Football season is here! An excerpt from TUSKERS!

It never occurred to Arly Hockrood that Jack worshipped him for his powerful mind but hated him for his inconsiderate ways.  Although he didn’t do it every week, Hockrood often asked Jack what his questions were—the ones Jack had been afraid to ask at the previous Monday’s Quarterback Lunch.  Like an admiring idiot, Jack usually revealed his questions.

     “Jesus, Alexander! That’s not an important question!”  Hockrood always snapped back.  “You gotta learn to ask significant questions, boy, real good ones, timeless ones!  You gotta be a student of the game if you’re gonna be a student of the game!”

     Jack had quite a bit of trouble trying to figure out what Arly Hockrood meant by that last profundity.  He also had trouble with “timeless, significant” questions about football.  He studied video, watched all the coach’s shows, read every word he could about the Tuskers, but still his questions about football didn’t seem important enough, at least to satisfy Hockrood.  So Jack usually came home depressed, as well as excited, hostile and aggressive, after the rich AEPI founder had made the rounds of the sales offices.  Sometimes on the way home Jack would wonder why football aroused all these simultaneous emotions in him.  Then he would try to shake off his feelings so he could be a little bit nice to Suzi, even though she wouldn’t be very responsive until Saturday, when Jack would have other things on his mind.

     On Thursday evenings, Suzi was sympathetic but not very patient.

     “Well, Jack, what were your questions?”

     He’d tell her.  More often than not, Suzi would say something that made Jack realize how stupid his questions were.  Suzi had about as much love for Big Red football as Arly Hockrood did, but she didn’t study the games for the purpose of making trouble.  She just loved to see Archie prance around on the field.  Suzi was just naive and innocent, thought Jack, at least about football.  What he didn’t realize was that in watching the televised games so she could see Archie, she’d picked up a certain amount of insight into the way football was played.  Of course her brilliant mind kept a jump ahead of the sport by wrestling, in its boredom, with the second most timeless and significant question of all:  How should football be played?

     And, from her philosophy classes back at the University of Nebraska, taken back when the football team was the miserable losing Cornhuskers, Suzi remembered that you could easily convert a somewhat significant question into a truly important one simply by replacing the word “how” with the word “why.”  For example, one could ask not “how . . . “ but “why should football be played?”

     This question was the precise one that the evil wealthy genius Arly Hockrood had asked himself every day since he’d been a youth in college.

(College football in the year 2090! TUSKERS is available on kindle, nook, and from smashwords, and as a really nice paperback from createspace. That paperback would make a great gift for some rabid college football fan!)

Excerpt from a writing project started in the 90s.

After watching the news last night, I decided to pull out these paragraphs from a book I started back in the 1990s at the insistence of a gentleman named Jim Starry. The book was entitled “Simple Solutions” and it was based on Starry’s engineering ideas and innovations. This excerpt is somewhat dated, of course, but it’s part of the intro to his material on filtration systems and the global supply of water.

            Approximately 100,000 cubic miles of water evaporates each year from the Earth’s surface, 85% of it from the ocean. And that’s the easy part to comprehend. What happens next becomes our economic and political issues. What happens, of course, is that water returns to Earth in a frustratingly natural, highly heterogeneous, manner, that is, according to wind currents, latitudes, geographic features such as land masses and mountain ranges, and season. In turn, this heterogeneity dictates and distributes variations in agricultural economies, heavy industrial economies, energy and power utilization, navigation, public health, climax vegetation, recreation, tourism, cultural phenomena, including art and literature, and natural disasters.

            About 1/4 of a cubic mile of this water is, at any one time, currently tied up in human bodies. This figure would not be a particularly impressive one were it not for the fact that about 5 trillion gallons of water flows through us each day, collectively, which converts into about 2 quadrillion gallons a year, a figure that will double in the next century. And that’s only in terms of urine. As with all natural resources, however, humans use water indirectly, and in a global economy, they use it globally. Water is similar to oil, lumber, and metals, in that our consumption of them leaves a footprint on Earth, but our individual footprint is scattered in many countries and takes many forms. The last time someone ate a banana in Brooklyn, for example, he or she used water that fell somewhere in Latin America. And during the course of a typical day that same person baths, brushes teeth, flushes a toilet, drinks pop which is mostly water, eats foods grown under irrigation and cooked in water, puts on clothes that have been through the laundry, and does many other seemingly routine acts that consume water directly or indirectly.

