Pre-Mamdani Election Reading: King of Kings

by philg

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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Money Illusion 101: Ricky Gervais’s New York apartment that fell 45 percent from its 2008 value

by philg

Some news from the Mamdani Caliphate… “Ricky Gervais has just sold a NYC apartment for $1.4M — a slight loss from its 2008 purchase price” (NY Post):

The English comedian and actor Ricky Gervais has just sold an apartment on East 63rd Street for $1.4 million, according to city property records filed on Monday.

Gervais, whose many credits include the across-the-pond version of “The Office,” and his longtime partner Jane Fallon, both appear on the deed in the property transfer to a limited liability company — whose identity could not immediately be identified.

The pair still own a larger unit on the 12th floor, which they bought in 2011 for $3.74 million, records show. They purchased this ninth-floor residence — with one bedroom and 799 square feet — for $1.66 million in 2008, property records also show. This means a slight loss for the couple.

A “slight loss”? If we adjust for inflation at official CPI, the purchase price is equivalent to $2.55 million in today’s mini-dollars:

Gervais took a 45% hit on the value of this apartment in real terms, in other words, but via Money Illusion it is only “a slight loss”.

(My hedge fund manager friend, if anyone talks up real estate as a surefire investment: “Prices can only go up because they’re not making any more condos.”)

What if we consider the loss in terms of gold? My question to ChatGPT:

In terms of ounces of gold, what percentage loss was it to buy something for $1.66 million in June 2008 and sell it for $1.4 million in June 2025?

Answer (not in quote style):

Here’s one way to think about it:

  • In June 2008, the price of gold was about $925.10 per ounce (on June 30, 2008). StatMuse
  • In June 2025, gold was around $3,264.03 per ounce (on June 30, 2025). Gold Price

Step 1: Convert the transaction amounts into ounces of gold (at those dates)

  • $1.66 million in June 2008 in terms of gold ounces = 1,660,000925.10≈1,794.8 ounces\frac{1,660,000}{925.10} \approx 1,794.8 \text{ ounces}925.101,660,000​≈1,794.8 ounces
  • $1.4 million in June 2025 in terms of gold ounces = 1,400,0003,264.03≈429.1 ounces\frac{1,400,000}{3,264.03} \approx 429.1 \text{ ounces}3,264.031,400,000​≈429.1 ounces

Step 2: Compute the percentage loss in gold ounces

  • Loss in ounces = 1,794.8 − 429.1 = 1,365.7 ounces
  • Percentage loss relative to original (in ounces) = 1,365.71,794.8×100%≈76.1%\frac{1,365.7}{1,794.8} \times 100\% \approx 76.1\%1,794.81,365.7​×100%≈76.1%

So, in terms of ounces of gold, the transaction represents about a 76 % loss.

Who are the two journalists and at least one editor who failed to notice the massive loss? “Zachary Kussin is the real estate editor at the New York Post. … He holds degrees from Bard College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. … Mary K. Jacob is a reporter at the New York Post. … A graduate of New York University with a degree in politics and journalism…”

In other words, the two reporters who worked on this story are among the American elite when it comes to educational credentials.

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If marijuana stores were “essential” could Donald Trump keep our national parks open during the government shutdown?

by philg

NBC:

The contingency plan says that about 64% of the National Park Service workforce is set to be furloughed and that those kept on would perform “excepted” activities, such as law enforcement or emergency response, border and coastal protection and surveillance, and fire suppression and monitoring.

If state governors, such as in California and Maskachusetts, were able to declare marijuana stores “essential” during coronapanic, and therefore legally allowed to continue operating, why can’t Donald Trump declare national parks to be “essential”? The hook could be that we have an obesity national public health emergency and the parks allow people to exercise more. The hook could be that we have a racial equity/equality emergency and the parks need to be open so that People of Color can get into them.

Separately, in the Department of Legacy Media Fighting Against Misinformation, the New York Times:

Without a compromise, hundreds of thousands of federal employees will be sent home without pay,

ChatGPT:

In January 2019, Congress enacted the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019, which made retroactive pay automatic for any future shutdown. That law requires that all federal employees furloughed or working without pay during a lapse in appropriations must receive full back pay after the shutdown ends.

Federal workers fortunate enough to be declared “non-essential” are, in other words, on a guaranteed paid vacation, which is reported, as a fact by the New York Times, to be “without pay”. They can’t be 100 percent sure when their windfall vacation checks will arrive, but they can be 100 percent sure that they money will show up, maybe while they are traveling in Europe or enjoying Xbox.

