Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 49
July 3, 2025
$1.5bn up in smoke: US THAAD missile stockpile dries up defending Israel against Iran
By Ivan Kesic
According to American media, defense news outlets, and independent analysts, the 12-day Israeli military aggression against Iran significantly depleted the US stockpile of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptor missiles.
Citing official sources, American magazine Newsweek reported on Friday that the US transferred a substantial portion of its advanced missile defense capabilities to support the Israeli regime, an effort with questionable results and a critical impact on US strategic reserves.
THAAD, developed by Lockheed Martin arms manufacturing company, is a key component of Israel’s multi-layered air defense architecture. It is designed to intercept medium-range ballistic missiles, including those launched from Iran and Yemen.
The US-made system is capable of targeting short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, whether inside or outside Earth’s atmosphere.
THAAD uses a “hit-to-kill” method, relying on kinetic energy rather than explosive warheads to destroy incoming threats, intercepting at altitudes of up to 150 km and ranges between 150-200 km.
Operated exclusively by American personnel, the US military maintains eight THAAD batteries with an estimated 350–400 interceptors in total. The eighth battery was activated during the June 20 Israeli aggression against Iran and is capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles.
Deployment in the occupied territories
At the outset of the Israeli aggression against Iran, seven THAAD batteries were operational, two of which had been deployed in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The first THAAD battery was stationed there in October 2024, following Iran’s “True Promise 1 and 2” operations, during which Israel’s domestic air defense systems, David’s Sling, Arrow 2, and Arrow 3, suffered notable failures. A second battery was deployed in April 2025.
These US-operated systems played a crucial role during the June 2025 confrontation with Iran, although their exact deployment locations remain classified for military reasons.
Based on available information, of the remaining US THAAD batteries, two are deployed within the United States, one in Texas and another in Guam.
The rest are stationed overseas in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with the UAE being the only country to have formally purchased its own THAAD systems.
A THAAD battery is a mobile, self-contained missile defense unit. Each battery typically comprises six truck-mounted launchers, with each launcher carrying eight interceptor missiles, amounting to a total of 48 interceptors per battery.
In addition, the system includes an AN/TPY-2 radar for long-range detection and tracking (up to 2,000-3,000 km), a fire control and communication system for coordinating intercepts, along with support equipment and approximately 100 personnel to operate the unit.
Given the deployment of two batteries in the occupied Palestinian territories, it can be estimated that the Israeli regime had access to at least 96 interceptor missiles.
However, the actual number was likely higher due to frequent resupply efforts during engagements with Yemeni ballistic missiles and in preparation for the broader conflict with Iran.
Mixed performance against Yemeni missiles
Despite being touted as one of the most advanced missile defense systems in the world, THAAD’s performance against Yemeni ballistic missile attacks has been mixed, even according to Israeli and Western sources.
While some interceptions have been claimed as successful, there have been notable failures.
By the end of March 2025, six successful interceptions of Yemeni missiles had been reported. However, on May 4 and May 9, THAAD failed to intercept missiles targeting Ben Gurion Airport.
In both instances, Israeli sources asserted that the incoming missiles were ultimately intercepted by the Arrow missile defense system instead.
This claim has been met with skepticism, as the Arrow system typically engages threats at far greater distances, tens or even hundreds of kilometers away, yet the airport was struck directly.
The Israeli regime’s own admission that multiple systems were used against the same class of Yemeni missiles suggests that the interception cost is significantly higher than commonly assumed. Rather than a one-to-one missile-to-interceptor ratio, several interceptors, possibly from different systems, may be required to ensure a successful shootdown.
Despite ongoing claims by American and Israeli officials about the effectiveness and reliability of both THAAD and Arrow systems, Yemen has continued to target Ben Gurion Airport as part of its retaliatory operations. The continued threat and perceived vulnerability led nearly all international airlines to suspend flights to and from Israel.
Yemeni missile hits Ben Gurion Airport on May 4, after unsuccessful interception with THAADThe most commonly used long-range weapon in the Yemeni arsenal is the Palestine-2 – a two-stage hypersonic ballistic missile capable of reaching speeds up to Mach 16 and equipped with a maneuverable warhead. This type of missile poses a significant challenge to traditional missile defense systems, including THAAD.
Technologically, THAAD faces several limitations. These include radar difficulties in distinguishing between actual warheads and decoys, vulnerability to saturation by large-scale missile barrages, and diminished effectiveness against newer hypersonic and maneuverable missile designs.
The system also relies exclusively on US personnel for its operation, which can limit rapid adaptability in dynamic combat scenarios.
THAAD has experienced test failures in the past, raising concerns about its reliability and operational readiness. These failures have been linked to software bugs, mechanical faults, and targeting system errors, factors that cast doubt on its real-world performance under pressure.
Failures against Iranian missile strikes
During the 12-day war of aggression against Iran, THAAD’s performance deteriorated significantly, highlighted by its low interception rate and the rapid depletion of US and Israeli interceptor stockpiles.
On the eve of the Israeli aggression, approximately 100 THAAD interceptor missiles were positioned in the occupied Palestinian territories. In response, Iran launched between 370 and 500 ballistic missiles during its retaliatory operations, a volume that far exceeded available THAAD capacity.
While Israel also relied on other systems such as David’s Sling, Arrow-2, and Arrow-3, the sheer scale and intensity of Iran’s response shifted the strategic balance. The damage inflicted throughout Israeli-occupied territories underscored this imbalance.
In the initial days of the war, Iran deliberately used older liquid-fueled ballistic missiles to exhaust enemy air defenses. More advanced and maneuverable missiles were introduced only after Israel’s interceptor supply had been significantly drained.
Although no official statistics have been released regarding the number of THAAD interceptors used or their success rates, available evidence suggests a poor performance.
High-altitude kinetic interceptions, hallmarked by bright explosions visible across the region, were rare, and many may have involved Arrow systems instead of THAAD.
A particularly telling open-source analysis, based on video footage by Jordanian photographer Zaid M. Al-Abbadi, missile ignition signatures, and geolocation data, estimated that Israel used 39 THAAD, 34 Arrow-3, and 9 Arrow-2 interceptors during just one of more than 20 Iranian missile barrages.
Given such high rates of interceptor use, analysts believe THAAD batteries likely exhausted their missile supply within the first four to five days of the conflict.
This rapid depletion, combined with underwhelming interception success, highlights the system’s limitations in a high-intensity, multi-wave missile war.
THAAD interceptor launchExhausted stockpiles and soaring costs
Estimates from military experts and news outlets place the unit cost of a single THAAD interceptor between $12 million and $15 million. However, other sources suggest the real cost is significantly higher.
In a statement to Newsweek, Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) noted that while the production cost of a THAAD interceptor is approximately $18 million, the total cost rises to $27 million when research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) expenses are factored in.
Estimates of total THAAD-related spending during the recent conflict vary. Analysts suggest that between $500 million and $800 million worth of interceptors may have been expended, corresponding to the use of 40 to 60 missiles.
On Tuesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing Israeli military sources, reported that approximately 200 American and Israeli interceptor missiles were launched in total, at an estimated cost of 5 billion shekels – nearly $1.5 billion.
What all sources agree on is that the THAAD interceptor stockpile has been significantly depleted. At least one full battery’s worth, 48 interceptors, is believed to have been expended.
