Posted: 11 Jun 2010 01:38 PM PDT

"Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields," by Charles Bowden (Avalon, $27.50)

Like a reincarnation of the original Old Gringo, author Charles Bowden is drawn irresistibly, even inexplicably, to the violence and mystery of Mexico. And never before have the flames of death burned so brightly.

Bowden prowls the graceless bloody streets of Ciudad Juarez.

Here, in what is officially described as a turf war between two drug cartels, more than 5,000 people have been killed since 2008, despite the heavy presence of ninja-suited Mexican soldiers and federal police.

The slaughter is random and unrelenting. Women, children and gangsters die together.

In a single day late last month, 22 people were killed. Days earlier, six federal policemen were gunned down.

This spring, two Americans linked to the U.S. Consulate died in daytime ambushes.

And in Juarez, the particulars of each death are limited only by the imagination and blood lust of the killers, as torture, mutilation and decapitations are commonplace.

Nothing is sacred and safety is nowhere. People are slaughtered at drug clinics, funeral processions and high school parties.

Bowden, 64, who has ventured deeper into this modern version of Dante's Inferno than any other reporter, returns with a message straight from the lowest circle of hell.

"There are two Mexicos," he asserts in his latest book "Murder City." "There is the one reported by the U.S. press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war against the evil forces of the drug world and using the incorruptible Mexican army as his warriors. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, and laws and is seen by the U.S. government as a sister republic. It does not exist," he writes.

"There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed," he writes.

It is the latter Mexico that informs Bowden's reporting, a place where the basic norms of civilization -- law and order, decent employment, a good education, and public institutions that work -- are cruel fictions.

And the "so-called War on Drugs," he writes, is the biggest fairy tale of all.

The culprits, according to Bowden, are the Americans with their insatiable drug appetite, and the Mexican government and the kings of the global economy, who together have made Ciudad Juarez, and much of Mexico, into a soul-killing sweatshop.

For the average poor Mexican stuck in Juarez, the options are stark: "You have two choices. You're going to be straight, get that job in an American factory in Juarez, work

5-1/2 days a week for 60 or 70 bucks, even though no one can live on such a wage," he writes.

"Or, you are going to take that ride, join a gang, learn to flash the sign, do little errands for guys with more power, get some of that money that flows through certain hands, snort some powder, and have the women eating out of your hand for a few hours in a discotheque," he says.

You end up dead either way, but one choice allows you to live like a king for a few years, if you are lucky, as opposed to surviving for awhile longer.

Bowden takes us into this hell hole called Juarez, introducing us to Miss Sinaloa, a beauty queen who went to the wrong party, and to El Pastor, a preacher who tries to save the discarded and the damned.

He brings us Armando Rodriguez, a reporter who, like so many other Mexican journalists, was slain with complete impunity, and to Emilio Gutierrez Soto, another reporter, who when threatened with death by the Mexican Army, sought asylum in the United States, only to spend seven months in a federal lockup.

Bowden's stunning tour de force is the interview with an unnamed Mexican drug gang hit man. The "sicario's" unflinching personal narrative of murder without end would have chilled even Dante's bold blood.

This is a disturbing and important book, one that questions the official line on Mexico and the war on drugs. That said, it is disturbing on another level which seriously diminishes its value.

As the book's main character, Bowden speaks with an exaggeratedly macho and melodramatic voice, and he ends up being the book's main weakness.

His pulp fiction narrative leaves an almost voyeuristic, pornographic feel, as it lingers over the ugly details of gang rapes, exquisite tortures and other atrocities.

The reader would have been better served with less Bowden, more editing and more Juarez.

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Eight Keys to Customers Wallets - Associated Content

Posted: 11 Jun 2010 11:50 AM PDT

How You Can Understand What Motivates Customers to Buy

Not egotistic, but egocentric. That means centered on the ego or self. Ask someone to do something and answer that person's unstated question, "What's in it for me?" On a deeper level, the question may be, "How does this give me feelings of personal worth?" We all see the world and everything in it in terms of how it relates to us personally. That's why features must be translated into benefits.

Customers are unpredictable.

Even professionals who ponder the psychology of selling can never predict with any certainty how people will act in a real-world situation. The equation is too complex. One can formulate hypotheses about why people do what they do. One can ask people what they think and like. But in the end, the results to your tests are the only data you can trust. So test and keep testing.

Customers seek fulfillment.

Love. Wealth. Glory. Comfort. Safety. People are naturally dissatisfied and spend their lives searching for intangibles. At its simplest, creating selling messages is a matter of showing customers how a particular product or service - or even a particular cause - fulfills one or more of their needs. Remember that motivations always have deeper motivations. You seek wealth for security. You seek security because you fear change. You fear change because - well, you get the idea.

Customers usually follow the crowd.

We look to others for guidance, especially when we are uncertain about something. We tacitly ask, "What do others think about this? What do others feel? What do others do?" Then we act accordingly. When lots of people do something, that thing becomes more than acceptable; it becomes desirable. This is the one reason why testimonials and case histories are so influential.

Customers fear loss.

In general, the fear of loss is more powerful than the hope of gain. This fear includes losing something you have and losing the chance to have something you want. By properly manipulating the instinct to avoid loss, a businessperson can trigger a favorable response to your offer. But don't turn every appeal into fear. Fear is powerful but tricky. A positive approach is usually easier to pull off.

Now, all we need is customers.

