Wayne Perkins has played on records by Bob Marley, Joni Mitchell, and The Rolling Stones. He was also nearly a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and, supposedly, had his beloved Gibson Les Paul stolen by none other than Joe Walsh. That’s a whole lot. As for what made him primed for such a career, Perkins shrugs, telling Guitar World: “It was basically, ‘Okay, kid. Let’s see what you got.’ I thrived under pressure because I loved the studio.” Before Perkins became a studio ace, he was a kid from Birmingham, Alabama. He gigged locally with The Vikings, who became The Rigbys. The post An Interview With Session Guitar Legend Wayne Perkins appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

President Donald Trump has finally moved the United States past the traumas of the Iraq War. With the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, the U.S. made the world a safer place in the long run. But the attack, and subsequent ceasefire between Israel and Iran, also represents a reset of American foreign policy. The president rejected both the naivety of neoconservatism and the shortsightedness of isolationism. For one thing, Trump, to the dismay of “non-interventionists,” came to terms with the serious limitations of diplomacy with Islamists. Iran was given decades to strike an agreement. It was more interested in a nuclear weapon. Even after Israel had severely degraded its military capabilities and nuclear program, seizing supremacy of the air, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wouldn’t surrender his program. The idea that diplomats were on the cusp of forging a deal with Iran is dubious. Trump also realized that diplomacy is useless without enforced red lines. For decades, the Iranian leadership, hard-liners and “moderates” alike, ignored its commitments without any repercussions. Simply because we were misled about the extent of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program doesn’t mean that no other country is pursuing them. Iran didn’t make much of a secret about its intent, after all. Also, let’s not forget that the Islamic Republic has been assailing Americans for 45 years. Some of us are old enough to remember hostages being paraded by revolutionaries, the bloody Beirut bombing, and servicemen being killed and maimed by Iranian improvised explosive devices. All of this should have been unacceptable. Yet, every president since Bill Clinton has been made a fool of by the Iranians on the nuclear issue. Trump accepted that Iran was not Iraq. Few argue that our experiment of imposing a democratic government on Islamic nations failed. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq evolved into anything resembling a free nation. Iran, though, was never going to be another social engineering project. The Trump administration’s goal was to deny the regime nuclear weapons. There could not have been a clearer objective. Our long-standing ally did the heavy lifting, severely degrading Iran’s military capabilities. We, hopefully, finished the job without a single American casualty. Yet, the failures of a foreign technocratic nation-building project have turned many Americans into cynics and panic-mongers. There was a lot of panic after Trump posted that though it wasn’t “politically correct” to use the term regime change, “if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a regime change??? MIGA!!!” Attempting to divine the president’s heavily punctuated thinking is a precarious undertaking. Still, it’s extraordinarily unlikely Trump ever meant the U.S. was mulling a way to install a new Iranian government by force. The president was likely attempting to frighten the mullahs into a ceasefire. An invasion of that nation would have taken a major buildup of troops and movement of military assets. There was never any sign that such a plan was in motion. Nor has anyone suggested such an undertaking. Nor is there any popular will to do it. Yes, the Israelis also talked up “regime change.” Stirring up paranoia and anxiety is a psychological component of warfare. Israel, moreover, is fighting an enemy that’s incessantly threatening its existence. It, quite rationally, wants to destroy its foe. It’s also quite rational for the U.S. to desire a less fundamentalist and bellicose government in Iran. Simply because Iraqis rejected our ideas doesn’t mean those ideas aren’t worthwhile or that we shouldn’t help those who organically embrace them. Our primary concern is American interests. But engaging in a foreign policy wholly stripped of any idealism also leads to ugly places. There have been five uprisings in Iran over the past decade. If the Iranian people had the means and ability to overthrow an autocratic regime and cobble together a less destabilizing government, which is unlikely, we certainly shouldn’t stand in their way. Perhaps most importantly, Trump understands that a superpower doesn’t act terrified when threatened. Others should be terrified of us. The U.S. seems to have forgotten our own strength after the failures of the Iraq War, which convinced a generation that even limited conflicts would spiral us into World War III. The last Iranian “attack” on a U.S. base in Qatar had all the