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The Big Picture

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Cool new blog from the Boston Globe selects one huge, compelling picture to illustrate the day’s news. As you might guess, this one is from Afghanistan.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 7:28 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Photo Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “The Big Picture”

  1. #1 |  Mikestermike |  June 8th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    Wasn’t this from The wizard of Oz?

    Poppies! ……………….

  2. #2 |  Matthew |  June 8th, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    Looks like a lucrative agricultural enterprise to me. More power to the farmer, I say.

  3. #3 |  claude |  June 8th, 2008 at 9:57 pm

    Their pot is pretty good too. ;-)

  4. #4 |  Nick Gallias |  June 8th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

    Excellent site! Thanks for the heads up.

  5. #5 |  Nobody |  June 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am

    Gee, I wonder what those poppies will be used for, and where they’ll end up going.

    I wonder what those fields would be growing if we didn’t have our little “War On Drugs”. Probably corn. ;) Or maybe poppies still.

  6. #6 |  UCrawford |  June 9th, 2008 at 3:41 pm

    Sadly, poppies are the best crop for them to grow. They’re pretty hardy, the product they’re turned into is less perishable than any other crops they can grow (which is pretty important when your country’s secondary “roads” are usually nothing more than goat trails so it takes forever to get your goods to market), and they bring a big profit. For all the people who complain about the Afghans growing drugs unmolested I’d ask “What else are they going to grow that’s going to be a better product for them?”

    Not that the average Afghan farmer really has a choice in the matter anyway…most of the local officials have control over what’s being grown in their region and there’s no way that they’re going to get rid of their biggest cash crop (and source of personal revenue) because a bunch of outsiders have moral objections. So long as drugs are illegal and there’s more money in that than other crops, poppies will be prevalent no matter who’s trying to carry out eradication.

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