From the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, our Science-following government reminds us that invasive plants are bad, unlike the invasive humans that Science assures us are at least good and probably great for all Americans:

Some more photos from this National Park Service site:

Related:

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Government restart or Hamas deal will happen first?

by philg

It will be ironic if it turns out to be easier to negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Gazans (Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al.) than it is to negotiate a settlement between Republicans and Democrats (a handful of Democrat Senators must agree to vote with Republicans in order to get to 60).

Separately, from the WSJ:

The militant group has told mediators it has reservations about some of the terms of the 20-point plan, including the stipulation that it disarm and destroy its weapons, a demand it has previously rejected. Hamas also says that releasing all 48 hostages within 72 hours, as laid out in the Trump plan, would be difficult because it has lost contact in recent weeks with some other militant groups holding a number of them, the mediators said.

We’ve been told that the Gazans are entirely without weapons. Israel has been waging a slow-motion genocide against a (growing) population of unarmed civilians. Now we’re told that a sticking point in peace negotiations is that the unarmed Gazans don’t want to give up their heavy weapons, rocket factories, rockets, etc.

We’ve also been told that Gazans are entirely peaceful humans. Perhaps 1 in 10,000 is a member of Hamas and this 0.01% of the population has been controlling the 99.99% and forcing them into a conflict with Israel that 99.99% of Gazans don’t want because they love and accept the state of Israel, according to the official narrative to date. Now we’re instead told that there are multiple “other militant groups” comprising peaceful unarmed Gazans.

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Desperate enough to rent a billboard…

by philg

… but not desperate enough to spend time with someone who doesn’t share her love for Kacklin’ Kamala.

New York Post:

What do we see at marrylisa.com?

  • 41 years old (also, “Wants marriage and kids within the next 2-3 years with the right man”?)
  • Loves cats!

Her “non-negotiable items” include the following:

  • Must be Democratic or liberal or left leaning politically.

Preferences for a mate:

  • 35-45. Flexible within a year or two at most.

One open question is why she insists on a single gender ID (“a man”). She’s a self-described Bay Area liberal. Why the heteronormativity? Second question: How is she going to produce “kids” (plural) starting at age 44?

In the background:

  • Lisa didn’t focus on dating in her 20’s and early 30’s – she prioritized finishing college, starting a career, learning new skills and working on personal development.

Let’s ignore the improper punctuation (should be “20s and early 30s”) and ask whether her life plan made sense. The New York Post article says that Lisa Catalano is “a vintage clothes retailer”. In other words, she could have the job that she has without ever having finished high school, much less having earned a college degree. So she spent the years in which she was most attractive as a mate, plus tons of tuition money and foregone income, to earn a degree that has no value to her at the moment. The result of this plan is that she’s out on Tinder at the age of a normal human grandmother.

Loosely related, “‘Men seem to make life for women worse’: single US women share the woes of dating in 2025” (Guardian):

By 2030, 45% of prime working age women in the US, defined as women aged between 25 and 44, will be single according to Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts – the largest share in history.

Kellie, 43 [i.e., grandmother age], from Georgia, joined the substantial number of respondents who felt that social media narratives had made dating toxic and pitted men against women.

“I wish I could have met my person before the stupid gender wars, social media and red pill rhetoric that has ruined people’s view of dating and marriage,” she said.

Danielle, 29, a public relations professional from Tennessee, said her future partner would need to be “kind, thoughtful, emotionally available, considerate, reliable, and responsible”, but also “college educated”.

“I’m very disheartened by the shortage of quality men,” she added. “Men my age are less educated, their social skills are abysmal, and now they’re running into the arms of Trump and ‘incel’ forums.”

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Hollywood, Yale, and the United Nations adopt my downdraft paint booth classroom idea, five years later

by philg

Me, July 2020: Build downdraft paint booths for K-12 schools?

Why not a system for schools in which (a) each classroom has its own HVAC system, (b) there are 8-12 outlets in the ceiling, and (c) there are 8-12 exhaust outlets in the floor? For maximum safety, the system would have no recirculation.

Hollywood (and Racism League Yale) meets the United Nations, this month: “Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet calls for post-COVID mask mandate in impassioned UN speech” (Page Six):

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet made an impassioned speech at the United Nations on Tuesday.

