The New Adventures of Horatio Bootblack

While I’ve written about US-Mexican border politics before, I even did a Masters thesis on border politics, the state of affairs today in Northern Mexico is rapidly spiraling out of control. As an example, this picture from a recent ABC article in particular really struck me–an image of silver and gold plated and diamond encrusted assault rifles–seized from the Sinaloa cartel by the Mexican military in 2010. This is the hidden side of the Mexican drug wars that Americans rarely see or hear about.

I can’t even begin to imagine the reality of someone who would want something like this, and who has no problem either personally executing–or order the execution–of thousands of people every year. To really get a sense of the immensity of this reality, consider the following stats from the ABC article:

“The trade is worth between $19 billion and $29 billion a year, according to the FBI, and has resulted in the deaths of at least 50,000 people since 2006. And the violence is escalating. According to a Wall Street Journal report, 22,000 people have been killed since 2010 – that is one death every 35 minutes.”

While I’m not one to advocate a utilitarian approach to life, if I were, I think the math calculations would work out so something like the following:

Time Period: 2006-2012 = 6 years
Death Count (2006-2012) = 50,000
Revenue (per year) = $19-29 billion – Let’s assume the low end for now ($19 B)
Revenue over time (2006-2012) = $114 B   or ($114,000,000,000)
50,000 deaths (6 yrs) / $114,000,000,000
1 human death = $2,280,000 in profit

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As Madeleine Rubenstein noted in a recent post at the Earth Institute, one of the hidden killers of the industrial world, as well as a major point-source of CO2 pollution, is concrete and its related production processes:

“Cement is the primary ingredient in concrete, which in turn forms the foundations and structures of the buildings we live and work in, and the roads and bridges we drive on. Concrete is the second most consumed substance on Earth after water.  On average, each year, three tons of concrete are consumed by every person on the planet.”

Abandoned cement plant outside Ironton, OH.

I suspect that most people don’t even think about concrete in their daily lives, yet for those of working in various environmental fields, it’s hard to get past such all-encompassing modern industrial materials. There are few critical resources that are so embedded in our daily lives as cement–the quick ones that come to mind are hydrocarbon derivatives (such as plastic and gasoline), wood products (lumber, paper, OSB) and iron ore (stainless steel, copper and various heavy metals).

As you can tell from reading the EI post, cement is really a nasty material to base an entire lifestyle on, and it is one that is only growing worse by the year, as all projections have more and more cement in the equation, not less. Read More

So after a day of marching, rallies, speakers and events here in NYC, what did the May 1 General Strike change? That’s the question that’s been on my mind since I went to bed last night, and is still with me now. And to be honest, I don’t think anything is changed. OWS has shown it can still turn out a sizeable crowd for a major day of action, but it also shows that much of OWS has run out of creative political steam. But most fundamentally, it has exposed two key problems:

1. Organized labor is not committed to a radical transformation of society along the lines that many in OWS have discussed and pushed for, yet the movement continue to pretend that unions are a make or break alliance
2. The tactics of OWS have grown stale, predictable and ineffective to the point of almost being comical

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A Brave New World doesn’t really even begin to capture it all…

There has been a slow but stead growth in the logistics of surveillance, whether that be of people or of objects. First there was the shipping label, then the UPC or bar code, and now we have RFID, or radio frequency identification. The image to the left is of an RFID chip next to a grain of rice, giving you a size of the devices we are talking about. Some are even smaller at this point.

Whether used for commerical, military, public or educational purposes, the slow but steady growth of various surveillance technologies and their homogenizing features are becoming more and more a part of our daily lives, even if we are not consciously aware of it. The following set of videos, starting with the #26 in this playlist on Transportation and Logistics, explores some of these issues in more detail, as well as their implications for the future of society. Enjoy.

 YouTube meet Google meet Me

Until next time…keep calm and carry on.

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As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, the Anthropocene is a concept coined a little over a decade ago by scientists to describe the massive scale of changes happening to the Earth’s biosphere directly linked to human actions. This past week provided one of the best examples of what the Anthropocene looks like in practice: record breaking warm weather, historically unprecedented catastrophic weather, massive crop disasters from exotic insect threats, and a decade of massive natural disasters all linked to human activity.

Welcome to the Anthropocene, where up is down and down is up, and catastrophe is all around. Read More