Want some torture with your peanuts?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/weblo…-your-peanuts/

Quote:

Just when you thought you’ve heard it all… A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers. This bracelet would: • take the place of an airline boarding pass • contain personal information about the traveler • be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage • shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes The Electronic ID Bracelet, as it’s referred to as, would be worn by every traveler “until they disembark the flight at their destination.” Yes, you read that correctly. Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and that it would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if he/she got out of line? Clearly the Electronic ID Bracelet is an euphemism for the EMD Safety Bracelet, or at least it has a nefarious hidden ability, thus the term ID Bracelet is ambiguous at best. EMD stands for Electro-Musuclar Disruption. Again, according to the promotional video the bracelet can completely immobilize the wearer for several minutes. So is the government really that interested in this bracelet? Yes!

If this thing actually makes it on the wrist of people who board US airlines, that puts the nail in the coffin of me wanting to live in the US or visit. One of my mates at work asked today why don’t I want to live in the US with the high petrol prices and crap weather in the UK. THIS ^^^^ is one of the many many reasons not to. What sort of idiotic policy-minded bureaucrat would actually want to strap this on American citizens and visitors to the US? One of the comments to the article said that this would be the death knell to the airline industry, and I don’t think they’re far off. How ridiculous. Taser location-tagged bracelets for every airline passenger. Right! I hope this is some fantastic hoax…but I fear it isn’t.

I had another convo with a different mate this evening about US politics and what’s ‘going down’ – he said he wanted to live in the US and we started going on about how hard it is to get a visa for the US vs the UK, etc., and I started remembering traveler’s horror stories of missing laptops, security lines, luggage x-rays, the TSA (and Canadian customs as well) going through MP3 players and laptops looking for copyrighted material, habeus corpus and civil rights disappearing, all this serious stuff, all the way down to internet neutrality and bandwidth throttling. Oh, not to mention the price of fuel going up 200% in 5 years and worse to come.

sorry…ranting but it’s shite like this bracelet thing that just really really irk the hell out of me. One of the comments at the moment says the people complaining about this possibility ‘do not value their lives’ and ‘what freedom will you have when you are wearing a head scarf or dead’ and finally ‘What do you hope to leave the next generation?????’ Apparently this guy is happy to leave the next generation in an Orwellian, Judge Dredd-like militia state where no one is trusted, only the rich and powerful have any say and everyone is watched for the least little bit of unpatriotic behavior. May the Flying Spaghetti Monster save us!