Considering the two THAAD batteries deployed and the high operational tempo due to prior Yemeni missile attacks, the actual figure may be closer to 96 interceptors. This would represent a reduction of roughly 30 percent of the entire US THAAD interceptor stockpile.
Open-source analysts also highlight the limited pace of US procurement: only 41 THAAD interceptors have been ordered over the past three years, including units designated for export customers. This slow replenishment rate underscores the vulnerability of even advanced missile defense systems when faced with sustained, high-volume missile warfare.
In stark contrast, Iran and China maintain vast ballistic missile arsenals, numbering in the thousands, making the rapid depletion of the US inventory, largely to defend Israeli territory, all the more striking.
Newsweek contacted the Pentagon for comment regarding the depletion and cost implications. The Department of Defense declined to elaborate, stating only that it had “nothing to provide.”
[…]
How Turkiye’s Eastward Ambitions Serve the Atlanticist Order
Ankara’s penetration into Eurasia blends neo-Ottoman ideology, Islamic soft power, and NATO-aligned geopolitics in a bid to rival Russia, China, Iran, and India.
Since the onset of the 21st century, Turkiye’s foreign policy agenda has shifted decisively eastward, charting a course through Central and South Asia. This transformation signals more than a revival of Ottoman-era influence.
It reveals a layered geopolitical project anchored in Pan-Turanist nationalism, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned political Islam, and strategic deployment of military and development tools – crafted to serve Ankara’s national interests while converging with NATO’s broader regional goals.
Ankara’s eastward thrust is taking place against a backdrop of eroding US influence, a return to multipolarity, and intensified global competition over energy, trade corridors, and emerging markets. In this context, Turkiye no longer views Eurasian expansion as optional; it is now a strategic imperative.
Bangladesh: Ankara’s eastern frontier for ideological testing
Bangladesh has become a forward operating theater for Turkiye’s Eurasian ambitions. Geographically wedged between India and Myanmar, the Muslim-majority country offers fertile ground for Turkish influence.
The 2024 rise of Muhammad Yunus’s government – a pro-Islamist administration sympathetic to Ankara – has paved the way for Turkish actors to operate not only as development partners but as cultural and political forces embedded within state and society.
One such vehicle is “Saltanat-e-Bangla,” a Turkish-backed NGO based in Dhaka that publicly identifies with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). This organization has gone well beyond charitable work, disseminating a provocative “Greater Bangladesh” map that claims parts of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, as well as Indian territories including Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, and India’s northeast region.
A map of “Greater Bangladesh” that claims parts of Myanmar and Indian territories including Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, and the northeast region.Though lacking formal recognition, the map has been quietly endorsed by figures within the ruling party – signaling a coordinated division of labor between like-minded Turkish and Bangladeshi political elites.
Diplomatic sources suggest that this cartographic venture reflects Turkiye’s attempt to establish a strategic counterweight to Indian hegemony in South Asia, particularly in light of recent confrontations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and Islamic governance models. Some analysts have even tied this project to a broader Turkish–Bengali interest in Tibet – an area that remains a non-negotiable red line for Beijing.
Bangladesh, then, is more than a new arena of influence. It is a laboratory where Turkiye is testing the exportability of its political model and religious ideology into the Indian sphere, wrapped in the veneer of humanitarianism and Islamic solidarity.
This is not without precedent. The Indian subcontinent – of which Bangladesh was once a part – was home to some of the most fervent supporters of the Ottoman Caliphate in the early twentieth century. The Khilafat movement, launched in the aftermath of World War I, mobilized millions of Indian Muslims, including leading figures from Bengal, in defense of the Ottoman Caliph as a symbol of pan-Islamic unity.
That historical memory still lingers, particularly among Islamist networks and religious elites, and Ankara appears keen to reactivate it as part of its broader strategy to rekindle a trans-regional Islamic identity aligned with Turkish leadership.
Turanism: The nationalist spine of Turkish expansion
Pan-Turanism, an early 20th-century ideology premised on the unification of Turkic-speaking peoples from Anatolia to western China, has been resurrected in Ankara as a vehicle for geopolitical consolidation. Today, Turkiye deploys this vision to deepen its grip on Central Asia – particularly in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan.
This ideological push is operationalized through the Organization of Turkic states, which functions as a joint political, economic, and security bloc linking Ankara with these post-Soviet republics. Through state-sponsored cultural initiatives – such as the work of TURKSOY, scholarship programs, and student exchanges – Turkiye is reshaping regional educational and media landscapes.
Concurrently, Ankara has supported efforts to replace Slavic-based scripts with Latin alphabets across these states, embedding the notion of a pan-Turkic family.
At the infrastructure level, projects like the East–West energy corridor and the Transcaucasian Railway are physically anchoring Central Asia to Turkiye and Europe. But this is not merely about logistics. It is about challenging Russia and China for influence in the Eurasian core, and positioning Ankara as a decisive actor in the balance of power across Asia.
The Brotherhood: A political bridge into South Asia
In Islamic societies outside the Arab world, Turkiye has expanded its reach through the AKP’s Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam. This approach resonates especially in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where Islamist forces – other than foreign-backed terror groups – often lack cohesive structures or reliable foreign support.
Ankara has established a growing network of advocacy and media outlets that present it as the spiritual and political vanguard of the Muslim ummah (community of believers). These include branches of the AKP or AKP-aligned formations operating inside countries like Bangladesh. Parallel to this, Brotherhood-affiliated NGOs—most prominently the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation—extend Turkish soft power through education, healthcare, and emergency relief.
Turkiye has also instrumentalized the Rohingya crisis to cultivate goodwill among Muslims in the region, presenting itself as the only Islamic power willing and able to defend oppressed Muslim populations.
This architecture enables Ankara to entrench itself within both civil society and state institutions, fostering political parallelism without triggering overt confrontation with entrenched national elites.
Pakistan: Ankara’s ideological and strategic bridge
Pakistan has long served as a foundational pillar in Ankara’s regional outreach. The bilateral relationship is reinforced by joint defense projects – especially in the manufacture of drones and armored vehicles – and a shared ideological framework between the AKP and Pakistan’s conservative Islamist elites.
Both countries have jointly championed Muslim causes to varying degrees, including Kashmir and Palestine. More discreetly, Islamabad plays a mediating role in Turkish–Bangladeshi coordination, smoothing Ankara’s entry into Dhaka’s political scene. Through religious networks and Islamist media, Pakistan also helps lay the groundwork for Turkish influence in both Afghanistan and Central Asia.
This partnership extends to Northern Cyprus, where Pakistan has repeatedly affirmed its support. Shortly after the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) declaration in 1983, Pakistan was among its earliest recognizers, though it formally withdrew recognition under UN pressure within days.
Decades later, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly declared that Pakistan “fully supports the cause of Northern Cyprus” and will “unwaveringly” stand by Ankara on the issue. This steadfast solidarity underscores the deep wherewithal of the Ankara–Islamabad axis, rooted in shared ideological commitments and mutual strategic interests.
Turkiye’s soft power architecture
Ankara’s expansion into Eurasia is underpinned by a carefully curated soft power strategy. The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) implements development projects across the education, health, and infrastructure sectors. The Turkish Religious Foundation builds mosques, funds religious centers, and offers Turkish-language Islamic education abroad.
Meanwhile, Turkish schools and universities overseas are producing a new cadre of elites aligned with Ankara’s political worldview.
