Authored by CJ Hopkins via off-guardian.org,

Fighting monsters by serbiandude Published: Jan 3, 2023

So, I gave a little speech about art, and war. The Internationale Agentur für Freiheit, a Berlin art and cultural association, asked me to do that to open their exhibition, Make Art Not War. I couldn’t turn them down.

As my readers may have noticed, I haven’t had very much to say about “The War on Hamas,” or “The War on Gaza,” or “The Liquidation of Gaza,” or whatever you want to call it. (It doesn’t look like much of a “war” to me, but then, nothing really has for quite a while.)

I wrote about it in October and November of last year. And I said a few things about it in my speech. But, mostly, I’ve been trying to keep my mouth shut. I don’t have much to contribute to the … well, I can’t really call it a discussion, or debate, or an argument. It feels like people screaming slogans into each other’s faces, accusing each other of this and that, and calling each other names, and so on. Which … I get why people are inclined to do that. I’m not. But I get why other folks are. So, I think it’s best if I just shut my pie hole (as much as possible) and let folks do that.

It isn’t going to change what’s happening. GloboCap (or whatever you call the system we’re all living under) has been occupying, destabilizing, and restructuring the Middle East for decades. It’s not going to stop. It is going to continue. As the restructuring of the West is going to continue.

GloboCap doesn’t have anything else to do.

Anyway, before I ramble on any further, here’s the English version of the speech I gave at the exhibition. Many thanks to those of you who attended … and apologies again for my German. I’ll get the hang of it one of these days.

Fighting Monsters

The name of this exhibition is “Make Art not War.” So I’m going to say a few things about art, and war. You’re not going to like all of them. Or at least I hope not. If you did, I wouldn’t be a very good artist, but I might be a pretty good propagandist.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. In the USA. The war was on television. In Vietnam. Cambodia. Cuba. The Middle East. Then in El Salvador. Nicaragua. Iran. Libya. Yugoslavia. Afghanistan. Iraq. The list goes on and on. I am almost 63 years old. All my life we’ve been at war. Not just Americans. All of us. People. Someone always at war with someone. And all my life there have been other people calling for peace. Protesting the war. Whatever war it was at the time.

If you read a little history, as I like to do sometimes, you will learn that someone has been at war with someone over something since the dawn of civilization. Certainly Western civilization. The history of Western art and literature begins with war. Genocidal war. The Illiad is a poem about a genocidal war. Rape. Mass murder. The slaughter of children. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are about war, or are set during a war, or have something to do with someone killing someone over something.

Some of that history happened right here. There are bunkers below us where people sheltered during the bombing raids in the Second World War. Legend has it the Stasi operated listening stations right here in these rooms. When I first arrived in Berlin, twenty years ago, I lived in a sublet on this street. This was my neighborhood, the Bötzowviertel. There were still bullet holes in the facades of buildings. People died here. Civilians. Children. Women were raped here. Families were dragged out of their homes and sent to the death camps here. This is Berlin. You know the history. I don’t need to recite all the details.

What’s my point? Well, my point is … that is war. Indiscriminate killing. Rape. Mass atrocities. That’s what war is. That is what it has always been. And we’ve been doing it to each other since the dawn of civilization. It is not going to stop. We are not going to stop it. Art is certainly not going to stop it. We are, whether we like it or not, a violent species, human beings. It isn’t all we are, but it is part of what we are. We are also lovers, teachers, healers, artists, and other beautiful things. But sometimes we are vicious killers. Monsters. Genocidal monsters.

A crazy old German philosopher once warned us, “beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” He was joking, of course. There are no monsters. Or, rather, there are only monsters, on every side of every war. In a war, there are no good guys and bad guys. There is just our side and the other side. Our atrocities and their atrocities. And whoever wins gets to write the history.

That’s it. The rest is propaganda. Their propaganda and our propaganda. Of course, our propaganda is not propaganda. Our propaganda is just the truth. Because we’re not monsters. They are the monsters.

This is Day 202 of Israel’s war on Hamas, or its liquidation of Gaza, depending on your perspective. I haven’t said too much about it publicly. I said a few things about it when it began. That didn’t go well. No one was listening. The propaganda from both sides was already deafening. I described the Hamas attack as mass murder. My pro-Palestinian readers didn’t like that. I described Israel as a typical mass-murdering nation-state, no different than the United States of America, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the British empire, the Ottoman empire, the Holy Roman Empire, or any other mass-murdering nation-state or empire. My pro-Israeli readers didn’t like that. Neither side wanted to hear about history. The history of asymmetric warfare, or terrorism, depending on your perspective. The history of nation-states and empires. They wanted to hear a story about monsters. About the monsters on the other side.

