Word: explainers
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Colombian cocaine cartel leaders are apparently investing in precious gems. "Cash is a pain," says a DEA official. "It's bulky if you move it, traceable if you bank it, and it mildews if you bury it." Which may explain why Colombians have been reported buying up jewels -- principally diamonds -- in Antwerp, Amsterdam and Hong Kong. U.S. agents don't think these buyers are Christmas shopping. "You can transport millions of dollars' worth of diamonds in your back pocket," says an investigator. Furthermore, diamonds don't rot when stored in the underground caches favored by Colombian dons...
...want to hedge against disaster, buy puts on stocks you think have further to drop, or on market indexes as a whole (your broker will be falling all over himself to explain this to you). Don't short stocks. Unless you're a very seasoned investor, it's just too risky (and it means you have to pay dividends, on top of commissions, not earn them). Buy puts only on days when the crisis seems to be over and the market has boomed -- and assume that whatever you do spend on puts is money you'll never see again. Because...
...chronology is important because it helps explain the shallow intimacy of most of the book. Not until the end does she come to grips with her capacity for denial and deception. The earlier parts are filled with foamy self- analysis. "I lived under a Damoclean sword of accusation," she writes of her childhood, "and at any given moment it could drop and cut off, if not my head, my confidence." During the primaries, she says, "I couldn't measure up, so I measured out the booze. My low opinion of myself reached a new high...
...Americans only by giving them a larger and clearer sense of the purpose of the mission. If the stakes are as large as the world's economic order and the danger that Saddam Hussein, armed with nuclear weapons, might eventually set off a Middle East holocaust, Bush should explain that...
...equation of busy-ness with importance may help to explain Americans' queasiness about vacations. The Washington Post reports that two days before Iraq invaded Kuwait, when troops were already massed on the border, someone tried to reach the head of Kuwait's civil defense, only to be told he was on vacation for the next three weeks. Go ahead and laugh. But is that any more absurd than Dan Rather, who was on vacation in France, spending the day of the invasion desperately scouring the Middle East for a place to broadcast from and ultimately settling for London -- rather than...