Horrifying yet Telling

I've got a whole lot of thoughts about women, employment, wages, food and obesity and how they all tie together, but in the mean time, let me give you two reasonably horrifying images that kind of sum up the problems, as I see it, of modern American life as exemplified by Wal-Mart and McDonalds. 

One is a map showing the insidious spread of Wal-Mart - someone on my message board likened it to watching a fungus take over America, and given the way I feel about Wal-Mart, I'd say that's a fairly apt description.  Click and behold in horror as the green dots take over the nation. 

The other is this picture (taken from Strangemaps@Wordpress), which shows the geographical distribution of every McDonalds in the contiguous 48 lower states - and brings to us the startling fact that the furthest anyone is from a McDonalds is somewhere in the middle of South Dakota, where the nearest Mickey D's is 145 miles away. 

Think about that.