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A third post about the core topic within House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company …

The company went Full Vegas:

Back when he had visited the United States in the 1990s, Ren Zhengfei had been struck by the grand architecture of Las Vegas, modeled after Roman palaces. He’d remarked that Las Vegas might be the most beautiful city in America. Now in the hinterland to the north of Shenzhen, he began building his own version. Huawei had outgrown its Shenzhen headquarters by 2016, with 180,000 employees globally and counting, and Ren’s team was searching for more space. This was hard to find in Shenzhen, which was a thicket of skyscrapers by now, with soaring property prices. They found what they were looking for in Dongguan, Shenzhen’s up-and-coming northern neighbor, which still had stretches of undeveloped land. Eager to woo the company, Dongguan officials offered Huawei a prime 1.2-square-kilometer tract of verdant land on the south shore of a lake. Ren’s younger brother, Steven Ren, was put in charge of the construction of these new Dongguan R&D grounds, which they called Ox Horn Campus. They hired Japan’s Nikken Sekkei, the world’s second-largest architectural firm, which produced a fever dream of a design: Ox Horn would be built to look like twelve miniature European cities, including Paris, Verona, Bruges, and Oxford. They would re-create some of the greatest hits of Western civilization, including Germany’s Heidelberg Castle and France’s Palace of Versailles. “What is important is not simply to copy certain architectural styles but to make them truly beautiful,” Steven Ren wrote of the project. Huawei would overlook no detail. The architects were proud that none of the roofs of the 108 buildings were identical. Reflecting an eye for historical accuracy, some of the shingles were slate, others terra-cotta or copper. The pitches of the roofs ranged from twenty to ninety degrees. The buildings were faced in a range of materials, including granite, sandstone, limestone, dolomite, brick, and stucco (for Verona and Grenada). There were, of course, some concessions to modernity, such as treating the porous stones to prevent mildew and algae growth. Facial-recognition gates were installed at the entrances.

Huawei hired 150 Russian painters to cover the halls’ ceilings and walls with Renaissance-style murals, with the painters joking that even the Kremlin didn’t have such beautiful corridors. Someone stocked the lake by the castle with black swans—a reference to the financial term for worst-case scenarios that are hard to forecast. Ren so frequently warned his staff to look out for black-swan events that, at some point, the bird became Huawei’s unofficial mascot.

Huawei today makes the world’s best smartphone in terms of camera quality. DXOMARK:

The founder didn’t want to get into this business:

In Huawei’s early days, Ren had been less than enthused at the idea of hawking handsets—which were called “terminals” in Huawei-speak—as he considered it too far afield from the company’s core businesses of switches, routers, and base stations. “Huawei will not make a mobile phone,” Ren once insisted indignantly. “Anyone who talks this nonsense is going to get laid off!” Even after Huawei began pursuing smartphones seriously, Ren feared wasting money on marketing and was often harsh on the company’s head of consumer products, Richard Yu, or Yu Chengdong. “People always say I criticize Yu Chengdong,” Ren remarked to staff. “Actually, my criticism of him is my way of caring for him.”

How tough is it to break into the premium phone market? From 2016:

To close the gap with Samsung would be a formidable challenge: Samsung was pouring $14 billion a year into advertising, more than Iceland’s GDP.[

There is a chapter on Canada holding Meng Wanzhou, the founder’s daughter from his first marriage and Huawei CFO, hostage at the request of the U.S. government, but that’s been extensively covered elsewhere. (The allegations against Huawei had to do with selling equipment to Iran.)

The U.S. also strong-armed the Taiwanese into shutting out Huawei, which merely resulted in the improvement of Chinese domestic capabilities. May 2020:

TSMC had supplied Huawei for years, but now, under the threat of sanctions, it could not risk losing access to US technology to run its own operations. TSMC shut its doors to Huawei. Huawei’s only hope now was for China’s domestic chip foundry, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, to learn how to produce advanced chips at lightning speeds. This was a real Hail Mary: SMIC had been endeavoring for two decades to advance its technologies but still lagged several generations behind global leaders in advanced chipmaking. This second round of US sanctions cut deep. In July 2020, citing the new US sanctions, the UK announced that it was reversing its position on Huawei and would remove all Huawei equipment from the nation’s 5G networks by the end of 2027.

