Big Picture

... the human dream, doesn't mean shit to a tree - Jefferson Airplane

I was checking out pictures of our planet and came across this NASA shot today which I have pumped up a tad in Photoshop. Spruce up the earth a little bit. Even found a way to shake it up with the radial blur tool but it made me a touch seasick.

I was ruminating today about the general sad state affairs around terra firma and you know we really don't have it so bad here in the ol' US of A. At least compared to some of the true shitholes like Burma, North Korea, China or Iran. Iran, where according to the last talking beard, god wants the ruling regime to shoot all dissenters. Sounds reasonable to me.

Can you imagine living in a country where you really did have no freedom to speak? Now left wing fashionistas might chortle and suggest that our country is but a step away but that is bullshit. In many places globally, it is real and everyday. A "subversive" was just sentenced to five years in the slam in that wonderful utopia, North Vietnam for crimes against the state.

Tran Anh Kim, 60, was accused of "working to overthrow the state" by joining the Democratic Party of Vietnam, publishing pro-democracy articles on the Internet, and joining Bloc 8406, an organization that promotes a multiparty state.

The Thai government is repatriating thousands of Hmong to Laos where they face similar draconian retribution.

It is possible and unfortunately probable that leaders of the current dissent in Iran will get snuffed out for daring to raise their heads up and speak out against the terrible regime. If you are going to dissent against the man, you better have a plan for taking him out entirely. Autocratic regimes don't tend to have a lot of sympathy towards dangers to their power base.

I read the recent reports about the Russian billionaire who was killed in jail along with the cute KBG assassinations of Russian journalists with horror and disdain for Putin's Russia.

Imagine living in Benin or Togo, where approximately 200 thousand children are sold into slavery each year to neighboring Nigeria and Gabon.

Find a place in the Arab world where you can practice the religion of your choice, not your birth, without fear of jihad. Imagine being a woman in Saudi Arabia, forbidden to drive and hidden behind a bhurka?

Saw where Hugo Chavez is threatening to nationalize Toyota in Venezuela. He is upset that they haven't made significant technology transfers, since they use the plant there to mainly snap components together. Toyota says that there isn't a required supply chain and the market is too small. He's threatening to bring in the chinese. Sayonara. Good for Toyota.

My point in bringing all this negativity up is this. Maybe the fact that our land is so fractured and divided politically is a good thing. Four year election, next cycle let us f*ck it up. Maybe the United States benefits by the centrifugal drag of the red state/blue state division that doesn't give the social engineers and fanatics the unbridled freedom to have their way? We act as a check on each other's madness.

Just wondering...