Two or three minutes after I saw the photo of Escobar’s cheeks and read the news stories, I considered writing this. But I decided to wait until things returned to normal so people would read me with cooler heads. It’s important to say I’ve never met the Toronto Blue Jays short-stop and don’t think I …
Category Archives: Diverse topics
Marketing Gaming
On October 8, Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist and deep thinker, stated: People, as we know, are imperfect. Governments, composed top to bottom of imperfect people wielding power, are very imperfect. There are of course a million examples, big and small, of how governments can damage the actual nature and character of the …
The worst enemies of capitalism
In late 2002 or early 2003, residing in Spain, I read a laudatory article on capitalism in a prestigious, pro-market, right-of-centre British magazine that included this assertion: “Some capitalists are the worst enemies of capitalism.” Twenty or more years earlier I had concluded that a number of politicians and religious leaders are the worst enemies …
The regressive nature of Communism
The human race has been unsuccessfully trying to crack a number of nuts for several millennia. In our time, billions of people all over the world are greatly concerned with the 21st century’s social problems. Most wealthy democracies confront predicaments such as terrorism, wars abroad, global warming, crime, drugs, illegal immigration, ever-increasing prices and taxes, …
The influence of promotion on the entertainment and cultural markets
Sellers go to marketplaces to make money by offering goods and services, and the same rules apply to marketplaces the world over. Make, harvest or extract something, price it accordingly and offer it for sale. It seems, though, as in the last one hundred years the ever-increasing role of promotion has profoundly changed the buyer-seller …
Reality in crime fiction
I appreciate this opportunity to share with you my views about reality in crime fiction. I look forward to learning your opinions on this topic and answering your questions after a brief introduction. Although I strive to create, and prefer to read, realistic and believable novels, I am not against good unrealistic fiction, the key …
Politics in Latin American crime fiction
Having read a considerable number of crime books by Anglo and Latin American writers, I believe that the plots of noir genre novels penned south of the Rio Bravo are much more political than the majority of American or British crime books. History shows that all along the 19th and 20th centuries, most British and U.S. …
