Good music is alive and well thanks to the Red Clay Strays. The Red Clay Strays have been treating fans over the last month with some new music, and it’s a treat, indeed. Last year, the Mobile, Alabama-based group released their critically acclaimed sophomore record Made By These Moments. The 11-song project, produced by Dave Cobb, explores the complicated chaos of everyday life, including facing conflict, death, emotions, and chasing one’s aspirations. Made By These Moments instantly captivated fans, and the way each song resonated with fans showed the power of music. Whether listeners were being saved with “Wanna Be Loved,” felt seen with “No One Else Like Me,” or were reminded by the band’s strong roots in faith that God loves them with “God Does,” there is a song for any and everyone on Made By These Moments. The hot streak continues after Made By These Moments, with the band previewing what’s in store for the next chapter during recent live shows. Earlier this month, in Cleveland, Ohio, the Red Clay Strays debuted a brand new song titled “What Are You Going To Do Today.” Ironically, the crowd was in for more than one surprise that night as the band had to pause their show that same night to throw out a man for hitting a woman. Never okay to hit a woman. Not the concert to be getting into a fight. But on the bright side, at least fans got to hear a gem of an unreleased song. However, that is not the only new song that the Strays have previewed while on the road this summer. Ahead of sharing “What Are You Going To Do” with fans, at the end of July in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Mobile, Alabama-founded band played another brand spanking new song titled “Walking Away.”  The show was coming to a close when frontman Brandon Coleman asked the crowd if they wanted to call it a night or keep the party going: “Pretty much just having fun at this point, we’ve got two options. We can go ahead and wrap up the show, or we can practice a new one for you. So if y’all are ready to go, I know you’ve been here for a while. We can wrap it up.” You can hear a roar of “No!” throughout the crowd. Brandon Coleman then gets his guitar in tune before the drummer, John Hall, counts them off. “Okay. We are going to give this one a shot.”  Once the band gets going, it makes me laugh that Coleman used the word “practice” ahead of performing the new one, because they sing like it’s been in their setlist for years. “Walking Away” is a heartbreak ballad in which the narrator recounts the story of giving his whole heart to a woman. But despite giving her the world, his love for her was not enough, and she ends up “Walking Away.” “Oh, how I try to make you complete I keep on giving  Just for you to pack your things and leave Oh yes, I loved you I swept you off your feet But I couldn’t keep you From walking out on me Oh, love just keeps walking away…” As Coleman delivers the lyrics, his soulful moans convey the longing this narrator feels to meet a woman who reciprocates his love. But no matter how much the narrator longs for this reality, his hopes come crashing down when the woman he loves leaves him feeling lonesome again. The Red Clay Strays truly do not miss. “Walking Away” and “What Are You Going To Do” are a strong preview for what their next chapter of music looks like. Come on with it. The post WATCH: The Red Clay Strays Perform Unreleased Heartbreak Ballad “Walking Away” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

