisis in a somewhat different way. Does it really matter if we have a crisis at all? I mean, haven’t we actually raised temperatures so much that we, as stewards of the planet, have to act? These are the questions that friends of mine ask as they are getting on board their private jets to fly to their second and third homes.

[LAUGHTER] And I would like, with their permission, to take the question just a little bit more seriously. I myself, uh, just a few years ago, held the kinds of views that I, uh, expect most of youin this room hold. That’s to say, I had a very conventional view about the environment. I thought it was going to hell. I thought human beings were responsible and I thought we had to dosomething about it. I hadn’t actually looked at any environmental issues in detail but I have that general view. … However, because I look for trouble, um, I went at a certain point and started looking at the temperature records. And I was very surprised at what I foun…The [second] thing I discovered was that everything is a concern about the future and the future is defined by models. The models tell us that human beings are the cause of the warming, that human beings, uh, producing all this CO2, are what’s actually driving the climate warming that we’re seeing now. But I was interested to see that the models, as far as I could tell, were not really reliable. That is to say, that past estimates have proven incorrect…

But let me first be clear about exactly what I’m saying. Is the globe warming? Yes. Is the greenhouse effect real? Yes. Is carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, being increased by men? Yes. Would we expect this warming to have an effect? Yes. Do human beings in general effect the climate? Yes. But none of that answers the core question of whether or not carbon dioxide is the contemporary driver for the warming we’re seeing. And as far as I could tell scientists had, had postulated that but they hadn’tdemonstrated it. So I’m kinda stranded here. I’ve got half a degree of warming, models that I don’t think are reliable. And what, how am I going to think about the future? I reasoned in this way: if we’re going to have one degree increase, maybe if, if, climate doesn’t change and if, uh, and if there’s no change in technology – but of course, if you don’t imagine there will be a change in technology in the next hundred years you’re a very unusual person.

…Decreasing our carbon, increasing our hydrogen makes perfect sense, makes environmental sense, makes political sense, makes geopolitical sense. And we’ll continue to do it without any legislation, without any, anything forcing us to do it, as nothing forced us to get off horses. Well, ifthis is the situation, I suddenly think about my friends, you know, getting on their private jets. And I think, well, you know, maybe they have the right idea. Maybe all that we have to do is mouth a few platitudes, show a good, you know, expression of concern on our faces, buy a Prius, drive it around for a while and give it to the maid, attend a few fundraisers and you’re done. Because, actually, all anybody really wants to do is talk about it. They don’t actually do anything. [SOMEONE CHUCKLES IN BACKGROUND] And the evidence for that is the number of major leaders in climate who clearly have no intention of changing their lifestyle, reducing their own consumption or getting off private jets themselves. If they’re not willing to do it why should anybody else? [APPLAUSE] Is talking

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enough? I mean, is, is -- the talking cure of the environment, it didn’t work in psychology. It won’t work in the environment either.

[LAUGHTER] Is that enough to do? I don’t think so. I think it’s totally inadequate. Everyday 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty. There are, a third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water, we have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now. I think that's unacceptable. I think that’s really a disgrace.

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Brian Lehrer, Reply to Crichton (Excerpt from Intelligence Squared Debate) http://intelligencesquaredus.org/wp-content/uploads/GlobalWarming-edited-version-031407.pdf

The issue of global warming and whether it’s a crisis or not, is in fact a scientific decision, it’s a scientific issue. It’s not a political one. On the other hand, deciding what to do about it is obviously political. Science can inform those decisions, but it can’t determine what decisions society makes. But we’re here to debate the existence of the problem and whether it is a crisis. That's something that the scientists on this side are eminently suited to do. You’ve all seen or heard about the CSI police drama, where high tech forensic scientists try and work out who done it when they come across the scene of a crime. Well think of climate scientists as CSI planet Earth, we’re try-, we see a climate change and we try and work out what’s done it. Just like on CSI we have a range of high tech instruments to give us clues, satellites, ocean probes, radar, a worldwide network of weather stations and sophisticated computer programs to help us make sense of it all. The aim is to come to the most likely explanation of all the facts fully anticipating that in the real world there are always going to be anomalies, there are always going to be uncertainties. Conclusions will be preliminary and always open to revision in the light of new evidence. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the same approach that doctors take when examining a patient. They don’t know everything about the human body, but they can still make a pretty accurate diagnosis of your illness. We end up then with a hierarchy of knowledge. Some things that are extremely likely, some things we’re pretty sure of, and some things that we think might be true, but really could go either way. There isn’t a division into things that are completely proven and things which are completely unknown. Instead, you have a sliding scale of increasing confidence. Let me give you a few examples. We’re highly confident that the sun is gonna rise tomorrow, it might not, it might go nova. But it’s likely that it will happen. It’s quite likely that you’ll be able to get a cab home from this event, unless it’s raining of course. [LAUGHTER] But, but those two things have different levels of certainty. You’re used to the idea that different kinds of knowledge come with different levels of certainty, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about the impacts of climate change.

