Blog Chez Jacq'

Fred Reed does seem to be obsessive in his need to write. Here is his latest effort, in English:

November 16, 2007

I am going to revitalize the American mayonnaise industry. Yes. Such is the patriotism rampant in this column. We will fill the nation’s swimming pools with the purest domestic variety, and then drown the entire staff of the public school system in it. I personally will tie cinderblocks to them.

My love of country is great: I will use no Chinese mayonnaise.

And then I’ll bring back the one-room school house. Many will denounce me in the public prints as retrograde. Well, when you have driven your car into a swamp full of underfed alligators, retrograde is what you want to be.

Why the one-room school house? Because it rewards initiative and brains and individualism and other things America no longer stands for and in fact can’t stand.

Think about it. In a school of one room, students can advance as they will. If a child of eight can read as well as the fifteen-year-olds, he can read with them. If he is able to do algebra when he is ten, why, he can do so. If he can’t, he can stay with kids at his own level. If the teacher can’t, put her in a tumbrel and take her to the mayonnaise. Is this not a splendid idea?

No. Today, advancement in the public schools depends on race, creed, color, sex, and national origin, on time served, docility, pernicious pseudopsychology, tolerance of pointless make-work, on preference for form over substance. Learning anything is irrelevant. Indeed it is discouraged, as it might increase the self-esteem of the smart. What counts is absorbing group-think like a napkin in a beer spill. The important things are doing witless homework and pasting pictures in stupid projects. This is pure hell for the very bright, and tends strongly to favor girls, who are more likely to do things they know to be stupid.

Next I am going to devastate the schools by giving the students hope. I will set up a comprehensive test, lasting perhaps a week, of everything that a graduate of a high school should learn. And I will tell the students that when they can pass that test, they can pick up their diplomas at the door. Gone, outa there. No more listening, agonized, to mouth-breathing IQ-85 preliterate marginal humans burbling ed-school Marxibabble.

Can you conceive of the academic frenzy that hope of escape would inspire, at least in the bright? A fair few kids in the fifth grade read at a twelfth grade level. (And plenty of affirmative-action teachers, documentably and obviously, don’t.) Lots could advance by broad jumps in all subjects if allowed to. Why not let them, and let them test out when they can? Isn’t the purpose of school to get them to learn?

Of course not. Schools exist to keep children off the streets and off the job market, to serve as day care, to provide submissive drones for the office market, and to instill appropriate values, meaning those that make for political passivity and high consumption. Americans exist to buy things.

Now, again, I understand that any notion of rewarding competence runs against the national character. I am aware of the almost lascivious fascination with the dull, slow, inferior, substandard, puzzled, coarse, shiftless, lame, and useless. We have affirmative action to ensure the perpetuation of these ideals. However, as a titillating venture into intellectual pornography, let’s consider how the schools look to the bright. Yes, yes, I know: the bright are elitist, and contribute nothing to civilization except all of it, and must be crushed. But…consider the bright anyway. Think of it as abnormal psychology, or peeking at dirty pictures.

Ponder Bobby Lou, who carts around an IQ of 145 or 160. Understand that he is innocent of this mistake. He didn’t mean anything by it. No intention of offending motivated him. Think of it as a genetic accident. But there he is: a freak, cursed by nature.

Every day, for all of his young life, he goes to school and does what seem to him appallingly stupid things. They probably seem appallingly stupid to the other kids too, but they are worse for him. He listens to teachers with IQs so far below his that he couldn’t reach them with a rope and a bucket. Globble-gurble. Blah blah blah. Wabble wabble. He squirms. He twitches. He thinks, “Why can’t I read my physiology text that I found at Reiter’s Scientific, or take Peggy Sue into the woods to cop a feel? God, I’ve seen bugs more intelligent than this woman, and more interesting. I’ve seen mothballs more….”

Now, being average is not reprehensible, any more than being unable to bench press Oprah Winfrey. However, there is something to be said for matching capacity to opportunity. If you want to teach Bobby Lou, you get someone bright, and let Bobby advance as he chooses. If you want to elevate Oprah, you get a fork lift.

