According to new reports from the Social Security and Medicare trustees, Social Security and a Medicare fund that pays for hospital expenses will both begin running deficits in 2035 and 2036. Disappointingly,…

The following article, Paul: Will the Fed Lose Control?, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. According to new reports from the Social Security and Medicare trustees, Social Security and a Medicare fund that pays for hospital expenses will both begin running deficits in 2035 and 2036. Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, Congress was too preoccupied spending billions more on military aid for foreign countries and banning TikTok to pay attention to … Continue reading Paul: Will the Fed Lose Control? ...

Genuine song theft, or just a moment of paranoia? The post Which Led Zeppelin song inspired Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Robert De Niro is a great actor. I have keenly followed much of his career. The thing with De Niro is that in real life, when he’s not acting, he’s not so great. When he talks politics, the myth crumbles; not because he’s a leftist — that can happen to anyone (I get itchy feet some Fridays too) — but because he has no idea what he’s talking about. It is of an extreme superficiality, a mixture of unbridled passion and cheap slogans that would make a 3-year-old child blush.  READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Conservatives Are on a Mission From God In a recent interview on The View, the actor compared Donald Trump to Hitler and Mussolini. The mere fact that he equated Hitler with Mussolini is a recipe for disaster, but adding the former American president to the mix cooks up a combination of tenderness and melancholy toward someone who years ago was one of the last great Hollywood actors. I could equate Joe Biden with Stalin and Pol Pot, but the Democratic president has neither the intelligence nor the wickedness of Stalin or Pol Pot. It would be effective from a propaganda standpoint, but my readers, thank God, are more critical of me than De Niro fans are of the actor and would not forgive me making stupid historical comparisons. That’s another big difference today between the Right and the Left: The Left has lost all capacity for self-criticism. “It’s gonna happen. If he gets elected, it’s going to change this country for everybody,” De Niro explains, trying to shock us. The truth is that if Trump is elected, it will have happened because a majority of Americans actually want to change this country for everybody. So I don’t know if De Niro here is criticizing Trump or becoming his best campaign adviser. I have already said that, outside of his movies, the star of the brilliant Analyze This is not the smartest guy in the class. “Those people … support him with anger and hate — because that’s what he’s about,” says De Niro, forgetting that if anyone has been the constant object of anger and hate for years, it is not the Democrats but the Republicans, and more specifically the Trumpers. On the other hand, it was not Trump but Biden who wanted to draw a line to separate the good Americans (those on the left) from the bad ones (those on the right).  And, as if the interview weren’t embarrassing enough, we had yet to witness the intervention of the interviewer, the famous, smart, intelligent, thoughtful, serene, sensible, sane, elegant, sympathetic, tolerant, and always truthful Whoopi Goldberg; that is, Barack Obama with a Bob Marley hairdo. “If he becomes president again, he is not going to not stop being president,” Goldberg said, displaying her talent as a philosopher, and adding, with a very progressive pacifist insinuation, that Trump will only leave when “he drops dead.” It sounds as though Goldberg is trying to win a part in a Godfather sequel. De Niro then switched roles from political analyst to futurologist: “That’s it. He’s not even conceding it now. So imagine if he actually did win the election — it’s over. We’re going to have such civil strife.” The thing is, when those on the left predict that there will be “civil strife,” you never know if they are trying to predict or encourage it. The Left is making the same old mistakes with Trump. On his first arrival to the White House, they used the same strategy: If Trump wins, the world goes to hell, they said. The problem is that he won, and all their predictions were proven ridiculous. Aside from some superficial controversy, the world was reasonably peaceful, the United States was once again respected on the international scene, the economy danced with timid joy, and people could devote themselves to work, fun, and their families without living in fear of danger and insecurity on the streets all the time. Trump did not open concentration camps, nor did he invade all his neighbors by land, sea, and air, nor did he set fire to Hollywood. It’s as though Hitler had turned vegan, heterosexual, and Hare Krishna. De Niro and Goldberg are as old as Biden, and their fear mongering of the old return of fascism was already boomer decades ago, but they don’t know how to defend their ideas otherwise. We may have to thank God that they didn’t end the interview in tears, cuddling on a bed like Lennon and Yoko Ono, singing “Imagine,” and demanding that Trump immediately abandon the Vietnam offensive.  