Whoever was running the U.S. during the Biden-Harris was just as hostile to Huawei as Donald Trump had been:

If there had been hopes among Huawei’s executives that Biden would be softer on China than Trump, they were quickly dispelled. The Biden administration was more careful in its rhetoric to avoid fanning anti-Chinese racism. It didn’t use terms like “Clean Network” and “Clean Nations.” But in many ways, it was only picking up where the Trump administration had left off and deepening the efforts to contain China.

Finally, check out the aesthetics on this data center that Huawei built:

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Every now and then the New York Times takes a break from Trump bad/progressive Democrats good and does some actual journalism. “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” (December 16, 2025) answers the only interesting question, in my opinion, about Jeffrey Epstein, i.e., How does a guy who doesn’t seem to be either smart or hard-working get rich enough to operate a Gulfstream?

I know some people who’ve gotten rich by working in finance. All had more advanced educations than Jeffrey Epstein (a college dropout) and none of them had time to party on a private island, with or without a stable of paid females.

How did Epstein get rich, then? According to the NYT, he stole it all. Not the 2 and 20 stealing that a hedge fund might do every year, but grabbing most or all of the principal with which he was entrusted.

In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.

One funny part: in 1980, making $1 million/year was considered successful:

He was regularly flying to Palm Beach, Fla., to visit young women. That summer, Cosmopolitan named Epstein its “bachelor of the month,” describing him as a “dynamo” who “talks only to people who make over a million a year!” The magazine encouraged interested parties to write to Epstein at his work address.

It was easier to steal because the clients themselves were trying to steal from the IRS and, therefore, they couldn’t easily complain to the government that Epstein stole from them before they could steal from the government:

According to Epstein’s friend Bob Gold, Epstein and the Pottingers pitched tax-avoidance strategies to wealthy clients, including some whom Gold believes Epstein met through Bear Stearns.

Bear Stearns, which took down the entire U.S. economy with its 2008 failure, briefly employed Epstein and its managers kept helping him:

In 1982, [Clark Schubach of Bear] introduced Epstein to Michael Stroll, who ran a pinball and video-game company. Stroll trusted Bear Stearns and Schubach. He gave Epstein $450,000 — about 10 percent of his net worth — to invest in a supposed crude-oil deal that Epstein told him he was planning.

Within two years, most of the money had vanished, Stroll later said in an unpublished interview with Thomas Volscho, a professor at the College of Staten Island who has spent years researching Epstein’s early years and shared some of his notes and documents with us. Epstein began dodging Stroll’s phone calls; at one point, he sent Stroll a quart of oil in an attempt to convince him that a deal was, in fact, in the works. The dispute ended up in civil court, with Stroll arguing that Epstein had promised to return his money but never did. In 1993, Epstein prevailed on technical grounds, and a judge ruled that he wasn’t personally liable. Decades later, Stroll remains bitter. “He’s a despicable prick,” he told us.

…

But Epstein’s perfidy ran deeper. Ed Epstein discovered that dozens of the people Epstein recruited to invest in Pennwalt, including Snyder, had written to him demanding that he repay their money. In other words, Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds. There is no record of Epstein facing any consequences — or repaying the money. A result was that by the end of 1988, he reported being worth about $15 million, according to a previously undisclosed document from a Swiss bank, which Thomas Volscho, the professor, shared with us.

Epstein got a lot of help from “daughters of famous, powerful men”:

Epstein seems to have had a keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry, leaving them angry and betrayed, and which were worth nurturing for the long haul as sources of connections and prestige. One of those was Sir James Goldsmith — a financier and European politician who was embedded in Manhattan’s upper crust. One evening, he hosted a gathering at his mansion on the Upper East Side. Among the guests was Stuart Pivar, who had amassed a fortune before becoming a renowned art collector. When Pivar arrived, he encountered Epstein playing a Beethoven sonata at a piano in Goldsmith’s spacious entrance hall. Pivar told us he was transfixed: Epstein had an irresistible “magnetism” — especially with “the beautiful daughters of famous, powerful men.”

