The planet Earth is in a crisis situation, folks. The resource allocation mechanisms have been strained to the breaking point, and the planet strains from the resulting burden.  At the University of Michigan’s World In Crisis Symposium, the benevolent and beloved J Man delivered a historic speech addressing the issues which confront us today. Here is the transcript of the J Man’s speech:

My Fellow Americans:

Let me begin by stating that I can identify the greatest single threat to our planet by simply enunciating one rather inelegant word. And that word is "blubber."

Ladies and gentlemen, please, I ask you to comport yourselves in a matter befitting this august forum.

The destructive force of blubber can be seen throughout the four corners of the globe. We see it in the starving and diseased masses of Africa, in the forced executions of orphans in China, in the child slave labor and prostitution of Southeast Asia, and in the outright obesity of the American population. And it is in the American population where this destructive tide originates. For it is the disgusting craving for yet another Whopper with Cheese by the American fatty which has caused the conversion of one of the earth’s greatest treasures, the rain forest, into mere grazing land for cattle. Millions of acres of land, formerly producing vitally needed oxygen, are now left besotted with tons and tons of cattle feces. Rising from this gargantuan new dung heap is a vast poisonous cloud of methane gas which drifts into the upper atmosphere and disrupts the normal equatorial currents – the result of which has left vast portions of Africa in continual drought.

And let us not neglect to mention that the conversion of the rain forest has also literally unearthed new diseases, sprung from microbes which from their age old existence had never seen the light of day. But I am already at our grim conclusion, without ever having demonstrated our tragic beginning. If you will allow me a few more general observations, I think I can then begin to explicate the entire disaster that is blubber in an easily understandable cause-and-effect relationship.

As you know, it is now fashionable for the American to register discontent with his government over the excessive size of the Federal deficit. Too much pork in the budget, Joe Citizen charges. And, after all, what is pork? Nothing but blubber. Joe Citizen angrily demands that the government trim the fat and return to him, via tax reductions, greater control of his own income. The American believes that he can spend his money more wisely than his government. This is nonsense – nothing but a spurious political homily served up by the Republican Party to an endlessly hungry American populace. For while the immense Federal deficit is a matter of open record and subject to much scrutiny - particularly in election years – there is an even faster growing deficit that almost nobody is aware of. And that is of the American citizen himself. Yes, in supreme irony, the angry citizen who huffs and puffs that he could do a better job of handling money than his government is, in reality, even deeper in debt! Little publicized government statistics show the average U.S. household to be $58,000 in debt! The plain truth is, the collective debt of the private sector far outweighs that of the Federal government. The American cannot, in fact, spend his money more wisely than his government. This is a cold, hard, statistical truth, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, for the nation’s well-being, it behooves Washington to raise taxes immediately. The American cannot be trusted with his money.

This economic malady is not without its physical manifestations. For just as the American’s budget contains blubber, so does the American himself. Department of Health statistics reveal that close to 70% of Americans are overweight, with 33% being so overweight that they are categorized as obese. Obese is the polite word for "pig." One out of every three Americans is a pig. Too much blubber, ladies and gentlemen, too much blubber. Americans eat more than they need, plain and simple. And, astonishingly, the consequences are now being felt literally throughout the planet – for the collective blubber of the American people is at a weight that is now causing stress upon the earth’s crust. The surface land mass of the continental United State is actually sagging into the earth’s lithosphere, thereby causing severe convergences of tectonic plates. Not only is this responsible for the rise of earthquakes in the United States in the past decade, but also of those worldwide. This is because the slippage of the faults under the U.S. surface area is so great that the effects extend to the continental plates under all of North America. This, in turn, puts pressure on the plates of South America, which, in turn, put pressure on the plates under Australia, and so on. In short, the blubber of America has caused an earthquake domino effect that has reordered the tectonic plates of the entire planet. Thus we see an unprecedented rise in earthquakes worldwide. Every mouthful of food that the American pig shovels into his or her mouth pushes the entire world closer to the catastrophe of a magnitude 10 quake. Millions will die as the result of the one American pig eating the one potato chip that will actually break the continental plate’s back.

