THE NEEDS OF THE PARTY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE, COMRADE: Democrats Already Vetted Graham Platner, Why Bail On Him Now?

He was vetted. People knew all these things and a whole bunch of Democrats in Maine showed up and voted for him anyway. And a bunch of from around the country sent him money anyway. I agree with Alyssa’s question. What changed? Why are you bailing on Graham Platner now? You already signed off on Nazi tattoo, a self-described communist somebody who’s had rape fantasies, somebody who has been on a social media platform known as a playground for predators, and on, and on, and on, and on and on.

And the difference between this accuser and the previous one is simply this, she’s a liberal. It’s okay, I guess, for Democrats that their candidates assault conservatives. But he broke into someone’s house. And apparently, according to her, raped her. And because her politics are correct, they can now believe it.

But they still can’t force him off the ticket if he doesn’t want to go — and the clock is ticking.

YES IT DOES:

The system takes care of its own https://t.co/txBX4cPfL7

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) July 8, 2026

On the flip side, Rob Province added this: “She lost her law license. Cant ever be a judge again. Has a felony. I’ll take it.”

Not everything you might have wanted, but more than you might have expected.

YES: America’s Factory Floor Is Still Its Greatest Superpower.

THEY ALWAYS HAVE BIG PLANS; THEY’RE JUST MORE OPEN ABOUT THEM NOW: Democratic socialists have big plans for 2028.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU DESPISE THE MEDIA…:

Worth noting that conservative outlets like the Free Beacon exposed his sham blue collar image long ago. Those facts were largely ignored by legacy media. Now that’s changed. A cynic might say it’s because he’s now seen as a threat to their partisan tribe’s power quest. https://t.co/7h7Xf48mhI

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 8, 2026

Well, I guess that makes me a cynic.

VICTORIA TAFT: Charlie Kirk Conspiracy Theories Suddenly Disappear With This One Amazing Trick.

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

Platner is a private school screwup, of a type familiar to people who went to private school. The fact that he was cast as a man of the people by elites, while the working class rejected him, seems kind of emblematic of the whole progressive project right now. https://t.co/7CygguIiNh

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 8, 2026

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.

SUICIDAL EMPATHY, INDEED:

Despite living in Ireland for 20 years, Parnell stabber Riad Bouchaker still had such bad English that he needed an Arabic interpreter in court. He also uttered anti-Irish slurs and said Ireland was "shit". Despite this, he was given citizenship.

Asked by @Ben_Scallan whether… pic.twitter.com/9YLgAzcFy0

— gript (@griptmedia) July 8, 2026

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.

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.”

THOSE AIRFRAMES ARE OLDER THAN I AM: Poor B-52 Readiness Creating Testing Challenges For New AGM-181A Nuclear Cruise Missile.

ISLAMIFICATION:

Austria's ruling party just published a 29-page strategy document on the Muslim Brotherhood.

It names exactly where the infiltration is happening.

Political parties. State-sponsored NGOs. Schools. Childcare facilities. Associations. Umbrella organisations. Educational…

— Ihsan Horani (@neutralground90) July 8, 2026

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.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Release the Clowns! Desperate Dems Send in the Odd Squad, Hilarity Ensues. “It appears that, just when you think you’ve seen the grand finale of progressive flunkies, the Democrats throw us an unsettling encore.”

CEASEFIRE UPDATE: US revokes Iran oil waiver after Hormuz attacks.

YEP, THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP:

The state of white men in the Democrat party:

Guy who dresses like a hobo recovering from a stroke tells a pretend socialist with multiple homes to stop promoting a rapey guy with a Nazi tattoo. https://t.co/cjKUYwqQak

— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) July 8, 2026

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.”

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.

THEY CERTAINLY OUGHT TO BE: Socialists Are Disqualified for Office Simply by Being Socialists.

UM…: ULA’s last six Atlas Vs can’t launch anything besides Boeing’s Starliner.

There are six more Atlas Vs in ULA’s inventory to launch Boeing’s Starliner crew capsules to the International Space Station (ISS) under contract to NASA. But it is not certain today that Boeing will use all six of those Atlas Vs. Last year, NASA reduced the number of guaranteed missions in Boeing’s commercial crew contract from six to four after chronic delays in the program. The next Starliner flight will haul cargo to the ISS, expending one of the remaining Atlas Vs.