In Bangladesh, these efforts are particularly visible in Rohingya refugee camps, where Turkish humanitarian outreach has helped embed a political presence under the guise of benevolence. These initiatives are not merely charitable; they are long-term investments in geopolitical loyalty.
NATO synergy – and the Eurasian backlash
Although Ankara frequently claims to pursue an independent foreign policy, its expansionist posture in Eurasia aligns neatly with key NATO objectives. In Tibet and Xinjiang, Turkish activity directly complements western efforts to contain China. In Afghanistan and Central Asia, Ankara’s presence encircles Iran. And in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Turkiye serves as a rival to Moscow’s residual influence.
Far from acting as a rogue state, Ankara is performing the role of NATO’s regional auxiliary. Its use of culturally resonant narratives – whether pan-Turkic or Islamist – makes its intervention palatable to local audiences, while serving long-term Atlanticist designs. This convergence of aims may explain western tolerance for Turkiye’s expansionist maneuvers, despite high-profile disputes over Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Despite its gains, the Turkish project is not without limits. India views Ankara’s growing footprint in Bangladesh with rising alarm, particularly the circulation of the “Greater Bangladesh” map. China considers Turkish engagement in Tibet as a strategic provocation. Russia, reasserting itself in Central Asia, is unlikely to cede ground to Turkish competitors.
Moreover, local populations may resist Ankara’s ideological push, especially if they perceive political Islam as a foreign imposition. The risk of over-reliance on religious soft power is that it may alienate secular elites or provoke backlash from emerging regional blocs seeking to curtail Islamist expansion.
Turkiye’s eastward advance is not merely strategic – it is ideological. By fusing Brotherhood-aligned Islam with Turanist nationalism, and packaging both within a NATO-friendly framework, Ankara is methodically carving out a sphere of influence across Central and South Asia.
But this expansion is not without risk. It demands careful calibration: asserting regional power without provoking a backlash from entrenched powers like Russia, China, and India; projecting independence while remaining a functional pillar of the western alliance.
This is not just a bold manoeuver, but a provocation. Whether Turkiye can entrench its influence in this contested Eurasian theater or whether the contradictions of its dual alignment will force retreat is no longer a hypothetical. The outcome will shape the limits of Ankara’s ambition, and expose the fragility or resilience of the Atlanticist order it claims to defy.
[…]
Qatari-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal: What does it include?
Al Mayadeen English
A new Qatari ceasefire proposal outlines a two-month ceasefire in Gaza, prisoner-captive exchanges between Hamas and “Israel”, phased Israeli withdrawal, and Trump-backed negotiations for a permanent agreement.
Baruch Yadid and Amichai Stein, analysts at the Israeli outlet i24NEWS, have revealed the terms of a proposed ceasefire agreement brokered by Qatar, aimed at stopping the Israeli war on Gaza.According to the report, the proposal is essentially a modified version of the earlier Witkoff Plan. “Israel”, the United States, and intermediary nations are now awaiting Hamas’ response after “Israel” reportedly conditionally agreed to the outline.
This approval reportedly followed a meeting between Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff.
Multiple sources confirmed that “Israel” has agreed, with certain conditions, to resume negotiations on ending the war even after the 60-day ceasefire period. A source further stated that the Trump administration made it clear the ceasefire would be extended beyond 60 days if talks were deemed serious.
During this time, the US President would commit to ensuring the continuity of the ceasefire. However, the report notes that “Israel” has not pledged to end the war, but rather to engage in dialogue aimed at ending it. Regarding the scope of Israeli withdrawal during the ceasefire, two sources indicated that negotiations are still ongoing over the scale of the withdrawal and the future deployment of Israeli forces.
The plan includes the release of 10 captives held by Hamas, eight on the first day and two on the 50th day, as well as the return of 18 bodies. In return, a two-month ceasefire would be implemented, during which negotiations would be held to reach a permanent end to the war, with each side presenting its demands.
[…]
Saudi Arabia covertly blocked Iranian drones launched at Israeli targets
A missile takes off as Iran carries out 11th phase of True Promise III against the Israeli regime.
Press TVJuly 3Saudi Arabia, which professed a public stance against Israel’s attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran, secretly participated in intercepting Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles during the 12-day US-supported Israeli aggression, media reports say.
According to reports, the Saudi air force scrambled helicopters to shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles crossing airspace over Iraq and Jordan, halting their advance before they could reach Israel.
Some of these drones could have continued toward Israel, but they were intercepted early as part of protecting Saudi Arabia’s space.
While Riyadh hasn’t officially confirmed involvement in the interceptions and even condemned Israel for launching the aggression against Iran, the revelations point to a dramatically growing secret Saudi cooperation with the US-led hostile powers towards Iran.
This comes as senior officials in Riyadh earlier stressed that Saudi airspace would not be opened for any offensive strikes on Iranian territory.
Saudi Arabia was one of dozens of Muslim-majority nations that condemned the Israeli action against Iran.
The interception of Iranian drones was part of a vast US-led operation involving Jordan, Britain, France, and the United States, coordinated under the umbrella of US Central Command (CENTCOM).
At the heart of that coordination stood CENTCOM commander Gen. Mike Kurilla, who oversaw a joint American command-and-control center linking the US, Israel, and European militaries in real time.
Years of joint training exercises and intelligence-sharing paved the way for this rapid, integrated response, military sources said.
Jordan, unlike others, has publicly acknowledged its role in intercepting Iranian drones. France described its participation as defending its interests in Jordan, though it avoided directly referencing Israel.
Saudi Arabia’s air force, built on advanced US-supplied systems, was bolstered by a major arms deal signed with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during Donald Trump’s first term and expanded during Trump’s most recent regional tour.
During the 12 days of aggression against Iran, the United States and its allies, alongside the Israeli military, were the most active, through aircraft, ships, Patriot and THAAD air defense systems, and more.
The US serves not only as a bridge between Israel and regional countries but also as a coordinating factor with Arab countries with which there are no direct relations.
This vicious cooperation was also seen in previous waves of Iranian attacks on Israel in April and October 2024. Then too, the United States and European countries operated in various arenas – some through interception means, others through location and information sharing.
Now, during the 12 days of the US-Israeli aggression, the operation was much broader in scope.
Analysts say any level of cooperation with the US and Israel against Iran would be seen as a “stab in the back” of … Palestinians and the entire Muslim world.
On June 13, Israel launched a blatant and unprovoked aggression against Iran, assassinating many high-ranking military commanders, nuclear scientists, and ordinary civilians.
More than a week later, the United States also jumped on the bandwagon and bombed three Iranian nuclear sites in a grave violation of the United Nations Charter, international law, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
In response, Iranian armed forces targeted strategic sites across the occupied territories as well as the al-Udeid air base in Qatar, the largest American military base in West Asia.
On June 24, Iran, through its successful retaliatory operations against both the Israeli regime and the US, managed to impose a halt to the illegal aggression.
[…]
Via https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/07/03/750527/Iran-US-Saudi-Arabia-Israel-CENTCOM
The Battle Between Edison Supporters and J P Morgan to Electrify America
Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress, From Franklin to Kennedy Volume II 1830s-1890s
By Anton Chaitkin (2025)
Book Review
(Part 3)
My favorite chapter in Who We Are concerns the role of Philadelphia supporters of the “American System” of political economy (see Lincoln: Expanding the Franklin/Hamilton “American System” to Make US World’s Leading Industrial Power) in fostering the career of inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison.