There are no rewards for being smart and honest:

A fateful flight to Florida that year would launch Epstein from a mere millionaire into a plutocrat with palatial estates, two private islands and luxury aircraft. The transformation came about through a new client: Les Wexner, the billionaire who built brands like the Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The two were introduced by Wexner’s friend Robert Meister, an insurance executive who happened to sit next to Epstein on the plane to Palm Beach. Meister suggested that Wexner get in touch with Epstein for financial advice.

Wexner soon had a financial adviser, Harold Levin, fly to New York to meet Epstein. Levin told us that he spent an hour with Epstein in his office and immediately got a bad vibe. He found a pay phone and called Wexner. “I smell a rat,” Levin reported. “I don’t trust him.”

Wexner apparently didn’t listen. About a year later, he hired Epstein to be Levin’s boss. As far as Levin could tell, Epstein won the billionaire’s confidence by falsely telling him that Levin had been stealing. Levin decided to quit rather than work for Epstein. Before long, Wexner had given Epstein essentially free rein by granting him power of attorney over his finances. Epstein’s name began appearing in government filings as responsible for Wexner’s businesses and charities.

Another price/inflation shocker:

He bought a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach for $2.5 million, about a mile from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

It’s now worth about $40 million, according to Zillow, after a rebuild and address change. (i.e., more than twice as much as the National Historic Landmark of Mar-a-Lago, if we accept the New York judiciary’s finding that Donald Trump’s house had a fair market value of $18 million)

Washington, D.C. was a good place to hunt for the next batch of money to steal.

On a freezing Thursday in February 1993, Epstein and Wexner arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Just weeks earlier, Bill Clinton had been sworn in as the 42nd president. It was the first of many visits Epstein would pay to the Clinton White House.

Epstein had become a political donor — including, later that year, $10,000 to help refurbish the White House, earning him a spot at a reception with the Clintons — and that gave him a certain amount of cachet with the new president. But Epstein had something else going for him as well: a new connection named Lynn Forester.

Forester told us that she met Epstein at a reception for George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, whom Epstein had befriended. Forester was a successful telecommunications executive, but she rose to greater prominence through her marriage to Andrew Stein, the Manhattan politician who in 1993 ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor. The end of his mayoral campaign coincided with the end of their 10-year marriage. Now Forester and Stein were feuding over how to divvy up millions of dollars, and Epstein apparently convinced Forester that he could protect her from getting ripped off. It was a version of the same tactic he used to get in Wexner’s good graces years earlier.

It was an opportune moment for Epstein to ingratiate himself with Forester, whom Clinton had appointed to a White House advisory commission. On at least one occasion, Forester brought up Epstein in a brief private conversation with the president, according to a letter, first reported by The Daily Beast, that she wrote that mentioned Epstein. He became a regular visitor to the White House, sometimes with a girlfriend in tow, according to records housed at Clinton’s presidential library.

Via this photo, the NYT reminds young readers to enjoy their youth and beauty while it lasts (though maybe using youth/beauty to assist Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t the highest and best use?):

(Why is the man-bites-dog story of an apparently mediocre and lazy person getting rich enough to operate a Gulfstream the most interesting aspect of the Emmanuel Goldstein saga? I don’t understand the fascination with Jeffrey Epstein’s after-hours frolics with a stable of paid young females. The ideas that middle-aged guys would find young females attractive (example study and research summary) or that females would be interested in having sex with rich men and/or men who were paying them are dog-bites-man stories, in my view. There is a linguistic twist in that the female employees of Epstein, who got housing, health care, dental care, transportation, entertainment, cash, etc. on the job and then later got $millions each (from Epstein’s estate and from a JP Morgan settlement), all of it tax-free, are considered “victims”. Even the ones who started their paid work with Epstein at age 18 or older may have received more money than the average American woman could earn in a lifetime of 9-5 toil. Regarding the moral outrage about “underage women”, the most frequently cited victim is Virginia Giuffre and she was turning 17 in mid-2000 when she says she met Epstein for the first time, i.e., older than the Massachusetts age of consent of 16. Epstein was indicted for being involved with females “as young as 14” (justice.gov). That is more shocking to the puritan mind of a Legacy American, but fourteen is the age of consent in a lot of European countries and was the typical age of marriage in Ancient Greece. Fourteen is five years older than Aisha was when her marriage with Muhammad was consummated (according to the Hadiths). Roughly half of Americans support filling the United States with Muslims, all of whom are supposed to follow the Hadiths. Why would the same people then express moral condemnation of Jeffrey Epstein’s harem, none of whose members were anywhere near as young as Aisha? Alternatively, if they reject a culture in which women under 18 can choose to have sex, get married, exchange sex for money, etc. then why would they advocate for continued expansion of Muslim immigration?)

