Mexico's drug/war lords and the suffering farmers

  

Image from www.agoranews.org  Behind Mexico's Bloodshed Part 1&2

Some argue the North American Free Trade Agreement has played a part in the current bloodshed in Mexico by driving farmers off the land and fundamentally shifting the economy into the drug trade to the US. While some politicians in Mexico argue that the majority of those who've died were engaged in the drug trade, more and more evidence is appearing that ordinary citizens are being brutalised, tortured, and killed by both drug lords and the Mexican military sent to tackle the problem.

Molly Molloy in 'Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?' The Nation July 23 2010

" “armed commandos” dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008." 

Bruce Livesey in Behind Mexico's Bloodshed says:

"While free trade wiped out Mexico's traditional agriculture, the drug cartels moved in."

Laura Carlsen in 'The Mexican Farmers' Movement: Exposing the Myths of Free Trade'

International Forum on Globalization February 25, 2003

"The reemergent Mexican farmers' movement reflects not only the serious crisis in the country's rural sector but also a crisis of faith in free trade itself"

Scott Henson, writer of the Texan criminal justice system blog 'Grits for Breakfast' argues in his post 'Stop Digging: US policies enriching Mexican drug cartels' that a range of US policies including NAFTA and US agricultural subsidies have:

"combined to enrich Mexican cartels unimaginably, even financing military-grade weapons purchases, most of which is smuggled in from the United States"

Food is something we have to do as humans. When contrived arrangements cause the production of food to diminish and dependent populations are pressurised, those desperate for a market will go to violent extremes. 

Is it 'end game' time yet?

It seems pretty clear that ConspiracyWatch.net with their investigator Tom Retterbush seem to think the apparent rise in gun purchases in the USA is cause for concern. If they didn't, why would they title their story thusly.

"Record Gun Sales as Americans Prepare for Financial Collapse"

. 

They even mentioned people stockpiling non-perishables, petrol, and water. Seems pretty end-gamey to me.

A Worldwide Day's Worth of Food

A Worldwide Day's Worth of Food

This is great! What an amazing array of diets and liefestyles! So artfully arranged.

Found on twitter. The link to the photo essay (thanks @michaelpollan )and also yours truly operating as @empathiser. 

Powdered Egg Whites: The first experiment.

Well finally, as promised nearly a year ago, I have had a crack at a powdered egg whites dish. All the ingredients are either from my pantry or our little herb garden.

This was the end result. Delicate and very tasty corn cake ramekins topped with a grilled red pepper and Italian herb salad. I gave these to the girls from Stag who were recording in my house mate's home studio, and sweating it out to lay some new tracks on his valve driven reel to reel. I explained this blog to them and asked if they would appreciate a small meal like this if they found themselves in a war time situation. They said absolutely!

I learned a great deal from the process. According to Pace Farms who sell massive amounts of powdered egg whites for commercial use in Australia, powdered egg whites should be mixed at a rate of  7:1 water to egg white powder. I made a huge oversight and failed to consider just how little I needed for my purposes. I used 100grams of egg white powder when I only really needed 25grams which is the equivalent to 6 medium egg whites. This meant I had to continually move up to a larger mixing bowl and ended up wasting loads of egg white mix. 

While I did achieve soft peaks after lots of hand beating with my Swift Whip. I feel I haven't fully demonstrated the ability of powdered egg whites to adequately substitute for fresh egg whites. I feel I really do need to make a souffle or macaroons to prove the point though I feel access to a temperature controlled oven during The Age of Warlords would be limited. 

It was my hope to make fluffy corn cakes in a heavy based pan as a single burner is likely to be what most families will possess or afford to run. I will have another go at corn cakes and try fluffy pancakes as well. I'll need to get myself one of those dope dealers scales and some baggies to measure quantities.  

Corn Cake Ramekins topped with a Grilled Red Pepper and Italian Herb Salad

Corn cakes

300grams corn kernels

300grams creamed corn

25grams powdered egg white (equivalent to 6 medium egg whites)

powdered garlic

dried onions

chilli flakes

water

salt

Red pepper and herb salad

fire roasted red peppers

aged balsamic

extra virgin olive oil

fresh parsley, oregano, basil, and thyme 

Follow me on twitter @empathiser

The Future We Deserve an excellent project!

The Future We Deserve is a collaborated book about possible futures that takes account of the very real possibility of castastrophic climate change and economic disintegration. It will be a collection of writings from dreamers, pundits, thinkers, inventors, campaigners, and activists looking at ideas, answers, technologies, culture, feelings, economics, and social strategy for an uncertain future.
Vinay Gupta is the inventor of the Hexayurt (a portable, lightweight house deployed in Haiti after the recent earth quakes) and a curator of The Future We Deserve. He contacted me recently saying he loved the Age of Warlords blog title and asked me to write an essay for the book. Needless to say I am very excited as I have been following the Dark Mountain Project as it develops and would be glad to make a contribution to discussion around their challenging ideas.
The Future We Deserve book will be made reality using Creative Commons licencing and funded using Crowd Sourcing through Kickstarter

This is what I've been talking about! Terra Vivos

Holy crap! This is more than survivalism lite. This is the ultimate corporate expression of fear of The Age of Warlords.

While I would have hours of fun exploring the Vivos underground hotel style bunker website. I'm going to let you go there and explore it for yourself. I will tell you that they have 11 threat scenarios, one of them called Planet x - Nibiru where a rogue planet passes by causing the earths poles to shift.

