The first thing that I thought of when I heard that Perry was going to send the National Guard to assist Border Patrol was the kid who was killed when The Military was sent to do the same thing back in 1997:
Esequiel Hernández, Jr.
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And the photo is from the CBP Flickr account:
Customs and Border Protection Border Patrol Agents in Line Formation on Motor Bikes Tucson, AZ - U.S Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol Agents in line formation on motor bikes.
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OK. My bad.
The real weapons are between our ears and at the ends of our hands. If we use them wisely, we could likely prevent others from communicating with their evil henchmen and from using their killing machines. It’s a race through our heads with crypto and code to see who will control the conversation and the have access to truth.
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Ah, I see.
I saw “radiation” and “pacemaker” and “96 year old”, and I immediately thought: Betavoltaic pacemakers from the 1970s. I thought there’s still a few people walking around with atomic tickers, but after a little research, I’ve now discovered that those devices ran on Promethium-147 which has a half-life of a tad over 2.5 years. I thought they used something like tritium, which has a half-life of 12 years, and is a beta emitter, so you can go the completely direct-to-electricity route.
But upon further research, it would appear that tritium would be impractical as a power source due to the low energy of its fission products. It doesn’t emit anything that can be conventionally detected if the source were implanted in a human chest cavity, just electrons with a few keV that can’t even make it through the epidermis and antineutrinos, which have a 50/50 chance of making it through a lightyear of lead and barely interact at all.
Anyway, good looking out, and thanks for the correction.
Didn’t some pacemakers run on plutonium-238? Half-life of 87.7 years. It is not a betavoltaic source but a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, but still…
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Found it! Gotta love LANL: Facts about pacemakers
Also comes with link to a handy PDF. The PDF’s creation date was September of 2011, so conceivably, there are still people walking around with PU-238 powered pacemakers.
There are still a number of people in the U.S. who have nuclear powered pacemakers, which need to be disposed of properly upon removal.
One of the example photos is of a Soviet (CCCP) model with 1990 on it and claiming to radiate at a rate of 3 Curies. Conceivably there are other people who have these and could still be alive.
That’s the amount of material inside as-new, defined by activity. In this case it is some 162 mg; so about 150, because Russians.
The radiation is mostly alpha and it is shielded with the device’s shell.
(The beauty of wikipedia. A value in an otherwise convenient table is missing, so it can be searched elsewhere and added in and then referred to.)
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When I was working at the University of Michigan hospital about 10 years ago there were still quite a few people who received one of the plutonium pacemakers out in the wild (they do their best to track them to make sure that they get safely recovered).
It’s like having a deep space probe in your chest 
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