I have detailed for you, in the form of the destruction of the rain forest and in the rise in earthquakes, just two of the many, many environmental disasters caused by the gross obesity and uncontrolled appetites of Americans. This then, the uncontrolled appetites of the Americans, is the beginning of the worldwide blubber crisis. But there is an even more alarming consequence of the swinish American character than the environmental ruin that I have just cataloged. For the American blubber mass is also a moral abomination. No longer able to be classified as human, these Americans must now be branded as pigs, inasmuch as they have given themselves over to the most reprehensible practices. I will now identify just two of the many disgusting character traits that define the term "American." In the interests of fairness, I will examine one trait each from the male and female pig.

We see in the female pig, or in the fat blubberous American woman, a disturbing tendency toward the physical torture of children. Otis Harrel’s study of child care workers showed that 73% of all full-time American babysitters are obese women – note: we are not talking of teenage girls who work part-time for movie and chewing gum money, but the terminally obese female pigs who, because of their repellent physical characteristics, are unable to secure full-time employment in the public sector, and must therefore turn to full-time child care work where their fat bodies can be safely hidden from the public’s view behind the locked doors of the homes of families with working parents or in day care centers. These ugly female endless eaters have been naturally selected to be shunted away from decent society. Unfortunately, the only position left available is child care. In a tragedy beyond compare, these hideous cellulite nannies are the absolute worst surrogates to care for our children. Harrel’s study has shown that female pigs, when exposed to healthy thin children, begin to experience feelings of intense self-loathing. This self-loathing is then projected, via the fatty’s ego defense mechanism, onto the innocent thin child. Harrel has documented the findings with over 500 hours of video tape of child torture. Dozens of families and commercial child care institutions allowed Harrel to install video surveillance equipment in their homes and day care centers. The results are truly horrific, ladies and gentlemen: 200-300 pound greasy haired female pigs victimizing thin children, screaming the most profane epithets imaginable, while slapping, punching, scratching, and clawing at the innocent thin. Worse yet, some attack the normal youths with scissors, needles, forks, knives, even the children’s own toys. One 260-pound behemoth live-in nanny was even caught on tape loading a pretty 35-pound girl into a clothes dryer. How do they get away with this? By threatening the children with death if they dare tell their parents. "You skinny little rat, if you tell your mother, I’ll cut you into bite-size pieces and cook you and eat you," we hear one massive sitter growl.

The American female pig’s cannibalistic lust has an interesting parallel in Nazi Germany. A little reported fact is that the second most blubberous nation on record in human history is Nazi Germany. And even in that loathsome society, where men eagerly volunteered to commit the most heinous atrocities, still, when it came to the mass extermination of Jewish, Slavic, and handicapped children, only overweight Frauleins could be moved to operate the crematoria. This ugly fact is documented in Heinrich Zifftag’s "Hansel and Gretel as Fact: Obese Women in Nazi Germany."

Ladies and gentlemen, if you will bear with me for just a few more minutes of unpleasantry, I promise that I will conclude this report on the dark cloud of blubber by revealing the proverbial silver lining.

I must now exhibit one of the most shameful facets of the fat male’s personality. The male pig in America, his belly so bloated by beer and Big Macs, has completely lost sight of his own organ. Let me repeat this. The fat man in America is so overstuffed that his stomach extends well past the point at which his vision can observe his lower extremities over the horizon of his belly. The fat man is left with a veritable waistband eclipse of his own organ. He therefore has developed a severe sexual mental disorder in which he comes to view himself as a pregnant woman. Jonathan Czech, who pioneered much of the early research into this disorder, has labeled the condition FART, or Fat Activated Remote Transsexualism. As such, the FART sufferer is prenaturally drawn to small boys, whom he identifies as the child he once was, and whom he fantasizes as carrying in his own bloated stomach/womb, soon to be reborn. Left at this, FART would merely be a harmless eccentricity of the jolly fat man. Unfortunately, repeated encounters with slim, lithe boys triggers an infantile sexual state in the fat man – resulting in a partial regression to the oral state of development where the fatty is consumed with a monstrous, insatiable desire to engage in activity which is unmentionable in this august forum. Statistical corroboration of the FART phenomenon is provided by FBI data which reveals that the typical male serial offender is almost always fat. Convicted adult male offenders have an average height of 5’ 9" and an average weight of 255 lbs. Perverted blubber, ladies and gentlemen, perverted blubber.

I do not have time to establish the links between the other environmental and moral disasters which have spread from blubberous America to the rest of the world. However, I will now reveal the promised silver lining in the battle against the dark cloud of blubber. We will look at one government program that has had dramatic results in reducing the incidence of blubber in American women.