But undeserved suffering is nonetheless inflicted on Bobby Lou. He rebels, or snores loudly, and the teachers think something is wrong with him. His grades are poor because he doesn’t want to paste pretty pictures in notebooks full of foolishness. In high school he takes to petty delinquency and to drink, becomes morose, and maybe lapses into terrorism. If he does, it is justified. (Come to think of it, I would issue him a hand grenade at matriculation to encourage the teachers not to bore him. Ha.)

In a one-room school, he could move at his own rate, and then test out of the whole fetid business.

Better yet would be separate tests of different subjects. When a kid demonstrates that he can read at the twelfth grade level, no teacher should ever again be allowed to so much as mention reading to him, unless it be to ask him to coach her. If the kid passes what is now the tenth-grade Algebra II, or chemistry or physics, that should be it. He should then have a choice of taking advanced courses, taught by a vertebrate, or going behind the school to smoke and drink beer.

I figure we can generalize the approach. We could have tests of what a student is expected to learn at a run-of-the-mill university (nothing), and at a middling or a first-rate university. (Surely someone remembers what they taught.\?) Really bright students could test out of the degradation in its entirety. The effect would be to unemploy a lot of professors, but we could just stuff them into the mayonnaise along with the rest.

I know what you are thinking. What if we run out of mayonnaise? Improvise. Ketchup. Salad dressing.

Labels: education, politics, satire, western culture

Sixer sent this one. Just had to share it.

Ted Nugent, rock star and avid bow hunter from Michigan, was being interviewed by a French journalist and animal rights activist. The discussion came around to deer hunting. The journalist asked, "What do you think is the last thought in the head of a deer before you shoot him? Is it,'Are you my friend?' or is it 'Are you the one that killed my brother?' " Nugent replied, "Deer aren't capable of that kind of thinking. All they care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away. They are very much like the French.' " The interview ended at that point.

Labels: family and pets, satire

by Scott Ott [Reknowned satirist]

(2007-04-17) — The day after an unidentified man killed 32 people, and wounded many others at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recanted years of support for gun control laws and called on Congress to initiate a national weapons training program at schools that receive federal funding.

“Since it’s clearly impossible to keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” Rep. Pelosi said, “the only way to hamper the evil plans of the deranged and wicked is to assure that their potential victims are not helpless.”

“As we have seen once again,” said Sen. Reid, “our gun-free school zones should really be called free-fire zones for terrorists and killers. Gun control laws only restrict the sale of weapons of self-defense.”

Under the Pelosi-Reid Personal Protection Act of 2007, all federally-funded colleges, universities and secondary schools would provide at least 40 hours of mandatory weapons safety and target shooting instruction.

Meanwhile, President George Bush continued to call on all Americans to pray for the wounded survivors and for the families of the dead, and he hailed the Pelosi-Reid Act as “an important step in making sure that no child is left behind.”

Labels: satire

by Scott Ott

(2007-04-07) — President George Bush this week allegedly plans to address efforts by Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to remove references to the so-called “global war on terror” from the 2008 defense budget.

Below is a draft of his speech, reportedly leaked by an unnamed White House official. Spokesmen for the major TV networks and cable news channels have already told the White House that no time is available to broadcast these remarks.

PRESIDENT BUSH:
Lately, some in Congress have attempted to alter the language of our fight. They don’t like the phrase “global war on terror” and prefer to talk of isolated conflicts — of wars in this country or that region.

I can agree with them on one point: ‘Global War on Terror’ is not an adequate phrase, because it fails to name the enemy. The United States of America is not at war with terror any more than we’re at war with the AK-47 assault rifle or the improvised explosive device. We’re at war with people who employ these tools as they attempt to terrify us into submitting to their will.

It’s hard to know what to call these people. They march under the banner of Islam, but some Muslims say the terrorists have twisted the religion of Mohammad to justify their godless thirst for power. And yet there is no concerted effort among the world’s Muslim leaders to stamp out the brush fire of radicalism that threatens to turn their so-called ‘peaceful religion’ into a blazing crusade against the infidels — that means you and me. There is no significant coalition of Islamists working to bring justice to those who have so perverted their religion that a militia operates from a mosque under the blessing and command of the Imam. The failure of so-called moderate Muslims to take action against in their radical brethren is more telling than their infrequent condemnations of terror as a tool to advance their faith.