Going back to being climate detectives, we’re certain that carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases and they’ve increased because of human activity. We’re very confident that the planet has been warming up, and we’re pretty sure that the other things that are going on, changes to the sun, changes to particles in the air, changes to ozone have made some difference but aren’t dominant. The physics tells us that this is a very consistent picture. Our suspects, the greenhouse gases, had both the opportunity and the means to cause this climate change and they’re very likely guilty. And they are increasing faster than ever. Now, the lawyers get involved. Lawyers are paid to present a certain case regardless of its merits and they do that by challenging everything in the case, and if one argument doesn’t work, well, they’ll just move on to the next. This procedure works very well when the proposition being debated is very binary, a yes, no. Is the subspe-, is the suspect guilty, uh should he go free, should he go to jail? It is designed specifically to prevent significant action in the face of uncertainty. If there is still reasonable doubt, the suspect gets acquitted even if you still think that they did it. But contrast that with the scientists. They want to know the most likely explanation. The lawyers, they want to win the case. In their own domains both ways of finding out things are very useful, it’s only when they come together in situations like this that things get tricky. Particularly when scientific results are perceived to have economic or moral implications, it’s common for political debates to get shifted into the scientific arena. It makes the political argument seem much more scientific and therefore logical. But since the basic

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disagreement is still political, this is a disaster for any kind of action. So tonight, you’re not gonna hear us arguing about obscure details in climate science, if you have any questions, Ihave a web site realclimate.org, you can go and check that out and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. But here we’re gonna talk about the bigger picture. Let me give you a few examples of how that works. Creationists have argued that the eye is too complex to have evolved. Not because they care about the evolution of eyes, but because they see the implications of evolution as somehow damaging to their world view. If you demonstrate the evolution of eyes, their world view won’t change, they’ll just move onto something else. Another example, when CFCs from aerosol cans and air conditioners were found to be depleting the ozone layer, the CEO of DuPont, the main manufacturer argued that because CFCs were heavier than air, they couldn’t possibly get up to the ozone layer. So there was no need to regulate them, that was pure fantasy, but it sounded scientific. Again, tobacco companies spent millions trying to show that nicotine delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s because that was a distraction from the far more solid case that, that linked tobacco to lung cancer. That was a distraction and a red herring. These arguments are examples of pseudo debates, scientific sounding points that are designed not to fool the experts, but to sow confusion and doubt in the minds of the lay public. This is a deliberate strategy and you’re hearing it here tonight. So during this debate, let’s play a little game. I’ll call it spot the fallacy. Every time that you hear the other side claim that we are predicting an imminent catastrophe, give yourself one point. Every time you hear an anecdote used to refute a general trend, that’s cherry picking and we heard that already, uh give yourself another. And every time you hear there’s a lag between carbon dioxide and temperature in the ice cores, give yourself two points because that’s a real doosy.

So far this evening we’re running at about two red herrings, two complete errors, three straw men and one cherry pick. [LAUGHTER] So see how you do and we’ll compare notes at the end. Scientists have to be professional skeptics, right, they are trained not to take new information at face value, they have to ask where measurements come from and what they could possibly mean. They have to be dispassionate about the data, and just see where it leads. Once you start making logically fallacious arguments in order to support a predetermined position, you are no longer acting as a scientist, you are acting as a lawyer, however scientific sounding you might seem. Despite that natural skepticism, the national academies of all eight, G8 countries, all the major scientific societies, even the White House have agreed with a scientific consensus on this matter, which pointedly did not happen in the 1970s by the way….

