July 8, 2026

DO AMERICANS KNOW WHO WE ARE? Lots of survey results in recent days prompted by the 250th July 4 celebration and, based on typical media reporting, it’s easy to conclude Americans, especially those in younger age brackets, have lost faith in the nation’s founding principles. Well, I say hold on there because that’s not the whole story. Check it out on The Washington Stand.

Posted at 2:25 pm by Mark Tapscott

“RIGHT NOW,” MEGAN, REALLY? PROGRESSIVISM FROM THE START WAS A TOP-DOWN IDEOLOGY OF EXPERTS TELLING THE MASSES WHAT TO DO:

Posted at 2:02 pm by Stephen Green

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Amazon Floats $25 Billion Debt Sale to Fund AI.

Amazon is preparing to borrow $25 billion or more in the U.S. bond market, adding to a wave of jumbo debt financing as the world’s largest technology companies race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, Bloomberg reports.

The e-commerce and cloud computing giant has already raised more than $82 billion in investment-grade bonds across several currencies since the start of 2025.

The deal would lift Big Tech’s global AI-related debt issuance to about $335 billion in 2026, more than double the amount issued in 2025, according to Bloomberg data.

Amazon is expected to invest nearly $200 billion this year, largely to expand data centers and computing capacity for its AI operations and Amazon Web Services customers.

Amazon last tapped the U.S. dollar debt markets in March, when it raised $37 billion. That was the fourth-largest U.S. corporate bond sale on record.

There are some very smart people arguing we aren’t necessarily in a bubble, but that’s an awful lot of spending and debt in pursuit of profits that have yet to materialize.

If they do come, great. But even then, expect a vicious shakeout along the way.

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

GRAHAM PLATNER: The Left’s Caricature of the American Everyman.

This is the basket-of-deplorables strategy in reverse. Progressives have long viewed Middle American men through a lens of condescension, seeing us as racist, sexist, gun-clinging, beer-drinking relics who need saving from their own vices. Rather than engage their real concerns about economic stagnation, cultural displacement or family breakdown, far Left operatives bet on manufacturing a proxy: a flawed but “relatable” everyman who mouths the right policy lines. Platner was elevated as the vessel with veteran credentials for patriotism points, manual labor for blue-collar credibility and veteran struggles with PTSD and alcohol repurposed as humanizing rather than disqualifying. The hope? That this caricature would lure disaffected working-class voters away from populists on the right, delivering Senate seats without conceding ground on core cultural issues.

Flashback:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

SUICIDAL EMPATHY, INDEED:

More:

Asked by @Ben_Scallan whether there should be culture and language requirements to gain citizenship, Social Protection Minister Dara Calleary rejected the idea, saying “Don’t isolate one case, Ben – don’t do that”, arguing that “citizenship is a much broader thing than just language” and that “contribution to the economy” mattered as well.

I wasn’t aware that stabbings contributed to the economy. Good to know.

Posted at 1:31 pm by Stephen Green

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: 13,000-year-old bones found near SoCal coast could rewrite human history. “Evidence found on the Channel Islands suggests humans could have arrived via boat instead of crossing an inland ice corridor. If true, it would overturn the conventional thinking that Americans crossed a land bridge from modern-day Siberia and traveled south.”

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BELMONT CLUB: The Utility of Civilization. “By and large, the world needs the skills of the developed world. The vaccine example illustrates that, in the grand scheme of things, the West, despite the hatred directed at it by progressives, is the workshop of the global south. It invents medicine, cell phones, computers, airplanes, high-yielding crops, transportation, long shelf-life food, etc., that even the pirates use, and without which the lives of people in the Third World could not be lengthened to historically unheard-of heights. Life expectancy at birth in Africa has risen to approximately 64.2 years, marking an increase of almost two decades since the 1970s. Lifespan on the continent has improved dramatically from historic lows of 26 to 37 years in the mid-20th century, driven largely by successful public health measures. Absent these underpinnings, the stage collapses.”

Posted at 1:15 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT PUBLIC POLICY SCHOOL SHOULD TEACH. As the article points out, maybe the Trump Administration would be a little less, er, exciting if right-leaning students didn’t have every reason to avoid public policy schools. Heck, I knew to avoid them back in the year 2000. I can only imagine what 20+ more years of that trend has wrought.

