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August 24, 2010
Posted by Carla René in: Accountability, Advice, African-American, Attitude, Biography & Memoir, Book Marketing Online, Book Review, Books, Business, Business Management, Cancer, Cap and Trade, Children, China, Climate Change, Commentary, Comments & Discussion, Communications, Communism, Community, Computers, Congress, Contributor's Audio/Video, Creative Writing, Current Events, Democracy, Democrat, Diet, Economic Crisis, Economics, Education, Energy, Entertainment, Environment, Environmental Issues, Faith, Family, Fiction, Finance, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Freedom, Freelance Author, General Topics, Geopolitical Events, Global Warming, Governance, Habit Change, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Heroes, History, Homeland Security, Humor, Inspiration & Motivation, Internet, Internet Advice, Interview, Islam, Journalism, Latino & Hispanic, Legal, Life Experiences, Lifestyle, Literature, Marketing, Marriage, Medical, Men's Issues, Mental Health, Mexico, Military, Minorities, Morality, Motivation, Music, Native American, Nature/Wildlife, Non-Fiction, Nutrition, Opinion, Personal Experiences, Philosophical Genres, Poetry, Politics, Publishing, Question of the Day, Recovery, Relationships, Religion, Republican, Rhyme, Satire, Self-Help, Sex, Short Stories, Social Aspects, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology, Spirituality, Sports, Technology, Television, Terrorism, The Economy, The Media, The Pundit's Corner, The Writer's Corner, Travel, Uncategorized, Website Instructions, Weight loss, Wellness, Women's Perspective, Women's Rights, Working Women, Workplace, World Issues, Writing Essentials
 Begun back sometime in 2001, this book was originally a fluke of an idea… [...]
August 22, 2010
Posted by Alan Caruba in: Accountability, Commentary, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Governance, Homeland Security, Latino & Hispanic, Legal, Mexico, Minorities, Opinion
By Alan Caruba
It is increasingly obvious that the Obama administration is more interested in protecting Mexicans than Americans.
Case in point; Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has eleven suspects accused of murdering law enforcement officers in his maximum security county jail in downtown Phoenix. As reported in the August 18 Washington Post, “Justice Department officials in Washington have issued a rare threat to sue (Arpaio) if he does not cooperate with their investigation of whether he discriminates against Hispanics.”
“The standoff comes just weeks after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer because of the state’s new immigration law,” the Post noted. The latest word from Americans for Legal Immigration is that twenty-two States now have lawmakers developing versions of Arizona’s illegal immigration crackdown bill SB 1070.
So nearly half the States are aligning themselves with Arizona. Why? Continue reading Mexico, Bloody Mexico
July 4, 2010
“The Orator, with his Flood of Words….”
It’s been a long time since I debated John Kerry’s Liberal Party at Yale. (We, the Conservative Party, whopped ‘em good.) Even longer since I debated in high school. Having listened to and analyzed President Obama’s speech on immigration, I’m more convinced than ever that Obama is a one-trick pony, an increasingly unsuccessful one.
The war in Afghanistan is in trouble, and the Talban might snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Therefore, Obama gives a speech. The American economy is in trouble and high unemployment persists. Obama gives a speech. Spewing oil in the Gulf is unchecked. Obama gives a speech. Drugs and criminals are running across the border into Arizona. Obama gives a speech. You get the idea.
When he gives a speech, he sounds like he is addressing the subject at hand. But that is only an illusion, an illusion that even his former supporters are beginning to recognize for what it is. Continue reading “The Orator, with his Flood of Words….”
May 17, 2010
By Alan Caruba
For some time now friends have been asking me why I haven’t written anything about the Arizona law, amnesty, illegal immigration, and Mexicans.
The problem with trying to see all sides of the problem is that, sooner or later, you have to pick a side. That is what Americans are doing in light of the recent law passed in Arizona; a law that mirrors a federal law that, quite simply, is not being enforced.
What exactly were Arizonans expected to do in light of the fact that their border with Mexico is now a war zone?
A typical bachelor, I pretty much have the same thing for lunch every day, a soft tortilla in which two thin slices of smoked turkey are placed. Thirty seconds in the microwave and about six bites later lunch is over. And every day I look at that damned tortilla and I think about Mexicans.