I'd like to thank The Colbert Report 28/06/10 for bringing it to my attention.

Uncivilisation: "A crisis in the environment movement"

Flaccid. That's the word most often used to describe the debate between George Monbiot and Dougald Hine of The Dark Mountain Project at the inaugural Uncivilisation festival.

GeoMon admitted that "There is a crisis in the environment movement". He admitted that there is no one environmental movement but many movements working to similar aims. He also argued that not only are non-renewable resources going to last for longer than we think (tar sands and coal seam gas), but that the machinery of Industrial Capitalism is highly resilient and able to adapt to ensure it's survival. GeoMon argued that Industrial Capitalism has been drawing the lions share of great minds to itself for so long that it cannot help but have the advantage over all others when it comes to protecting its position.

Dougald Hine articulated the elements of the Dark Mountain manifesto but was out-gunned by GeoMon's depth of knowledge (he did most of the talking).

What came through strongly in the discussion was that the Dark Mountain Project is an environmental movement of sorts looking to push a different angle.

Despite GeoMon's erudite ways I still see the power of The Dark Mountain Project manifesto though I believe that they need to model the collapses in creative and well informed ways.

Audio recording of the discussion between Dougald Hine and George Monbiot.

http://www.archive.org/details/MonbiotHineUncivilisation2010

Vigorous/Vitriolic debate in the blogoshere.

http://dwighttowers.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/dire-mountain-more-abysmal-than-abyss-mal/

The inventor of the Hexayurt Vinay Gupta. Good discussion around GeoMon.

http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2010/05/31/a-church-full-of-underminers-and-george-monbiot/

GeoMon vs The Dark Mountain

This weekend may see the most significant public debate about the future of the earth and the West's role in helping to save the environment or at least saving some semblance of life after civilisation.


The first ever Dark Mountain Festival will be held in Llangollen north Wales and George Monbiot (GeoMon) who has had a running debate with the Dark Mountain Project will be there to debate in person. George has always insisted that the West take responsibility for environmental destruction and Dark Mountain Project founders Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine head an ever growing movement that is deeply critical of Western civilisation and recognises that we may well have missed our chance to stop catastrophic climate change. Both GeoMon and the Dark Mountain Project are highly critical of the West's actions in it's stewardship of the earth but differ over the message that should be delivered to the people.

I admire George Monbiot a lot. He lives his values and writes articulately, always providing useful references. Most importantly he doesn't fly around the world giving talks and attending conferences instead choosing limited travel by train. George has been the steady voice of eco-reason for me which is why this particular conflict is so significant. The Dark Mountain Project came into my field of view only a few months ago but given the changes in our knowledge of the current and imminent threats to the global climate and the obvious lack of international will to act, their point of view continues to become more and more relevant.

Musician Chris TT who has an association with the Dark Mountain Project sums up the debate quite well in this article. He argues that the essence of the debate is about the reluctance of environmentalists to admit they are privately pessimistic about the future and don't share this pessimism due to the perceived need to grow public optimism. I'm inclined to agree with him.

While I have much admiration for GeoMon I feel that he has got his knickers in a twist over this debate. In his May 10/2010 article in The Guardian GeoMon responds to the Dark Mountain thesis contending that Western civilisation is much more resilient than they assert listing a range of new fossil fuel resources and extraction methods. I didn't find his argument compelling. It seemed that he was arguing that the very practices that he rails against would sustain the system he knows to be the problem.

Paul Kingsnorth in his May 19/2010 article The need for growth makes a strong argument for how utterly dependent Western civilisation is on economic growth and that such growth is necessarily dependent on eco-destructive practices. Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine sharpen their critique of the green movement in their reply to GeoMon entitled The environmental movement needs to stop pretending asserting that more than anything else our lifestyles need to change.

I find this debate to be exciting and extremely important! While I feel that the Dark Mountain Project tend to grandstand a little and GeoMon is defending what may well be a lost cause I feel that between them they have begun to flesh out the defining issue of our age. What seems a little amusing here is how GeoMon comes out looking a bit like an establishment figure.

The Dark Mountain Project have taken a very radical position which I find attractive. There is something very positive to me about new culture and contingency plans for a future that lack of political will seems to make very possible. While I wish for global cooperation and renewable energy solutions for the future I very much see the need for a critique of Western civilisation and the world that it has delivered to us.

My food hero!

I was watching the Sri Lanka and Bali installment of Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey tonight when he stopped to mention the impact of the civil war which was in full swing at the time of filming. He said something then that sums up my sentiments exactly "Food is about good times even if there are terrible things going on all around you".

Despite his tendency to be accident prone and rather awkward in the studio kitchen I love Rick Stein. There is a simplicity to his approach to food that reflects his fundamental decency and capacity to relate to ordinary people. I have his book Mediterranean Escapes and have watched many of his television programmes like Food Heroes and have sensed in both that his recipes reflect the connections made with real people.

I think his works also reflect the camaraderie he has with his production team. I can feel the sheer pleasure he takes in being with people while they do all manner food related activities. I get a real sense that he and his production team are able to put individuals and the general public at ease while shooting.

It came as no surprise when I heard Rick utter that wonderful quote. It tells me that the lives and conditions of ordinary people are not far from his mind.