The AWS team has pushed a non-denial denial dressed up as a correction. I guess it’s time for this disinformation historian to break down what’s happening:

The Amazon post claims to “correct” an FT report while actually it confirms the core story. Burying it in minimization doesn’t actually contradict it. They admit an AI-related tool (Kiro) caused a production service disruption, then spend every sentence trying to make you forget they just said that.

For the record, an AI agent was asked to fix a bug in Cost Explorer, autonomously decided the right move was to delete the environment and rebuild it, and caused a 13-hour outage in mainland China.

The AWS rhetorical moves to avoid admitting this are so sloppy, perhaps they were written by AI:

Blame displacement: they say “user error—specifically misconfigured access controls”. Yeah, ok, this reframes an AI agent autonomously misconfiguring production infrastructure as equivalent to a human typo. The whole point of the FT story is that AI coding agents can make changes they shouldn’t. Calling the agent action a “user error” is like calling a car crash “road error.”

Wait, no, it’s worse.

FT sources said employees complained about being forced onto Kiro. So the “user error” framing is even more absurd given management was pressuring engineers to use this tool aggressively while simultaneously blaming them when it breaks things. Management demanded rapid adoption, few or no guardrails, and the result seems predictable.

Amazon set an 80% weekly usage target for Kiro and actively tracked adoption rates. They got what they asked for, an outage caused by Kiro.

Scope minimization: “extremely limited,” “single service,” “one of our 39 Geographic Regions,” “did not impact compute, storage, database”… the list goes on and on like they’re not even convinced themselves yet. Look at everything that didn’t break rather than explaining what did break and how, is an annoying rhetorical move.

The big lie: “We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again—not because the event had a big impact (it didn’t), but because we insist on learning.” You don’t add mandatory peer review for production access over nothing. That’s a significant operational control change. Denial, denial. That tells you the existing guardrails failed.

Amazon designed a system with no guardrails, mandated aggressive adoption, then called the inevitable result “user error.” That’s just wrong. The FT reported that AI tools were treated as extensions of the operator and given the same permissions, such that operator-level access with no mandatory peer review was never a “misconfigured” anything.

The rough landing: “The Financial Times’ claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.” This is the only categorical denial in the entire piece, which means everything else is carefully worded admission. Simple math. Amazon is really screwing themselves at this point. Why? GeekWire got a clarification from AWS that the second event “did not take place within the AWS business, but elsewhere within Amazon.” So the categorical denial of “entirely false” really are just weasel words about what’s technically within AWS. The second tool was Amazon Q Developer, so it’s still Amazon, still AI, and now shows a pattern.

Zero technical detail: Honestly, this is my biggest complaint. AWS used to care about engineering. For a company that once upon a time published detailed post-incident reports, there’s nothing here. No timeline, no root cause analysis, no explanation of what Kiro actually did or what permissions it had. The COE process they brag about produced what? This press release?

The whole thing reads like legal had an intern who used a chatbot prompt that said “technically don’t lie while giving the impression nothing happened”.

The defining philosophical move of Nazism, the thing that distinguishes it from generic authoritarianism, is the totalization of function. The person ceases to exist except as an instrument of the collective mission.

Hannah Arendt identified this precisely: totalitarianism doesn’t just suppress dissent, it eliminates the category of the person who could dissent. If you aren’t in, you’re out. Now read Hegseth’s new Nazi rule applied to the U.S. military.

The department must ensure it is building ‘one force’ without subgroups defined by anything other than ability or mission adherence. Efforts to split our troops along lines of identity weaken our force and make us vulnerable. Such efforts must not be tolerated or accommodated.

The stupid. Think about it. The guy appointed to oversee an organization with effectiveness defined by how it splits troops into subgroups, doesn’t believe anyone can be special.

Special forces used to mean something, but not to Nazipants Pete.

Hegseth’s statement does exactly what Nazis do. There are now only two permitted identity traits of “ability or mission adherence”. You are what you do for a Trump mission, or you are nothing.

That’s not a military philosophy. That’s literally Nazi Gleichschaltung forcing every institution, identity, and association into alignment with a single purpose defined from the mouth of an unhinged lunatic at the top.

As a historian I want to double-down on what specifically makes this a Nazi speech by Hegseth rather than just authoritarian:

Banning recognition of identity-based patterns destroys the detection mechanism for discrimination. If you can’t categorize, you can’t measure. If you can’t measure, you can’t identify bias. If you can’t identify bias, bias becomes structurally permanent and invisible.

Hegseth doesn’t just want to enforce conformity, he says he will destroy the capacity to perceive the problem. That’s why book-burning was so much more than the loss of books themselves, as it was destroying the entire framework through which injustice becomes legible.

Circular self-justification also should be called out. “Ability” is declared the only legitimate criterion, but who assesses ability? The existing hierarchy. Whose biases are embedded in that hierarchy? The question is now prohibited. So the dominant group’s perspective becomes reality itself. “Are you able” is a weapon, not a measurement. The permitted framework of evaluation predefines answers.

Again, we see a purely Nazi epistemic move: declare the particular to be universal, then criminalize any lens that would reveal it as particular.

Universalism disgraced

“One force” sounds like equality. The Nazis also claimed this, building unity as their Volksgemeinschaft, the people’s community. Hegseth is clearly repeating the trick. He will define unity as the erasure of all difference except the categories the leader designates as real. Race is how the Nazis defined “ability”. A supposedly natural, objective criterion replicated the existing power structure exactly.

Hegseth is making statements that redefine what a human being is within the institution, as a functional unit with no legitimate interiority, no group history, no structural position worth recognizing. And he makes his redefinition coercive, exclusionary, by declaring that anyone who resists it “must not be tolerated.”