Early History
Thomas Edison was the son of a Canadian revolutionary named Samuel Edison who fled to Michigan after being charged with treason. After learning Morse code, Thomas became a telegraph operator at 15, also became a founding member of the National Telegraph Union at 18.
The Battle with J P Morgan
General William J Palmer, long time civil engineer for the Philadelphia railroads, hired Edison in 1870 to help him launch the Automatic Telegraph Company in competition with J P Morgan controlled Western Union.* Two of Edison’s inventions, the automatic printing telegraph and a technology to send multiple transmissions over a single wire were essential to this enterprise. In 1876, Palmer and other Philadelphia oil and railroad industrialists set him up in Menlo Park New Jersey. It was there Edison invented the carbon transmitter microphone, enabling the telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell to carry a voice signal over long distances.
While at Menlo Park, Edison also developed the phonograph to record speech and the “telemachon,” a dynamo/generator capable of illuminating eight electric lights simultaneously. J P Morgan, who owned the patent on lightbulbs and a controlling interest in the natural gas used to light streets, blocked Edison’s efforts to manufacture lightbulbs. He was extremely wary of Edison’s ability to provide consumers with cheap electrical energy at a fraction of the cost of gas.
In response Edison sold his stock in the Edison Electric Light Company in 1880 to set up the Edison Lamp Works.
Edison Construction Company
Although his board opposed him, J P Morgan also sought to prohibit the building of any new generators in towns and cities. Edison now formed the Edison Construction Company, which supported local invests to set up generators in their own towns. In return for a fraction of their stock, Edison and his team would build their generators, operating pant and transmission networks. They then operated the plants for a brief period before turning them over to a local utility.
A mechanic named Henry Ford joined Detroit Edison when it first formed in 1886 and by 1894, he was their chief engineer.
Lincoln’s son Robert Todd formed Chicago Edison in 1887,
The US Government, a well as Edison and Philadelphia industrialist who supported them all facilitated electricity development in Europe, Mexico, South America and India and Africa.
The Development of Alternating Current and Edison’s Demise
When Thomas Houston and Westinghouse (who bought the patents from Tesla, a former Edison employee) promoted alternating current (AC) because it could be transmitted over longer distances. Unwisely Edison resisted adopting it in his own business, which proved unable to compete. J P Morgan eventually took over Edison’s entire enterprise (which he renamed General Electric) and froze Edison and his associates out of the businesses they had started. Morgan immediately put the brakes on expansion of electrical generation in favor of financial manipulation. This denied numerous sectors (farmers especially) access to electrical machinery for at least two decades. They would wait until the late 1920s, when governor Franklin Roosevelt renewed electrification efforts for residents of New York state. Southern electrification would wait until his 1932 election as president and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
*General William J Palmer was a Civil War veteran and civil engineer who built first bridge and across the Rio Grande and completed two-thirds of the railroad ink to Mexico City before a major attack by Boston financiers caused the financial collapse of his railroad
**Using the Pennsylvania Railroad right of way to construct telegraph poles and lines, Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. In the engineered depression that followed the Civil War, J P Morgan assumed a controlling interest in both the Pennsylvania Railroad and their Western Union spinoff.
July 2, 2025
RFK Jr. Unloads Disturbing Vaccine Secrets on Tucker—And Surprises Everyone on Trump
Vigilant Fox Jul. 1, 2025This article originally appeared on vigilantfox.com and was republished with permission.
It’s not every day an active HHS Secretary sits down for 90 minutes straight with Tucker Carlson.
But that’s exactly what happened, and Kennedy instantly seized Carlson’s attention with a chilling story of CDC corruption.
He revealed that the health agency buried a 1999 internal study led by researcher Thomas Verstraten, which showed an alarming 1135% increase in autism risk from the hepatitis B vaccine.
Kennedy said the researchers were “shocked” by the findings.
So what did they do? They covered it up, according to Kennedy.
“They got rid of all the older children essentially and just had younger children who are too young to be diagnosed [with autism].”
RFK Jr. then explained the real reason why your pediatrician will kick you out of their practice for refusing vaccines.
“There’s a published article out there now that says that 50% of revenues to most pediatricians come from vaccines.”
It’s all about the money. The higher the vaccination rate, the bigger the bonus.
“And that’s why your pediatrician, if you say I want to go slow on the vaccines… will throw you out of his practice because you’re now jeopardizing that bonus structure.”
To the claim that the vaccine–autism link has been “debunked,” Kennedy had a message for Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, and everyone who smugly insists on it.
“None of the vaccines given to children in the first six months of life have ever been studied for autism.”
Let that sink in.
He went further, revealing that the CDC actually did find a link when they studied the DTaP vaccine.
But they dismissed it. Kennedy said they claimed it “didn’t count” because the data came from VAERS—the very system they use to track vaccine injuries.
So when the evidence pointed to harm, they simply claimed their own system wasn’t reliable enough and took no steps to fix it.
The vaccine corruption didn’t end there. Kennedy attested that the CDC killed off a vaccine injury reporting system that actually worked—because it worked too well.
It showed that 1 in 37 vaccines caused an injury.
Tucker was stunned.
“Of all vaccines?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Kennedy confirmed.
The vaccine corruption didn’t end there.
Kennedy attested that the CDC killed off a vaccine injury reporting system that actually worked—because it worked too well.
It showed that 1 in 37 vaccines caused an injury.
Tucker was stunned.
“Of all vaccines?” he asked.
“Yeah,”… pic.twitter.com/jFcjNLXzqt
— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) July 1, 2025
RFK Jr. explained that the CDC funded a study led by researcher Ross Lazarus. It compared a sophisticated machine-counting system to VAERS.
What did they find? VAERS was failing to catch over 99% of vaccine injuries.
The new system also revealed that 2.6% of all vaccinations resulted in an injury.
So what did the CDC do? They shut it down in 2010. And they’re still using VAERS today—even though it’s a completely inadequate system.
But Kennedy didn’t stop at old vaccine scandals. He also broke down Pfizer’s own COVID vaccine trial data. That trial showed a 23% higher death rate in the vaccinated group.
• Pfizer gave 21,720 people the vaccine and 21,728 the placebo.
• One vaccinated person died of COVID. Two placebo recipients died. They used this tiny difference to claim “100% effective” based on relative risk reduction.
• But in absolute terms, it took 22,000 vaccinations to save one life.
• Over six months, 21 vaccinated participants died of all causes, compared to 17 in the placebo group—a 23.5% higher death rate.
And then there’s vaccine spokesperson Paul Offit, often seen on CNN and other mainstream networks.
Kennedy shared an infuriating story about how he literally “voted himself rich” on the rotavirus vaccine.
While serving on the CDC’s ACIP committee, Offit voted to add rotavirus vaccination to the childhood schedule—even as he was developing his own competing vaccine. He guaranteed demand for his product.
The first approved rotavirus vaccine, RotaShield, was yanked from the market for causing dangerous intussusception. Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, eventually replaced it.
He and his partners later sold their rights to Merck for $186 million. As RFK Jr. said, Offit literally “voted himself rich.”
When Carlson mentioned Fauci, Kennedy revealed how Fauci funded research that helped scientists hide evidence of lab-made viruses.
The technique, called “seamless ligation,” allowed researchers to engineer viruses in a lab without leaving telltale genetic fingerprints.