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Kristof, War & WisdomNew York Times Editorial, February 7, 2003. By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

[1] President Bush and Colin Powell have adroitly shown that Iraq is hiding weapons, that Saddam Hussein is a lying scoundrel and that Iraqi officials should be less chatty on the telephone. But they did not demonstrate that the solution is to invade Iraq.

[2] If you've seen kids torn apart by machine-gun fire, you know that war should be only a last resort. And we're not there yet. We still have a better option: containment. That's why in the Pentagon, civilian leaders are gung-ho but many in uniform are leery. Former generals like Norman Schwarzkopf, Anthony Zinni and Wesley Clark have all expressed concern about the rush to war.

[3] "Candidly, I have gotten somewhat nervous at some of the pronouncements Rumsfeld has made," General Schwarzkopf told The Washington Post, adding: "I think it is very important for us to wait and see what the inspectors come up with." (The White House has apparently launched a post-emptive strike on General Schwarzkopf, for he now refuses interviews.)

[4] As for General Zinni, he said of the hawks: "I'm not sure which planet they live on, because it isn't the one that I travel." In an October speech to the Middle East Institute in Washington, he added: "[If] we intend to solve this through violent action, we're on the wrong course. First of all, I don't see that that's necessary. Second of all, I think that war and violence are a very last resort."

[5] Hawks often compare Saddam to Hitler, suggesting that if we don't stand up to him today in Baghdad we'll face him tomorrow in the Mediterranean. The same was said of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom the West saw as the Hitler of the 1950's and 1960's. But as with Nasser the analogy is faulty: Saddam may be as nasty as Hitler, but he is unable to invade his neighbors. His army has degraded even since the days when Iran fought him to a standstill, and he won't be a threat to us tomorrow; more likely, he'll be dead.

[6] A better analogy is Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, who used to be denounced as the Hitler of the 1980's. Saddam and Colonel Qaddafi are little changed since those days, but back then we reviled Mr. Qaddafi — while Don Rumsfeld was charming our man in Baghdad. In the 1980's Libya was aggressively intervening abroad, trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, losing air battles with American warplanes and dabbling in terrorism. Its terrorists bombed a Berlin nightclub patronized by American soldiers and blew up a Pan Am airliner over Scotland. Libya was never a military power on the scale of Iraq but was more involved in terror; indeed, one could have made as good a case for invading Libya in the 1980's as for invading Iraq today.

[7] But President Ronald Reagan wisely chose to contain Libya, not invade it — and this worked. Does anybody think we would be better off today if we had invaded Libya and occupied it, spending the last two decades with our troops being shot at by Bedouins in the desert?

[8] It's true, as President Bush suggested last night, that Saddam is trying to play games with us. But the inspectors proved in the 1990's that they are no dummies; they made headway and destroyed much more weaponry than the U.S. had hit during the gulf war.

[9] Even if Saddam manages to hide existing weapons from inspectors, he won't be able to refine them. And he won't be able to develop nuclear weapons.

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[10 Nuclear programs are relatively easily detected, partly because they require large plants with vast electrical hookups. Inspections have real shortcomings, but they can keep Saddam from acquiring nuclear weapons.

[11] Then there's the question of resources. Aside from lives, the war and reconstruction will cost $100 billion to $200 billion. That bill comes to $750 to $1,500 per American taxpayer, and there are real trade-offs in spending that money.

[12] We could do more for our national security by spending the money on education, or by financing a major campaign to promote hybrid cars and hydrogen-powered vehicles, and taking other steps toward energy independence.

[13] So while President Bush has eloquently made the case that we are justified in invading Iraq, are we wise to do so? Is this really the best way to spend thousands of lives and at least $100 billion?

Bleich, California’s Higher Education DebacleJeff Bleich, “California's higher-education debacle.” Los Angeles Times, November 04, 2009. Watching the decline of the California State University system from within its boardroom mirrors the erosion of the California dream.

[1] For nearly six years, I have served on the Board of Trustees of the California State University system - the last two as its chairman. This experience has been more than just professional; it has been a deeply personal one. With my term ending soon, I need to share my concern -- and personal pain -- that California is on the verge of destroying the very system that once made this state great.

[2] I came to California because of the education system. I grew up in Connecticut and attended college back East on partial scholarships and financial aid. I also worked part time, but by my first year of grad school, I'd maxed out my financial aid and was relying on loans that charged 14% interest. Being a lawyer had been my dream, but my wife and I could not afford for me to go to any law schools back East.