Our fight is a global war on terror in the sense that terror tactics aim to inspire fear. President Franklin Roosevelt wisely pointed out that our only formidable enemy during the darkest days of World War II was that paralyzing emotion that clouds our vision, wearies our muscles, staggers our steps and waters down our resolve.

In this battle against the principalities of fear, we fight no nation. We aim to conquer no ethnic or religious group. We desire to occupy not one inch of soil beyond our borders.

Some have said that the global war on terror is unwinnable, but I believe that it is unloseable. In other words, we must not lose this war for Western civilization.

And we will not lose, because Divine Providence rules in the affairs of men, because righteousness trumps wickedness, because freedom overshadows slavery, and because — despite all of our faults — the United States of America is the greatest nation the world has ever seen, and the only human hope for humanity. This is not an arrogant statement. It’s a humble recognition that God has seen fit to bless this experiment in citizen-rule with unprecedented prosperity, opportunity, joy and strength.

The enemy longs to strip the people of their God-given rights and power. But we love these treasures more than they hate them. We will guard them. We will not permit them to be plundered, even if it takes our last breath and our last drop of blood. Because to live in the world that our enemies envision is to live not at all.

Calling it the ‘global war on terror’ is accurate in this respect: This is a not a national conflict. It belongs to no country and respects no borders. No legitimate claim to sovereignty exists. When we triumph over the terrorists, no nation of people will be humbled. The losers will be the terrorists. No sensible person in any nation will mourn their loss. And some who now cower in caution, appearing to give tacit approval to the terrorists, will dance with joy on their graves.

Some think that the battle in Iraq is unrelated to the global war on terror. In this, they not only disagree with me, but they’re at odds with the terror leaders themselves who have poured millions of dollars and thousands of lives into the effort to raise the dark flag of fear over the heads of 25 million Iraqis. The terrorists fight in Iraq as if their future depends on it. It does.

They’d like nothing better than for us to view the conflict as a centuries-old civil war among a primitive people that cannot be resolved by any means.

If the attempt by our opponents to reclassify this global battle as a series of unconnected dots is successful, the terror leaders will check off another box on their to-do lists, and celebrate another milestone.

Much of the talk among politicians and pundits of all political stripes reflects an ignorance of history and of warfare.

The crucial element in time of war is not perceived troop morale or somebody’s gut feeling about how things are going. The crucial factor is victory always — and victory alone.

Victory means the enemy must surrender, his ability to wage war must be destroyed, his ambitions definitively denied. His commanders must be tried and punished, or slain on the field, and his troops disarmed. The streets of the war zones must be made safe for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The purpose of waging war is not to keep our troops out of harm’s way or even to bring our troops home. It is to defeat the enemy.

No soldier, marine, seaman or airman wants to leave the theater of battle without the laurel of victory. No true American will countenance surrender, or anything like it. When our opponents here and abroad speak of anything short of victory, realize that it is nothing but defeat draped in the costume of fine words and empty diplomacy. Viewed in the full light of history, it is little short of treason.

The stakes could not be higher.

When our enemies believe that we don’t have the stomach to fight, they know that they have not only won the war, they have effectively ended the era of the American republic. We have become their colony, subject to their rule, and to their dark vision of a future under their law. We may be allowed to maintain our standing army, to conduct our legislative and judicial activities, but real executive power shall have been transferred to them.

This must never happen. We will not permit it.

Changing the name of the global war on terror does not end the war, anymore than a child covering her eyes makes the scary thing disappear.

May God grant us the wisdom to answer our calling to fight for something greater than our ambitions, and to do so with unshakable resolve toward ultimate victory.

Thank you. God bless you, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Labels: satire

EPA to Use Roe v. Wade to Regulate CO2 Emissions

(2007-04-03) — The Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must regulate carbon dioxide emissions and suggested using the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent to reduce the number of “renewable CO2 emission sources.”

“Since each human produces almost a ton of carbon dioxide per year,” the high court said, “reducing the number of exhalers provides the greatest opportunity to make immediate cuts in the gross CO2 content of the atmosphere.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the 5-4 majority, said greenhouse gas production could be cut even further if “a woman’s so-called right to choose were legally elevated to an enforceable patriotic obligation.”

Labels: satire