            Scaling up our individual water use to that of a nation gives anyone a peek into Jim Starry’s thoughts. A truly simple calculation will likely show that if everyone who brushed his or her teeth in the United States turned off the water instead of letting it run, as a nation we’d save at least a hundred million gallons a day. To a person whose daily thoughts span hundreds of millions of years and square miles, society’s seeming pre-occupation with the immediate is always a little bit frustrating. If Jim Starry has any advice to science teachers around the world, it would be to give your best efforts to this task of teaching us to think in large scales and long terms. Or at least to translate our daily experiences into those of all humanity, those of our children, and those of our grandchildren. Tricks to accomplish this seemingly daunting task are as numerous and freely accessible as our ideas. A trip to the grocery stores produces apple, orange, and grapefruit counts and measurements. A thirty minute squeeze job, or a weigh-in before and after drying, produces an estimation of the water content of common fruit. The scale up is a simple lesson in ecological arithmetic; the phone book yellow pages lets a sixth grader estimate how much water is tied up in oranges on any one day in his or her city.

            But the amount of water actually tied up in fruit is only the tip of a very large iceberg. For example, in the early 1980s, world citrus production was about 50 million tons per year, 35 million of which were oranges and tangerines. Citrus groves covering about 7 million acres. About half of this production occurs in North and Central America and around the Mediterranean. In the San Joaquin Valley of California, where in the middle 90s irrigation water cost between $60 and $100 per acre-foot, mature orange groves yielded about 547 cartons per acre, a typical acre supporting 110 trees. Each tree gets 10 gallons an hour when the irrigation system is operating. These estimates, as well as the following, are from a U.S. Cooperative Extension bulletin for 1995, entitled “Sample costs for establishing an orange orchard and producing oranges (low volume irrigation),” available on the web.* Up to the time of a tree’s maturity, however, i.e. the first three years, there are no oranges per acre; in the 4^th year the harvest is something less than 30 cartons per acre, and in the 5^th slightly over 200 per acre, until the mature yield is achieved. Irrigation costs range from about $30 per acre for first year trees, up to about $94 per acre at maturity. Frost protection, including water, would be another $164 per acre for mature trees. Drip irrigation systems depreciate at $63/acre/year, and interest on the irrigation systems can be expected to run about $43/acre/year.

How does a sixth grade teacher in Idabel, Oklahoma, or Gallup, New Mexico, convert all these cooperative extension data into an ecological arithmetic lesson Jim Starry would approve of? Easy. Walk down to the local store, go back to the produce department, and ask one of the people working back there how many oranges there are in a carton. That one number lets anyone who can multiply and divide at elementary school level to calculate not only how much water is in an orange, but how much water it took to get that small amount of water stored in a form (orange) it could be shipped around the world. I promise; trust me: do the calculations yourself, and you’ll never look at another orange with quite the same naiveté as before. Suddenly apples, grapefruit, tomatoes, bananas, grapes, in fact all fruits and vegetables, will also look different. What will they look like? They’ll look like a gigantic water problem for the next millennium.

See also TEN MINUTE ECOLOGIST and INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: EVOLUTION FOR POLITICIANS both available as paperbacks from createspace and as e-books from kindle and smashwords.

Excerpt from a work in progress

5. The Human Factor: Individuals vs. Mobs

Let’s talk sense to the American people.

—Adlai E. Stevenson (Accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952)

Humans are very smart animals that routinely act in truly dumb ways that are counter to their own vested interests. But if you take a serious look at the really dumb behavior, you’ll see that most of it occurs when people are in groups, and especially so when relatively uneducated, simple-minded, often highly religious, and seemingly insecure men are in leadership positions. When alone, individuals usually act in much smarter and more rational ways than when they are in groups, mainly because individuals don’t always have as much power as groups, and furthermore, individuals have memory, which groups evidently do not. Finally, individuals typically have some sense of reluctance to get engaged in dangerous acts; groups—especially groups of men—seem to possess an illusion of power that overrides individual judgment when it comes to danger.

A corollary to this assertion of the difference between groups and individuals is that a truly well-educated, emotionally secure, and mature king is probably better for a nation than a highly ideological, populist, and anti-intellectual elected president. If you are a terrorist, and want to accomplish your goal of destroying the United States, then you should be working overtime to make sure that mature, well-educated, and emotionally secure men and women do not rise to public office in America. You don’t have to assassinate such people; you simply have to dehumanize them somewhat by ridicule, especially if you start when they’re at an early age and can find any way to later label them as “liberal” or “socialist.”

