Subject: Sorting Thru The Dross
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shook up his tenuous “Make America Healthy Again” coalition during a congressional hearing on Tuesday when he announced that he wants to ensure every American is equipped with a fitness-tracking “wearable” by the end of Trump’s second term.

“My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years,” Kennedy said. He went on to reveal that a major government-funded ad campaign to promote wearables—a category of digital devices that includes Fitbits, Apple Watches, and similar devices—is in the works.

This is not what many of Kennedy’s most devoted fans want to hear. And, to a certain degree I think they have a point.

The MAHA discontents’ opposition to the government pushing fitness wearables centers on a few issues, ranging from the crazy (wearables are the “mark of the beast” from the Book of Revelation), to the unproven but harmless (wearables generate energy at damaging frequencies), to the pretty reasonable (wearables raise data-security and privacy concerns).

Taken together, Kennedy’s endorsement of MEGAFTA (the Make Everyone Get A Fitness Tracker Agenda) provoked a wave of backlash from leading figures of MAHA.

“Horrifying,” prominent anti-vaccine podcaster Shannon Joy wrote on X.

“Wearables are spy devices,” fringe health figure Mike Adams, who has often appeared on InfoWars, posted, adding that the devices would be “medical shackles” fit for prisoners of a “medical police state.”

Several of Kennedy’s critics are concerned that the federal government could use data from health trackers to impose new medical restrictions on people deemed to be unhealthy. And while that might seem extreme, Kennedy himself has called for people with health problems ranging from opioid addiction to ADHD to be sent to “wellness farms”—exactly the kind of thing mass health data collection could, in theory, help facilitate

I wore a Fitbit for years, then an Apple watch (finally sidelined it because it was too distracting). Now wear a Polar. I won’t go into the relative merits of each; there are plenty of online reviews that offer comparisons.

I don’t come close to pushing the limits of my Polar’s capabilities, but sanity and reducing anxiety over every damned thing I do has led me to track only two things- heart rate and steps.


Strangely, I don’t even use the Polar to track steps; it’s too inaccurate for that. Instead, I use an old Omron pedometer that I’ve had for 15 years and keep in my hip pocket

I work in the yard, walk, and cycle. I’d swim, but the gym I go to doesn’t have a lap pool….

I used to keep spreadsheets on my performance, but in the wake of bypass surgery (13 years ago) and a hip replacement (2 years ago) I’ve decided to forego “excellence” in favor of “good enough to stay alive and remain active and able to negotiate life with a minimum of difficulty.”

But that Polar fitness tracker, in fact, most fitness trackers, can upload personal data to the cloud and I can understand peoples’ reticence to wear one.

And RFKJr HAS talked about sending overweight people to fat farms, or people with psychological conditions to rehabilitation camps of various sorts,….

In some ways, RFKJr. represents the intersection of the far left with the far right. He may intend his “command” that Americans wear fitness trackers is “for their own good”, but it also represents another step in the direction of population contol.

Do you think population control is beyond the pale for today’s Republican Party?

See attempts by some state legislatures to track women’s menstrual cycles.