James Harris

Trump: That's where Martin Luther King gave his great speech, and he had a million people and I had the same exact crowd, maybe a little bit more. I have pictures of Martin Luther King’s crowd, the exact same, everything, but it was 70 years difference. The exact same crowd, but I actually had more people

Trump has extended the ceasefire. Iran has seized two ships in the Strait of Hormuz. So are we looking at more diplomacy – or more war? 1. Probably some of both. The fight has moved from the air and land to the sea. It’s no longer a matter of drones versus interceptors but rather blockade versus blockade. An economic war, focused on the Strait of Hormuz. 2. Blockading Iranian ports and denying oil revenue to the IRGC is, for the U.S., far better than the President’s oft-invoked threats to bomb power plants and bridges. It’s hard to parse who is in charge of what in Tehran, but IRGC hardliners clearly have significant sway right now. And it’s a decent bet that they care more about their own access to resources than the suffering of their people. It’s telling that Tehran’s chief demand right now is an end to the blockade. 3. The problem is that Iran has leverage too, and knows it. Its grip on the world’s economic jugular produces pain everywhere, especially in Asia. Tehran bets that it can endure the pain of a blockade longer than the world can. That may or may not be right. 4. As it turns out, Iranian control over the Strait is more useful for Tehran than its nuclear program. It generates immediate leverage, can be dialed up and down, and takes little military resources to effectuate. Where the nuclear program generated potential threats, controlling the strait produces actual ones, and with economic results in hours. 5. That lesson won’t go unnoticed elsewhere. Does Beijing conclude that it can best generate leverage in a Taiwan crisis by blockading its exports of semiconductors? At a minimum, the old notion of key geographic choke points – the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca – will get a new look by military planners everywhere. 6. Lesser noticed right now are the UK and French efforts to assemble a coalition that keeps the Strait open after an enduring ceasefire. This is a key element in the ultimate solution here. The U.S. – and the world – cannot simply leave an Iranian sword of Damocles hanging over the waterway. For all the President’s complaints about U.S. allies, they are mobilizing to play a vital role. 7. Beyond reopening the Strait, the U.S. will necessarily focus on Iranian enrichment and the uranium stockpile. The VP had it right in shifting the discussion from Iran’s purported right to enrich to whether Tehran is actually enriching. The latter matters most. 8. Getting a permanent deal with Iran that addresses all U.S. concerns is impossible. Critics of the JCPOA long said that a better deal was always possible, if the U.S. had only pressured more, or negotiated harder, or been smarter and tougher. Now’s the time to show it. Yet count on Iran to remain intransigent on key issues, even after its leadership has been killed, its defense industrial base destroyed, and its country ravaged. 9. The U.S. must weigh the war’s global consequences, beyond the economic. Running down missile and interceptor stocks, for instance, and focusing military resources on the Middle East, means less for Asia and Europe. Russia and China will have an enduring interest in keeping it that way, including by helping Iran recover. 10. Completely lost at this point is how it all started: the Iranian regime, just months ago, killing thousands of protestors who wished nothing more than a better, freer life for themselves and their families. Help, it turns out, wasn’t exactly on the way. And, at least in the near term, the Iranian people will be the biggest losers in this fight.

Denver had 96 murders in 2021. Last year it had 37. The lowest since 1990 and the largest homicide drop of any major American city, far outpacing the national decline. Auto theft, burglaries, and gang-related violence also declined significantly. Here's what they did: 1. The police chief studied successful efforts in Boston and Dallas and mapped the specific blocks driving most of the violence, concentrating resources there with more officers, better lighting and cameras. 2. They’re now catching 8 out of 10 killers. Better evidence collection and stronger community trust generated more tips. And when criminals know they'll get caught and prosecuted, some of them stop shooting. 3. Colorado made every car theft a felony regardless of the car's value, closing a loophole that let so many repeat offenders walk. Auto thefts dropped 36%. But last month, the city council ripped out all 110 license plate reader cameras over fears the data could reach federal immigration authorities. This year, the numbers are already moving the wrong direction outside of police-targeted hotspots. A man walking his dog in Curtis Park was randomly shot and killed by a man on probation. Two people were killed at a north Denver park on Easter Sunday. The police strategy works where it's deployed. The question is whether Denver will keep building on what's working, or let politics take it apart.

SFUSD's 'reforms' were meant to achieve 'equity'. The number of African American students taking AP math exams fell from 27 to 3.