[3] I applied to UC Berkeley Law School because it was the only top law school in the U.S. that we could afford. It turned out to be the greatest education I have ever received. And I got it because the people of California -- its leaders and its taxpayers -- were willing to invest in me.

[4] For the last 20 years, since I graduated, I have felt a duty to pay back the people of this state. When I had to figure out where to build a practice, buy a home, raise my family and volunteer my time and energy, I chose California. I joined a small California firm -- Munger, Tolles & Olson -- and eventually became a partner. This year, American Lawyer magazine named us the No. 1 firm in the nation.

[5] That success is also California's success. It has meant millions of dollars in taxes paid to California, hundreds of thousands of hours of volunteer time donated to California, houses built and investments made in California, and hundreds of talented people attracted to work in and help California.

[6] My story is not unique. It is the story of California's rise from the 1960s to the 1990s. Millions of people stayed here and succeeded because of their California education. We benefited from the foresight of an earlier generation that recognized it had a duty to pay it forward.

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[7] That was the bargain California made with us when it established the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960. By making California the state where every qualified and committed person can receive a low-cost and high-quality education, all of us benefit. Attracting and retaining the leaders of the future helps the state grow bigger and stronger. Economists found that for every dollar the state invests in a CSU student, it receives $4.41 in return.

[8] So as someone who has lived the California dream, there is nothing more painful to me than to see this dream dying. It is being starved to death by a public that thinks any government service -- even public education -- is not worth paying for. And by political leaders who do not lead but instead give in to our worst, shortsighted instincts.

[9] The ineffective response to the current financial crisis reflects trends that have been hurting California public education for years. To win votes, political leaders mandated long prison sentences that forced us to stop building schools and start building prisons. This has made us dumber but no safer. Leaders pandered by promising tax cuts no matter what and did not worry about how to provide basic services without that money. Those tax cuts did not make us richer; they've made us poorer. To remain in office, they carved out legislative districts that ensured we would have few competitive races and leaders with no ability or incentive to compromise. Rather than strengthening the parties, it pushed both parties to the fringes and weakened them.

[10] When the economy was good, our leaders failed to make hard choices and then faced disasters like the energy crisis. When the economy turned bad, they made no choices until the economy was worse.

[11] In response to failures of leadership, voters came up with one cure after another that was worse than the disease -- whether it has been over-reliance on initiatives driven by special interests, or term limits that remove qualified people from office, or any of the other ways we have come up with to avoid representative democracy.

[12] As a result, for the last two decades we have been starving higher education. California's public universities and community colleges have half as much to spend today as they did in 1990 in real dollars. In the 1980s, 17% of the state budget went to higher education and 3% went to prisons. Today, only 9% goes to universities and 10% goes to prisons.

[13] The promise of low-cost education that brought so many here, and kept so many here, has been abandoned. Our K-12 system has fallen from the top ranks 30 years ago to 47th in the nation in per-pupil spending. And higher education is now taking on water.

[14] At every trustees meeting over the last six years, I have seen the signs of decline. I have listened to the painful stories of faculty who could not afford to raise a family on their salaries; of students who are on the financial edge because they are working two jobs, taking care of a child and barely making it with our current tuitions. I have seen the outdated buildings and the many people on our campuses who feel that they have been forgotten by the public and Sacramento.

[15] What made California great was the belief that we could solve any problem as long as we did two things: acknowledged the problem and worked together. Today that belief is missing. California has not acknowledged that it has fundamentally abandoned the promise of the Master Plan for Higher Education. And Californians have lost the commitment to invest in one another. That is why we have lost our way in decision after decision.

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[16] Today, everyone in our system is making terrible sacrifices. Employee furloughs, student fee increases and campus-based cuts in service and programs are repulsive to all of us. Most important, it is unfair. The cost of education should be shared by all of us because the education of our students benefits every Californian.

[17] We've gone from investing in the future to borrowing from it. Every time programs and services are cut for short-term gain, it is a long-term loss.

[18] The solution is simple, but hard. It is what I'm doing now. Tell what is happening to every person who can hear it. Beat this drum until it can't be ignored. Shame your neighbors who think the government needs to be starved and who are happy to see Sacramento paralyzed. We have to wake up this state and get it to rediscover its greatness. Because if we don't, we will be the generation that let the promise for a great California die.