RFK Jr. explained:
“One of his fundees, Ralph Baric, from the University of North Carolina, developed a technique called the seamless ligation technique, which is a technique for hiding the laboratory origins of a manipulated virus.”
“… normally if there’s a virus manipulated, researchers can look at the DNA sequences and they can say this thing was created in a lab. Ralph Baric had developed a technique that he called the no-see technique and its technical name was seamless ligation, and it was a way of hiding evidence of human tampering.”
He called it the exact opposite of what real public health work should be. Carlson cut in, saying, “That’s what you would do if you’re creating viruses for biological warfare.”
When Carlson mentioned Fauci, Kennedy revealed how Fauci funded research that helped scientists hide evidence of lab-made viruses.
The technique, called “seamless ligation,” allowed researchers to engineer viruses in a lab without leaving telltale genetic fingerprints.
RFK Jr.… pic.twitter.com/UqnkDmZyoN
— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) July 1, 2025
The conversation shifted to Trump, leading to one of the biggest highlights of the entire interview.
First, Kennedy explained that Trump chose his cabinet in an unorthodox way: he wanted to see three clips of each candidate performing on TV before considering them for the job.
“One of the things with President Trump is that he really knows how to pick talent… For every one of the positions that he picked, he wanted to see three clips of them performing on TV. He’s very conscious of the fact that these people are going to be out selling his program to the public,” Kennedy said.
That’s when Kennedy ended the interview with a bang, sharing his genuine thoughts about Trump for three straight minutes. It was one of the standout moments of the entire conversation.
If you’re on the fence about Trump, listen to Kennedy here. It might just change how you see him.
“I had him pegged as a narcissist, when narcissists are incapable of empathy. And he’s one of the most empathetic people that I’ve met,” Kennedy said.
“He’s immensely curious, inquisitive, and immensely knowledgeable. He’s encyclopedic in certain areas that you wouldn’t expect,” he continued.
Kennedy added that Trump genuinely cares about soldiers who go to war, citing how Trump “always talks about the casualties on both sides” of the Russia–Ukraine conflict.
“Whether it’s vaccines or Medicaid or Medicare, he’s always thinking about how this impacts the little guy. And the Democrats have him pegged as a guy who’s sort of sitting in the Cabinet meeting talking about how can we make billionaires richer. He’s the opposite of that. He’s a genuine populist,” Kennedy said.
Here’s the clip. Trust me, watching this is better than reading it.
That’s when Kennedy ended the interview with a bang, sharing his genuine thoughts about Trump for three straight minutes. It was one of the standout moments of the entire conversation.
If you’re on the fence about Trump, listen to Kennedy here. It might just change how you see… pic.twitter.com/CS0RItpUC4
— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) July 1, 2025
There’s so much more in this conversation, and it might change the way you think about vaccines forever. For the full picture, watch the entire interview below.
[…]
Via https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/07/rfk-jr-unloads-disturbing-vaccine-secrets-tucker-surprises/
Peter Thiel Unveils American ‘Social Credit Score System’ To Eradicate ‘Non-Compliant’ Citizens
By Baxter Dmitry
They told you it was a conspiracy. They said the World Economic Forum was losing power. But behind the scenes, the machinery never stopped.
Now, the social credit score system they’ve long fantasized about is no longer theory—it’s code. It’s policy. And it’s coming.
Peter Thiel—yes, that Peter Thiel—once seen as a tech renegade, is now a WEF Trojan horse in the White House. His company, Palantir, built to surveil, to profile, and to punish, is laying the infrastructure brick by digital brick.
Their message to America is clear: comply with the social credit score system, or be excluded from society.
But here’s the kicker—this isn’t some distant, sci-fi nightmare. It’s already happening.
The very same Palantir technology being prepared for rollout in America is already being used overseas to hunt, target, and eliminate the “non-compliant.”
It’s not just tracking behavior—it’s enforcing compliance. With deadly consequences.
The World Economic Forum has spent years laying the groundwork for a global social credit score system—one that tracks your behavior, limits your freedoms, and rewards blind compliance. And while they called it progress, we’ve been sounding the alarm from the start.
At the heart of their plan: a global digital ID, linked to everything from your financial data to your carbon footprint. In this system, freedom isn’t a right—it’s a privilege you have to earn through constant compliance.
Many believed the WEF had been defeated when Klaus Schwab stepped down… When the American people pushed back against the globalist agenda in the 2024 election.
But the globalists didn’t surrender. They simply changed strategy. Now, lurking in the shadows, their dystopian vision is more dangerous than ever. It isn’t a future threat. It’s a present reality. And its delivery system? Palantir.
Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed tech empire is building the surveillance infrastructure to make the WEF’s dream a reality—right here in the United States.
Palantir’s Gotham platform was built by the CIA, for the CIA. In its early years, the CIA was Palantir’s only customer. It was—and still is—a surveillance tool designed for intelligence agencies.
No wonder Palantir co-founder Alex Karp is on record urging Americans to get ready for a three-front war with Russia, China and Iran.
These psychopathic globalists have been working hand-in-glove with the WEF to cause chaos around the world for decades, and now they are turning their dystopian technology on the American people.
Palantir is developing a new system for the federal government—powered by AI—that will monitor every American. It will merge Social Security, IRS records, and immigration data into one centralized database. A single profile. A centralized point of control.
And they’re using Gotham to do it—the same platform the CIA funded to spy on foreign targets, now repurposed to track and condition you.
While most people are distracted or looking the other way, this is the quiet construction of a digital prison… by a man long obsessed with the Antichrist, who went viral this week for insisting he isn’t one.
You can’t make this up. And yet, he’s the architect of the surveillance state rising around us.
A former WEF Young Global Leader and longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel bought himself political cover by pouring millions into Trump’s presidential campaigns and bankrolling JD Vance’s Senate run in Ohio.
While many were fooled into believing he was an ally of the anti-globalist right, Thiel was quietly laying the groundwork for something far more insidious.
As the public looked the other way, the foundation for a digital control grid was being built—one line of code, one government contract at a time, by a WEF member who thinks that transgender surgeries do not go far enough, and we should all transform ourselves more radically.
The global elite’s vision for the future is nothing short of dystopian.
They’re not just rewriting the rules—they’re rewriting reality. Family, gender, culture—dismantled. Privacy—abolished. In its place? A system of total obedience, enforced by surveillance and algorithms.
That’s why protecting yourself starts now—with VPnet. In this digital war, your data is the first casualty. VPnet helps shield your identity before it’s too late.
Because this isn’t just theory anymore. Thanks to Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and the WEF’s long-laid plans, the framework for a full-blown social credit system in America is already being assembled. Quietly. Relentlessly.
Still think it can’t happen here? Just look at the nations where Palantir’s tech is already in place. The consequences aren’t speculative—they’re real. And they’re chilling.
Palantir’s AI system—reportedly nicknamed “Antichrist AI” by insiders—is already operational in Israel, where the Netanyahu government uses it to assign Palestinians a numerical score between 1 and 100, determining their perceived threat level.
Even more disturbing, the system generates a daily kill list—identifying 100 individuals for targeted assassination, based entirely on algorithmic profiling.
When asked about Palantir’s role in these operations, Peter Thiel offered no real answer—and instead said that he “defers to Israel.”
