I find VIP RFID tales annoying. I am not sure why. Maybe it is because the concept of VIP lounges in loud dance clubs appeals to me as much as the restroom at a fast food restaurant.

I have been invited into them a few times, for various reasons, but something about the “free booze and food” or “free people” does not make me feel like I have really achieved anything significant enough to give up something meaningful in return. I mean would I pay a few dollars for a beer instead of being tagged as a VIP and getting the beer for free?

In that context, a BBC reporter had a chip implanted as part of a “story” on Barcelona clubbing and using a chip to pay for drinks.

The idea of having my very own microchip implanted in my body appealed. I have always been an early adopter, so why not.

Why not? Why not? This guy is a “science producer” and he can not think of any risks from radio microchips that carry financial, let alone personal, information?

The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.

This sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical.

Right, because you are really a VIP if no one can recognize you without your implants. I think he should have called himself a Very Unimportant Person with a Chip (VUPC).

The story’s perspective really started to get under my skin:

With a waiver in his hand [the owner of the club] Conrad asked me to sign my life away, confirming that if I wanted the chip removed it was my responsibility.

That seems worth it, no? They get to debit money from you without any transparency and you get…drinks.

The chip responds to a signal when a scanner is held near it and supplies its own unique ID number.

The number can then be linked to a database that is linked to other data, at the Baja beach club it make charges to a customers account.

If I want to leave the club then I can have it surgically removed – a pretty simple procedure similar to having it put in.

Sounds so painless. I can think of nothing less VIP-like than needing implants linked to a database, linked to other data, that charges an account. Then again, as I said, I have never really found the VIP clubbing concept appealing. Whether whisked in on a red carpet or allowed to sneak in through the back door, I would never go with an implant chip for VIP access especially if it required waiving all rights.

The real pain was the sore head the following day after a night on an open bar tab.

Uh, yeah. I think he means the real point of the story…

I noticed a book in a store the other day that claimed to be a reprint of the WWII US Army guide to Iraqi culture. I should have bought it, as the topic keeps coming into focus lately. Wired wrote about this as well and even attempted to show dismay with some of the suggestions. Maybe I’ll go back.

In the meantime, I have been reading anecdotes about how the modern Army wants to be culturally savvy, but just does not seem able to understand how to influence local populations in a positive way.

Identity is a funny thing. A Glimpse of Iraq points out a classic example of how two cultures in sudden proximity might end up with dangerously opposite perspectives:

It is probably perfectly normal for an adult American to be seen chewing gum in public. In traditional Iraqi society, the act of chewing a gum is reserved to women, but never in public. Country folk utterly despise city boys when they see them chewing gum. They regard it as feminine. Even little children are discouraged from doing it. The sight of grown, armed men chewing gum must have been one of the causes of many people losing their respect for those armed men! It simply conveys an unintentionally ‘undesirable’ image!

This also reminds me of a young US soldier manning the Iraqi side of the Iraqi-Jordanian border. He glanced at our passports with a lollypop in his mouth. I couldn’t help but notice the reaction on the taxi driver’s face: Utter contempt!

While an American might see a calm, collected, even playful and welcoming person, and Iraqi might see a scared, weak and disrespectful one. Then again, many Americans see chewing gum as disrespectful as well, the difference thus only being the environment. In other words, an American soldier manning a border might not be trained to respect the normal people who might try to cross, whereas they are most certainly trained to respect a superior officer and respect their military buildings.

Although it is tempting to chalk up the gum as a matter of cultural differences in a general sense, I think it may in fact be a reflection of very poor management by the American military. Soldiers have been given specific instructions on how to kill but perhaps not yet how to treat foreign civilians with respect. The interesting question becomes whether the latter has as much security relevance as the former; especially as it might be too late, or too costly, to turn back public opinion.

I will never forget a review I read in the Sunday paper one sunny day in Paris, when I lived there as a student. Each week an overall top wine recommendation was made, as well as a top wine recommendation for under $7 a bottle. On this particular day, the inexpensive bottle was the overall top recommendation.

Two things struck me after reading this review. First, wine obviously did not need to be expensive to be fine. Second, if the top Paris critics knew this and wrote about it openly in the paper, prices for wine had to be based on something other than rational thinking.

Today I just read a similar story in the NYT.

HOW much do you want to spend on a bottle of wine? The intuitive answer, of course, is as little as possible. That stands to reason, except that the way people buy wine is anything but reasonable.

Substitute the word wine with security technology, and this story gets even more amusing.

For most consumers, wine-buying is an emotional issue. The restaurant industry has a longstanding belief that the lowest-priced wine on the list will never sell. Nobody wants to be seen as cheap. But the second-lowest-priced wine, that’s the one people will gobble up.

All buying is an emotional issue, no? We might tell ourselves we are making a highly informed decision, but information integrity is never perfect, and we never have unlimited time to decide. A waiter standing over the table, guests with thirsty stares, or executives impatiently waiting to report to the board, we usually rely on some kind of emotional compass to pull the trigger.

I don’t usually think of American wines as great values. Too often the producers try to imitate expensive wines using artifice — mediocre cabernet sauvignon flavored with oak chips, for example — rather than making more honest wines from lesser grapes.

That seems a bit emotional to me, but I suppose they have a point to their critique. It tells me to look for wines from smaller boutiques as they are more likely to work towards a higher standard (their own good taste, rather than an abstract notion of marketing). And, for what it’s worth, that is often also the best way to look for security vendors. If you want overpriced and only marginally palatable vintages, go with the big names. You won’t be disappointed, but you also won’t be impressed, and in many cases (pun not intended) with the big names you might not even be able to get the job done.