Foreign Affairs Checking In on the Peace Administration Mr. Peace is almost as delusional as Mr. War. One of the recurring motifs of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric these days is that he’s Mr. Peace, settling wars left and right across the globe. Certainly this is better than styling himself as Mr. War, who is a character who has been found wanting these past few decades and whose departure from the stage is not much mourned. Of course, there’s a bit of slippage between style and substance. Yes, wars have been settled, although with how much American input is a matter of debate. (India flatly denies American involvement in the settlement of its short war with Pakistan, and the Azerbaijan–Armenia accord is little more than a mere recognition of Azerbaijan’s victory.) And, while glorified border disputes between Cambodia and Thailand or Congo and Rwanda are doubtless lamentable episodes to be deplored, the American taxpayer may be forgiven for wondering what they have to do with These States, and why our president is touting their dénouements as triumphs of U.S. policy. We may be glad they are over while also doubting that they are the stuff of a legacy. It is also good for a chuckle to see who is nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is itself a bit of a punchline. Who doubts the peaceful bona fides of Azerbaijan’s Aliyev regime, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the government of Pakistan? On the other hand, in the first eight months of the second Trump administration, the U.S. has bombed the daylights out of Yemen’s Houthis (ineffectually) and was buffaloed by a junior partner into bombing the daylights out of Iran (also ineffectually, so far as anyone can tell); we’re still funding and arming the Ukrainians and Israelis, and we’re now directly menacing various South American potentates with war ships and strike plans. (Not to mention business as usual at AFRICOM, which is perhaps more dysfunctional than even CENTCOM.) All human aspiration exceeds reality, sure, but this is still pretty striking stuff for Mr. Peace.  But there’s a bigger problem with being Bizarro Bush (as Mr. Peace is known among his friends). The Ukraine war negotiations are illustrative. The two principals are fighting a war because they in fact believe it in their respective national interests to do so. Without a fundamental change to the underlying conditions—for example, the collapse of the Russian economy or the breaking of the Ukrainian defensive line—it looks like they’re going to keep going at it. The U.S. can’t do anything about it in particular, besides yelling shrilly from the sidelines. (Pulling the plug on American armaments for Ukraine, which are now being laundered with European money, is apparently deemed a political non-starter.) Similarly, it is unclear that there is much the U.S. could do to wrap up the Israel–Gaza war, although we could certainly stop actively fueling it. Mr. Peace is a great character on the TV, but in fact his pretensions to ordering the rest of the world are almost as delusional as Mr. War’s. Indeed, Mr. Peace is just the friendly inversion of Mr. War—not the world’s policeman, but the world’s therapist. This all is to say that there’s less to the picture than meets the eye. The two classical texts for understanding America in this century are Sallust’s Jugurthine War and Seneca’s Hercules Furens. Needless to say, neither is terribly widely read. (“The thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation . . . / Oh well! / It troubles my sleep.”) The former is about an apparent footnote on Roman military history, a desert war in North Africa, in which Sallust found both symptoms and further causes of republican decay. In the latter, an apparently invincible hero at the zenith of his career is driven mad by powers beyond his control and destroys his own household. If you had to decoct these works down into neat little lessons, the first is that empire has unintended consequences; the second is that no human entity is all-powerful, and the worst sort of damage is self-inflicted. These conditions have not changed. Putting a smile instead of a scowl on the face of American imperialism does not make it more effective. America’s orientation should not be toward managing affairs that do not touch our national interest. It’s not as if we don’t have problems at home. Solving the world’s problems is expensive and distracting, yes, but worse, it doesn’t work. Setting out with the goal of bringing peace on earth and goodwill toward men is less ghoulish than many alternatives, but perhaps no less misguided. This is especially true if we pick up uncompensated obligations along the way—security guarantees in peripheral regions, to pull an example out of the air. The president should not be Mr. Peace or Mr. War, but Mr. America. The post Checking In on the Peace Administration appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Trump’s Iran War Mulligan The president soon will have another shot to avoid the sand trap of a Mideast war. In June, President Donald Trump granted a longtime wish of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  For decades, Netanyahu pressured American presidents to bomb Iran. Each one resisted, including Trump in his first term, when he griped that the Israeli premier was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.” But in Trump’s second term, Bibi finally got what he wanted. Two months ago, as the Israel–Iran war raged, the president authorized strikes by air and sea on Tehran’s nuclear energy facilities. Now Netanyahu wants Trump to attack Iran again, and this time on a massive scale. If the president still intends to stay out of forever wars in the Middle East—as he promised to do—then he must rein in Netanyahu and preemptively signal a refusal to fight the enemies of an out-of-control client state, which is what Israel has plainly become. In June, Trump managed to avoid getting embroiled in a protracted and escalating conflict. Next time, he might not be so lucky. Trita Parsi, a veteran analyst of U.S.