earmarks of a face-saving symbolic maneuver designed for a domestic audience. The truth is that we humiliated our enemy and denied them a chance at a nuke. We have no clue how all this ends in the long run. What we do know is that the U.S. is no longer paralyzed by the past.????? COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Trump Learned the Lessons of Iraq appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump repeatedly promised to restore America’s manufacturing base. But what exactly is his vision of a reindustrialized America? “I’m proclaiming that by the end of my term, the entire world will be talking about the ‘Michigan miracle’ and the stunning rebirth of Detroit,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Novi, Michigan, in October. Since then, the president has pursued a bold tariff strategy, while encouraging foreign countries to invest in American manufacturing and advocating business-friendly regulation standards for emerging tech industries. But if he achieves the “rebirth of Detroit,” it’s unlikely to make Motor City look like it did in its heyday. A Friendlier Look at Foreign Investment On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly lamented the fact that much of American manufacturing has been moved to other countries. He blasted the Japanese Nippon Steel Corp.’s purchase of U.S. Steel, saying he would “block it instantaneously” in order to maintain control over the company, which is virtually synonymous with American industry. At the time, he shared that position with then-President Joe Biden. But once elected, Trump took a different tone after negotiating with the company and receiving assurances that they would make large investments in the United States. President Donald Trump visits the U.S. Steel-Irvin Works in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, on May 30. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images) “I am proud to announce that, after much consideration and negotiation, US Steel will REMAIN in America, and keep its headquarters in the great city of Pittsburgh,” Trump wrote in a post on the social media platform Truth Social in May, adding: This will be a planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel, which will create at least 70,000 jobs, and add $14 billion dollars to the U.S. economy. The president has also applauded planned investments from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which announced in March a more than $100 billion investment in America. In his March joint address to Congress, Trump attributed that to tariff threats. “All that was important to them was they didn’t want to pay the tariffs. So, they came, and they’re building. And many other companies are coming,” he said. “They will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America.” Manufacturing Jobs—but Not the Kind You Think As Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick made his case for Trump’s tariffs strategy, he made clear that the factories of the future would not be like the ones Americans are familiar with. “We use robotics here. It’s cheaper than cheap labor overseas,” Lutnick said in an interview shortly after Trump’s sweeping “liberation day” tariffs were put in place. “The renaissance will be the greatest factories in the world, high-tech people. What are the jobs Americans are going to have? We are going to have mechanics who fix robotics.” Beating China to the Punch in Tech Trump has long singled artificial intelligence out as a major priority and has enlisted billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks as the White House tech czar. That focus is reflected in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which contains a controversial provision that strongly discourages states from regulating the artificial intelligence industry. President Donald Trump and venture capitalist David Sacks confer at the White House on March 7. (Allison Robbert/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Vice President JD Vance said at an artificial intelligence conference in February that “the Trump administration believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression, and beyond.” He added that “to restrict its development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.” For the Trump administration, this has become a race to the finish line against China to develop this economic and technological superweapon. In January, Trump ordered an action plan, due in July, to be created to make “America the world capital in artificial intelligence,” and multiple outlets report that the president is planning a series of executive orders to set aside energy resources for the power-hungry technology, as well as land for data centers, although that’s not confirmed. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has spoken on the importance of abundant energy and the “drill, baby, drill” approach to natural gas. “The implications on national defense make it simply critical that America leads the AI race. We have the talent, innovative spirit and leading companies to win, but all that won’t matter if we can’t deliver the energy. AI is an energy-intensive manufacturing industry,” Wright said in March. After years of making reindustrialization a priority, it appears Trump is better positioned and more daring than ever in pursuing this goal.  