Kim Jong Un’s aunt fled to the USA where she has political asylum

I just read an article about how an aunt of North Korean dictator Kim Jon Un managed to flee to the US and was granted political asylum. She had surgery to change her appearance and lives in secret somewhere in America.

Its funny, because I live in a city that is so multi-cultural, and I’ve often thought about how it would be if leaders of other countries ended up living in some neighborhood here, just like the thousands or tens-of-thousands of other citizens from their countries.

For example, there’s a fairly large Russian population here. I saw a guy driving past me today when I was on my bike in a nice sports car and he almost looked like he could be Vladimir Putin.

Maybe if people like Putin and Kim Jon Un actually could move out here and live in a neighborhood with others of the same nationality their perspective would change. Perhaps they could use their enormous wealth to help out the immigrant communities here and could also find other ways to contribute.

One other note – I have to say this city is really remarkable. I went to my polling place a while ago and staffing it were two dedicated people who looked a bit tired and had been there since early in the morning. One, a young asian-american girl. The other, a middle-aged african-american woman. Here where I live this is totally normal.

But you have to think that its not this way in many parts of the world.

I admire the dedication of people who work at polling places. They earn relatively little money for a very long day’s work, but it is through people like them that makes democracy work.

One final thing about voting: I walked into the polling center and asked if she needed my ID to verify who I was before voting and she said no, its not necessary. This is wrong. Voting is a vital function in democracy and having no form of identity verification is very wrong.

Imagine if people tried to conduct transactions online without there being what is called strong identity? It would be a nightmare. There would not be much e-commerce going on at all. All transactions require identity. The more important a transaction, the greater the importance of identity.

It is absolutely wrong that voting is not taken seriously to the point that basically anyone could easily committ fraud. Perhaps it testifies to how broken our democracy actually is that this is the case.

Anyone who cares about democracy would want there to be identity verification. The most obvious form should just be a driver’s license or state ID. Its ridiculous to not require one of these for voting.