It's another morning and it's time to weed through the various emails, postings and messages that came through the night and early this morning. I make no secret of being a liberal these days. So, I get a lot of trash in my mail box and news feeds.
Have you got the one about the RFID chip, yet? Yes? You delete it, too? I get rid of this nonsense as soon as it appears. That might help me, but for those who fearfully and fervently believe "the gub'mint is out to get me" paranoia conspiracy theories believe this clap trap. They believe it and base their votes on this hogwash.
First off a Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. They are currently used in dogs and cats to help owners find lost pets. The fear is that these chips will be put into all of us for tracking purposes.
The problem with writing a "myth" or debunking piece is that readers take away the myth or falsehood and not the debunking. Playing whack-a-myth with RWNJs is annoying at best and I've never found an effective way to deal with it. Currently I ignore it - right wing or left wing conspiracy theories, but I wonder if I miss opportunities doing that.
So, I took it on with predictable results.
It started with a reference to this page which refers to this fluff piece from way back in 2007 where Brian Williams hands off to Tom Costello to talk about what our future identification techniques will look like. The pertinent point about RFID chips plays between 0:15-0:30. You read that right, 15 seconds.
Oh, Betsy! Grab the tin foil! We're all going to get the mark of the beast! Except we're not. It's goes over iris scans, fingerprint use and facial recognition techniques far more than the 15 seconds that Tom Costello devotes to RFID chips used for unresponsive, unconscious Emergency Department patients. I responded, hogwash! Prove it in the ACA bill, give me the Section and paragraph number.
That didn't happen. I was accused of drinking kool aid.
Seriously, I searched the NBC news site for RFID chip and got this:
Skylander Toys Robot
Apparently NBC doesn't want anyone remembering that 2007 fluff piece. Anyway,
He was not amused.
So, I tried again,
No, really, even the guy running the RFID Journal (Mark Roberti) says chipping America is bogus and he wants people to stop emailing him about it.
He doesn't trust "technocrats".
Ok, here's a crowd sourced fact checker, Skeptics. These crowd sourcers do better than a lot of journalists. They picked up on the fact that the language came from the failed H.R. 3200 from the 111th Congress that was never part of the ACA (aka Obamacare). It's NOT part of the ACA.
ACA? SchmACA
Ok. Ok. Surely you'll accept this right wing blogger's take. She's conservative, hates biometric ID and says the language from the failed HR3200 was never put into the language of the ACA. There is no mandate to insert an RFID chip into anyone, but there is language regulating Class II medical devices have serial numbers to be tracked.
Ok, so I have the wrong bill it has to be a law somewhere!
Funny he said that. There is H.R. 4872 from 111th Congress which did pass; but if you go to Section 519, page 1014 you see NOTHING calling for a mandated insertion of anything into anyone. By then the snark beast had hold of me, "I totally understand your fear of probes as anyone wearing tin foil hats is, but you shouldn't confuse a tin foil hat for an assguard."
That got censored.
It didn't matter what source I used, showed or referred to. It didn't matter if it was simple or a complex explanation. He read on the internet that we all were going to be chipped by 2017, so it was true. Never mind that what I found was also on the internet, but in his mind, false. (Logic has never been this guy's go to skill.)
So, that's the end of today's insanity. I think I'm going to go make some tea.