October 10, 2022 Elkin Tribune
By Stephen Harris Contributing Columnist
A 41-year-old Tesla owner near Detroit got himself on local TV news by waving his hand at the driver’s window and unlocking his car with an implanted microchip in the back of his right hand, not with a car key.
The resulting stir prompted renewed attention to the rise of a growing industry and to an ancient Bible prophecy about the Mark of the Beast in the right hand.
Microchips are not new. My credit and debit cards got replaced a few years ago with ones with chips that took over for magnetic tape strips on the back. The bank did not give me a choice, and I now pay for groceries, gas and even meals at John Boy’s (as of this year) with a microchip on a card. I don’t know if I could still do all of that with an old-fashioned magnetic strip instead.
“People think I’m a little crazy,” Tesla owner Brandon Dalaly told WXYZ (how’s that for cool call letters?) TV news in Detroit. “People call me a cyborg or something like that.”
It’s no joking matter for those of us who know a brief but striking prophecy from 2,000 years ago in the concluding book of Revelation in the Bible, a prediction about the future: “He causes all, both small and great, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark.” Rev. 13:16-17
In the 21st Century we’re being told that the hand or forehead are the best spots for implanted microchips. Coincidence? A multitude of books and films have been made about the Mark of the Beast, as the Bible prophecy is called.
Now, Brandon Dalaly has not received the Mark of the Beast, nor have the thousands of others with chip implants.
“For now, the chips are voluntary and fairly innocuous,” said Norman Ford, a vice president at Skillsoft, a New Hampshire-based multinational business consultant. “You would be well down the hill once chips are deemed mandatory.”
The first microchip was implanted in 1998, but only last year were chips offered to the general public in Britain, where the chips are being embraced. The British-Polish firm Walletmor, for one, reports selling more than 500. There are many other such firms in Europe. The chip champion is Sweden, where about 6,000 have chips, according to Euronews.com.
“There is a dark side to the technology that has a potential for abuse,” warned Nada Kakabadse, a professor at Reading University near London, to the British Broadcasting Corporation. “To those with no love of individual freedom, it opens up seductive new vistas for control, manipulation and oppression.”
“Is it ethical to chip people like we do pets?”
Dutch security guard Patrick Paumen, 37, told the BBC that he has 32 chip implants. “Technology keeps evolving, so I keep collecting more,” he said. “My implants augment my body. I wouldn’t want to live without them.
“There will always be people who don’t want to modify their body. We should respect that – and they should respect us.” He showed a nail hanging from his fingertip via an implanted magnet.
Five years ago on this page I reported on a Wisconsin company, Three Square Market, a vending-machine company, that was the first in the U.S. to offer chips to employees. In a so-called chip party, more than half among the work force of 80 took chips. The chips unlock office doors, log onto computers and make purchases from vending machines.
“This technology was born to help us, to give us small ‘superpowers’,” Eric Larsen of Italian chip company Biohax, which is awaiting approval to chip thousands of medical workers there, told Euronews.
Get ready. Superchip is about to leap up, up and away.
Stephen Harris returned home to live in State Road. Here he shares his musings about the hometown and beyond.
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