Not Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world, but those poor souls trekking across deserts or sneaking in any way they can because, presumably, Mexico sucks so badly that their only hope is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Continue reading Thinking About Mexicans
May 6, 2010
Posted by Antonio de la Vega in: Democracy, Economic Crisis, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Relations, Freedom, Geopolitical Events, Governance, History, Latino & Hispanic, Mexico, Morality, Native American, Opinion, Politics, Social Aspects, Social Issues, Sociology, Uncategorized, World Issues
La ley SB1070 además de polémica debe encerrar otras razones de fondo, para llevar a la reflexión sobre los temas relacionados con el movimiento de personas en el mundo. [...]
April 5, 2010
By Alan Caruba
It is amazing how little national coverage there is of the vicious drug wars next door in Mexico that are driving Mexicans across the Texas, Arizona and New Mexico borders to seek asylum under the threat of death for themselves and their families.
It is a war that now includes the murder of U.S. consulate staff and an American rancher. There are other casualties who have already fallen victim to murder and rape about whom the national media make little or no mention.
On April 1, The Washington Times published an excellent and extensive report on the border violence, written by Ben Conery and Jerry Seper. “For more than two years, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have been warning that the dramatic rise in violence along the southwestern border could eventually target U.S. citizens and spread into this country.”
The U.S. shares a 1,951-mile border with Mexico. It is so porous that millions of Mexicans and others from South America and the Caribbean have simply walked across while others are busy exporting drugs into the nation. Estimates of how many illegal aliens reside in the U.S. range between 12 and 20 million. Continue reading Mexico: The War Next Door
November 12, 2009
Mexico City Dream Trip
I wish
there was some way
to get
you & Mexico City together.
You’d enjoy it.
Your sharp blue eyes would
pick out everything
there is to see,
& you’d walk around
saying nothing
while your mind took everything in
& stored it.
What excitement
you would find there!
What material for dreams! Continue reading Mexico City Dream Trip
November 8, 2009
He met him on the third day of the second week after he opened his psychology practice on Rio Mississippi Street in mid-January, 1973 when his receptionist, Luisa Mercedes Rodriguez opened his office door, came in, closed it and said:
“Doctor Manning, he is here!”
“Who is ‘he,’ Luisa?” glancing down at his appointment book and seeing nothing written there for that hour; “A walk-in client?”
“No, doctor; he, that cop; you know, the one I told you about? ¿Sì?”
“Oh, you mean the one that collects protection money from people?”
“Yes, that one! He wants to see you. And he won’t wait.”
And then, as if to prove the truth of what she said, the door opened and there he stood, Sergeant Pedro Alfredo Gomez of the Mexico City Police Department, all five foot five lean muscular feet of him, dressed in khaki slacks, an open-neck light blue sport shirt, black shoes spit-shined like mirrors, hair and mustache neatly trimmed and brushed, staring at the psychologist with the flat, predatory eyes of a snake. Continue reading George Polley: “The Disappearance of Pedro Gomez”
November 4, 2009
A group of students take their teacher, Eric Lindahl, out on the town in Mexico City’s Plaza Garibaldi during the Christmas season. They are in for some big surprises when a local tough shows up and harasses their teacher, and an even bigger one when their teacher turns into a donkey, and a new corrido is born. [...]
October 14, 2009
Ex-pat Joseph Manning falls asleep waiting for his friends Mel and Wanda Blackstone in the apartment they’ve rented in an old mansion. Wanda insists the apartment is haunted. Dr. Manning learns she may just be right. [...]
September 16, 2009
This is Eric Lindahl’s story, and I’ll let him tell it like he told it to me a few days before he left for Des Moines, Iowa. I didn’t experience the storm, because Lisa and I were in Cuernevaca visiting her family, but I heard about it in the news, and read about it in Excelsior, el Universal and The Herald, so I knew a lot about it before we returned to Mexico City about two weeks after it hit. The storm was unexpected, and did tremendous damage in a wide swath across the city. It even surprised the weather forecasters, who didn’t see it coming. Some people said it was the old Aztec god Tlaloc, and that he was cranky about something. Just what it could have been is anyone’s guess, and I haven’t seen my old friend Gerardo Pulido to ask him. I’m not sure he was in Mexico City anyway, as Lisa was sure she’d seen him in Cuernevaca down by the Cortez Palace, but didn’t get a good look at him, because when he saw her looking toward him, he ducked behind a tree.
