Trace Amounts of Intelligence
Politics — as a form of public service — should be a noble pursuit. However, as anyone sensible knows, the reality is that it reduces to power-mongering of a more or less petty nature in almost every instance where the politician can get away with it.
This morning, I was having a browse of the BBC News website (which has enough irritating foibles of its own to warrant a post at some point) and noticed this story.It’s one of those instances where it steadily dawns on you that someone’s thought processes are going horribly wrong, except in this case we’re peering into the arcane world of the minor politician or the professional busybody.
The set-up is straightforward enough: Politicians try out drugs test equipment and test positive. Given that, you might expect some light-hearted amusement expressed, perhaps a touch of embarassment. No, none of that, we’re straightforwardly told that the positive result probably came from incidental contact with some traces of drugs. Okay then, it’s a story about politicians realising the limitations of such testing and perhaps coming to a conclusion about appropriate usage? No, while we’re told that the test can’t be used as evidence of illegal activity, it still gets the thumbs up from the gathered politicos as a way of identifying suspected criminals for further attention. In fact, some of them gushed:
“May I pay tribute to the Ion Track system, despite the fact that both the minister and William Graham tested positive on it – I was relieved that I didn’t – but it is an excellent system nevertheless.”
We’re told that this thing can detect “the equivalent in drugs of a grain of salt in an Olympic-sized swimming pool”. Now, I have no idea what this is meant to mean in terms of a purposeful amount of drugs. An Olympic-sized swimming pool contains water, presumably the water capacity represents an amount of drugs, but what is that in terms of drug usage? If we’re talking about significant amounts of water, then a glass is enough for a drink, but an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty much required to host a session of Olympic-sized swimming, so is a dose of politician-speak generic drugs represented by a drink of water or a 4x100m relay? Even if it’s the glass of water that represents enough to get you out of your box, a grain of salt isn’t going to do anything. Besides which, it’s salt and not water… or drugs in the metaphor.
The bottom-line is that they are talking about something that can detect an amount of substance that you could pick up “from door handles, money or other public areas”, so it’s a machine that incriminates you for just touching stuff that someone else has touched. In fact, I suspect the detector is so hyper-sensitive that you could test positive from touching something that someone touched who had touched something that someone else touched who touched something that someone who simply passed a joint on at a party without smoking any had touched in some sort of insane Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon implementation of law enforcement.
“You could pick it up from anywhere couldn’t you?” says Social Justice Minister Edwina Hart while failing to pick up on any shred of a clue that this might be a fatal frigging flaw in the plan to use this thing and that as “Social Justice Minister”, she might possibly be someone who should pick up on exactly that.
So, if you happen in the future to find yourself being strip-searched on the basis that a machine detected that you have been in the same hemisphere as a torn Rizla packet, remember that you pay for these idiots to afford you that level of protection from the dangers of infinitessimal amounts of drugs.