Brooks, Poetry for Everyday LifeDavid Brooks, New York Times, April 11, 2011

Here’s a clunky but unremarkable sentence that appeared in the British press before the last national election: “Britain’s recovery from the worst recession in decades is gaining traction, but confused economic data and the high risk of hung Parliament could yet snuff out its momentum.” The sentence is only worth quoting because in 28 words it contains four metaphors. Economies don’t really gain traction, like a tractor. Momentum doesn’t literally get snuffed out, like a cigarette. We just use those metaphors, without even thinking about it, as a way to capture what is going on.

In his fine new book, “I Is an Other,” James Geary reports on linguistic research suggesting that people use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words. Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think, Geary writes. They are at the very heart of it.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked. When talking about relationships, we often use health metaphors. A friend might be involved in a sick relationship. Another might have a healthy marriage.

When talking about argument, we use war metaphors. When talking about time, we often use money metaphors. But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top. Even the job title stockbroker derives from the French word brocheur, the tavern worker who tapped the kegs of beer to get the liquidity flowing.

The psychologist Michael Morris points out that when the stock market is going up, we tend to use agent metaphors, implying the market is a living thing with clear intentions. We say the market climbs or soars or fights its way upward. When the market goes down, on the other hand, we use object metaphors, implying it is inanimate. The market falls, plummets or slides.

Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events. we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.

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Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.

Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist. That’s a “desktop” on your computer screen. Metaphors are things we pass down from generation to generation, which transmit a culture’s distinct way of seeing and being in the world. In his superb book “Judaism: A Way of Being,” David Gelernter notes that Jewish thought uses the image of a veil to describe how Jews perceive God — as a presence to be sensed but not seen, which is intimate and yet apart.

Judaism also emphasizes the metaphor of separateness as a path to sanctification. The Israelites had to separate themselves from Egypt. The Sabbath is separate from the week. Kosher food is separate from the nonkosher. The metaphor describes a life in which one moves from nature and conventional society to the sacred realm. To be aware of the central role metaphors play is to be aware of how imprecise our most important thinking is. It’s to be aware of the constant need to question metaphors with data — to separate the living from the dead ones, and the authentic metaphors that seek to illuminate the world from the tinny advertising and political metaphors that seek to manipulate it.

Most important, being aware of metaphors reminds you of the central role that poetic skills play in our thought. If much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.

Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called “pedestrian poetry.” 

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Bittman, “Junk Food ‘Guidelines’ Won’t Help” (sample WPA question)

Mark Bittman on food and all things related.

[1] Imagine your child’s teacher was distributing twice daily snacks, before and after lunch — maybe Snickers and PopTarts in the morning, Mountain Dew and fries in the afternoon. Now let’s pretend you complain to the principal, who tells the teacher, “Could you please stop doing that? You have until … five years from Tuesday.”

[2] Would you allow that?

[3] Yet that’s pretty much what the Federal Trade Commission and other government agencies did last week when they announced food marketing guidelines. The agencies would like Big Food to refrain from marketing to children foods with more than 15 percent saturated fat, 210 milligrams of sodium or 13 grams of added sugar per serving or any trans fat at all.

[4] But instead of announcing, “We have guidelines you must follow, and we’ll give you until January 2012 to comply,” the F.T.C. said, in effect, “We have voluntary guidelines we hope you’ll follow — they’re voluntary, you understand — and in five years we’d like you to voluntarily comply with these voluntary guidelines.”

[5] We need legal action, not voluntary guidelines. The federal agencies that are involved with the F.T.C. in this request for less marketing to children — the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Agriculture Department — deserve credit for acknowledging marketing’s impact. If their suggested rules were followed, food advertising would be drastically different. “There’d be a large number of products they’d no longer be advertising,” says Marion Nestle, a New York University professor of nutrition and public health and the author of the book “What to Eat.”

[6] But five more years, and then it’s voluntary? Five more years of allowing children to think that a diet of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, PopTarts, Doritos, 7UP and Chicken McNuggets is normal? By then, your five-year-old is 10; your newborn is five, and his or her eating patterns are set. Five more years — at least — of America bulking up? Who will pay for all that diabetes?

