Along with pristine beaches and extensive malls, Kish is—or rather ought to be—known more widely for another feature and institution which the Iranian mullahs established there way back in 2003; namely, the Kish Bourse (i.e., Kish Stock Exchange). ???? ??? if you prefer the Farsi.

Think of it as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange of Iran, a country stacked with natural resources, a relatively well-educated and sophisticated population (the literacy rate is 97 percent among young adults, which, if you consider the deplorable state of secondary education in the United States, means that Iranian youth are most assuredly smarter than your average young American adult), and an economy burdened by mismanagement of their own Islamic theocracy and crippling, long-duration sanctions from the American secular theocracy.

That American secular theocracy has considered it a dogmatic rite of passage into the state and corporate media (their temples) that one must, at the very least, excuse the economic, cultural, and political warfare against Iran as necessary for a variety of spurious reasons. Who really has enough free time to investigate and then suggest otherwise? After all, Iran is plagued by terroristic Islamic fundamentalists who have pledged—like their former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—"to wipe Israel off the face of the earth."

That hero of American warfare and empire and regime change and nation building, George W. Bush, declared Iran to be one of the hinges of the "axis of evil"; so, since George W. Bush is so much better than Donald J. Trump, well, all Iranians must be malevolent thugs. Iran deserved to have the United States aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, to have the United States provide Hussein chemical weapons (mostly made in Germany and the United Kingdom), and then have those chemical weapons unleashed on them.