While Thiel remains tongue-tied in public, behind closed doors he and his WEF allies are aggressively lobbying for the same surveillance technology to be rolled out across the United States.
His Palantir co-founder, Alex Karp, is even more brazen. According to Karp, anyone who resists or refuses to comply with the emerging social credit system should be treated as a terrorist—just as the Israeli government labels women and children queuing for food and water as enemy combatants.
This is the same man who once suggested deploying drones to spray “fentanyl-laced urine” on those who oppose him.
And no—he didn’t say it like a joke.
In Palantir circles, “neutralizing hostile cognitive infrastructure”—military speak for destroying the contents of a skull that holds the wrong ideas—is considered a top priority.
They’ve already developed slide decks and strategy briefings outlining exactly how it will be executed—when the time comes.
Did you hear those gasps and cheers? These are people fully signed up to the globalist mission to monitor and control humanity through advanced technology.
And it’s being rolled out before our eyes, while the masses continue to sleep, believing that everything is fine.
Xfinity just launched “WiFi Motion”, a new feature that tracks movement inside your home using nothing but WiFi signals. No cameras. No sensors. Just your internet bouncing waves off your body to see where you are.
And it’s automatically included. Your router just became a motion detector. Welcome to the next phase of surveillance, and they’re calling it “convenience.”
Protect yourself before it’s too late. Sign up with VPnet today—because in this digital war, your data is the first battlefield.
Here are a few more survival hacks for the world we’re walking into:
If they promise safety, it’s really about control.
If Palantir is involved, you are the product.
If Peter Thiel is funding it, assume it’s a CIA front.
If they say it’s for security, it’s surveillance—full stop.
And if you dare to question any of it? Congratulations—you’re already on a list.
The only way to stop the globalists and their Trojan horse agenda is simple: We make the resistance too big to silence. We make the list so long, they can’t take us out one by one. They can’t erase us all—if we stand together.
[…]
Syria’s Jolani US-Israeli ‘intelligence tool’ working to advance their interests
By Sally Ahmed
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the head of the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led regime in Damascus, is a US-Israeli “intelligence tool” working to advance their interests, according to a Syrian political activist.
In an interview with the Press TV website, activist Mohammed al-Jajeh described the situation in Syria roughly six months after the collapse of the Assad government as “catastrophic by all measures” and said “no one” in the country, including ethnic and religious minorities, is safe.
The country, he said, has descended into “a dangerous slide into chaos,” marked by “ethnic and sectarian purges,” particularly targeting minorities such as Alawites, Christians, Ismailis, Shias, and even moderate Sunni Muslims.
Al-Jajeh noted that members of the former Syrian president’s Alawite sect have been subjected to a “fierce campaign of revenge,” citing reports of “horrific” massacres in Syria’s western coastal region.
Among the incidents he referenced was the killing of more than 70 civilians in the village of Ain al-Tinah, adding that thousands of Alawites have been forcibly displaced, with their homes and properties seized in the provinces of Tartus and Latakia.
‘Minorities as easy targets’
In reference to pledges made by the HTS regime to uphold the rights of religious and ethnic minorities, the Sweden-based Syrian political activist dismissed those promises as “empty.”
“Christians have become easy targets for militias and extremist Salafi groups,” he said, referring to the latest attack on Mar Elias church in Damascus.
On June 22, a man with a rifle entered the church and shot at worshippers, killing 25 people and wounding dozens of others, before blowing himself up.
The activist said Christians’ homes have been ransacked and monasteries have been looted, adding that cases of abductions among Christians and mass exodus from towns like Maaloula and Sednaya have been reported, due to the inaction of the Jolani regime.
Al-Jajeh noted that people from the Ismaili sect have also been a target for kidnappings and attacks since Assad’s fall, adding that a civil activist named Hilal Samaan was assassinated “just for calling for coexistence”.
Speaking about the violence targeting Shia Muslims, al-Jajeh said that sectarian killings have become routine. Individuals are often questioned about their religious affiliation at checkpoints, and in some cases, he noted, they are killed solely because of their names or how they pronounce certain words.
He added that even moderate Sunni Muslims, who make up the majority of Syria’s population, are not spared from violence and intimidation.
According to al-Jajeh, religious scholars and preachers who oppose extremism or foreign intervention have been either assassinated or forcibly removed from their mosques.
Stressing that the state “has collapsed”, al-Jajeh said “the institutions are absent, the law is not enforced, and power is divided among warring factions, some of which are loyal to Turkey and some others to the [Persian] Gulf [Arab] states and foreign militant groups of various nationalities.”
Since Assad’s fall, the activist said, rights groups have recorded “more than 1,200 sectarian violations”, “over 30,000 people” have been trapped in prisons with an unknown fate and “more than 5,000” abducted girls have been taken as captives.
“Syria after Assad: No one is safe,” he emphasized.
‘Jolani is a trained agent’
Amid Israel’s expansion of its occupation into Syrian territories beyond the already-occupied Golan Heights following the fall of the Assad government, al-Jajeh said this further proves Jolani is merely an American-Israeli intelligence asset, positioned in Syria to advance a broader agenda.
Referring to Jolani’s public statements expressing a willingness to normalize relations with Israel and declaring that his top priority is fighting the former Syrian government.
“This is the language of a trained agent who knows what the West wants to hear, and sends reassuring messages to Tel Aviv,” he stated.
Al-Jajeh emphasized that Jolani, who was previously affiliated with al-Qaeda and Daesh, is ultimately “just a tool” and “a minor detail” in what he described as the U.S.-led project for a “new Middle East.”
“Abu Mohamad al-Jolani is neither a revolutionary, a rebel, nor a warlord. He is a carefully trained American-Israeli intelligence tool, speaking in measured language and acting within defined boundaries,” he remarked.
Despite Jolani’s offer to normalize ties with Israel, the activist noted that the regime continues to attack Syria because it “knows its real size and continues to strike Syria because it simply despises the agents even if they serve it.”
‘It’s a gang, not an army’
Commenting on the Jolani regime’s plan to incorporate thousands of foreign Takfiri militants into the country’s new military, al-Jajeh said this move is aimed at tightening Jolani’s grip on power, slamming it as “the most dangerous, unannounced demographic change process”.
The activist said the decision comes as the new ruler “doesn’t trust the Syrian people” and seeks to recruit foreigners “who don’t speak Arabic, don’t know the geography [of the country] and have not any belonging to the territory” to just carry weapons and “obey his orders without question”.
He described those militants as “tools ready for killing, in exchange for salaries, housing and insurance”.
“This army is not built to protect Syria, but to protect the ruler from the Syrians themselves.”
To stay in power, the activist said Jolani aims to create “a personal army that owes him complete loyalty” and “does not hesitate to open fire at Syrians simply because they are not ‘one of them’.”
“Whoever brings in strangers to rule over their people does not run a state; rather, they run a gang, that’s waiting for the moment of explosion,” he added.
‘Syria as part of new regional deal’
Commenting on recent remarks by Turkey’s defense minister where he announced that Ankara has no immediate plans to withdraw from Syria, al-Jajeh said this is “a declaration of actual occupation and a direct message stating: ‘This land is no longer yours, but it has become part of the new regional deal’.”
The activist referred to the role played by Turkey in the foreign-backed militancy that erupted in Syria in 2011, saying Ankara “was not a ‘supporter of the revolution’ as it claimed, but rather one of its architects”. This was “tailored to its national interests”, he added.