I can’t believe I have to say this but it also is a self-refuting enforcement point. Saying troops identified by his ideological “ability” review then “must not be tolerated” is itself an act of splitting the force along ideological lines, performing exactly what it prohibits.

There is no policy here. Hegseth has made an ontological claim enforced by threat. He has presented himself as the operational definition of Nazism.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last June fired every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and restacked it with anti-vaccine allies. In December, his ACIP voted 8-3 to gut a 34-year-old recommendation that all American newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth — a policy that had reduced pediatric infections by 99% and prevented an estimated 90,100 childhood deaths.

The cruelty, it burns.

During deliberations, ACIP members dismissed hepatitis B victims as “largely a disease of sex workers, drug users, and immigrants.”

Two days after the CDC adopted their recommendation, the Federal Register announced a $1.6 million unsolicited, non-competitive grant to run a trial of that same vaccine on 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau.

Not in Denmark, where the lead researchers live. No, that’s where the rich white kids live.

Not in the United States, where the policy was just changed. No, rich white kids there too.

In Guinea-Bissau because it has a poverty rate 60%, hepatitis B prevalence 19%, and most importantly believed to have no leverage to refuse. This study could never pass an institutional review board in America. Everyone involved knows that.

The entire point was to do it somewhere the subjects can’t fight back, then use the results to demolish vaccine policy everywhere else.

They are literally trying to cook a precedent by denying vaccines to infants, based on their race.

Mengele much?

Who Gets Experimented On

The architecture is not new. Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service knowingly withheld antibiotics from hundreds of Black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama — not to learn something unknown, but to watch what a known disease does when you let it run. Paul Offit called the Guinea-Bissau trial “RFK Jr.’s Tuskegee Experiment.” An active CDC employee who leaked the study protocol to Inside Medicine used the same comparison.

The parallel is obvious: a U.S. government agency deliberately withholding a proven intervention from a population selected for its poverty and powerlessness, to study outcomes that are already known.

Ninety percent of babies exposed to hepatitis B at birth develop chronic infection. A quarter of those children will die of liver cancer or liver failure. The hepatitis B vaccine, given within 24 hours of delivery, prevents this. That is not a hypothesis. It is settled medicine backed by four decades of data and over 1.4 billion administered doses. The WHO recommends universal birth dosing. Guinea-Bissau was planning to implement it in 2027.

The infamously immoral Bandim researchers — Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby, based at the University of Southern Denmark — called that gap between current practice and planned policy a “window of opportunity.” Their study randomizes half the babies to get the vaccine. The other half don’t. In a country where one in five people is a carrier. Without screening pregnant mothers. The WHO condemned it:

Exploiting scarcity is not ethical.

White European researchers, funded by the American government, experimenting on Black African newborns with a vaccine they would never withhold from white children at home. That is the “study”.

Like taking candy from a baby.

Rigged by Design

The trial measures mortality at 42 days and tracks “non-specific effects” — skin rashes, neurodevelopmental issues — for up to five years. But hepatitis B kills through cirrhosis and liver cancer, which take decades to develop. As Jeremy Faust noted, it’s like running a chemotherapy trial and checking if the patient is alive a week later. The study cannot detect the vaccine’s benefits. It can only detect short-term adverse events. That is the point.

The single-blind design means researchers know which babies were vaccinated — what the WHO called “a significant likelihood of substantial risk of bias.” None of the vaccines are FDA-approved. The results won’t apply to American children. Kennedy’s CDC is paying $1.6 million for a study designed to produce one specific result: no measurable benefit from the birth dose. That result will then be cited to justify the domestic policy change that was already made two days before the study was funded.

Policy first. Manufactured evidence to follow, so even more children can be harmed.

The Machine

Kennedy cited Bandim’s 2017 study — claiming the DTP vaccine killed girls in Guinea-Bissau — to slash over a billion dollars in global vaccine funding. Bandim later failed to replicate those findings. A November 2025 analysis in Vaccine found that Bandim authored roughly 35% of all published clinical research on vaccine “non-specific effects.” Stabell Benn advised the new ACIP and collaborated with Tracy Beth Hoeg, a senior FDA official who previously worked at the University of Southern Denmark. The ACIP cited Bandim research in its September 2025 presentations, then voted to gut the birth dose, then the CDC funded Bandim to produce the next round of evidence.

The CDC is paying the people who generate the data Kennedy uses to dismantle vaccine policy to generate more data Kennedy can use to dismantle vaccine policy. Using African babies as the raw material.

Offit’s suggestion was simple: take the $1.6 million and vaccinate as many newborns as you can. CIDRAP reported that amount could fund Guinea-Bissau’s birth dose for over a decade. Instead, the money buys a study whose lead researchers have documented credibility problems, awarded without competition, in a country that just had a coup, with an ethics approval that Guinea-Bissau’s own health minister says may never have actually occurred.

Guinea-Bissau suspended the study in January. Because they see what Trump is, especially in context of a coup. The WHO condemned it in February. Because they see what Trump is. Three members of Congress called it “abhorrent.” Because they see what Trump is. HHS responded in a deranged rant calling the Africa CDC a “powerless, fake organization” and insisting the trial would proceed as planned no matter what anyone says.

The Bandim team’s official response drips with unaccountable privilege:

We welcome continued discussion.

The guy with his hand in the cookie jar says keep talking while he keeps taking.

The technology changes. The architecture doesn’t. Tuskegee proved that federal science can be turned against the people it claims to serve when those running it decide certain populations are expendable. The CDC was built to prevent disease. Under Kennedy, it is manufacturing pretexts to let disease run — and choosing whose children pay the price.