Remember the fat citizen’s complaint that the government was not spending his money wisely? Well, I have the great privilege of releasing today, for the first time, results of a decades old program designed to lighten the American female pig.

In the early 1950s, CIA psychologists and psychiatrists developed the first ever auto-suggestive eating disorder: Anorexia Nervosa. By creating a false positive, that is, by manipulating the images of women produced by the mass media, the government has gradually begun to precondition females, from the earliest ages at which they can comprehend external cues, to embrace an emaciated, skeletal appearance as the ideal in female beauty. The results have been encouraging on two levels. First, obviously, as a general overall weight reducer. The Anorexia Nervosa program has effectively saturated 10% of the American female population, and recent surveys predict a continued steady growth rate throughout at least the next decade. The program’s goal of an overall saturation rate of 33% seems attainable. The second level of success has stemmed from an unpredicted outcome. For some still unknown reason, it has been discovered that 2-5% of the females participating in the Anorexia Nervosa program will die. This unexpected side effect is, of course, highly efficient in terms of weight reduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me now conclude what was initially a rather bleak report on the problem of blubber in a World in Crisis with still more reason for optimism for the future. I can now confidently report that, as our taxes are increased, the government will be able to introduce into the male population of America a program similar to Anorexia Nervosa. While this male program begins, and the female program continues, research scientists will be hard at work creating a second generation of blubber reducing programs. Early indication from some of our government’s most advanced research and development labs indicate a bright future filled with blubber killing viruses, mind control programs, and even prenatal genetic engineering. In short, your government is working hard to insure that the grotesque blight of blubberous male and female pigs is forever removed from the American landscape by the year 2029. Thank you for your attention, my fellow Americans, and sweet dreams.

On the morning of Christmas Eve the temperature at the North Pole was all the way up to an unbelievable 34 degrees. Santa Claus was getting ulcers because that meant there wouldn't be any snow for Christmas.

Santa turned on his radio and tuned in on station WRED, Moscow, for the weather forecast. Santa had a machine that could translate any language into English, which was the only language Santa knew. The weatherman said that the temperature would stay above freezing in Moscow and north of it. Santa Claus fainted and immediately there was an earthquake in Montreal, killing 327 people.

One of Santa's elves, Poindexter, was determined to get some snow. He told Santa, "I'll get some snow for you if I could borrow one of your reindeer."

"OK," said Santa, "but don't use Hollingsworth, he has transmission problems."

So Poindexter took Prodney, the best flyer, to help him look for some snow. They headed south at 1,729.97324 miles per second. That's 103,795.944 miles per minute or 6,227,756.64 miles per hour.

Poindexter landed in California and asked some scientists, "Could you tell me how to make some snow?"

They thought that Poindexter was nuts so they put him in a straightjacket and called the loony bin to take him away. While they were waiting for the truck from the loony bin, Prodney was getting restless and started flying around the laboratory. As the scientists were watching the reindeer, Poindexter, who had been studying ape language, called the scientists' pet ape over and told the ape to get him out of the straightjacket. The ape politely obeyed, and Poindexter snuck out the back door.

"Let's go," he said to his reindeer, and they flew off at 6,227,756.64 miles per hour.

When the people from the loony bin arrived, and there was no nut, they asked the scientists, "Where's the nut?"

The scientists said, "He flew off on a flying reindeer."

Since flying reindeer aren't too common around California, the people from the loony bin said, "Those scientists must be a couple of nuts!"

They were taken to the eye doctor and the people from the loony bin told the doctor, "These guys say they saw someone riding a flying reindeer."

"Those guys should see an eye doctor," said the eye doctor.

"That's why we're here," said the people from the loony bin.

After determining that the scientists had 20/20 vision, the doctor said, "These guys must be nuts."

"That's what we thought," said the guys from the loony bin as they took the scientists off to the loony bin.

Heading south, Poindexter and Prodney encountered very hot weather, so they increased their altitude to where the air was thinner and they could fly faster. At 10:30 that morning they reached the South Pole. Poindexter found some penguins that could speak English and asked them how they learned it.

Elmer, the penguins' governor, said, "We found some English books and learned the language."

"I have a problem," said Poindexter, "Santa is getting ulcers because there is no snow for Christmas."

"You could borrow some snow a few miles west of here," said Elmer, "but watch out for the Abominable Snowman. He's 27 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 1342 14/17 pounds. He could eat you and me in one bite. You can tell when he's coming. You can smell him 3 4/5 miles away. My friend Max will go with you, he knows the area better than anyone."