Al-Jajeh noted that Turkey facilitated the passage of thousands of foreign militants into Syria in the very early days of the militancy, allowed the entry of weapons to the al-Nusra Front, trained the Takfiri militants in camps on its territory, and provided them with medical and logistical support.
“What is happening today is a clear implementation of a soft partition plan,” he stated.
Al-Jajeh also referred to “the imposition of Turkish education” in the schools of Idlib, Afrin and al-Bab, the raising of Turkish flags in institutions, the changing of streets names to Turkish names, the issuance of temporary identity cards to residents, the use of Turkish language in administrative dealings, and the establishment of large military bases in Aleppo.
“These are not emergency measures to protect ‘the borders’, but rather complete practices of political and administrative occupation,” he said.
The security situation in Syria remains tenuous after militant factions, led by HTS, toppled President Assad’s government and took control of Damascus on December 8, 2024.
[…]
Senate Votes to Remove AI Provision from Trump Tax Bill
APTOPIX Congress Tax Cuts © Mark Schiefelbein
Story by MATT BROWN and MATT O’BRIEN
WASHINGTON (AP) — A proposal to deter states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade was soundly defeated in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, thwarting attempts to insert the measure into President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts.
The Senate voted 99-1 to strike the AI provision from the legislation after weeks of criticism from both Republican and Democratic governors and state officials.
Originally proposed as a 10-year ban on states doing anything to regulate AI, lawmakers later tied it to federal funding so that only states that backed off on AI regulations would be able to get subsidies for broadband internet or AI infrastructure.
A last-ditch Republican effort to save the provision would have reduced the time frame to five years and sought to exempt some favored AI laws, such as those protecting children or country music performers from harmful AI tools.
But that effort was abandoned when Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, teamed up with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington on Monday night to introduce an amendment to strike the entire proposal.
Blackburn said on the floor that “it is frustrating” that Congress has been unable to legislate on emerging technology, including online privacy and AI-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate an artist’s voice or visual likeness. “But you know who has passed it? It is our states,” Blackburn said. “They’re the ones that are protecting children in the virtual space. They’re the ones that are out there protecting our entertainers — name, image, likeness — broadcasters, podcasters, authors.”
Voting on the amendment happened after 4 a.m. Tuesday as part of an overnight session as Republican leaders sought to secure support for the tax cut bill while fending off other proposed amendments, mostly from Democrats trying to defeat the package.
Proponents of an AI moratorium had argued that a patchwork of state and local AI laws is hindering progress in the AI industry and the ability of U.S. firms to compete with China.
Some prominent tech leaders welcomed the idea after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who leads the Senate Commerce committee, floated it at a hearing in May. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Cruz that “it is very difficult to imagine us figuring out how to comply with 50 different sets of regulation.”
But state and local lawmakers and AI safety advocates argued that the rule is a gift to an industry that wants to avoid accountability for its products. Led by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a majority of GOP governors sent a letter to Congress opposing it.
Sanders, who was White House press secretary in Trump’s first term, credited Blackburn for “leading the charge” to defend states’ rights to regulate AI.
“This is a monumental win for Republican Governors, President Trump’s one, big beautiful bill, and the American people,” Sanders wrote on X on Tuesday.
Also appealing to lawmakers to strike the provision was a group of parents of children who have died as a result of online harms.
“In the absence of federal action, the moratorium gives AI companies exactly what they want: a license to develop and market dangerous products with impunity — with no rules and no accountability,” Florida mother Megan Garcia wrote in a letter last week. Garcia has sued the maker of an AI chatbot she says pushed her 14-year-old son to kill himself. “A moratorium gives companies free rein to create and launch products that sexually groom children and encourage suicide, as in the case of my dear boy.”
Cruz over the weekend tried to broker a last-ditch compromise with Blackburn to save the provision. Changes included language designed to protect child safety as well as Tennessee’s so-called ELVIS Act, championed by Nashville’s country music industry to restrict AI tools from replicating an artist’s voice without their consent. Cruz said it could have “passed easily” had Blackburn not backed out.
“When I spoke to President Trump last night, he said it was a terrific agreement,” Cruz said. “The agreement protected kids and protected the rights of creative artists. But outside interests opposed that deal.”
Blackburn said Tuesday there were “problems with the language” of the amendment.
Cruz withdrew the compromise amendment and blamed a number of people and entities he said “hated the moratorium,” including China, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a teachers union leader and “transgender groups and radical left-wing groups who want to use blue state regulations to mandate woke AI.”
He didn’t mention the broad group of Republican state legislators, attorneys general and governors who also opposed it. Critics say Cruz’s proposal, while carving out some exemptions, would have affected states’ enforcement of any AI rules if they were found to create an “undue or disproportionate burden” on AI systems.
Even Cruz ultimately joined the early Tuesday vote to strip the proposal. Only Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who opposed Trump’s broader budget bill, voted against eliminating the AI provision.
“The proposed ban that has now been removed would have stopped states from protecting their residents while offering nothing in return at the federal level,” Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of children’s advocacy group Common Sense Media, wrote in a statement. “In the end, 99 senators voted to strip the language out when just hours earlier it looked like the moratorium might have survived.”
[…]
Via https://apnews.com/article/congress-ai-provision-moratorium-states-20beeeb6967057be5fe64678f72f6ab0
Is Amazon Really Eliminating Jobs with Robots?
by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
Amazon announced yesterday that they had added their “1 millionth robot” to their fulfillment centers. This announcement has led to another news frenzy about how robots are replacing humans.
And yet, there was nothing in Amazon’s announcement that predicted this. It was the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) coverage of the announcement that has been repeated and spread like wildfire through both the corporate and alternative media today.
This was the opening statement of the WSJ article:
The automation of Amazon.com facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans. (Source.)
While this statement was repeated far and wide to predict that robots were now taking over the labor market and replacing humans, other facts from this announcement by Amazon were completely ignored.
Tech Radar, a technology publication, had a much more balanced coverage of this announcement:
Amazon Robotics VP Scott Dresser boasted that more than 700,000 employees have been upskilled since 2019 through training in robotics, engineering and maintenance, suggesting that human roles at Amazon could be evolving rather than disappearing.
Dresser also noted that new fulfillment centers, including Shreveport, LA, require 30% more technical roles to look after the tech.
Even the WSJ mentioned this later in their article, and gave one example:
For some Amazon workers, the increasing automation has meant replacing menial, repetitive work lifting, pulling and sorting with more skilled assignments managing the machines.
“I thought I was going to be doing heavy lifting, I thought I was going to be walking like crazy,” said Neisha Cruz, who spent five years picking items at an Amazon warehouse in Windsor, Conn., before she was trained to oversee robotic systems.
Today she sits in front of a computer screen in a Tempe, Ariz., office making sure mobile robots inside Amazon facilities across the U.S. are working properly. She earns about 2.5 times more pay than she did when she started at Amazon.
“You have completely new jobs being created,” such as robot technicians, said Yesh Dattatreya, senior applied scientist at Amazon Robotics. […]
So if 1 million robots have now been added to Amazon warehouses worldwide, and over 700,000 hourly workers have retrained to operate this technology, what about the technology professionals who were hired from outside Amazon, such as engineers, tech managers, tech producers who develop and maintain the equipment, etc.?
That could easily make up a workforce of 1 million that offsets the 1 million robots, as Amazon admits that their fully automated warehouses require 30% MORE employees.