If you’re a terrorist, you have plenty of help in this subversive endeavor aimed at neutralizing the United States’ human resources. That help comes largely in the form of social institutions that tend to promote conformity and, in the process, often enhance one’s self esteem or sense of worthiness: certain religions, athletic teams, etc. The help also comes from our preoccupation with money—perhaps the most powerful of all homogenizing forces—although it’s fairly common knowledge that any claim for the destructive effects of such money-worship goes back at least to Biblical times, namely, to the Apostle Paul in his letter to Timothy (I Timothy, 6:10). Paul’s warning about the love of money being the root of all evil is actually a statement about this homogenizing force and he could just as easily have been talking about religion, including his own, as a means of making people behave like a mob.

It is simply a fact of life that we easily convert just about anything, including any social phenomenon, into common currency, and then can easily converse in such terms. The word “tax” for example, is sure to polarize any discussion of civic needs and responsibilities, and to do so very quickly, regardless of the really interesting relationships between people and their governments. But let’s really be honest, ladies and gentlemen: money is boring, and I do mean really boring. Indeed, money may be one of the most boring of all human constructs, although admittedly it is also one of the most useful of all technologies, one that contributed most significantly to the rapid distancing of ourselves from our lower primate relatives.

Humans differ in many ways from monkeys and apes, but possession and use of this technology called “money” is among the most distinctive and powerful of these. Money allows us not only to exchange items of value over vast distances and great lengths of time, but also to accumulate power and property far in excess of a fellow primate. Money is also largely symbolic, and trafficking in money is actually a highly metaphorical activity because there is very little about humans that cannot be bought or sold, including their time, talents, property, and even body parts.

Monkeys can’t do this kind of exchange with their currency, which is largely food. Lower primates exert power by use of their body size, coloration, emotional intensity, and age, all of which eventually disappear and cannot be saved, used to generate more, or passed on to heirs, although obviously some behaviors and physical traits are inherited. Humans, however, exert power largely by use of money, property that could be converted into currency, or legal access to other people’s money. A politician does not have to be rich in order to dabble in money; all he or she has to do is have words and ideas that make other people want to traffic in money, either through giving it up willingly, spending some that doesn’t belong to them, or saving some of their own. 

Paul’s warning to Timothy is probably based on our readily observed ability to subordinate everything tangible to its descriptive language or image, an ability most strikingly manifested in computers and digital files. Thus money was an early version of symbolic information. For example, a scrap of paper with poetry written on it is of no intrinsic value regardless of the fact that it might be of extreme value to the person who wrote the poem, although a few close friends and lovers may also greatly appreciate the item. Depending on the personality of the poet, anyone with enough money could buy it, including all rights to the use of it forever, copy that poem into an e-mail message and send it all around the world in a few seconds.

Conceivably, what originally appeared on that scrap of paper, which could easily have been a bar napkin, could be read by millions of people within an hour or two. Conceivably, those lines of verse could end up as song lyrics, recorded, and thus converted into lots of money. Many more millions of people would then hear the music and enjoy it for whatever personal reasons induced them to listen in the first place, having no clue that the sounds began as pencil marks on a bar napkin. If you think this scenario is unlikely, visit the National Country Music Hall of Fame museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and see some of those familiar platinum-record lyrics as they were first composed, often on bar napkins or coffee-soaked cheap motel receipts, by an individual.

But none of those millions who bought or listened to the music or read the poetry would know what it was like—mentally, emotionally, intellectually—to sit in that smoky bar, sipping a glass of wine, looking over the bare shoulder of your gorgeous girl friend at the long-haired college student, slumped in another booth scribbling something on a napkin, something that turned out to be that poem about a lost love, before dropping his head down on the table top and heaving with sobs and knocking his half-finished draught of Sam Adams onto the floor. Money does the same thing to our humanity that, in this example, the Internet or the recording industry has done. Both homogenize, dehumanize, and cleanse us of our individuality. Money and communication technology take away our memory, our individual emotions, often our creativity, our willingness to act in a manner counter to that endorsed by prevailing cultural influences, and our sense of shared responsibility for the natural world that supports us.

See also the following titles, available on smashwords.com, kindle, nook, and as nice paperbacks from createspace.com.: 

(1)TEN MINUTE ECOLOGIST: TWENTY ANSWERED QUESTIONS FOR BUSY PEOPLE FACING ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

(2) INTELLIGENT DESIGNER: EVOLUTION FOR POLITICIANS

(3) PIECES OF THE PLAINS: MEMORIES AND PREDICTIONS FROM THE HEART OF AMERICA (paperback from J&L Lee, Lincoln, NE)

Contribution to the Hobby Lobby discussion

This modest proposal is re-posted in response to the Hobby Lobby discussion:

A Modest Proposal in response to one of my Facebook friend’s commentary about former Republican Senator Alan Simpson’s assertion that male elected representatives should not vote on abortion laws. See:

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/03/29/alan-simpson-smacks-down-gop-for-violating-privacy-of-women/

John Janovy, Jr.