The 19-year-old called for post-COVID mask mandates — while wearing one of her own — to combat “unmitigated infection and reinfection.”

The teen also advocated for “clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary … that tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it.”

The Yale University student wishes to “recognize filtered air as a human right, as intuitively as we do filtered water.”

She continued, “It is a neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say, ‘We knew how to protect you and we didn’t do it. We have access to a technology to prevent airborne disease … and we refuse to use it.”

It’s never too late to be proved right!

Related:

  • Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment? (May 28, 2020: “Take out half the shelves in a Target for example, so that people are naturally farther apart. With so many other retailers shutting down, there is plenty of mall space. … switch small retail to more like it was in the 18th century. Customer enters spacious front part of shop and asks for item. Shopkeeper goes into jammed back part shelves to retrieve requested item.”)
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White House plan to help Gazans prep for river-to-the-sea liberation

by philg

“Here Is the Full Text of the Gaza Plan Released by the White House” (NYT):

Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough. [Gazans can put 100% of their efforts into military activities because outside capital will fund repairs to all damage done during latest war.]

Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners plus 1700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context. [The most experienced Gazan fighters will soon be back in the Gazan military.]

Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries. [The next attack against Israeli civilians can be a lot more brutal than the October 7th attack because amnesty will always be available.]

Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the Jan. 19, 2025, agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads. [Gazans can put 100% of their efforts into military activities, have 8 children each, etc. because US and EU taxpayers will fund all of the essentials for daily life.]

A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries. [The Swiss, who last perpetrated a war against neighbors in 1815, are subject to a 39% tariff. Gazans who took and held hostages, on the other hand, will enjoy most favored nation status.]

The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) to immediately deploy in Gaza. The ISF will train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza, and will consult with Jordan and Egypt who have extensive experience in this field. This force will be the long-term internal security solution. The ISF will work with Israel and Egypt to help secure border areas, along with newly trained Palestinian police forces. [Gazans who killed and raped Israeli civilians will now be paid to carry guns around inside Gaza.]

Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. [Gazans can start wars and have a chance in each new war of winning some territory, but unlike for any other group of humans on this planet who’ve ever waged war, there is never a risk of losing any territory.]

Given that the above are the consequences of starting the October 7, 2023 war, why wouldn’t the Gazans rationally rearm and start another war a few years from now? The plan promises a continuation of a fully-funded lifestyle for Gazans: shelter, food, health care, education, etc. With US and EU taxpayers funding all of the day-to-day essentials, Gazans will be able to devote 100 percent of their productive efforts to rearming and planning their next attack.

Loosely related, here’s the kind of pot belly that a resident of Gaza can suffer from after two years of “starvation” and “famine” (Reuters, September 20, 2025):

Also in the NYT, “Tony Blair Emerges as Potential Figure in Postwar Gaza”:

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, has emerged as a potential figure in the reconstruction of Gaza.

He has been trying to build support for a plan that would create a Gaza International Transitional Authority, a U.N.-mandated administration that would include a multinational security force to stabilize the war-torn enclave. Now he has emerged as a candidate to head that authority.

Every group of Brown people, in other words, needs a white man as a leader.

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Will AI make conscientiousness and organization more or less valuable?

by philg

A human’s productivity is typically determined, to a large extent, by intelligence and conscientiousness. These are both heritable traits so there is a limit to how smart and conscientious a person is likely to become if his/her/zir/their biological parents weren’t smart and conscientious.

As we celebrate National Coffee Day today, I’m wondering if the conscientious aspect of productivity will be rendered more or less relevant by artificial intelligence and robotics. Consider a person prone to disorganization and procrastination, both behaviors negatively correlated with conscientiousness. Suppose that each of us is being followed everywhere by a humanoid robot. At any given moment, the robot reminds us what needs to be done. Even the spaciest among us will never space out and miss a videoconference because the robot will log us into it.

The flip side of this argument is that AI is a productivity amplifier and, therefore, the people who are currently unproductive will stay unproductive (100 times 0 is still 0) while the productive will become superheroes of output. Maybe a person with mediocre conscientiousness will be rendered more conscientious by the companion robot, but that person will still be left in the dust by the conscientious who’ve gotten even more of a boost from their companion robots.

