29 August 2015   My father, a New York financier, used to call dubious stocks or bonds,  “Chinese paper.”   Last week, we saw a blizzard of  Chinese paper, both in China and around the world.  As manager of a sizeable investment portfolio (an unwelcome second job from my main work, […]

22 August 2015 The deaths in South Asia of three of the West’s ‘Great Satans’ were announced in recent weeks: Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani in Afghanistan; and Pakistan’s Lt. Gen.  Hamid Gul. I never met Mullah Omar though I was present at the birth and expansion of his movement, […]

15 August 2015   Gov. Jeb Bush repeated one of the biggest falsehoods of our time during the recent presidential candidate debate: “we were misled (into the Iraq War)  by faulty intelligence.” US intelligence was not “misled.”  It was ordered by the real, de facto  president, Dick Cheney, to provide […]