Related:

• Department of American nation-building… “Critics say new bill passed by Iraqi lawmakers opens door to child marriage” (CBC/AP 2025): “New changes in Iraq’s law would allow marriage of girls in early teens or as young as 9, say critics”

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Trigger warning: contains alarming urological details. Also, NSFW.

A gay-adjacent friend sent me a long Facebook post by his 60-something-year-old retired gay male friend. (What’s “gay-adjacent”? My friend lives in Manhattan and is in the music industry.) The story relates to the failure of a device installed by Jesse N. Mills, MD who says that he’s done “thousands of penile implants.” As I think you’ll quickly realize, the good doctor was in no way to blame for the failure.

Dr. Jesse Mills, my wonderful surgeon, visited me both before and after surgery, and I will see him again tomorrow before dawn for catheter and drain removal. He reported that the left cylinder broke completely, at the base. He referred to torque being more of an issue, the bigger you are. That failure mode is very rare, since the cylinders are very difficult to damage; it’s almost always the pump, followed by the tubes that fail. … Dr. Mills replaced everything except the reservoir, which will help make my recovery more comfortable, and hopefully shorter, since there wasn’t that trauma in my belly. …

It is good to know that the pump did not wear out, despite at least 4,000 “uses.” The manufacturer rates the devices at 10,000 uses, which at the rate from the last two years, would mean that it would need replacement in less than five years, so I will reduce the number of times I increase and decrease the amount of rigidity. (Read on for what constitutes “uses.”) Having kept track of the number of unique partners, I know that number is more than 2,500. In addition, there were many repeat partners, sometimes the same day. I can only guess that number, based on my activities, but it conservatively adds up to way over 3,000 instances of penetrative anal sex (which is much more challenging than vaginal sex for the device),

A lot more exciting than being married, right?

PLUS, add penetrative sex with my husband most every day. Masturbation “counts” too, because it requires cycling the pump. That was reliably every day, once I healed, and included bending exercises meant to allow increased size, and using a penis pump, or “VED” at least once every day to work on increasing my size. For the first 3 months, I did intense “physical therapy” at least twice a day in order to regain size that I lost from the surgery (which was as expected).

The potential benefits of Medicare for All become a lot clearer when we consider what this senior citizen was able to obtain:

Dr. Mills gave me the great news that he was able to use a larger implant, given all my use and pumping. The largest cylinders they make are 24cm, so he gave me a 24cm implant, plus a 3cm extension, so I now have a 27cm implant. That’s 10.63 inches, for metric-averse ”mericans.” (Keep in mind that part of a penis is internal, and the percentage varies from man-to-man.) I can’t wait to complete physical therapy exercises to see what I end up with. I will post progress reports, with photos where allowed.

Unfortunately, I can’t share the photos since I didn’t ask to see them.

ChatGPT says that it might be difficult for a man to arrange a sanctified heterosexual marriage with 2,500 extramarital female sex partners:

Gay male sexual networks have much higher partner availability, lower courtship friction, and faster partner turnover. Heterosexual encounters with women—especially repeated, anonymous, one-off encounters—require far more time, negotiation, and selectivity.

It helpfully volunteers the idea of employing prostitutes (uses the hateful term rather than “sex worker”, unfortunately), but says “2,500 distinct female partners in 2 years would require (1) massive financial outlay, (2) industrial-scale coordination.”

Separately, I think that I might also be gay-adjacent because I love the Jersey Jack Elton John pinball machine, including the animatronic Elon at the piano.

#SanctityOfSameSex/Marriage

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One of Florida’s great 19th century hotels, the Tampa Bay Hotel (1891; 511 rooms built for $3 million), fell on hard times during the Great Depression and was converted to use by what today is the University of Tampa, a private 11,000-student school. A portion of the structure is preserved as the Henry B. Plant Museum, named for the railroad tycoon who built the hotel.