Eric told me this version of what happened when we got together for coffee at Sanborn’s on the Paseo, which was badly damaged, but was cleaned up pretty well by the time Lisa and I returned from Cuernevaca. What follows is just as Eric told it because I recorded it…with his permission, of course. Continue reading “The Storm”
September 13, 2009
A partir del punzante, humorístico y crítico artículo publicado recientemente en esta SWI por Tim Roux expuse en el mismo el comentario que ahora incluyo aquí a modo de artículo modificado y ampliado. [...]
September 1, 2009
Posted by Antonio de la Vega in: Cancer, Education, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Latino & Hispanic, Lifestyle, Medical, Mexico, Native American, Nature/Wildlife, Nutrition, Religion, Self-Help, Sex, Social Aspects, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology
Recientemente la Universidad Autónoma de México (U.N.A.M.) presentó el resultado de un esfuerzo monumental, consistente en la construcción de una enciclopedia multimedia especializada en la medicina tradicional mexicana. [...]
July 30, 2009
A simple answer is that I find them everywhere: birds, monkeys, people I meet, communities and even huge cities which, at first glance, seems impossible but in my experience, isn’t. To me, “character” has first to do with meeting, then seeing the whole. One definition of character is: “The inherent complex of attributes that determine a person’s moral and ethical actions and reactions” (source: WordWeb thesaurus/dictionary), which is what happens when you really get to know someone, when you see beyond the details to the larger picture of what the person or the city is “like”. I use the word in its larger sense because that’s what happens as I get to know someone or something (like a neighborhood or a city), moving from the details to see the big picture. This is what happened as I wrote the stories that make up my novel about Mexico City. As the stories grew in number something magical happened: the city itself began to appear, resulting in the title “The City Has Many Faces”, which pulled each of the stories together within the context of the huge entity that is Mexico City. I had intended to write a collection of stories set in Mexico City during the time that I lived there, but the city demanded more. Sometimes that’s the way things happen. I’ve had the opposite happen, too: tried to write a novel from a story, and have it refuse to move beyond a story. (That’s happened twice, in “Jonah’s Birth”, a story published in The South Dakota Review back in the 1970s, and in Verhoeven, a story about a murder in Seattle and a 6′ 11” Minnesota detective named Magnus Willem Verhoeven. It worked wonderfully as a short story and refused to budge beyond that. So it sometimes goes. Continue reading Where I find my characters…and how that plays out in my writing
July 3, 2009
Posted by Antonio de la Vega in: Attitude, Congress, Democracy, Freedom, Geopolitical Events, Governance, Latino & Hispanic, Legal, Mexico, Politics, Social Aspects, Social Issues, Sociology
¿Será el voto nulo como el futuro termidor (cuya etimología alude al hecho de dar calor) de la democracia mexicana? Así definen algunos al fenómeno, en franca y preocupada alusión al undécimo mes del calendario republicano francés, que empezaba el 19 de julio y terminaba el 17 de agosto, y durante el cual (“9 de termidor”) se suscitó el episodio del golpe de Estado con que la Revolución Francesa dio fin al Terror e instauró en su lugar la reacción de la Convención (27 de julio de 1794). [...]
June 26, 2009
Posted by Antonio de la Vega in: Attitude, Communications, Democracy, Governance, Habit Change, Internet Advice, Journalism, Latino & Hispanic, Marketing, Mexico, Opinion, Politics, Social Aspects, Social Issues, Sociology, The Media
En estos días muy próximos a las elecciones intermedias en México, los temas de discusión central han sido el voto nulo y el voto blanco. Al buscar en Google la combinación exacta “voto nulo” obtenemos 495 mil referencias. Con la combinación “voto blanco”, 363 mil referencias. [...]
June 13, 2009
Stayin’ Alive. Ah. Ha, Ha, Ha….
by John Armor
Saturday Night Fever begins with the classic scene of a very young John Travolta striding through the streets of Brooklyn. His shoes slap the pavement, his body sways to the rhythm of the Bee-Gees’ immortal song, played sotto voce, Stayin’ Alive. The story is about the attempt of the protagonist, his whole family, his friends and his community merely to survive.
Therein lies a lesson for our times.
The late, great Peter Drucker once wrote to the effect that, “Once an organization exceeds 1,000 people, its first purpose becomes self-preservation.” (Anyone who can find the precise quote in Professor Drucker’s monumental opera, please e-mail me.) The point, of course, is the tendency of any organization to become destructive of the ends for which it was created, when its staff goes to seed as bureaucrats.