Translated by Joel Dalmau. Buy Itxu Díaz’s new book, I Will Not Eat Crickets: An Angry Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite, here today! The post Analyze This One More Time: De Niro Compares Trump to Hitler appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The United States is now paying for serial acts of appeasement for over a decade. We are witnessing the bitter fruits of irresolution, lack of national discipline, and self-doubt — and our enemies and potential adversaries know it. READ MORE: Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II The well-known archetypal appeaser was Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Great Britain who, in September of 1938, agreed that Adolf Hitler could take the Sudetenland, which was much of the former Czechoslovakia with a majority of German speakers. This followed Germany’s occupation in 1936 of the Rhineland, originally inhabited by Germanic Franks, and the annexation of Austria in early 1938. What followed, of course, was a cataclysm on a grand scale. While geographies and circumstances are different, the U.S. has committed various acts of appeasement toward Syria and Russia; Iran and its proxies, the militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis on the Arabian Peninsula; the Taliban of Afghanistan; and on our southern border with Mexico. In August of 2013, President Barack Obama famously changed his publicly stated position and declined to order airstrikes against Syria, following the use of sarin nerve gas by Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, against his own people. A year earlier, Obama had defined the use of chemical weapons as a “red line.” In early 2014, the Russian Federation invaded Crimea, a part of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin used the pretext of protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine from genocide, also claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people — a single whole.” The response of the Obama administration was bland sanctions. The appeasement of Iran continues since the Iran nuclear deal of 2015, when Obama gave us the false dichotomy of his deal or war with Iran; holding out for a better deal was not deemed an option. Part of the deal was to give Iran $1.7 billion, of which $400 million was covertly delivered by plane in various currencies of cash. The strategic flaw of Obama’s deal was that it contained no linkage to Iran’s adventurism elsewhere in the Middle East — and such behavior has only intensified since then, particularly through ideological and operational support of its proxies. Looking like supplicants, the Biden administration renewed talks with Iran in Vienna in 2022, and they went nowhere. Further, the Biden administration is not supporting the sanctions against Iran’s oil industry imposed by the Trump administration, which cut Iran’s oil revenue by an estimated $50 billion per year, to a nominal level. Through early March, Iranian supported militias in Syria, and Iraq attacked U.S. forces in those countries 170 times since the Oct. 7 attack of Israel by Hamas; there was also an attack in Jordan. The U.S. policy was restraint until early February with a kinetic response by CENTCOM. However, missile and drone attacks by Houthis against commercial vessels and warships continue in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The U.S.–Mexico border is yet another case in point. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that over 7.2 million million illegals entered the country during the Biden administration, including 169 on the FBI terrorist watch list — with another 1.7 million known “gotaways” in fiscal year 2023, according to the House Homeland Security Committee. Thus far, the U.S. has not gone after the organizers or the cartels that are believed to exert much control at the borders — over which control has been abdicated by the U.S. In recent years, the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan set the stage for state and non-state actors to challenge U.S. interests, believing the U.S. lacking in resolve — and they were right. An industrial, technological, and military colossus has been unable to defend its interests and its allies’ and to protect itself at home and abroad — indeed a giant, crack Doberman, but with no teeth. With over a decade of displays of American weakness and hesitancy, the U.S. is facing an array of intensifying threats. Certainly, the Syrian “red line” seems to have started it, although some might argue that it was the lack of U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, which met with almost universal condemnation but limited penalties for Russia. As the leading member of NATO, the United States and partner countries deterred aggression by the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Yet we were unable to deter Russia in Ukraine, as well as far weaker adversaries in the Middle East. It will probably take a new national security team to present more resolve. While avoiding so-called forever wars, the bad actors need to know that the U.S. is just over the horizon. No doubt the observant Chinese Politburo is watching. Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals. The post American Appeasement Emboldens Bad Actors appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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