Short article from TIME about—get this—a violent Mexican Fundamentalist Christian methamphetamine cartel putting billions of dollars of crude crank on the American black market—about 100 tons—each year. The Obama Administration has called La Familia “a significant foreign narcotics trafficker” and Attorney General Eric Holder singled out their “depravity.”
Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s military push-back against the traffickers has had little effect. On April 24, 2010, La Familia made a bold attack on the car of Mexico’s public safety secretary, Minerva Bautista. But forget fighting the government, that’s for the little guys. The praying La Familia cartel wants to become the government by putting their own candidates into political office:
Mexico’s newest drug cartel, and certainly the most bizarre, is La Familia Michoacana, a violent but Christian fundamentalist narco-gang based in the torrid Tierra Caliente region of western Michoacan state. The group is infamous for methamphetamine smuggling, lopping off enemies’ heads and limbs, and massacring police and soldiers. (Most recently, on June 14, a band of Familia gunmen ambushed a federal police convoy in Michoacan, killing 12.) Yet La Familia’s leader, Nazario Moreno — aka El Mas Loco, or The Craziest One — has written his own bible, and his 1,500 minions hold prayer meetings before doing their grisly work.
La Familia, which has started to expand beyond Michoacan, poses more than theological problems for Mexican President Felipe Calderon. His 3½–year-long military offensive against drug traffickers, a period that has seen 23,000 gangland-style murders in Mexico, looks increasingly on the ropes. And amidst it all, investigators tell TIME, La Familia is establishing a troubling new narco-business model: It doesn’t merely buy off officials, it puts its own candidates in power. “Other cartels just pay off the political structure in order to be able to do their business,” says a Michoacan investigator, who estimates the group controls 83 of the state’s 113 municipal governments. “La Familia is making itself the political structure.”
Last fall, a DEA sting snared over 300 Familia operatives working in America. This is really fucking Sci-Fi isn’t it? Sci-Fi meets Breaking Bad, I should say…
Mexico’s Meth Warriors (TIME)
Photo essay of the Mexican drug war by Shaul Schwarz (TIME)
Fascinating photo essay seen on Time.com that shows what 12 popular alcoholic drinks look like under a microscope. How ironic that these photographs, taken at Florida State University, are so amazingly psychedelic! Above sake, below tequila.
What booze looks like under a microscope (Time)
Word from a Fab Five Freddy tweet and a post on his own MySpace blog is that New York hip-hop futurist Rammellzee has passed away at age 50 from as-yet-unrevealed causes. (@149st features a great, fact-filled interview with the man.) Emerging as a teen graffiti artist in the mid-‘70s, bombing the A-train from its last stop in his Far Rockaway, Queens hometown, Rammell ended up like many of his talented peers—a multidisciplinary creative icon submerged in the nascent metropolitan hip-hop scene. He first surfaced as a persona to the world in amazing fashion, dressed in trenchcoat and wielding a sawed-off shotgun as he MC’ed for the Rock Steady Crew in the Amphitheatre scene of hip-hop’s famous first film, 1982’s Wild Style.
Although I was too young to ever see them live, The Germs loomed large in my musical upbringing. They made deliciously evil sounding records
As you can see, London artist collective Liberate Tate were at it on Monday, letting the Tate Modern art museum know during their BP-feting summer party that taking sponsorship money from the oil giant is unacceptable. Don’t be misled by the occasional media reports of indignant Englanders bristling about the supposed anti-British nature of BP bashing. While we in the US have been driving around barely knowing what “BP” stands for, UK orgs like Art Not Oil have been working since 2004 to call attention to BP’s and Shell’s beneficent use of arts sponsorship to divert public attention away from their actual activities.
And now you can spill on the Tate yourself!
Image via Zazzle
It would be impossible for me to summarize research psychologist Dr. Jesse Bering’s sprawling essay, One reason why humans are special and unique: We masturbate. A lot, so I won’t even try. However, amongst the more interesting things discussed in the article—trust me, it’s a great read—is the fact that most men basically need to spill their seed, drain the vein, etc, at minimum, every 72 hours. Pair that notion with studies that found women’s bodies rejected sperm that had overstayed its welcome in the male testes (had not been flushed out) by 48 hours.
Masturbation a biological imperative? Looks that way. As Bering points out in the article, imagine if only our parents had known this! The male libido has been exonerated!
But as the article is, as I wrote above, difficult to summarize, here are the final paragraphs, going straight to the punch line, so to speak, where Bering ties together all that had come before quite nicely:
The Psychological Bulletin article on sexual fantasy is chockfull of interesting facts, and those with a more scholarly interest in this subject should read it themselves. [...] But Leitenberg and Henning’s piece was written over fifteen years ago, summarizing even older research. The reason this is important is because it was still long before the “mainstreaming” of today’s Internet pornography scene, where zero is left to the imagination.
And so I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?
I’m not saying porn isn’t progress, but I do think that over the long run it could turn out to be a real evolutionary game-changer.
One reason why humans are special and unique: We masturbate. A lot. (Scientific American)
Thank you Paul Gallagher!