For the first example, consider the American labor movement. The AFL and the CIO were separately founded to improve the wages and working conditions. They did exactly that, over their first century of effort. But today we have the spectacle of the AFL-CIO actually changing sides to support “immigration reform” which would accept as American citizens, about ten million Mexicans who have entered the US illegally. Continue reading Stayin’ Alive. Ah. Ha, Ha, Ha….
May 16, 2009
Posted by Alan Caruba in: Accountability, Current Events, Democrat, Foreign Affairs, Geopolitical Events, Governance, Homeland Security, Latino & Hispanic, Mexico, Opinion, Politics, The Pundit's Corner
 By Alan Caruba
Among the latest news out of Mexico was the discovery of four U.S. citizens found in a van, strangled, beaten and stabbed in the border city of Tijuana. The victims, ages 19 to 21, were two men and two women from San Diego and Chula Vista areas.
In 2008, 6,292 Mexicans were killed in the drug wars between the drug cartels. In the first eight weeks of 2009, there were already a thousand casualties, some of them beheaded. By way of comparison, in six years of war in Iraq, this exceeds U.S. losses by more than three thousand.
In mid-March, however, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, third in the line of succession to lead the nation, told a crowd of legal and illegal Hispanics that enforcement of federal or even local laws regarding immigration is “un-American.” She called the illegal aliens in the audience, “very, very patriotic.”
No, Madame Speaker, the patriotic, indeed the constitutionally responsible thing to do is to enforce the laws of the nation. You even took an oath of office to do so.
It is an open secret in Washington, D.C., that Obama and his fellow Democrat travelers in Congress want to push through an amnesty in order to increase the number of voters likely to support Democrats in coming elections. Congress has a short memory and no doubt has conveniently forgotten the firestorm of protest that erupted when the Bush administration attempted the same thing. Continue reading The War on Our Southern Border
May 7, 2009
I must go. I need permission from my fiancé’s family to marry my intended. It’s ~700 miles from Houston to Tampico, Mexico, across the border at Brownsville/Matamoros. Half way between Matamoros and Ciudad Victoria, on a desolate highway, my old Ford dies. Four hours later, after accepting a ride from a passing stranger, who says he can arrange to get my car towed to CV, I board a decrepit bus and take a 10-hour ride to Tampico. There I call my friend Bill Lyons in Houston and ask him to come to Ciudad Victoria, the State capital, a week later to tow my car back to Houston.
Bill arrives in an almost new but badly beat-up Hertz rental car, bearing a tow hitch. He says that bridges are out; diversions through riverbeds caused the body damage. We find my car in town, attach it, then head north to Monterrey, in the State of Nuevo Leone—we cannot tow back to Texas through riverbeds.
Half way to Monterrey, as night falls, we must traverse mountains over a switch-back highway. Bill has no experience towing and is overcooking the corners. As I urge him to slow down, my car under tow drifts off line, pulling the back of our car with it. The tow hitch breaks. The last I see of my car is its underside as it vaults wheels-in-air over the cliff on the left—no guardrail. Continue reading A Mexican jail
April 28, 2009
Recientemente recibí el correo de un familiar acerca de la epidemia de INFLUENZA en México. Anoto y añado algunas precisiones que bien cabe aclarar. Sirva este texto a modo de aportación. [...]
April 28, 2009
 Jose Antonio De La Vega Torres http://indiciosmagazine.wordpress.com/ is one of our valued contributors who lives in Mexico and posts his articles in Spanish. I wrote to him asking him how he was doing and for his comments on the Swine Flu from his perspective in Mexico. With his permission are his comments below:
“Easy, man. Easy. Thanks for asking. Just taking care about hygiene, essentially washing hands, take some physical distance among the others, avoiding congregation, going to physician if suspect some symptoms like heavy head ache, dry coughing, high temperature over 39 degrees (centigrade) or equivalent in Fahrenheit, muscles and articulations aches, eyes irritation. And the most important, be calm. As we say in Mexico “we are cured of fright”. We had experienced worst problems at the past, and the population has behave exemplarly as they did other times like the earthquake in 1985, or the climate disasters. My people is full of hart, thinking on their childrens. The cases indeed are arising, affecting spetially to young people among 20 and 55 years old, but there are no such deads to feel panic. Every one is doing what is under the self responsability, if I said the wright way. Continue reading Swine Flu – A comment from our Contributor in Mexico
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The Gaslight Journal is Done
Begun back sometime in 2001, this book was originally a fluke of an idea… [...]