Related:

  • “Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets: a twin study” (classic 1996 paper finding 44% heritability for conscientiousness)
  • Wokipedia forced to admit that we’re not all born equal when it comes to IQ (but remember that in the Wokipedia world there is no correlation between race and IQ, only “high heritability of intelligence within races”)
  • average IQ in the US is declining (coinciding with soaring immigration from societies with low average IQ), thus making conscientiousness more important: academic paper (2023) from Intelligence (“A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018. Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores.”)
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Current stock market valuations explained

by philg

From Pedro Domingos, a CS prof at University of Washington, the best current explanation for stratospheric stock market valuations:

Oracle’s main business these days is promising vast amounts of cloud computing it doesn’t have to AI companies who don’t know how they’ll pay for it.

WSJ, a month ago:

The S&P 500 currently trades at 22.5 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, compared with the average of 16.8 times since 2000. … The 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 accounted for 39.5% of its total value at the end of July, the most ever…

How badly beaten up did investors who bought into stocks at a high P/E ratio get? I asked Grok “Consider an investor who purchased the S&P 500 in February 2000. What annual return on investment would he or she have received through August 2025 vs. an investor who bought in August 2002 and held through August 2025?” and learned that the “Peak P/E ratio” investor (bought before the dotcom bubble burst) would have earned a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 6.3% vs 8.9% for an investor who bought at a more reasonable P/E ratio in August 2002. This difference is close to the difference between investing from 2002-2025 in wired U.S. (9%) vs. tired Europe (5.7%).

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Robot tugboats to repel Greta Thunberg’s selfie flotilla and similar?

by philg

Climate change no longer being an issue, apparently, Greta Thunberg and friends have spent the past month headed for a visit to the noble Gazans via diesel-powered flotilla (“Global Sumud Flotilla”). It’s a strange situation because the flotilla participants seem to have no respect for Palestinian religious and cultural norms, e.g., they permit females to roam the decks of their yachts without wearing hijab. The photo below could perhaps be a prostitute with two clients by Gazan standards:

Israel has established a blockade against its military enemy in Gaza and, therefore, under international law can repel (or sink, if necessary?) any ship that crosses the dashed red line below.

But Israel gets a lot of bad press when it uses standard military procedures. What about robot tugboats that could intercept the selfie yachts and push them out of blockade area? That would deny Greta Thunberg and other diesel-powered climate activists the photo opportunities that they seek. The flotilla folks claim that to be unarmed so they don’t have any means of destroying robot tugs. Robot tugs could be built in different sizes to match up to the different size yachts in the flotilla. They’re intercepting uncooperative vessels so should have a higher top speed than conventional tugboats. The Israelis could start with simple skiffs equipped with modern outboard engines. Since the skiff doesn’t have to hold any cargo or humans it could hold a tremendous amount of fuel for endurance. Surround the skiff with used car tires so as to get some extra points for recycling.

For maximum reliability with minimum fuel consumption and pollution, the Israelis could use Honda’s only V8 engine (350 hp; Mercury makes one with 600 hp if necessary):

Loosely related, Israel has invited the hostile vessels “to dock at the Ashkelon Marina and unload the aid there”, which would certainly be anticlimactic compared to a climate activists-v-robot interaction!

As of September 24, 2025, the yachts had survived 14 attacks by warships and warplanes, without sustaining any damage, and were using their inoperative radios to report a “communications jam” that has rendered their radios inoperative:

See also “Posing with Hamas chief, activist who’s joined Greta on Gaza ‘freedom flotilla'” (Daily Mail):

Grinning as he gives a Churchillian ‘victory’ sign, the spokesman for Greta Thunberg’s Gaza ‘freedom flotilla’ poses with a Hamas chief weeks before setting sail.

Wael Nawar was draped in a scarf emblazoned with the terror group’s emblem as he stood with other pro-Palestinian activists beside Youssef Hamdan, who runs Hamas’s North African operation, during a meeting at its Algerian headquarters in June.

Mr Nawar is listed alongside Swedish campaigner Ms Thunberg as part of the 13-strong ‘steering committee’ orchestrating the Global Sumud Flotilla, which left Spain last week to deliver food and medical aid to Gaza.

Another committee member, political activist Marouan Ben Guettaia, was also a guest of Hamdan a few days after and later posted a picture of the pair sitting in front of a Hamas flag.

A third committee member, Brazilian Thiago Avila, attended Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut in February and praised him as an ‘inspiration’.

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