So here’s a modest proposal, based on the premise that it’s irrational to demand that a public health problem be solved but at the same time be adamantly opposed to the methods of solving it. The public health problem in this case is one we know how to solve, namely, unwanted pregnancy. The methods of solving it are readily available, safe, extensively tested, and found to be effective, at least at the individual level. It’s a well-known and widely-accepted fact that long-term effects of this particular public health problem fall unequally on the sexes, with the female being physically affected, subjected to potential medical complications, and traditionally burdened with nearly two decades of direct responsibility for the care, feeding, and education of another human being, whereas the male’s participation in this responsibility is largely voluntary or, when involuntary, limited to financial contribution. Because the large majority of state legislators are male and claim to understand public policy, my modest proposal is perfectly capable of being carried out at the state level, at least, and should be carried out in those states imposing severe restrictions on elective abortions. The main points are:

(1) Immediately enact a so-called “life tax” to provide for public funding of “life services,” defined as prenatal health care, treatment for medical conditions arising from pregnancy, and care, including medical care, clothing, food, shelter, and both education and special education as needed, for any infant born to a mother who would otherwise have chosen to abort it. Life services would continue until the child is 18 years old.

(2) Establish residency requirements, for access to such support, similar to those already established, for example, for tuition at a state’s post-secondary institutions.

(3) Establish a means test for access to such support. The federal government already has established guidelines for access to other social services, and means testing is already in place for Medicare premiums, so enacting such a test for “life tax” services should be easy to accomplish.

(4) Require DNA testing of mother, infant, and father (when the father can be ascertained) when an infant is born to a mother who would otherwise have aborted it. Costs of such testing would be paid by life tax revenues. If necessary, use test results to identify the father. Require, by law, the father to contribute half of the costs incurred in providing life services to mother and infant, and provide for an 18-year lien on the father’s earnings if necessary, with an extension to such time as the state is re-paid half of the life services costs by the father. Include in this law a provision that the father’s parents are liable for this contribution if the father is a minor.

(5) Immediately establish sex-education programs in all public schools, the curriculum to include effective contraception. Withhold certification from private schools that do not institute such a curriculum.

(6) Immediately provide birth control services for all individuals who want them but are unable to afford them. Pay for these services through the life tax. Services would include oral contraceptives, Plan B, condoms, patches, injections, and all other forms of artificial birth control to individuals over the age of 14. These services would be available in school health centers.

(7) In the event that an infant born to a mother who would otherwise have obtained an abortion requires long-term care or services due to a congenital condition, then such care and services would be provided by the state and funded by life tax revenues.

(8) In the event that pregnancy results from rape or incest, the mother would receive a lifetime stipend for carrying the fetus to term and the state would fund all services resulting from this birth, including counseling, adoptive services, and treatment of any medical conditions, including mental or emotional ones, resulting from the conception and delivery of this infant. In the case of rape or incest, residency and means requirements do not apply.

(10) The overall impact of this program, including life tax and life services, will be reviewed every ten years by qualified consultants from outside the state. Life tax will be adjusted annually to ensure revenues adequate to support life services programs.

I don’t know what the tax base is for North Dakota, but a VERY rough estimate, based on the widely available information on costs of rearing children in the United States, and North Dakota’s population, would fall in the range of $500,000 per non-aborted fetus if you add in the overhead costs of administering the above program. North Dakota reported 1,290 abortions in 2009, so we’re looking at somewhere in the vicinity of $645 million over the next 18-20 years to provide life services as part of this male legislative action to deal with the problem of unwanted pregnancy for a single year. Alternatively, of course, that $645 million would be paid by those who would have had an elective abortion but could not because of the law or other de facto restrictions on reproductive services, and that’s assuming that the individuals involved actually had the resources to pay these bills.

We have, of course, not even started to consider the social costs of unwanted pregnancy brought to term, and I’m not sure there is any real way to calculate those costs so that the public in general, and male legislators in particular, appreciate their impact on society. We do know that social factors such as lack of education, poverty, and crime are linked at least to some degree, and that “quality of life” factors are important for the attraction of business to a particular region. So in essence, the $645 million should probably be considered a conservative estimate of the overall impact of unwanted pregnancy on the State of North Dakota.

Cheers.

JJ