Food for thought. Iran Is Not Winning. It Is Unraveling. The prevailing narrative on Iran has it almost perfectly reversed. We are told that Tehran is winning a war of wills in the Gulf and that Donald Trump is gambling recklessly with the world’s most sensitive chokepoint. In reality, Iran is not consolidating strength; it is managing decline. And Trump’s play on the Strait of Hormuz has quietly forced energy markets to reprice security—tilting the balance decisively toward the Americas, and away from Europe, Asia and China. The Islamic Republic no longer resembles a confident revolutionary project. With the old clerical core leadership shattered, power has splintered between a camp that recognises a deal with the outside world as the only path to survival and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a class of military dictators with guns, patronage networks and a rational fear that any genuine settlement will ultimately throw them overboard. This is not a unified strategy at work; it’s infighting, paranoia, a fragmented system in late-stage decay, crumbling under pressure. Into this fragmentation, the White House has introduced a form of calibrated coercion too often caricatured as impulsive. Around the Strait of Hormuz, Washington has threatened disruption without fully triggering it, forcing shipowners, insurers and policymakers to absorb a hard truth: dependence on vulnerable, seaborne Middle Eastern barrels is not a passing inconvenience but a structural risk. Iran can harass tankers and jolt day-to-day sentiment; it cannot rebuild a broken economy on sporadic shocks to global shipping. And the world must deal with the end of Pax Americana! The underlying playbook is anything but novel. Sun Tzu’s insistence that “all warfare is based on deception”, Machiavelli’s counsel that a ruler must manipulate appearances and exploit factionalism, and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s argument that sea power and control of chokepoints shape the fate of nations are not museum pieces. They are, in this case, the operating code. Trump’s opaque signalling, deliberate use of disinformation and visible but limited naval posture in and around Hormuz amount to a modern, Mahanian use of sea power as economic statecraft. Energy markets are already adjusting. Tankers are head to the Gulf of America. In a world where a single strait can a risk to economies is Europe and Asia, without ever being fully closed, assets tied to secure basins and diversified export routes deserve a premium. The Americas sit in an enviable position: vast, politically stable hydrocarbon resources, multiple pipelines and ports, and no dependence on a distant maritime chokepoint controlled by adversaries. By contrast, Europe, much of Asia and China find themselves downstream of vulnerabilities they do not control and regimes they cannot stabilise, exposed to shipping routes that can be threatened faster than alternative supply can be mobilised. All of this plays out against a domestic backdrop in Iran that looks less like revolutionary vigour and more like fear. A state that cannot safely keep its internet on, that must rely on public brutality to deter dissent, is not projecting confidence. It is signalling weakness, to its own citizens as much as to its rivals. Winston Churchill once remarked that “in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.” Iran’s leadership offers only defiance, without realistic prospects of victory or peace. The uncomfortable conclusion for those still insisting that Tehran is “winning” is that what they are observing is not the rise of a regional hegemon, but the protracted, strategically exploited unwinding of a brittle regime at the centre of an overexposed energy system.

Finally finished this. The first ~300 pages were quite heavy going mainly because I don't really have a good baseline for the 16th century where the story begins. It was just Qezilbash this, Safavid that - one damned thing after the other. But from the late Qajar era to the rise of Reza Khan and the Pahlavi era the story gets super interesting and very hard to put down till it ends around 2009. Professor Amanat spent 20yrs writing the book and it really shows. Some things I previously knew but now have a much (much) better understanding of include (but not limited to): - The Wilāyat al-Faqīh and the specific ways in which Khomeini manipulated them for his own power grab - The ousting of Mossadeq, thoroughly and properly contextualised - The fall of the Shah and the very specific errors he made that left an opening for Khomeini (as I say below in the thread, my leading contender for the 20th century's greatest conman) - The ways in which the Shia motifs of messianism and martyrdom are so deeply woven into the Iranian polity such that, even though the revolution of 1979 is shocking for the fact that for at least 5 centuries the clerics had actually never held power, I got the sense that it was long in coming My conclusion is that Iran has not known any chill in its history. To borrow a Nigerianism - the polity is always heated. When there's not a revolution going on, the groundwork for the next one is being laid. If things are quiet or going relatively quietly, Iranian leaders seem to take this as an affront and then say or do something crazy to raise the temperature back to the 'normal' boiling point. I was taken aback by the strong similarities between the current conflict and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. With my highest possible recommendation (you can start on page 315 when the Qajars are on their way out). A remarkable achievement of scholarship and research