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The Da Vinci Code is Fiction - Farewell to Mayberry - Newsblaze.com

Posted: 11 Jun 2010 01:52 PM PDT

By Joe Sobran

Newsweek ended 2005 with a cover story hyping the forthcoming movie version of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's huge bestseller, to be directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks. The novel is a brilliant thriller with an absurd anti-Catholic premise: that the Church has been trying to hide the truth about Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene (and their offspring) for two thousand years, which would be quite a feat; but the facts have been known to a few people anyway, one of whom was Leonardo Da Vinci, whose ostensibly religious paintings subtly subverted the Church's teaching. When anyone starts catching on, the Church resorts to murder to keep the truth hidden. The dirty work is handled by Opus Dei, one of whose priests has recruited a crazed albino to knock off a scholar who is hot on the trail.

The story begins when the victim's nude body is discovered at the Louvre, and a Harvard professor (who happens to be lecturing in Paris) is wrongly suspected. He must not only escape the police but solve the crime and the larger mystery, in which he is assisted by a young Frenchwoman, a brilliant cryptologist, who turns out to be a remote descendant of Jesus.

If you think all this is a little implausible, wait until you meet the British historian the hero turns to for assistance. He explains that nobody ever claimed divinity for Jesus until 325 A.D., when the emperor Constantine foisted the idea on everyone and it was adopted by the Church, though we never learn just why the Church existed at all for three centuries, if its central doctrine hadn't been thought up yet. We are, however, informed by this learned historian that the Church has been hostile to women throughout its existence, and during the Middle Ages burned much of the female population of Europe - several millions of women - as witches, apparently without protest from the male population.

All this is not so much bigoted as just psychotic; but Brown boasts that it's all meticulously researched, and that only the modern characters are fictions. In an earlier novel, he disclosed that the Church had executed Copernicus for his theory, so it may be time for him to hire a new research assistant with access to, say, a children's encyclopedia.

Nevertheless, millions of readers are buying into this nonsense and thanking Brown for his illumination of the history which the Church had kept hidden from them. Among these is Howard, who says he loves the novel and is not toning down its controversial theses in his film. Many of us first knew Howard as Andy Griffith's little boy, Opie, little suspecting his latent intellectual depths. He has obviously put Mayberry far behind him.

The Triumph of the Darwiniacs

Dan Brown's stunning success should give pause to anyone who has ever assumed that literacy is the antidote for ignorance, error, and superstition. In an age when most of us have been to college, you'd think there were some limits to popular gullibility. I am not myself a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, but I wouldn't have expected to be widely believed if I wrote, for example, that Lincoln was actually a werewolf. Maybe I was mistaken. I guess you really can fool some of the people all of the time.

Are people really that stupid? Some, yes. But I think we should be careful to distinguish stupidity from obtuseness. Many people make incredible errors not because they lack intelligence, but because on certain subjects they simply refuse to use their heads.

Brown has found one of those subjects: the Church. He's not the first. Some of the great frauds of modern history have been perpetrated by highly intelligent men who have appealed to the desire for relief from the unbearable demands of Christianity; and other intelligent men have welcomed their doctrines. Think of the worldwide appeal of atheistic Marxism in the twentieth century. Or of the parallel appeal of "liberal" Christianity among some nominal Christians.

After all, wouldn't our lives be easier if we refused to believe in Christ? This tempting thought can pervert the highest intelligence; in fact the term "intellectual" has become almost synonymous with unbelief. And the people we call "intellectuals" are often ready to believe in almost anything rather than Christianity, especially Catholicism.

Today Marxism has been so falsified by disastrous experience that few still believe in it; but we are finding that Darwin has outlived Marx. Darwinism also appeals to godlessness, but Darwin, in contrast to Marx, didn't make predictions that history could refute in a generation or so. Today, in consequence, the Darwiniacs, as I like to call them, are going strong.

A federal judge named John E. Jones has overjoyed the Darwiniacs by ruling that the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools, even as an alternative to Darwinian evolutionism, violates the U.S. Constitution. Apart from being legal nonsense, that would outlaw even Aristotelian teleology as "religious." Children must be taught that nature has no purpose, beyond "survival of the fittest" - though even survival is, strictly speaking, an accident rather than a purpose. We owe our existence, our humanity itself, not to anything intelligent, but to the chance mutations of stupid matter.

This is the dogma of Darwinism, which passes for "religious neutrality" (at least among the modern mainstream of the irreligious). As always, liberalism is playing its old game of "Let's compromise my way." The happy medium between theism and atheism is atheism. As long as you don't call it atheism, of course. (You should call it Science.)

So much for the idea that Nature makes nothing in vain. But why, then, does man seem to be, as cultural anthropology seems to suggest, religious by nature? Maybe because religion has (or once had) some survival value, even if religious beliefs are in fact false. Or maybe such beliefs, though generally false, at least don't prevent the survival of those who hold them. Perhaps they represent a harmless mutation we can live as well without. Or something.

Obviously there is no end to this kind of thinking. It follows that we can believe pretty much whatever we want to, since Nature's only commandment, so to speak is "Thou shalt survive." I'm not sure why this particular belief is held with such evangelical fervor. Why is it so urgent to teach the kids that life is absurd? Are little Darwinists better equipped for survival than little Christians? Is that what the Constitution tells us?

* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze

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Fiction

Jumat, 11 Juni 2010

“Fear, Loathing and a lot more in Juarez - Stamford Advocate” plus 2 more

“Fear, Loathing and a lot more in Juarez - Stamford Advocate” plus 2 more

How You Can Understand What Motivates Customers to Buy

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