What Really Scares Me Guest Editorial by Mike L. What really scares me is all this ID technology. Retina scanners. Fingerprint scanners. Palm scanners. Face Scanners. ID chips planted under the skin. And yes, these are all real. I'm not making any of it up. Just plug a few of these words into your favorite search engine if you don't believe me. My body is mine. It's not an machine readable input document for some computer. God did not create me to be an input document. Ear tags are for cattle, sheeps and pigs. And we all know where they end up. (Some are in my freezer right now!) Who's pushing all this anyways? I'm not. My bank card and a PIN number is all I need. Actually cash is all I ever needed. With 2% interest rates, who needs a bank anyways. A good stash with a shotgun handy..., A stash is always open, there is no daily cash limit, it's never out of service, convenient location, and no transaction fees! I don't keep much cash in the ATM accessable account anyways. It's the same account the automatic withdrawals come out of. For everyone that gets robbed at an ATM, there's at least two fighting with the gas,cable, water etc. company about an automatic withdrawal that was in error. If someone needs the $128.91 in my bank account that badly, he can gladly have it. I probably won't even report it to the police, because it is not enough to deal with cops, lawyers and judges over. Back to these scan maniacs. So given I need a thumb print to use my ATM, some freak is either going to kidnap my kid, or cut my thumb off. We've gone from getting beaten until I give my PIN number and card up, to a loss of a thumb, and in the case of kidnapping, probably a death or two. This is progress? I had this discussion with a cab driver once, and he replied, "When it's too hard for people to steal money, they just start stealing food, clothing, booze, smokes, and whatever else they need to survive. You can't eat money anyways." Progress? I think the people who are driving this, are the banks and the tax people. The government's immediate goal is to squeeze as many tax dollars out of everyone. Or if some idiot sues you, you can be wiped out in a nanosecond. It will be harder and harder to keep that emergency stash of cash. The banks like it, because once all their credit records are together, and they have detailed knowledge of your assets and liabilities, they can reject the bad risks, and charge the iffy risks a higher rate. As well as foreclose in a nanosecond. Higher profits for the banks. And then there's tying health records into this data too. Here in Alberta, the government is talking about having one great big database with everybody's health records on it. Let's look into the future a bit. Try getting a job if you're credit's bad, you got a bad heart, you spent a few weeks in a mental hospital or a re-hab center. Maybe you tried to start a business and went bankrupt. Maybe you got caught doing something stupid when you were a teenager and have a less than spotless criminal record. I'm sure most of you have had some scrape in the past that you'd rather the whole world didn't know. What happens when they start isolating MORE human genes? Let' call it the "Survivalist Gene" for a lack of a better word. Or the "Questions Authority Gene?" Or the "Doesn't accept the mainstream media hook, line and sinker Gene". All this data plugged into a big network of computers. And this gene testing will be done at birth under the guise of "early diagnoses of disease". The ID'ing will be done for "YOUR financial security" and "Instant Access to your medical history in times of medical emergencies". You must've seen this TV shows like "Profiler" and "Cracker".(I watch them.) They amass data and make big leaps about what a person is like from just a small amount of data (evidence). Well, (for all you statistic buffs like me) what if you had lots more data on about 10 million people? Let's go profiling. Let's weed out the undesirables before they get a chance! Hey, it's 95% accurate, and it saves us a ton of law enforcement and health care money! A little far-fetched, maybe... See I'm not so scared of disasters. I grew up in the country, and was about 9 before we had electricity, and about 14 before we had indoor plumbing. Day long power outages happened several times a year, winter and summer. Been snowed in for a week many times. What I'm scared of is this quite, slow, creeping accumulation of information about everything we do. Where we live. Where we work. If you pay with charge cards or bank cards, someone knows what we bought when and where. Our health, both physical and mental, our finances, what we drive, what we look like, our legal run-ins, who we phone, what web sites we look at and soon our genetic dispositions. Punch a few buttons and they know where to pick you up. If not now, in the very near future, everything will be available to the powers in control with the touch of a button. And of course a computer generated profile or "risk assessment", probably summed up in a few magic numbers, and a short paragraph or two. If knowledge is power, then somebody is sure collecting a pile of it. Sure there will natural disasters. Storms, floods, volcanoes, new deadly diseases, wars, famines, death, pestilence, Earthquakes, riots. (Did I leave any of the horsemen of the Apocalypse out?) We can and should prepare for these. (Which reminds me, I need to get a truckload of firewood before it gets much colder.) A month of supplies seems just about right to me. But these are local catastrophes, and through government bailouts, insurance companies and just plain hardy folks, things will eventually get running again. The horseman that scare me is the one that's the color of money. The one that man has invented. For example: Our federal debt in Canada is 65% to 80% (depending on who you listen to) of our GDP. Then there's provincial, municipal and city debt's. (Don't forget Ontario hydro and it's debt, which is larger than most provinces) Then there is personal and household debt Then there is the unfunded Canadian Pension Plan. Unfunded means there is no money set aside and invested. It has to come young working taxpayers. How about all those aging baby-boomers that are living longer and are going to beat the crap out of our health care system in the next 20 - 30 years. And gee, what's going to happen when all those baby-boomers start cashing in their stocks and mutual funds. Are the DOW, the TSE, and all those other stock markets going to keep climbing to new heights. I remember something from an economics class about prices going down when supply exceeds demand. I heard just recently on the TV, that some mutual funds have never experienced a net yearly outflow of cash. They have always had more money coming in than going out. I wonder what's going to happen when the baby-boomers start drawing out their retirement money. For those of you that think all these mutual funds were run by honest and COMPETENT people and that none of these institutions will crash... Another thing that scared me was a news story about, that on average, in this one large Canadian company, the average employee was taking 4 sick days off a year. Authur Anderson (don't get me started about them, PLEASE) was called in to fix things. Apparently, this was cutting significantly into the companies profits. 72% of these sick days were for parents looking after their sick children at home under the age of six. Now if this company can't handle a 1.6% cut in employee output, with a 10% unemployment rate in Canada, there is something out of whack here. For god's sake, hire a few more people, and let these mother go home and be with their sick babies. I guess the major theme here, is (to me) things seem wound up too tight. Financial markets are stretched. Employees are either overworked, and over-stressed, or not working at all. The government and big money fears this and is inventing and implementing more and more ways to keep a lid on things. Monitor the undesirables. Take away everyone's guns. Follow the big cash transactions like a hawk. They don't want anyone (besides themselves) to trade guns, money and cash and accumulate wealth and power. (Freedom fighters have been trading drugs for weapons for many years in many countries). Train up more police with deadlier tactics and weapons. Pump out this crap called TV, which teaches everyone to be passive and nonaggressive. That the happy friendly government will fix everything and make it happy. That we are not capable of looking after ourselves. Just like children. Shut-up and behave. Mommy and Daddy know what's best. There won't be a global revolution. There won't be a global war. There won't be a big loud flashing jolt. Just a slow slide into a polluted, poverty-stricken, morally bankrupt, diseased un-educated totalitarian global village. That's what I'm preparing for. 30 years from now, we will look around and wonder how it got this way. And these are some of the things that scare me. Mike L. 1