After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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VERICHIP IMPLANTS AND TUMORS
A cabal of corporate and government officials is pushing to legalize and market microchip devices for implantation in humans. The chief advocate, an outfit named VeriChip Corporation, claims that inserting one of its radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips into your upper arm could help, say, hospital staff activate a database containing your medical history.
VeriChip envisions a market of at least 45 million Americans sporting their very own RFID codes. Now we learn that several studies have found that these implants can induce malignant tumors in lab mice and rats.
We've also learned that Tommy Thompson, who approved RFID chips for use in humans back when he was serving under Bush as Secretary of Health & Human Services, is getting $40,000 a year from Applied Digital Solutions (the company that owns VeriChip) and has received company stock worth about $1 million. Applied Digital Solutions also makes Digital Angel-the chips for animals that we talked about in last month's Lowdown.
Although Thompson once told an interviewer that he would "absolutely" be willing to have a VeriChip implanted in his own arm, he never did.