[7] The F.T.C. is endorsing food that contributes to a healthful diet, but it’s mandating nothing, simply requesting voluntary compliance from a blame-the-victim industry that pushes ultra-processed, unhealthful junk. From fast food to cookies, snacks and breakfast cereals (many with the same nutritional profile as cookies) and worst of all, sugar-sweetened beverages, many of these products have these things in common: their slim “benefits,” if any, often come from chemically added nutrients, and they contain multiple forms of sugar, highly refined carbohydrates, chemically extracted fats and mystery ingredients only a food scientist or profiteer could love.

[8] These concoctions are the poster children for what’s wrong with American food and in turn our diet, and about Big Food’s marketing strategies and power, which harm our diet, weight, health and budget. (Nearly every age group weighs at least 10 percent more than they did in the mid-‘60s, and our diabetes rate increased by 164 percent from 1980 to 2009, according to the CDC. See my blog for more numbers on this.)

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[9] Food marketing to children needs to be reined in, and it’s impossible for me to believe that Coke is going to voluntarily refrain from marketing to anyone, let alone the children and adolescents who comprise the largest segment of its market. One more statistic, then I’ll stop: the average male adolescent consumes 300 calories of soda a day, about 15 percent of his required calories.

[10] It might help to take a quick look at how quickly and effectively our (often Republican!) governments acted against cigarette marketing: Five months after the famous 1964 Surgeon General’s report linking smoking to cancer, the F.T.C. required warning labels on all packaging and advertising. By 1971 President Nixon signed a law banning radio and television ads for cigarettes, a law that took effect eight months later. When big tobacco focused on children and adolescents (Joe Camel had become more recognizable than Mickey Mouse), billboard advertising was banned, to be replaced by anti-smoking messages.

[11] There’s more, and some of it resulted from successful lawsuits, first by individuals and later by states’ attorneys general. Those same kinds of lawsuits will eventually happen as more and more evidence shows that junk food kills people. But from the time cigarettes were identified as unhealthy, government moved to discourage Americans from smoking them, saving tens of millions of lives in the process.

[12] Obesity comes from excess calories and causes diabetes. Excess calories come from junk food. (Few people get fat eating real food.) And although this may not be quite the smoking gun that links cigarettes and lung cancer, there isn’t a serious independent dietary researcher or agency in the world who would claim that the typical American diet isn’t skewing numbers for obesity, diabetes and a slew of other diseases and needlessly premature death.

[13] In this conversation, I frequently hear, “The difference between tobacco and food is that you need food to live.” This isn’t food I’m talking about, though, but food-like products. No one needs Pepsi or Whoppers; we aren’t born craving doughnuts or nachos.

[14] Some industry members acknowledge the problem and claim to be working on it, creating smaller portion sizes and “healthier” versions of classic junk foods. Others talk about self-responsibility, as if their own marketing played no role in encouraging people to act in self-destructive ways. But no one in industry is interested in regulation; we may hear griping about the voluntary guidelines, but there must be a collective sigh of relief at what appears to be a brokered deal that gives the industry a five-year break-in period before … before what? Before either something else happens — like an even more business-friendly government — or the voluntary “regulations” take effect. And nothing happens. In the meantime, keep feeding the kids those Snickers.

[15] Or maybe it’s time for some of those lawsuits.

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WPA Essay Prompt – apply to BittmanCraft a coherent essay (i.e., one that is not just a series of paragraph responses to the prompt) in which you respond (in an appropriate order) to all of the following components.Identify and provide a brief summary of the author's argument; describe and discuss two strategies that the author uses to support his or her argument; describe the overall structure of the reading selection and explain whether it furthers the aims of the author's argument; discuss the premise(s) and/or assumption(s) on which the argument is based; evaluate the extent to which you find the argument convincing.Caution: This essay is not an "agree or disagree" exercise, nor is it intended to generate extensive summary of the article. Responses that emphasize personal opinion or summary will not earn a passing score.http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~gwar/index.html

ARGUMENT ANALYSIS 1. What is the main argument in this article?2. What are the main claims? 3. Name 2 types of evidence presented4. Is there a rebuttal section – which paragraph does it appear in?5. Name 3 strategies6. How does the author use analogy in this argument? 7. What assumptions can you identify (hint – look at word choice and categories)8. Can you think of any counterexamples to any of the points made?9. Can you find any flaws, weaknesses, or counterarguments (if you agree with the author,

try playing devil’s advocate).