I told you you weren’t going to like everything I said, right?

OK, let me say a few things about art now. If you didn’t like what I said about war, maybe you’ll like what I say about art. I can’t speak for other artists, but I’ll tell you why I think I became an artist, and what I have been trying to do as an artist.

I haven’t been trying to stop any wars. Or to pacify the human species. I don’t know how to do either of those things. And I am not a fan of propaganda. I confess, I have engaged in it from time to time, but mostly what I’ve been trying to do is deprogram minds, starting with my own.

We are all, by the time we realize we exist, the products of programming, ideological conditioning. I believe it is the job of artists to undo that, or at least to marginally interfere with it. That’s what art, and artists, did for me. They introduced me to my mind. My programmed mind. They forced me to think, and to see, and listen. They taught me to question, to pay attention. They dared me to deprogram my mind, and provided me with the tools to do it. OK, sure, some mind-altering drugs also helped, but it was artists that introduced me to those drugs. Then they introduced me to the monster I’ve been fighting.

I have been fighting this monster, in my art, in my mind, and out in the world for as long I remember. You have to fight it everywhere at once. To fight it in your mind, you have to fight it out in the world. And to fight it out in the world, you have to fight it in your mind.

Let me tell you about the monster.

The monster is legion. It goes by many names. It wears many faces. They change over time. William S. Burroughs called it “The Control Machine.” Some people call it the corporatocracy. I call it global capitalism. The monster doesn’t care what we call it. It doesn’t care who we are, what our politics are, or which side of what war we think we are on. It doesn’t care what we believe, which religion we profess. It couldn’t care less how we “identify.”

All it cares about is power. All it cares about is control.

It is everywhere, and nowhere. It has no country. No nationality. It doesn’t exist. It is everything, and nothing. It is the non-existent empire occupying the entire planet. It has no external enemies because there is no outside, not anymore. So there is no real war. There are only insurrections, carried out by rebels, traitors, terrorists.

The monster, our non-existent empire, is the first global empire in human history. It is not a group of evil people. It is maintained by people, but they are all interchangeable. It has no headquarters. There is no emperor. There isn’t any “Bastille” to storm. It is a logos. A system. An operating system.

It has no politics, no ideology. Its official ideology is “reality.” Thus it has no political opposition. Who would argue against or oppose “reality”? Lunatics. Extremists. The terminally deranged. And thus there are no dissidents, no opposing political parties. There are only apostates, heretics, blasphemers, sowers of discord, “reality” deniers.

It manufactures “reality.” Whatever “reality” it needs. The War on Terror. The War on Populism. The War on the Virus. The War on the Weather. The War on Hate. The War on Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It is all the same war. The same “Clear-and-Hold” op. The same counterinsurgency. It has been for about 30 years.

If things seem crazy, if you’re wondering what’s happening, that is what’s happening. That is all that is happening. That is all that has been happening since the end of the Cold War.

The empire is eliminating internal resistance, any and all forms of internal resistance. The monster is monsterizing everything and everyone. Transforming societies into markets. It doesn’t have anything else to do. It is erasing values. It is dissolving borders. It is “sensitivity-editing” culture. Synchronizing everything and everyone in conformity to its only value … money. Rendering everything a commodity.

It is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, the part where the monster does away with democracy, with the simulation of democracy, and proclaims itself “democracy.” It is global-capitalist Gleichschaltung.

That’s the monster I have been fighting.

Which makes me a terrorist. A conspiracy theorist. A Russian propagandist. A Covid denier. A right-wing extremist. An anti-vaxxer. An anti-Semite. A transphobic racist. An enemy of “democracy.” A Hamas supporter. A Donald Trump supporter. An AfD supporter. Whatever the official enemy happens to be today.

It makes me a criminal. A thought criminal. An art criminal.

Which I literally am. The German authorities are prosecuting me for disseminating art. For tweeting art. Pictures. Words. They banned one of my books. So maybe I’m marginally interfering with their ideological conditioning, with their programming, with their New Normal Gleichschaltung op.