So what happens to the Atlas Vs left in ULA’s inventory if Boeing doesn’t need to use them all? One idea would be to repurpose the rockets for other missions, perhaps to add launch capacity for the Amazon Leo network. But there’s a catch.

The Starliner spacecraft flies in an exposed configuration during launch, meaning the launch last week was the last time an Atlas V will fly with a payload fairing. Even if Boeing gave up some of the Atlas Vs under its contractual control, ULA would not be able to easily retrofit any of the leftover Atlas Vs for other missions.

A ULA spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the payload fairing now in production for the company’s newer Vulcan rocket—the replacement for the Atlas V—is “not interchangeable” with the out-of-production Atlas fairing.

If — when? — NASA ditches Starliner, it has to be cheaper and smarter to fabricate new fairings than throw away a handful of perfectly good Atlas rockets, right?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Keep Missing the ‘Cease’ Part of All These Ceasefires With Iran. “Iran is continuing its run as ‘The Country Least Likely to Stick to Any Agreements That Don’t Allow It to Be Unhinged.’ Not the most clever prize title, but one that Ayatollah Whomeverisincharge seems to really covet.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

I don’t listen to podcasts or conservative media at all. But it sounds like a few have gone completely whackadoodle. And if you believe some grand conspiracy about Charlie Kirk let me help you…
He was shot by a gay tranny with severe emotional issues and terrible parents. https://t.co/UlsM8Lq74H

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) July 8, 2026

Mostly true, anyway: “His parents could’ve been much worse. They turned him in right away.”

THAT ABOUT SUMS IT UP: The Expert Class Created a Perfect System: They Accuse, They Censor, and They Never Have to Prove a Damn Thing. “A point of amusement for me a week back on Twitter/X was a situation surrounding a volcanoes enthusiast going off topic by asserting the European heat deaths were ‘blood on the hands of people behind Big Oil-funded lies’ – meaning industry deception campaigns, no doubt. The famous Tom Nelson replied by pointing out how there was no evidence to back up the claim. I’ve detailed that problem right here at GelbspanFiles since 2013. Meanwhile, an environmentalist decided to counter Tom with ‘proof’ that ‘deception campaigns’ happened by recommending him to read the ‘a bit dated’ Naomi Oreskes Merchants of Doubt book, implying the book compared Big Oil ‘misinformation mechanisms’ to ‘pro nuclear weapons / pro tobacco mechanisms.’ The comment there – likely well-intentioned and certainly believed by the person posting it – is a classic example of intellectual dishonesty – a person essentially lying to the public and to themself. I own a copy of that book, nowhere within it is evidence of skeptical climate scientists advocating use of nuclear weapons or even remotely being pro-tobacco. My response to that commenter was to read my SPM on Oreskes, to comprehend just how much disinformation Oreskes generates. But my recommendation goes much farther – the same basic accusation may end up in some form when the Supreme Court takes up a discussion about the Boulder v Suncor lawsuit.”

Much more at the link.

ICYMI: Did the AI Bubble Just Spring a Leak When Nobody Was Looking?

CORN, POPPED:

Stay strong king you got this https://t.co/DNGWQcIH28

— The Drunk Republican (@DrunkRepub) July 8, 2026

ALEX, I’LL TAKE “ARGUMENTS I’VE MADE SINCE I WAS A YOUNG AMERICAN” FOR $400: Don’t Lock Young Americans Into Social Security.

Rather than dragging younger workers through years of uncertain taxation, policymakers should give them a choice. Americans who are decades away from retirement should be allowed to opt out of Social Security and pursue retirement planning through private alternatives.

The freedom to decide how to spend and save one’s income is deeply ingrained in American culture. Some people rent apartments, rely on public transportation, and prioritize international travel. Others buy homes, raise families, and invest heavily in property or small businesses. The diversity of lifestyles that defines the United States is made possible by economic liberty.

Social Security’s mandatory payroll tax limits that liberty, particularly for younger generations who are unlikely to receive the same value from the program as their parents and grandparents. Every dollar directed to Social Security is a dollar that cannot be used to pay down debt, purchase a home, invest in education, build a business, or save independently for retirement.

Private retirement accounts also offer greater opportunities for long-term growth.

Virtually any growth would be an improvement.