Instead of elbowing their way off Spirit, the elite guests of the hotel would step out of their private railcars just a few feet from the front door of the hotel. The original front entrance dog sculpture has been preserved and also the museum shows an early word processor:

The museum explains that immigrants destroyed career opportunities for Black Americans in the 19th century, just as Harvard economists found was true in the 21st century (see “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER 2007)):

In the 1890s, Black dining room supervisors and servers faced increasing job competition from European immigrants. Efforts to combat this challenge revealed competing understandings of Black manhood.

It looks as though $1-$2/day was a good wage in 1903:

Because my almost-12-year-old companion is passionate about art museums, our next stop was the main Tampa Museum of Art. He was delighted to find The Bucs at Fifty, a photo exhibit:

He also enjoyed a Man with the Golden Gun-style car/plane. Original from 1974:

The museum displays a 2016 work:

The curators fail to credit James Bond:

I still can’t figure out how it is possible for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to advertise a policy of race-based discrimination:

In 2022, The Tampa Museum of Art launched an initiative to purchase a work of art by a Black or African American artist in tandem with its annual Juneteenth Cultural Celebration. The Museum selected Ya La’Ford as its 2024 Juneteenth artist.

Roughly half of the money spent by a nonprofit is government money (foregone tax revenue because charitable deductions are tax-deductible). How is it legal for a museum to say “We’re going to buy works of art only from people who are of one specific race that we consider superior”? Here’s the artwork that was purchased under the race-based scheme:

While on the beautiful Riverwalk, a 2.6-mile path, we saw a dolphin in the Hillsborough River. We stopped briefly at Armature Works before heading back towards the airport. On the way we stopped at a 49ers v. Buccaneers game in which fans were encouraged to drive sound levels above 100 dBA SPL (maybe closer to 90 dBA most of the time, still well about the 85 dBA OSHA limit for factory work without hearing protection) and a hearing loss company is one of the in-stadium advertisers:

The best customers for hearing aids are probably those who sit near the pirate ship and are thus subject to perhaps 100 cannon blasts per game.

iPhone 17 Pro Max super wide lens:

Related:

• Tampa Bay football game guide for pilots

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We have a bunch of 15-year-old Sonos gear that doesn’t comply with the new Sonos S2 religion. I thought it might be nice to upgrade the whole house, especially because the 10- and 12-year-olds don’t have phones with which to control music in their respective bedrooms. They could use a Sonos Era 100 or Era 300, for example, with voice control. (Senior Management quickly realized that there was a flaw in this plan, which is that Sonos doesn’t have parental controls. The 10-year-old could select gangster rap, for example, from the typical streaming service or SiriusXM.)

I picked up a $479 Era 300 as an experiment and used a Sound Level app on my phone to try to make sure that the volume level was equalized between the Era 300 and the legacy gear.

The Era 300 is Dolby Atmos-compatible, which sounds great until you realize that the popular music streaming services don’t generally provide Atmos content (it’s more for video?). A listening panel of two adults and two kids was assembled and concluded that a single Era 300 in my home office doesn’t sound obviously better, though maybe brighter, than an old Sonos Gen 1 Play:5, which has an eBay value of about $100. For listening from a desk chair, both of the magic Sonos devices were easily defeated by a pair of 13-year-old desktop Audioengine P4 speakers ($250) driven by a 10.5-year-old Windows 10 PC via optical S/PDIF through a NuForce Dia desktop DAC/amp with a mighty 18 watts of power (maybe the heir to the discontinued NuForce would be the USB-driven 50-watt AudioEngine N22?).

Admittedly, the near-field monitor comparison isn’t fair since the Sonos devices are intended to fill a room with sound. That said, I wonder if Sonos’s best idea wasn’t Sonos’s first idea: a networked DAC/amp that drives conventional bookshelf speakers. If one is content with the deprecated S1 gear, these amps, e.g., ZP120, are available on eBay for about $100 vs. $800 for the functionally similar latest version. The Era 300 weighs 10 lbs. and it’s what the typical person would stop at in one room. The old Sonos ZP120 is 5 lbs. A cheap Sony bookshelf speaker weighs 10 lbs. So it’s 10 lbs. of gear vs. 25 lbs (10+10+5).