The other thing the people predicting the end of the human labor force in favor of robots are failing to leave out of their fear mongering reports, is a picture of what these robots in Amazon warehouses look like, which is similar to the “robots” that many consumers already have in their homes: vacuum cleaner “robots”.
These apocalyptic articles make it sound that the robots in commercial use in Amazon warehouses are all humanoid robots with arms, legs, hands and feet.
Of course one can look up “amazon robots” online and see humanoid examples, but they are still prototypes not in production yet, and may never be.
[…]
Other than the Roomba-like warehouse robots, there are a few other types of robots Amazon uses that are like glorified forklifts with extensions like “arms” that can more efficiently move things through the warehouse, or grab and move something from point A to point B, and these are larger machines which would only have a few per warehouse.
[…]
The Problems and Limitations of Warehouse Automation that Nobody is Talking AboutWarehouse automation with robotics has been around for almost 2 decades now, so let’s talk about some of the limitations and dangers of relying too much on the technology.
First, they need electricity to operate, and when the grid goes down, humans can still work with backup battery-operated lights.
And while all of these warehouses for sure have back-up generators, have these warehouses been fully tested to see if those back-up generators will have enough power to do more than just turn the lights back on and get the Internet back up and running?
Those robots need a ton of power to operate, I would imagine. And especially with AI, new power centers are being built as rapidly as possible to meet the demand of new data centers.
It was reported earlier this week in Texas that a new law gives grid operators the power to disconnect these data centers during a crisis. See:
Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis
Another big concern to being so dependent on the technology is the SOFTWARE that is needed to run all of these robots.
As a former Certified Microsoft Systems Engineer, I can tell you that this is a much BIGGER danger to being dependent upon all of these robots.
Amazon calls its software “DeepFleet.”
[…]
How does one deploy this software and updates across the Amazon warehouses around the world running this software?
Through the Internet.
So first, the Internet has to be available at these warehouses, and secondly, that software can be hacked or have some bad code that could bring down everything.
And we saw how that worked last year when a single Microsoft Windows update was deployed to millions of MS Windows computers around the world, which caused worldwide chaos when it failed, even bringing down airports’ ability to show flight information. See:
The other statistic I could not find, probably because Amazon.com will not reveal it publicly, is how accurate are these robots in terms of sending the right products that were ordered to the customer?
When I started my online ecommerce business back in 2002 and we experienced rapid growth, one problem we found was that the error rate in what is called “pick and pack” has to be very low when you are shipping a lot of products, or you will lose customers and revenue to those mistakes.
The industry standard for error rates back then was .5%, or 99.5% success rate and shipping out the correct order to the customer, which is one mistake for every 200 packages shipped.
We still maintain that standard today, with NO robots.
Amazon.com ships billions of orders a day, with some of them their own branded products, mostly made in China, and the others are products of third party vendors.
I don’t know what Amazon.com’s error rate is for shipping their own products with all of these robots, but for the orders they ship for other vendors, the rate is required to be below 1% to maintain their Amazon store, which is twice as high as the older standards, and the standard that my company still maintains, without robots.
We know that automation with robots in warehouses does not automatically mean that their pick and pack services increase in quality, because there are websites out there instructing companies how to setup their automation to make sure it works properly.
Here is one called “sortingrobotics.com”:
10 Common Mistakes in Pick and Pack Automation
Is this Technology even Profitable and Sustainable?The last, and perhaps the most important question we should ask, would be: Is this technology even profitable?
No, it is not. The hope is that some day they can “scale” this to mass production and make it profitable.
I grew up with Amazon.com, and started my own ecommerce company just a few years later. Jeff Bezos has rich and powerful friends that allowed him to keep building up Amazon.com to become the most popular ecommerce site in the world, for over a decade without earning a profit.
He was gathering so many customers into his database that investors just assumed he would one day learn how to make it profitable, so they kept throwing $millions into the company to make it happen. It would be years later when Amazon Web Services began with their Cloud computing division when they finally started earning a profit.
We can be sure that the same thing is happening today with Amazon’s robotics division.
As an example, we can look at Google’s Waymo robotaxis, which have been in development for about two decades now, and started with funding from the U.S. Government through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
There have been talks for a couple of years now that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is going to spin off Waymo as a separate company and do an IPO.
But based on reported financial reports for Waymo, it is believed that it is still losing almost $1 billion every single quarter. And yet, they are the “gold standard” for robotaxis, having the most cars on the road. They do a couple of hundred thousand ride shares a week, while Uber, which is run by human drivers, does 15 million ride shares a day.
Tesla just released their own robotaxis in Austin, Texas, but it is only a few cars on a closed course, with a human driver in the passenger seat. And yet, they are considered the main competitor to Waymo.
While many of these driverless taxi companies are no longer revealing how many humans it takes to operate one “driverless” automobile, it has been previously published that in some of these companies it takes about 1.5 humans behind the scenes to keep these “driverless” cars operating.
With Google’s Waymo, considered the gold standard with the most cars deployed, they still can NOT go to the airport or on freeways, as it is too difficult for them. And they have been working on this technology for almost two decades.
It was also just announced a few days ago that Waymo “quietly” just shut down its Detroit plant.
Self-driving car company Waymo quietly closed its Detroit plant.Google-affiliated autonomous vehicle company Waymo shuttered its plant in Detroit earlier this year after shifting resources and production down south.
The developer of self-driving shuttle technology, along with its automotive supplier partner Magna, ceased operations at a factory leased from American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. in the first quarter, Waymo spokesman Chris Bonelli confirmed to Automotive News affiliate Crain’s Detroit Business.
The closure marks a quiet ending to a ballyhooed project announced in 2019 as the “world’s first 100% dedicated Level 4 autonomous vehicle factory.” The 200,000-square-foot plant, expected to create as many as 400 engineering jobs, was seen as a major victory in Michigan’s quest to be a next-generation mobility hub.
The project never met those ambitious goals. At its peak, there were 60 employees who were on Magna’s payroll doing contract work for Waymo, Magna spokesman Dave Niemiec said. (Full article.)
The fact is that Silicon Valley still has too much money to throw away on science fiction, and they can continue to develop it whether consumers want it or not.
Robots can NOT replace humans. They can make humans more efficient, but humans are still needed to run them.
America’s over-reliance on the technology will be her downfall, and perhaps we are already watching it happen.
The Pentagon’s budget has increased significantly the past few years to invest in Big Tech and AI. The Biden/Harris administration’s FY 2025 defense budget asked for close to $100 billion invested in technology like AI (source), and the new Trump administration is asking for even more (source.)
Did we just observe in real time how this worked out in the REAL world during the 12-day war against Iran? The U.S. and Israel were forced to end the war after only 12 days, as they ran out of bombs.
Iran, on the other hand, stated that they only used 5% of their missiles.
So what does Iran have that the U.S. doesn’t? Human labor, factories, and the ability to make LOTS OF BOMBS.
The U.S. and Israel thought they could rely on their technology to use espionage and terrorism to kill Iran’s top military leaders, hoping to cripple its military.
It didn’t, as Iran recovered quickly, and showed superior hardware made by human labor in factories that probably had ZERO robots working in them.
[…]
Via https://healthimpactnews.com/2025/is-amazon-really-eliminating-human-jobs-with-robots/
The Most Revolutionary Act
- Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's profile
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