#615 Qualitative Analysis

Every now and then, I read a magazine called “The Week.” It’s a great summation of the week’s events told from the perspective of news snippets from other publications of every political persuasion, left, right, and indifferent.
Although I’m usually a little wary of snippet news analysis, thinking that there are, after all, some things that should be dealt with in depth, it’s still a great read.
Like this report they made about snippets themselves. Sound byte that is.
They point out that in 1968 the average length of a politician’s sound byte on television was 42 seconds. Today it is only eight.
I’m guessing TV watchers don’t vote on issues. Or at least issues spoken of at length by candidates.
The flip side of that, and the scary one, is that political advisors relentlessly coach their candidates to craft and guard each and every phrase they utter so it can’t be taken out of context and rendered into damaging fodder by the opposition. No wonder politicians seem to speak like party line automatons.
It’s like you can only find out what a politician really wants in a bathroom.
Which, by the way, is not far off either.
Speaking of in-depth analysis from a little snippet, recently researches analyzed a single teaspoon of wastewater from a sewage plant and determined what, and in what quantities, the people in the community were using in the way of drugs.
That’s right, a community urinalysis.
Is this a great country or what?
Officials then conducted similar tests in 10 cities and determined that there’s some serious, um, “stuff” going down people’s pipes.
(They were going for 11 cities but one of them had a brownout during the analysis.)
Some nuggets of discovery: Ecstasy and cocaine use went up on weekends while meth and prescription drug use stayed steady. Meth was used across the board in all the cities; cocaine was more prevalent in wealthier cities.
Scary that they can do that.
Personally, I feel invaded by this government cheekiness. What’s next? Are cities now going to install receptors just downstream of your sewer outlet?
Follow the toilet paper trail to big load of crack cocaine?
America, ya gotta love it