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Balko, “What you eat is your business” (sample WPA question)Published by the CATO Institute, May 2004, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2663#

This June, Time magazine and ABC News will host a three-day summit on obesity. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who last December anchored the prime time special "How to Get Fat Without Really Trying," will host. Judging by the scheduled program, the summit promises to be pep rally for media, nutrition activists, and policy makers -- all agitating for a panoply of government anti-obesity initiatives, including prohibiting junk food in school vending machines, federal funding for new bike trails and sidewalks, more demanding labels on foodstuffs, restrictive food marketing to children, and prodding the food industry into more "responsible" behavior. In other words, bringing government between you and your waistline.

Politicians have already climbed aboard. President Bush earmarked $200 million in his budget for anti-obesity measures. State legislatures and school boards across the country have begun banning snacks and soda from school campuses and vending machines. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, among others, have called for a "fat tax" on high-calorie foods. Congress is now considering menu-labeling legislation, which would force restaurants to send every menu item to the laboratory for nutritional testing.

This is the wrong way to fight obesity. Instead of manipulating or intervening in the array of food options available to American consumers, our government ought to be working to foster a sense of responsibility in and ownership of our own health and well-being. But we’re doing just the opposite.

For decades now, America's health care system has been migrating toward socialism. Your well-being, shape, and condition have increasingly been deemed matters of "public health," instead of matters of personal responsibility. Our lawmakers just enacted a huge entitlement that requires some people to pay for other people's medicine. Sen. Hillary Clinton just penned a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine calling for yet more federal control of health care. All of the Democrat candidates for president boasted plans to push health care further into the public sector. More and more, states are preventing private health insurers from charging overweight and obese clients higher premiums, which effectively removes any financial incentive for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

We're becoming less responsible for our own health, and more responsible for everyone else's. Your heart attack drives up the cost of my premiums and office visits. And if the government is paying for my anti-cholesterol medication, what incentive is there for me to put down the cheeseburger?

This collective ownership of private health then paves the way for even more federal restrictions on consumer choice and civil liberties. A society where everyone is responsible for everyone else's well-being is a society more apt to accept government restrictions, for example -- on what McDonalds can put on its menu, what Safeway or Kroger can put on grocery shelves, or holding food companies responsible for the bad habits of unhealthy consumers.

A growing army of nutritionist activists and food industry foes are egging the process on. Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest has said, "we've got to move beyond `personal responsibility.'" The largest organization of trial lawyers now encourages its members to weed jury pools of candidates who show "personal responsibility bias." The title of Jennings special from last December -- "How to Get Fat Without Really Trying" -- reveals his intent, which is to relieve viewers of responsibility for their own condition. Indeed, Jennings ended the program with an impassioned plea for government intervention to fight obesity.

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The best way to alleviate the obesity "public health" crisis is to remove obesity from the realm of public health. It doesn't belong there anyway. It's difficult to think of anything more private and of less public concern than what we choose to put into our bodies. It only becomes a public matter when we force the public to pay for the consequences of those choices. If policymakers want to fight obesity, they'll halt the creeping socialization of medicine, and move to return individual Americans' ownership of their own health and well-being back to individual Americans.

That means freeing insurance companies to reward healthy lifestyles, and penalize poor ones. It means halting plans to further socialize medicine and health care. Congress should also increase access to medical and health savings accounts, which give consumers the option of rolling money reserved for health care into a retirement account. These accounts introduce accountability into the health care system, and encourage caution with one's health care dollar. When money we spend on health care doesn't belong to our employer or the government, but is money we could devote to our own retirement, we're less likely to run to the doctor at the first sign of a cold.

We'll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and personal health when someone else isn't paying for the consequences of those choices.

ARGUMENT ANALYSIS

1. What is the main argument in this article?2. What are the main claims? (hint: look for problem/solution patterns)3. Name 2 types of evidence presented4. Is there a rebuttal section – which paragraph does it appear in?5. Can you identify any strategies?6. How does the author use definition and analogy in this argument? 7. Can you think of any counterexamples to any of the points made?8. Can you find any flaws, weaknesses, or counterarguments (if you agree with the author,

try playing devil’s advocate).

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Parry, The Art of Branding a Condition

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