(The latest amp is 125 watts/channel vs 50 or 55 watts on the older units, a difference of just over 3 dB in SPL. You could either content yourself with the roughly 100 dB max SPL that you’d get with an low-sensitivity speaker (85-87 dB) and 50 watts or get some high-sensitivity speakers (Klipsch, JBL, Triangle; I got some Klipsch outdoor speakers rated at 95 dB for our modest back yard).)

I also tested the Era 300 against a 20-year-old Sonos ZP100 amp driving 30-year Radio Shack Optimus LX5 bookshelf speakers, which have ribbon tweeters (!) and are available on eBay for $50-80/pair (originally $200-300/pair). The Radio Shack speakers, each of which weighs just 7.5 lbs., were separated by about 6′, which no doubt helped. The $150ish combination of decades-old used gear absolutely crushed the fresh-from-the-box $479 Era 300.

If you had the space, you could buy a used ZP100 or ZP120 and a couple of brand new tower speakers (about 100 lbs. total) for less than the cost of two of these wimpy Era 300s.

Maybe it’s worth paying $5,000+ to upgrade a house from Sonos S1 to Sonos S2 because the voice control, which runs locally on the device, is so convenient? Sadly, no. It failed at simple requests, such as “Hey Sonos, play Mozart string quartet” or “play Beethoven Pastoral piano sonata”. It works for volume up/down, but so do the physical buttons on legacy Sonos S1 gear.

Maybe it’s worth paying $5,000+ to upgrade a house from Sonos S1 to Sonos S2 because the S2 app is so much better than the S1 app? In my limited trial I didn’t find anything to love about the S2 app. One purported selling feature for the latest Sonos devices is that they can function as Bluetooth or AirPlay speakers. But if your primary use case is Bluetooth or Airplay there are much cheaper options than Sonos.

For those who are passionate about social justice, the big advantage of the latest Sonos gear is that one can listen while being 2SLGBTQQIA+ (photo from the Sonos home page):

One can also listen and set up while being Black:

I’ll try to end on an uncharacteristically kind note. I’ve probably purchased about 20 Sonos devices over the past 20 years and I think only one has died. On the third hand, this solid reliability record makes the latest $700 Sonos more vulnerable to competition from a $100 previous generation device sourced via eBay.

Related:

• my 2005 article about Sonos

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From the author of Chaos Monkeys:

My former PhD advisor got the Nobel Prize (John Clarke at Berkeley). It was without question the dullest work I’ve ever done in life and should have left earlier.

My former PhD advisor got the Nobel Prize (John Clarke at Berkeley).

It was without question the dullest work I’ve ever done in life and should have left earlier. https://t.co/fDNDDdsuyn

— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) October 7, 2025

Related:

• Chaos Monkeys: Relations between the sexes in Silicon Valley
• Who will sign up to read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to the tender souls at Google?
• “Women in Science” (Greenspun 2006): This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.

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It’s been roughly two years, almost to the hour, since Gazans streamed across the border fence to rape, murder, and kidnap Israeli civilians (more than 800 murdered):

The Gazans also took hostage and/or murdered people from other countries, e.g., Thailand (which recognized a sovereign State of Palestine in 2012), killing at least 79 non-Israelis. Examples from the BBC:

We’re informed than the Gazans have had no food, no electricity, no shelter, and no Internet for two years. Here are some recent photos from UNRWA (all of the fighters and “civilians” who perpetrated the October 7 attacks were graduates of UNRWA schools and some UNRWA employees directly participated in murders and kidnapping) of children who haven’t had any food for two years:

UNRWA remains one of the largest providers of emergency learning and psychosocial support across #Gaza.

With 236 school counsellors and over 300 assistants, the Agency has conducted over 328,000 psychosocial support sessions for 730,000 displaced persons — more than half a… pic.twitter.com/v0zNGHEtbN

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) October 4, 2025

They’re playing their violins, undamaged after what we’re told has been “carpet bombing”, and sitting/standing within an apparently undamaged school, after what we’re told has been specific targeting of schools (UN) by tanks, artillery, and 500 lb. bombs:

Instead of foraging for scarce food after two years of “famine”, the kids are encouraged to expend extra calories by running around (on a perfect-condition patio surrounded by perfect-condition walls?):

See also this video, posted September 20, 2025, of Gazans who’ve received “10 million health consultations” at the clinic, in which PCs are fully powered and everyone seems to be of normal weight.