If so, good, because, if I can quote another German, “art is not a mirror held up to reality, it is a hammer to shape reality with.”

And I’ll go a little further than Brecht. Every work of art we make shapes reality one way or another, whether we intend it to or not. It either feeds the monster or it fucks with the monster. The monster out there, and the monster in here, inside us, all of us … because it’s all the same monster.

Thank you, all of you who are fucking with the monster. That is all. Let’s keep it up.

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,

It is not clear whether a Chinese official was at the Beijing airport to bid farewell to Secretary of State Antony Blinken as he ended his three-day visit to China on Friday, but the send-off was in any event low-key and Chinese leader Xi Jinping slighted America’s top diplomat at the end of his troubled stay.

Also, China, literally and figuratively, did not roll out the red carpet for his arrival in Shanghai on Wednesday. Only a low-level official was on hand to greet Blinken as he stepped off the plane.

“The Chinese government flouted international protocols at the airport on the secretary of state’s arrival in Shanghai and departure from Beijing,” Charles Burton of the Prague-based Sinopsis think tank told Gatestone.

“It was petty.”

“This was more than a slight,” Burton, a former Canadian diplomat who served in Beijing, said.

“Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore.”

Blinken was in China to discuss the growing list of disagreements between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, he did not accomplish anything there other than register America’s complaints on matters such as Beijing’s support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and unfair treatment of U.S. companies. On every major issue, the U.S. and China take different sides, and the Chinese have clearly dug in. Blinken was reduced to begging.

As a result, America is resorting to the dialogue-is-progress narrative. “I think it’s important to underscore the value—in fact, the necessity—of direct engagement, of sustained engagement, of speaking to each other, laying out our differences which are real, seeking to work through them, as also looking for ways to build cooperation where we can,” Blinken said to Chen Jining, Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, ahead of his talks in the Chinese capital.

After the end of fruitless sessions in Beijing—Blinken met with, among others, President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi—all the secretary of state could do is highlight new dialogue issues.

“I’m pleased to announce that earlier today, we agreed to hold the first U.S.-PRC talks on artificial intelligence to be held in the coming weeks,” he said at a press availability on April 26, as he wrapped up his trip to China.

“We’ll share our respective views on the risks and safety concerns around advanced AI and how best to manage them.”

Blinken’s comments repeated those of President Joe Biden after his November 15 meeting with Xi Jinping in Woodside, California. In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.

There is no question that AI is an important topic, especially when it comes to the control of nuclear weapons. Yet this does not mean the U.S. should seek an agreement with China on that topic.

“The latest shambolic display by the Biden administration comes in the form of Secretary of State Antony Blinken groveling before China’s Ruler-for-Life Xi Jinping for a new set of protocols for governing the development of artificial intelligence between America and China, the two nations contributing the most to both the advancement of AI and its weaponization,” Brandon Weichert, a national security analyst at The National Interest, told Gatestone.

“Although creating such protocols may sound like a good idea, it seems like a bad idea for Washington to unilaterally agree to limit its own activities.”

“Unilaterally”? Burton and Weichert point out that China never honors agreements, so any deal with Beijing is akin to a unilateral promise.

“China is deeply committed to the weaponization of AI and would be counting its lucky communist star if the Americans basically deterred themselves with such a protocol,” Weichert, also author of Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, added.

He suggests the United States spend its time getting the world to restrict tech trade with China “rather than pleading with Xi Jinping for mercy.”

On the AI front, the Biden administration to its credit has been restricting sales of chips and chip-making equipment and has been coercing cooperation from others, most notably the Netherlands, the home of equipment-maker ASML.

Nonetheless, Biden needs to do more: China has been able to buy chips on the black market. For instance, Reuters reported this month that ten Chinese entities were able, despite U.S. rules, to acquire Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips through resellers.

The risk now is that the Biden administration will trade away its restrictions for meaningless promises from China’s Communists.

Biden is willing to sign agreements with China’s regime because he believes it is merely a “competitor,” refusing to label it an adversary and certainly not using the term that the Chinese Communist Party reserves for America: enemy. He and his predecessors have not wanted to acknowledge that the Party, as it openly proclaims, seeks the destruction of the United States.

Enemy? In May 2019, People’s Daily, the Party’s self-described “mouthpiece” and therefore the most authoritative publication in China, carried a landmark piece declaring a “people’s war” on America.

