The Environment

Among those things I have listed in the past about which I am passionate, I included engineering and the environment.

So I'll talk about that for a minute.

I am reminded of the old George Carlin line about how everyone driving more slowly than you are is an "idiot" and how everybody driving faster than you is a "maniac". His point (of course) was that we always consider ourselves to be perectly normal. The standard by which others ought to be judged. It is, at best, a subjective standard.

When we seek to establish acceptable levels of contamination in the environment, we are - right off the bat - assuming that some level of contamination is either necessary or unavoidable. As for the term "acceptable", well, a 25-year-old organic gardener pursuing a vegan lifestyle in Arizona is going to have a different opinion regarding what is "acceptable" than a 57-year-old unmarried CEO living in Manhattan.

Maniacs and lunatics.

So what did we do? We tried to scientifically establish an objective one-in-a-million standard for each contaminant. So, if you're drinking that good old Framingham water, you can be comfortable in the knowledge that if there's any methyl-tertiary-butyl-ether in your glass, your increased chances of getting cancer from drinking that water are? That's right. One in a million. One additional case of cancer in every million citizens. That's not a one-in-a-million total, mind you. That's one more per million.

If we're talking about liver cancer, that would mean that for every million people, instead of sixteen cases of liver cancer, there would be seventeen.

Oh, wait. Those are 1975 statistics. Here we go - in 2005, for every million people, instead of forty-nine cases of liver cancer, there will be an even fifty cases.

And now we come to my real point. All the tongue-in-cheek stuff aside. We're killing ourselves. Mercury in our seafood. Gasoline constituents in our drinking water. Dry cleaning solvents in our homes. The viability of our economy is crucial: people have to work, people have to eat. But we mustn't allow inertia and simple bad science to keep us moving down the road to extinction. Reducing the presence of known carcinogens (like for instance mercury in swirly lightbulbs) and removing the carcinogens we've released already (like chlorinated solvents in our groundwater) must continue to be priorities. Not because we're such good global citizens, but because we don't want to die of liver cancer.

Why Do You Want to be President?

Teddy Kennedy was asked that question way back in 1979, and blew the answer so spectacularly that it still stands today - over 30 years later - as an example of how *not* to reply to a question.

He can be forgiven, I think. How many of us can answer this question: What are you really passionate about? In preparation for that question, I will now try to reply.

I am passionate about:
My son;
Engineering and the environment;
Politics;
History (particularly military history);
Ireland and Irish history;
the Constitution;
Alternative energy;
Art;
Civil rights.

I think that's most of it. There are many things I like. I like AHL hockey, pancakes, cold windy days, firearms, and Jennifer Love-Hewitt. But I'm not passionate about much.