Amid continuous displacement and ever-deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Gaza, UNRWA provides healthcare and relief services to displaced persons.

Since the war began, UNRWA teams have provided nearly 10 million health consultations across the #Gaza Strip.

Our health… pic.twitter.com/dmp4A0ueSK

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) September 20, 2025

The Japanese and Germans felt defeated towards the end of World War II and were in no mood to continue the war or start another one. Based on the photos, videos, and interviews coming out of Gaza, there is no indication of any Gazan believing that the Gazans have been defeated. The New York Times followed up with 100 out of the 700 Gazans they’ve interviewed since October 7, 2023. Not a single interviewee mentions wanting to abandon the goal of destroying the Zionist entity. Nobody wants to surrender, recognize Israel, or release hostages. What Gazans want, it seems, is a victory over Israel at a lower personal cost, e.g., via emigration to Europe or the U.S. and letting the Gazans who stay in Gaza carry on fighting.

The Hamas leadership, consistent with popular opinion surveys, explicitly says that everything since October 7 has gone better than planned (CNN):

The question for today is where we think the Gazans will be in two additional years. Let’s suppose that the answer to Government restart or Hamas deal will happen first? is “Hamas-Israel deal”. The fighting in Gaza ends tomorrow. What will the Gazans be doing two years from now? Will any still be living in tents? How many attacks will Gazans have perpetrated against Israeli civilians, e.g., by firing rockets? (The fighting can continue long after the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) signs a deal because the Hamas folks can legitimately say that they don’t control Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam; “has called upon Muslims to carry out lone wolf attacks against Israel”), Jaysh al-Ummah (“Jaysh al-Ummah has criticized Hamas as being too moderate and not focused enough on Islamist projects”), the Abdul al-Qadir al-Husseini Brigades, the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade, or a rebooted Jund Ansar Allah.) What percent of Gazan GDP will be money extracted from U.S. taxpayers, who’ve historically been the biggest enablers of the Gazans’ military efforts (by being the biggest suppliers of cash to fund all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc., and thus enabling Gazans to spend up to 100 percent of their productive energies on preparing for a river-to-the-sea liberation)? Will the Gazans have launched another October 7-style attack? (my prediction: no, because it will take closer to 4-5 years to rearm and for the Israelis to become complacent)

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King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson is a new-ish book that is relevant to the upcoming election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (one more month!).

In both the opening and closing sections, the book explains that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, the Religion of Peace. The world’s terrorists are Christian, white, Hindu, and/or Jewish. The pages in between describes Iranian Muslims burning alive other Iranian Muslims, in the name of Islam, for the un-Islamic act of going to the movies (Cinema Rex fire, in which hundreds died).

As with Mamdani backers, elite progressive Iranians who had thrived under the Shah were eager supporters of the Islamic Revolution proposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (they imagined that he would defer to credentialed elites when he picked ministers). Part of their motivation seems to have been jealousy that members of the Shah’s inner circle were getting far richer than they were (kind of like elite New Yorkers who aren’t in rent-stabilized apartments are jealous of those who are and New Yorkers who earn $300,000/year are envious of those who earn $30 million/year). Like Andrew Cuomo, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, last in the line of 2,500 years of monarchy, was fond of partying with young females. Another parallel is that the current U.S. government is accused of being disorganized while the author describes the Carter administration as exhibiting “colossal incompetence”. The author blames Jimmy Carter and friends for Iran becoming an Islamic dictatorship, rather than transitioning to a post-Shah parliamentary democracy, and also for the U.S. Embassy being held hostage for more than a day. The book describes Ayatollah Khomeini’s initial reaction to the embassy takeover as a direction to get the students out immediately. After Jimmy Carter signaled a willingness to negotiate rather than threatening a traditional military response to what the author describes as an “act of war”, the Ayatollah changed his mind and told every Iranian to support the “students”. Carter was, therefore, the cause of the 444-day “crisis” (the world’s longest prior to the Maskachusetts, California, and New York governors’ states of emergency for coronapanic?). Carter eventually transferred to Iran $25 billion in today’s mini-dollars (previously frozen assets) to secure the hostages’ release.