After they headed west for a while, Max said, "I smell the Abominable Snowman."

"Which way is he coming from?" asked Poindexter.

"Nobody can tell," said Max, "he smells so bad that the stench is all over."

"Sounds like my mother-in-law," said Poindexter.

They ran forward and bumped into a huge creature 27 feet 2 inches tall. As the Abominable Snowman opened his mouth to eat them in one bite, Poindexter took his pointed cap, which was made to fit the shape of his head, and put it into the Abominable Snowman's mouth, which prevented him from closing it.

Poindexter and Max flew off as fast as they could. After a few miles Max showed them the snow that they could borrow. It was now approximately 12 noon and Poindexter asked, "How could we get this snow all the way back to the North Pole?"

"You should take the shortest possible route," said Max.

"The shortest way is through the center of the earth," said Poindexter, "but there isn't any hole that goes all the way to the North Pole."

"We could make one," said Max

"How?"

"There is only one thing hot enough to melt a hole through the center of the earth, and that is the Abominable Snowman's and the Giant Polar Bear's blood mixed together."

"What's the Giant Polar Bear?" asked Poindexter.

"He kills anything he sees and is 23 feet tall and weighs 1348 5/12 pounds," replied Max.

"I know how we can get them to fight," said Poindexter. "I could get the Giant Polar Bear's attention by riding on Prodney and then the Giant Polar Bear will follow us to the Abominable Snowman."

"I'll ask Elmer," said Max.

After they received permission, Poindexter found the Giant Polar Bear and lured him over to the Abominable Snowman. The fight shook the earth and there was a crack right down the middle of it. The Abominable Snowman hit the Giant Polar Bear in the mouth and the skin between his mouth and nose was torn off. This didn't meet with the Giant Polar Bear's approval so he cracked the Abominable Snowman over the head with his paw and destroyed his skull. After 10 minutes one of the Giant Polar Bear's eyes was hanging out, his spleen was cracked, his left ear was missing, and his right front paw was torn off. The Abominable Snowman's nose was slit, the skin on the top of his head was barely hanging on, one of his legs was cut off, and he had a 3- foot hole in his stomach. Both of the combatants had a few minor injuries such as 6-inch cuts in their necks. They both died soon afterwards.

Poindexter took one of the Giant Polar Bear's ears, attached it to Prodney with the Abominable Snowman's large intestine, and ordered Prodney to fly in a circle around the corpses with the ear in the blood so that the blood would get mixed. They poured the blood down the crack in the middle of the earth to make the hole larger. Then they cleaned the corpses and took 5,127.532 acres of snow and condensed the snow into the corpses and attached them to Prodney's legs.

Poindexter said goodbye to the penguins and flew with Prodney through the crack in the middle of the earth. Some snow fell out of the corpses and snow was coming out of all of the volcanoes in the world.

Poindexter and Prodney came out of the crack at the North Pole and told Santa what had happened. Santa was so happy that he jumped up and down so much that the earth shook and the crack closed.

At approximately 7:00 PM Poindexter rode Prodney through the air from the North Pole to Moscow. Each inch of condensed snow was equal to 17,248 yards of snow. Poindexter poured the snow where there was none and everybody was happy. The Russians gave Poindexter a medal and the Norwegians promised to make dolls that looked like him.

Poindexter put the excess snow on a cloud so that it would fall later. He and Prodney dropped the corpses into the Arctic Ocean. At about midnight Poindexter and Prodney went to the North Pole to help Santa get ready to take toys to all of the children all over the world.

The preceding essay was written by yours truly in the fourth grade.

Sandwiched between a nonstop blitzkrieg of cluttering chaos, fuzzy gestalt, and the roiling waves of sensory overload on the one side and the quixotic landscapes and interior machinations known as the dark recesses of the human mind on the other, the denizens of this third rock from the sun clamber to enlist an enabling device - a sorting mechanism to mark the very margins of human thought and somehow make sense of it all. The study of this ongoing orchestration transcends the laboratory, the lexicographer's den, and the law, for it is the study of a truly surreal cerebral artifact: the study of universals.

A universal is an abstract term or object that encompasses particular things. How is it that humans partition the universe into various categories? More importantly, do these categories exist in reality, or is their existence dependent on the human mind? Indeed, during the Middle Ages Porphry casts a question that notoriously vexes the intelligentsia of that era: Do universals have any existence apart from the human mind?