But if he succeeds, it’s doubtful that a reindustrialized America—with semiconductor plants, automated factories, massive foreign investors, and drastically increased energy needs to support AI—would bear any significant resemblance to the industrialized America of decades past. The post What Would Trump’s Reindustrialized America Look Like? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On June 25, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at a peaceful pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, on June 1, was indicted on 12 federal hate crime counts. He also faces state charges, including attempted murder, with a trial pending that could result in significant prison time if convicted.“He’s an Islamo-Nazi” who “came into this country on a tourist visa in 2022 under the great Joe Biden regime” and then “overstayed his visa,” says Mark Levin. However, “rather than deporting him,” Soliman was granted “a work visa,” which he also overstayed.It’s this kind of Democrat “humanitarian” impunity that teed up Soliman’s alleged crime, he says. When Soliman tried to purchase a gun but was barred due to his immigrant status, he decided instead to “burn the Jews,” one of which was an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, Levin recounts.Sadly, this horrific case of anti-Semitism isn’t an isolated event, but rather one in a chain of Jewish-targeted hate crimes that have spiked since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.This uptick in anti-Semitism is largely due to the Biden regime’s open borders, says Levin, but now that the Trump administration is trying to reverse course and deport criminal illegal aliens, many of whom harbor anti-American sentiments, we have “Democrat party radical judges, the ACLU, and these radical defense lawyers” who are working overtime to prevent deportations. And then the mainstream media, beholden to the Democratic Party, swoops in to affirm and regurgitate their leftist narratives.At this point, the left's party slogan might as well be: “Bring us your poor, your huddled masses, your terrorists, your Islamists, your Marxists. ... If you disagree, you're obviously a white supremacist," says Levin. If “the West has a will to survive,” he warns, we'd better find a way to get the “terrorists ... or would-be terrorists” who are currently in our country out. And further, we'd better find a way to address the rampant anti-Semitism festering in our colleges and universities, which Levin calls “indoctrination mills” cultivating “homegrown terrorism" that's "paid for by communist regimes, by Islamist regimes.”Soliman and his alleged crimes, he says, point to an insidious cultural trend of immigrants who reject assimilation, insisting on “bringing their hate, their evil, their view of their faith, [and] their terrorism into our country.”“They come to the country for the purpose of destroying the country,” says Levin.To hear more of his analysis, watch the clip above.Want more from Mark Levin?To enjoy more of "the Great One" — Mark Levin as you've never seen him before — subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Freedom of expression, universal suffrage, and separation of church and state. Our country prides itself on these foundational principles. In fact, for many Americans, the document enshrining these principles has become an object of almost religious veneration. The Constitution is no mere legal agreement, but a sacred covenant between people and power, a reminder that no king or cleric can rule over us without our consent. The church historically has always possessed and asserted its temporal powers. It rebuked kings. It crowned emperors. It waged wars, both literal and spiritual.But what if I told you that some of these foundational principles themselves are the root cause of the current tyranny you’re facing?Fathers know best?Let’s take the separation of church and state, for example. The founding fathers, influenced by the Enlightenment, were pioneers of the democratic republic system, meaning they harbored a strong distaste for the theocratic monarchies that populated the European nations for much of the medieval and early modern eras. They saw the union of throne and altar as a source of corruption and oppression.Many, though not all, leaned toward a rationalist or deist conception of God, meaning they conceived of God as one who designed the universe but refrained from interfering in human affairs. They admired natural law, not revealed law. They were wary of ecclesial authority, especially when it mingled with politics.So they did something radical: They stripped the church of temporal power. Their primary aim, we’re sometimes told, was the promotion of religious freedom. But that’s simply not the case. The primary objective was to remove the church’s power in government affairs.RELATED: Yes, Ken Burns, the founding fathers believed in God — and His 'divine Providence' Interim Archives/Boston Globe/Getty ImagesDomesticating GodFor this reason, they saw fit to design a country that domesticated God, keeping Him confined