Posted at 1:12 pm by Robert Shibley

ISLAMIFICATION:

More:

Political parties. State-sponsored NGOs. Schools. Childcare facilities. Associations. Umbrella organisations. Educational institutions. Not mosques. Political structures.

The document is precise about the method:

“Islamization from below.” Train individuals ideologically. Insert them into civic life. Let them work their way into the institutions that shape how a society thinks and governs itself.

Austria’s parliament has simultaneously submitted a formal question asking whether intelligence chiefs were ordered by ministers to suppress surveillance results on political Islam.

Read that again. MPs are asking whether the government was told to look away.

Austria is further ahead than any other European country in naming this. It has banned Brotherhood symbols, closed radical mosques, expelled imams and now published a comprehensive counter-strategy naming specific institutional targets.

The EU designation question has been sitting unanswered since January.

Brussels knows what’s coming yet refuses to act.

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

YEP, THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP:

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

I’M HAVING WAY TOO MUCH FUN WITH THIS: Platner Down but Not Out. “Every second Platner clings to his nomination like Hitler in his bunker is another second his replacement won’t have to run against Collins, and he knows it.”

Posted at 11:11 am by Stephen Green

THE BOB PACKWOOD YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Sen. Robert Packwood (R-ORE) passed away recently. The prototypical Senate GOP RINO, Packwood is probably most remembered these days, if he is recalled at all, for sleeping with certain female staffers. But there was much more to the man.

Former Reagan White House official Chuck Donovan, writing in The Washington Stand, tells about Packwood’s devotion to advancing the cause of population control (remember Erhlich’s “The Population Bomb”?). and the closely related issue of legalizing abortion. Packwood played a huge role in blocking Reagan’s major pro-life initiative:

Packwood “was a key force within the GOP in blocking progress on life. In 1982, the Reagan administration endorsed a measure called the Human Life Bill, which, less than a decade after Roe v. Wade, would have made clear that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied to all human beings from conception, freeing the states and, by implication, the federal government to protect human life from abortion. Packwood joined fellow Republican Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey and many Democrats in opposing the HLB, as it was dubbed. The Senate failed to break a filibuster against the bill, and it was ultimately tabled,” Donovan writes. There is much more like this, courtesy of Donovan’s careful re-telling.

Posted at 10:58 am by Mark Tapscott

TRUMP’S TURKEY MOVE: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a good guy, regardless of the fact our President has known and liked him for a long time. Richard Pollock lays out the multiple aspects of Erdogan’s vision for a new strategic alliance of radical Sunni powers in the Middle East to replace the rapidly fading Iranian influence. Making even 1, much less 100, U.S. F-35As available to Turkey is thus a huge mistake.

Posted at 10:40 am by Mark Tapscott

I’M NOT SURE, I’D HAVE TO CONSULT WITH CHATGPT: Is AI making us dumber?

Researchers called this the “Google effect.” They found people recalled where to find specific information better than they remembered the information itself when they knew they could easily find it again. “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found,” the researchers wrote in 2011. Some worried that cognitive offloading to Google was “making us stupid,” a possibility raised by an Atlantic cover story. Others argued Google was democratizing access to information and let us trade hours spent scouring library stands for supercharged thinking.

You don’t need to Google any of this to know why it sounds so familiar. Early research into how generative AI affects our brains has resurfaced the same talking points: overreliance on AI will weaken mental persistence, flatten creativity, atrophy our critical thinking skills, and degrade our relationships. Experts in machine learning, creativity, social behavior I spoke to said we can glean some insight from the fallout of past innovations, but the totalizing pervasiveness of AI is unparalleled.

AI could pose a bigger risk to our brains than past innovations because “the tool is completely different in nature,” says Nataliya Kosmyna, a researcher at MIT who published one of the most widely cited pieces of research on AI and cognitive decline last year, showing that people who had access to gen AI for writing essays performed worse over time than those who used Google or had no aid. Kosmyna says the widely circulated comparisons of AI to a calculator, which has also been used by Sam Altman, is a fallacy. “You don’t fall asleep and wake up with a calculator. You don’t talk to the calculator about everything you have in your mind.”

Somebody should write a book about Seductive AI.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green