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Joe Biden’s Submissive — and Highly Revealing — Embrace of Saudi Despots

In 2018, President Trump issued a statement reaffirming the U.S.’s long-standing relationship with the Saudi royal family on the ground that this partnership serves America’s “national interests.” Trump specifically cited the fact that “Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world” and has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers. Trump’s statement was issued in the wake of widespread demands in Washington that Trump reduce or even sever ties with the Saudi regime due to the likely role played by its Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

What made these Trump-era demands somewhat odd was that the Khashoggi murder was not exactly the first time the Saudi regime violated human rights and committed atrocities of virtually every type. For decades, the arbitrary imprisonment and murder of Saudi dissidents, journalists, and activists have been commonplace, to say nothing of the U.S./UK-supported devastation of Yemen which began during the Obama years. All of that took place as American presidents in the post-World War II order made the deep and close partnership between Washington and the tyrants of Riyadh a staple of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Yet, as was typical for the Trump years, political and media commentators treated Trump’s decision to maintain relations with the Saudis as if it were some unprecedented aberration of evil which he alone pioneered — some radical departure of long-standing, bipartisan American values — rather than what it was: namely, the continuation of standard bipartisan U.S. policy for decades. In an indignant editorial following Trump’s statement, The New York Times exclaimed that Trump was making the world “more [dangerous] by emboldening despots in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere,” specifically blaming “Mr. Trump’s view that all relationships are transactional, and that moral or human rights considerations must be sacrificed to a primitive understanding of American national interests.”

The life-long Eurocrat, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, lamented what he described as Trump’s worldview: “if you buy US weapons and if you are against Iran – then you can kill and repress as much as you want.” CNN published an analysis by the network’s White House reporter Stephen Collinson— under the headline: “Trump’s Saudi support highlights brutality of ‘America First’ doctrine” — which thundered: “Refusing to break with Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman over the killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Trump effectively told global despots that if they side with him, Washington will turn a blind eye to actions that infringe traditional US values.” Trump’s willingness to do business with the Saudis, argued Collinson, “represented another blow to the international rule of law and global accountability, concepts Trump has shown little desire to enforce in nearly two years in office.”

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A Google employee warns that the company’s AI has become sentient

A senior artificial intelligence (AI) software engineer at Google has claimed that the company’s AI robotics system has become sentient and has thoughts and feelings.

Google’s AI system, known as the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), allegedly took part in a series of complex conversations with Blake Lemoine, the 41-year-old software specialist, the Daily Mail reported.

Lemoine claimed that he and LaMDA had discussions that covered religious themes and whether the AI system could be goaded into using discriminatory language or other forms of distasteful rhetoric.

The software engineer came away with the belief that LaMDA was indeed sentient and was filled with sensations and original thoughts of its own design.

In a recent interview, Lemoine said, “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics.”

In order to present the evidence he had collected that detailed LaMDA’s sentience, Lemoine worked with a collaborator and presented the findings to the company. Reportedly, Google’s vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the company’s head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, dismissed the claims and concerns.

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Debunking the 1619 Project: Africans Were Not The First Slaves of Virginia

To countermand the insistence that America is solely responsible for slavery according to the 1619 Project, here are the facts which prove their blatant falsehood of research.

One must understand how, when Christianity became widespread throughout Europe, there was a distinction pertaining to the enslaving of Christians that endured through to the latter part of the 17th century, a baptized Christian could not be sold as a lifetime slave. This held true when the first black “slaves” were traded for food from a Dutch slave ship in August of 1619. The eyewitness, John Rolfe wrote in his diary, “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars. They were needed for the booming tobacco crop, but had been baptized, so as Christians they could not be enslaved for life, but only indentured, just like many of the English colonists, for 5-7 years.”1

As an interesting point to consider is how historians refute Rolfe’s statement, stating it was in fact a Portuguese slave trader San Juan Bautista which had been captured by the British privateers by The White Lion and The Treasurer in the Gulf of Mexico. The San Juan Bautista was bound for Mexico to sell its ‘cargo’.2 While this can perhaps be accepted, what cannot be is the demand that African slaves began at this point in our history and what becomes more dangerous, is the omission and absence of the rest of Rolfe’s diary entry regarding their status as Christians. This in and of itself marks of shoddy scholarship, for this was the basis for decades.

The other point that is not explored is the fact that England was unable to break into the African Slave Trade, as it was under the monopoly of African tribal leaders, the Middle East, the Portuguese and later the Dutch; (The White Lion was flying the Dutch flag.) The difficulty at the time for England, was that her economy was somewhat spent in maintaining their fledging colony of Virginia and with France occupying the vast territory to the north and Spain occupying the vast territory to the south, England had little inclination at the time to invoke either country in war.

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Judge suggests CIA may have illegally recorded Assange conversations, challenging extradition demands

Spanish media is reporting that a court order issued by Spanish High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz indicates that content of communications between Julian Assange and his lawyers may have been illegally recorded during the time he spent at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The order that the newspaper El Pais has seen names Spain’s Under Cover (UC) Global security company as handing over the information to CIA agents. That would have revealed the defense strategy of Assange, a whistleblower and journalist whom the US wants extradited from the UK on espionage charges, a request that has been granted and will be decided on within the next two months by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel.

If put on trial and found guilty in the US, Assange could be sentenced to 175 years in prison for revealing damning US military operations during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and publishing it on the WikiLeaks website.

The Spanish court order is procedural in nature, sent by Jusge Pedraz to the UK as an explanation as to why the country’s authorities should allow him to take testimonies from Assange’s doctors and UK lawyers – one of whom is well known solicitor and human rights activist Gareth Peirce – who were the subject of spying at the embassy.

Legal sources have told El Pais that the extradition request could fall through for violating the right of defense if there is proof that US intelligence agencies managed to learn about Assange’s defense by illegally spying on his legal representatives and doctors. Spain gaining access to these individuals for the sake of obtaining witness testimonies would leave the British justice system “in an embarrassing situation,” some believe.

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FOIA Documents Disclose the CDC Has Been Producing and Culturing Human Stem Cell Lines

The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) obtained documents disclosing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cultured 22 distinct human cell lines, including cells apparently extracted from parts of aborted fetuses and babies younger than four weeks.

ICAN’s lawyers sent the CDC a letter (pdf) on June 25, 2021, asking for documents that contained the word HEK.

HEK cells are immortalized cell lines likely obtained from a miscarried or aborted fetus.

“Immortalized human cell lines live outside of the body in nutrient media that, under ideal conditions, will replicate forever without death,” Dr. James Thorp, a maternal-fetal medicine expert told The Epoch Times.

“These various cell lines are used for numerous experimental purposes including the development of vaccine technology and genetic modification. The origin of these numerous human immortal cell lines is impossible to determine for certain but likely derived from abortions, miscarriages, fetal deaths, or other human sources derived from a variety of different organ systems,” Thorp said.

Recently, the CDC had to release 281 pages of related documents (pdf).

An email from 2015 with the subject “Research using Fetal Tissue” says in the unredacted part that “The list below contains all the cell lines Jason’s team has cultured,” which include 22 human cell lines.

It includes the human brain endothelium, liver, intestines, foreskin, lung, and other body parts.

Another email with the subject “Cell Lines from the last two years” shows 47 cell lines of which some are also human.

“Below are the cell lines we have produced in the last two years,” reads the email of the CDC researcher.

The main controversy with stem cell research arises in the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos that are usually conceived in a lab.

In 2009, former President Barack Obama lifted a ban that lasted for about 8 years on federal funding for most stem cell research.

In a bid to appease those concerned, Obama said: “We will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.”

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