"Authored by the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), the Joint Operating Environment (
JOE 2008,
pdf) outlines a strategic framework and forecasts possible threats and opportunities that will challenge the future joint force." One portion picked out by the media: Mexico and Pakistan are the two countries most likely to undergo "
sudden collapse".
[more inside]
posted by 445supermag
on Jan 15, 2009 -
7 comments
Mexican Aerophones are wind musical instruments or artifacts that can generate sounds or noise with air jets and one or several resonator chambers of globular, tubular and other shapes. Roberto Velasquez, a mechanical engineer, has
recreated some of these aerophones. Example sounds:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5 (.wav files)
posted by dhruva
on Jul 1, 2008 -
6 comments
The Serenader.
Roberto’s long moon-shadow stretches absurdly across the walls of the house as he plucks prettily at his guitar while his drunk client swaggers like a cat... Like many men in San Cristóbal, Roberto holds two jobs. At night he plays and sings the love songs that men use to woo women; in the day he teaches guitar to young men who may someday be his competition. Of the two jobs, serenading is far more lucrative.
posted by amyms
on Apr 18, 2008 -
3 comments
"Moralistic, prejudiced, racist, misogynist, manipulative, sexist, daring, exciting, critical, sarcastic and passionate - these are just a few adjectives that commonly describe Mexico's most widely-read publication:
the historieta."
[more inside]
posted by jbickers
on Apr 10, 2008 -
4 comments
The Mexican kitchen's Islamic connection :"When Mexico’s leading writer, Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz, arrived in New Delhi in 1962 to take up his post as ambassador to India, he quickly ran across a culinary puzzle. Although Mexico and India were on opposite sides of the globe, the brown, spicy, aromatic curries that he was offered in India sparked memories of Mexico’s national dish, mole (pronounced MO-lay). Is mole, he wondered, “an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce ?” How could this seeming coincidence of “gastronomic geography” be explained ?"
posted by dhruva
on Apr 9, 2008 -
53 comments
Like a windshield cowboy ... never ridden on a house says the guy from Mexico ... Vincente Fox also says Bush is "quite simply the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life".
Interestingly though, around the world this story is reported differently. In India he is "
petrified of horses", while Germany just says he's
scared. It seems most American news just covers it as "doesn't like horses". As the real cowboys I grew up with would say "all hat, no horse".
posted by Kickstart70
on Oct 14, 2007 -
39 comments
On November 25th, 2006, Valentin Elizalde was killed in the city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Elizalde, a singer of a style of song known as the
narcocorrido, was warned not to step foot in Tamaulipas because of a video for his song “A mis Enemigos,"
which showed footage of (WaPo article) the deaths of drug traffickers from the
Gulf Cartel. In
December of 2006, Javier Morales Gómez was killed in Huetamo, Michoacán while talking on his cell phone. Morales Gómez was the singer for Los Implacables del Norte, another group closely associated with
narcocorridos. The most famous death of a narcocorrido writer/singer has to be
Chalino Sanchez, killed in 1992, and spawning several imitators known as
Los Chalinillos that are still prevalent 15 years after Sanchez's death. (
previously) [more inside]
posted by sleepy pete
on May 25, 2007 -
17 comments
Just Coffee is a vertically-integrated coffee cooperative with a mission to provide the training and resources to create a sustainable small-scale international coffee company fully owned and controlled by the coffee growers. Could they also provide a model
solution for the immigration problem?
posted by carsonb
on Feb 18, 2007 -
17 comments
Mexican Day of the Dead, only with a twist: in Pomuch, in the Mayan area in Southeastern Mexico, Mayans celebrate their dead by digging out their remains, and cleaning them. Photos
here. The regular Day of the Dead of the dead festivities have been discussed previously on MetaFilter
here,
here, and
here. For those of you who may want to practice,
this is a story
en español. The link to the pictures might be NSFW.
posted by micayetoca
on Nov 2, 2006 -
21 comments
Mexico City post-election protests, which began on July 30th at the instigation of López Obrador, former mayor and alleged "loser" of the July 2 federal election, now cover a
12-kilometer (7.5 - mile) stretch of Paseo de la Reforma,
one of the main arteries of one of the world's largest cities. Some see it as a
party, others see it as
ridiculous.
In any case, a crisis of legitimacy is at hand, as all eyes await the announcement, due by Sept. 6 from
"Trife",
the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary, which will either decide the winner, or annul the result and call for new elections.
With partisans of Obrador already claiming that the results of the recent partial recount
suggest systematic fraud, it's unlikely that a smooth resolution is going to come any time soon.
posted by dinsdale
on Aug 23, 2006 -
22 comments
Mexico's election: now being recounted, but
some are saying it was stolen with our help. Many countries in Latin and South America have been moving to the left lately,
following in the footsteps of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile. Argentina actually caught us messing with things during their election, too. Exit polls in Mexico (as in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004) showed a lead for the more leftist (relatively) candidate, and for those who scoff at using exit polls as evidence--in 2004,
US Republican Senator Richard Lugar, in Kiev, cited the divergence of exit polls and official polls as solid evidence of “blatant fraud” in the vote count in Ukraine. As a result, the Bush Administration refused to recognize the Ukraine government’s official vote tally. So, honest election, or what?
posted by amberglow
on Jul 3, 2006 -
65 comments
The Mexican General Elections are held tomorrow, and the campaign has been extremely
fierce and dirty. Long-time favorite center-leftist
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the
Party of the Democratic Revolution, who had been running with an up to 10 percentage point lead earlier this spring, is down to a 2-3 percentage point lead in the last polls before the poll blackout started on the 23rd of June. His main opponent is
Felipe Calderón, of the right-wing
National Action Party, whose
Vicente Fox, an ex-executive of the Coca-Cola company, is the current president. But attacks against López Obrador
started several years ago, when he was the head of government in Mexico City, as right-wing interests and the upper classes saw his populist rhetoric and support from the huge lower classes as a threat to their privilege and way of life. They compare him to
Castro,
Chavez and
Morales, while his politics may in reality be closer to those of
Kirchner,
Lula,
Vázquez and
Bachelet. López Obrador has accused Calderón of
corruption and nepotism, while Calderón has declared López Obrador a
danger to Mexico. Meanwhile, the US would much prefer a right-wing president in Mexico, and some
track that to the right wing's willingness to privatize the national oil monopoly, and of course,
most of Latin America has been turning left lately.
posted by Joakim Ziegler
on Jul 1, 2006 -
15 comments
Nueva Orleans Before Katrina, Hispanics accounted for 3 percent of New Orleans’ population, with just 1,900 Mexicans showing up in the 2004 Census. No one knows for certain how many new ones have arrived, but estimates put the number between 10,000 and 50,000.
posted by ColdChef
on May 9, 2006 -
105 comments