to the church building. The rest of society and the government, in turn, were to be packaged within a professional secularist framework. “God” was not to meddle with the affairs of men. Hence, the separation of church and state.Except, that’s not what really happened. A separation never really occurred. It was more of a replacement.Religious vacuumSure, the church lost its temporal powers. But something else filled the religious vacuum. Something else always fills the religious vacuum. Remove one orthodoxy, and another takes its place. And that alternative orthodoxy was secular liberalism.Instead of priests, we have an endless array of “highly qualified” experts and bureaucrats telling us what the truth is (and inversely what the heresies are). Instead of a bishop crowning a king, we have TV stations announcing the results of our newly elected leaders. Instead of trusting God, we trust “science.”And then we wonder why we’ve gone so astray. We ask ourselves why we’ve lost all sense of tradition and God. Why does it feel like morality is made up on the spot? Why do our traditionally Christian institutions seem powerless to resist the tides of culture?It’s because, from the beginning, we accepted the premise that God should not interfere with the affairs of men.Head and bodyI’m aware I speak harshly. But I’m also speaking truly. I grew up believing in the concept of separation of church and state. But the older I get, and the more I peel back the layers of history, the more I realize it was the wrong move. The founding fathers were simply wrong.Ask yourself what a church is. Is it just a house of worship? No, it’s more than that, right? It’s the body of Christ, after all. So if Christ is head of the church, how is His body serving Him? What action is the body taking? What powers does the body possess? Jesus Christ isn’t just a brain floating in a vat. As head of the church, He has a fully operational and functional body that bends the world to His whim.The church historically has always possessed and asserted its temporal powers. It rebuked kings. It crowned emperors. It waged wars, both literal and spiritual. It wrestled with the powers of the world, and often won. It has always had real power. It’s only today in our modern society that we believe it belongs nestled away in a hall full of pews.Secular visionAnd yet we are so immersed in secularism that we can barely recognize it as one ideology among others. It is simply "reality," a reality that distorts our understanding of the past. As Andrew Willard Jones writes in "Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX,"Our own vision is secular. Even when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal. To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—including religious history—is played. Within this secular vision, religion as a sociological category is often considered inessential to the concept of society itself. In this view, religious societies are, in a sense, accidentally religious: their religion can fade away. Secular societies, for their part, do not seem to have a religion proper to themselves at all, even if some individuals within them are religious.Imagine you were in the middle of a nasty divorce. Ask yourself, could the church overrule the court? In Revelation 2:14, Jesus reprimands the church of Pergamum for tolerating sexual immorality. What is no-fault divorce except for legalized adultery? Yet today, our churches passively accept it and are unable to demand any kind of legal standing in court. Do we think we’re any different than the church of Pergamum?Likewise, the state has redefined marriage to include same-sex unions. Where is the separation there? Where was it when the state invaded the church’s sacramental territory?The truth is that the separation of church and state has never been real. It is an illusion. The state always imposes and enforces a theology, whether it’s Christian or not. Which means that the state is the church. And the church is the state. I would go so far as to say that the church cannot be even classified as the church unless it is the state.If we want a re-emergence of Christendom, it means the church needs to once again wield state power. There’s no getting around it.

Corporate security provider SonicWall has – together with Microsoft – discovered the distribution of a fake version of its VPN. This is concerning news for anyone using this VPN, as rather than protecting your privacy as you would expect, it may in fact, be exposing you. Continue reading Is your VPN stealing login details? MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Best graphics card, Best gaming PC, Best SSD for gaming

Harry Sisson Goes Full 'Baghdad Bob' With a Laundry List of Laughably False Claims About Trump

A Fool and His Money: Karmelo Anthony Supporter Is MAD the Funds Raised for His Legal Defense Are GONE

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, engaged in a social media debate over President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" and how best to reform Medicaid, The Hill reported.

Archaeologists and students in the Netherlands have unearthed a 1,800-year-old temporary Roman military fort in the Netherlands.