This phrase has special meaning. “A people’s war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods,” declared a column carried in April 2023 by PLA Daily, an official news website of the People’s Liberation Army.

Therefore, Biden’s measures, like those of presidents before him, have been inadequate.

America still suffers from an inability to appreciate the hostility and maliciousness of the Communist Party. Blinken left China talking about how it was in America’s interest for China to prosper. China’s regime, however, fueled with American investment and trade, has been waging “unrestricted warfare” against the United States for decades. Beijing’s unrestricted warfare has included the killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with fentanyl, the equivalent of one plane crash every day and more American deaths than in the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars combined.

Now, Xi thinks he has the upper hand. From the moment Blinken touched down in Shanghai to the moment he left, China’s ruler went out of his way to humiliate the secretary of state. The secretary of state, however, exhibited inexhaustible patience for humiliation.

Unfortunately, acceptance of rough treatment has consequences, because the meekness leads the Chinese to think they can do what they want, making them even more arrogant and aggressive. Biden has yet to figure that out.

Xi met Blinken on Friday, but China’s leader let the cameras record his disdain for his visitor. Seconds before the secretary of state walked half-way across the room to shake hands, Xi asked an aide, “When will he leave?”

“Not soon enough,” Blinken should have replied.

The secretary of state should never have gone to China in the first place.

The growth of the senior population is a consequence of the demographic transition towards longer and healthier lives. Population aging, however, can pose economic and social challenges.

Here, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu maps the size of the world’s population aged 65+ for 1980, 2021, and 2050 (projected). The data is from the World Social Report 2023 by the United Nations.

Global Aging

Currently, population aging is most advanced in Europe, Northern America, Australia, New Zealand, and parts Eastern and Southeastern Asia.

According to the UN, in most countries in these regions, the proportion of older persons exceeds 10%, and in some cases, 20% of the total population.

Most parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) are still in an early stage of this transition, while most countries in Central and Southern Asia, Western Asia and Northern Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean are at an intermediate stage.

The size of the world’s senior population isn’t just growing in absolute numbers; it’s also growing as a share of the overall total. For example, in 2021, 1 in 10 people worldwide were over 65. By 2050, this is likely to be around 1 in 6.

While the shift towards older populations is largely irreversible, some critical measures are necessary to guarantee this transition. These include financial support for the senior population through pension plans, budgeting healthcare and long-term care costs, and implementing measures to adapt and innovate in labor markets to include seniors.

The Global Senior Population in 2100

What will the global senior population look like in the future? For more on that, look at this chart which highlights aging projections by country based on data and projections from the United Nations.

Authored by Michael Wilkerson via The Epoch Times,

Last week, Japan saw its currency, the yen, rapidly depreciate against the U.S. dollar and other world currencies to near record low levels. This drew the attention of financial markets and other observers, and—in some quarters—led to panic. There was concern that Japan, a formerly great nation now increasingly viewed as the “sick man of Asia,” was on the brink of a currency and financial markets crisis.

It wasn’t so long ago that Japan was the envy of the world. Japan’s postwar recovery and subsequent economic miracle produced by the 1980s the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. Numerous Japanese multinational corporations were admired by the business world as a result of their growth, efficiency, and managerial discipline. The state and big business were closely aligned in what appeared an unstoppable formula. Flush with cash and confidence, Japanese companies and investors were aggressively expansionist, acquiring market share, trophy properties, resources, and businesses in the United States and elsewhere. Much like concerns about China today, fears then abounded that Japan would overtake the United States as the global economic leader.

These fears were unfounded. “Japan Inc.” was a house built on a faulty foundation. Overly accommodative easy money, along with high leverage throughout the financial and corporate sectors, facilitated a massive stock market and real estate bubble, which eventually burst in 1990. The crash led to a depression from which Japan has never recovered, even after three decades. The question is, why not? Herein lies a lesson for the United States.

Repeated government bailouts of failing financial and industrial companies have perpetuated Japan’s crisis. Japan’s leaders and policies have repeatedly blocked the process of creative destruction, which—if allowed to run its course and cleanse the system—would have been a massive stimulus to entrepreneurship and economic vitality. However, rather than allow capitalism to work, the Japanese system doomed the country to a generation of stagnation.

As a result, Japan has endured three “lost decades” of weak economic growth, diminished purchasing power, lower and lower standards of living, loss of prestige and influence in the global community, and an aging population that the island nation’s resources are straining to support.