The author says that American Democrats were happy to see the Shah go and the Ayatollahs take over partly because of false information about the Shah promulgated by non-profit organizations and U.S. media. Amnesty International, today famous for its anti-Israel propaganda, said that the Shah was holding 100,000 political prisoners when, in act, the number was less than 3,000. The Shah and agencies under his command had executed roughly 100 opponents of his regime over the years, but U.S. media reported that thousands of Iranians opposed to the Shah were being killed. (The book notes that thousands of Iranians were ultimately killed for their political views, but nearly all of them were killed by the Islamic government that took over from the Shah.)

Iran is a fascinating case study in how far an empire can fall. The Persians were empire builders in the same league as the Romans and Chinese. They got taken over by Arabs during the Muslim Conquests and lost their religion (Zoroastrianism) and could no longer use their own language for religious purposes. After about 1400 years of Persian-style government, which was tending towards westernization, combined with Arab-originated religion they ended up with an Arab-originated government (Islamic theocracy). The Arab-inspired theocracy took over shortly after the Pahlavis and friends celebrated 2,500 of Persian Empire. Today the non-Arab Iranians are the primary military supporters of Arabs (since the 1960s, calling themselves “Palestinians”) fighting to destroy the Zionist entity and they suffer much of the Israeli military action formerly directed at Arab states such as Egypt and Jordan.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran is a fascinating study in how westernized elites who’ve been huge beneficiaries of a system can turn against it.

Fun fact: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a qualified Boeing 707 pilot who often flew left seat until the plane was in cruise. Not-to-fun fact: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1974 and died 1.5 years after fleeing from the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In other words, the Iranians who hated the Shah needn’t have done anything to get rid of him other than wait a couple of years.

Related:

• Ebrahim Yazdi, U.S.-educated founder of the Muslim Students Association, who became the interpreter for Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris for the foreign journalists who showed up unable to understand Farsi and who didn’t bring their own interpreters (Yazdi considerably softened Khomeini’s anti-West/anti-Jew message while interpreting). Yazdi imagined a progressive Shah-free future for Iran with an Islamic flavor and ended up falling out of favor with the government of Mullahs. He was ultimately imprisoned.
• Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son, has been living in the D.C. suburbs and received pilot training from the USAF (his web site)

Grok’s attempt at showing Mayor Mamdani in an Iranian ayatollah’s robes:

Ayatollah Khomeini:

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One reaches the museum’s last hangar by walking through the “missile gallery”:

The principles of rocketry are explained and the museum notes that the New York Times ridiculed Robert Goddard in 1920 and finally apologized in 1969.

Here’s part of the Newspaper of Science’s editorial:

There’s a plaque honoring the founder of Boeing, but no mention of the fact that FDR’s federal government forced its breakup in 1934 due to its alleged monopoly power. Nor is Boeing’s subsequent career as a real estate developer mentioned in which he restricted ownership in his new neighborhoods to whites (he anticipated the Harvard University research described in 2007 by the New York Times in “The downside of diversity”: “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”).

The fourth building of the museum contains some impressive items, including the enormous North American XB-70 Valkyrie, Mach 3 predecessor of the B-1 bomber.

My favorite, though, was Wile E. Coyote’s space sled:

The Apollo 15 command module in which Al Worden orbited solo:

Here’s a smiling but unsuccessful competitor to the F-35:

The museum holds a collection of Air Force Ones dating back to FDR, but my favorite is Eisenhower’s:

On the way out of the museum, Outstanding Airmen of the Year are recognized:

A separate area is maintained by the National Aviation Hall of Fame and I was pleased to see Frank Robinson honored (he looks quite tall standing next to the R22!):

A substantial portion of the gift shop is dedicated to Rosie the Riveter:

There are some beautiful memorials near the parking lot set up by various units and retirees of the Air Force:

Here’s one for the Kanye West fans:

Thus concludes my coverage of the 2025 trip to the USAF museum in Dayton, Ohio. Allow at least a full day for the experience.

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