–Iran relations, has forecasted that Israel likely will launch another war this year, perhaps before September. Unlike last time, Parsi writes in Foreign Policy, Iran will hit back hard right away to demonstrate its resilience:  As a result, the coming war will likely be far bloodier than the first. If U.S. President Donald Trump caves to Israeli pressure again and joins the fight, the United States could face a full-blown war with Iran that will make Iraq look easy by comparison. Obviously, an Iraq War 2.0 would pose considerable risks for the U.S. and for Trump, who came out of the “12-Day War” mostly unscathed. Only a slim majority of Americans opposed the U.S. strikes in June, even as a supermajority—78 percent—expressed concern that America would get drawn into a direct war with Iran, according to polling from Quinnipiac. Another survey found that Americans were more supportive of the strikes after being told they were limited to Iran’s nuclear facilities. These findings suggest that many Americans oppose war with Iran but tolerated Trump’s discrete and targeted bombing raid. The voters, in essence, have given Trump a pass, a redo, or in golfer’s terms, a mulligan. Soon, the president will have another shot to avoid the sand trap of a Mideast war. This time, he can’t afford to miss, and he’ll have less room to maneuver. Both Israeli and Iranian officials seem to consider the present moment a kind of intermission, a lull in the fighting, rather than a stable post-war period. “We are not in a ceasefire, we are in a stage of war,” a top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei is reported to have said last week. “No protocol, regulation, or agreement has been written between us and the US or Israel.” Over in Israel, the former intelligence officer Jacques Neriah warned this week of a looming “second round” of the 12-day war. “There is a sense that a war is coming, that Iranian revenge is in the works,” Neriah said on an Israeli radio program. “The Iranians will not be able to live with this humiliation for long.” Tehran’s “humiliation” results not only from the damage it took throughout the war in June, but also from Israel’s broader geopolitical gains over the last two years. These could soon include rapprochement with Syria, an erstwhile Iranian partner and Israeli adversary until the toppling of Bashar al-Assad last December. With Tehran agitated and its threat perception heightened, “Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Iran in its present state, as a large part of its military capabilities is paralyzed,” Neriah added. Senior Israeli officials agree. Defense Minister Israel Katz has warned Iran’s leaders of an imminent Israeli offensive. Katz even suggested that this time Israel will assassinate Khamenei, advising the Iranian leader to “lift his eyes to the sky and listen carefully to every buzz.” Other Israeli officials, including Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, have also hinted at further attacks to neutralize the perceived threat from Iran. Israel is not only making plans for another preemptive war but urging the Trump administration to join, according to Asharq Al-Awsat, a daily pan-Arab newspaper, which cited unnamed security sources in Israel. The outlet said that if Trump refuses, Israel will seek the president’s green light to go it alone. The problem is that Israel cannot really go to war alone against Iran. At the very least, it needs the U.S. to extend its superpower shield over the small country, intercepting missiles and drones launched by Iran. And since Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to bomb Iran for Israel when war between them breaks out, the Netanyahu government will expect offensive action. Netanyahu plays hardball, and he’s quite good at engineering geopolitical crises that generate pressure on Washington to intervene on Israel’s behalf. Netanyahu may soon put those skills to the test, because he knows that time is running out to secure hegemony in the region—an obvious aim of Israeli hardliners—with popular support for Israel plummeting in the West. Earlier this year, Netanyahu told an Israeli foreign affairs committee that the country will need to “wean” itself off of U.S. military aid. While Washington still has its back, Israel wants to decapitate the Islamic Republic and turn Iran into a failed state—and it needs the U.S. to join the regime-change war. “Limited engagement is likely no longer an option,” Parsi writes. “Trump will have to either fully join the war or sit it out.” The president should do the latter. Indeed, he should communicate now, in no uncertain terms, that the U.S., with its stocks of interceptor missiles alarmingly depleted, will not only refrain from joining Israeli strikes on Iran but will even withhold air defense. Such a warning would make Netanyahu think twice about attacking Iran. American and Israeli interests differ, with Washington wanting an agreement to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program and Jerusalem wanting to deliver a knock-out blow to its regime. Perhaps Trump can’t stop Israel from launching a war against Iran. But he can at least make clear that it would be Israel’s war, not America’s, and certainly not his. The post Trump’s Iran War Mulligan appeared first on The American Conservative.

Bed, Bath and Beyond California

Making Schools Great Again Thanks to Trump

Who Will Protect the Kids?

Don’t Let Them Spin It—High Energy Prices Are a Green Failure