Japan now has the world’s highest government debt-to-GDP ratio, at 264 percent. Japan’s banks are walking zombies, unable to grow or lend because they have never restructured their balance sheets to clean up massive piles of debt left over from excesses of previous decades. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) holds government bonds and other assets equal to 127 percent of Japan’s GDP, the highest ratio of any central bank in the world. This portfolio resulted in over $70 billion in unrealized losses for the BOJ in six months of 2023 alone.

The Japanese yen has devalued against the U.S. dollar by more than 30 percent in just three years since 2021. Since the global financial crisis 2008–09, the yen has lost 75 percent of its value against gold. Because of Japan’s high reliance on imports, this loss of purchasing power has translated directly into a substantially lower standard of living for the Japanese people. In theory, Japan could support the yen by raising interest rates, but this is a political, monetary, and fiscal impossibility.

Decades of easy money policies are a central culprit and cause of this slow-moving trainwreck.

The Bank of Japan only began raising interest rates this March, some three years after the United States and the European Union brought their own easy money policies to an end. This was the first time the BOJ has raised rates since 2007, a move that pulled the official rate out of negative territory. Nonetheless, with inflation now approaching 2 percent, a short-term policy rate of zero to 0.1 percent means that real rates remain around negative 2 percent. This serves as an additional tax on Japanese households and an intended stimulus to spend today rather than save for tomorrow.

Money essentially is free in Japan, but no one can afford to borrow it, even if the banks can manage to lend it. The BOJ and the entire banking system stand in the penumbra of insolvency. Only Japan’s decade-long zero interest-rate policy has allowed Japan’s decrepit financial system to continue to stand following the 2008 financial crisis and the effects of COVID economic shutdowns. Japan cannot afford to raise interest rates to support its currency more than nominally above the zero bound without substantially raising debt service costs and exploding losses. This would bring the entire rickety system to the ground.

A growing economy might help ease the burden, but Japan’s economy is moribund. This is not surprising, as meaningful growth is impossible under mountains of debt. GDP shrank by 0.8 percent in the third quarter and eked out 0.1 percent growth in the fourth quarter. While the country thus barely escaped technical recession (two consecutive quarters of GDP decline), Japan hasn’t posted GDP growth above 2 percent in more than 20 years, save for two rebound quarters after the global shocks of the financial crisis and COVID.

Japan represents a slow-moving demographic disaster. Japan has the oldest median population of any major country in the world and the lowest fertility rate at 1.37. Japan’s fertility rate has been below the minimum population replacement rate (2.1) for 40 years, meaning that the country is both aging and losing economic productivity, and it is probably too late to reverse it.

This all represents a grave warning to the United States.

The U.S. government is chasing Japan for the ignoble title of most indebted nation. Overly indebted nations cannot grow. With federal government debt to GDP of 129 percent, a ratio which is increasing rapidly, the United States is now the fourth most indebted country in the world. Debt is growing more quickly now because the federal government refuses to wean itself off of deficit spending, including an additional $1.7 trillion in 2023, which must be funded by new debt, as must over $1 trillion in interest expense. This debt—and the cost to service it—acts as a drag on our economy. Deficit spending and the borrowing required to support it crowds out private market investment and financings.

Rather than let more insolvent banks and unprofitable firms fail, U.S. monetary policy since at least the 2008 financial crisis has propped up bad business models—and the asset values of otherwise worthless investments—by subsidizing the cost of capital well below the natural rate of interest. In a nation that has been the standard bearer and exporter of capitalism for more than two centuries, socialistic government policies are preventing capitalism from working at home. This will eventually catch up with our financial markets and economy, just as it did for Japan.

It is not just shortsighted monetary and financial policy that threatens U.S. competitiveness.

If Americans’ worsening attitudes toward the importance of marriage and children do not reverse course dramatically, the United States will face the same demographic fate as Japan. The fertility rate in the United States has been in decline since at least 2008, and reached a record low of 1.62 in 2023. This is well below the replacement rate, and thus unsustainable.

Progressives point to declining fertility rates and aging populations to justify mass illegal immigration, but this is a red herring. Bringing tens of millions of unskilled, uneducated, and culturally unassimilated migrants into the nation is not a benefit but rather an untenable burden on social infrastructure, an enervating drain on economic productivity, and an unbearable tax on legal citizens.

At least Japan got that part right.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, participants use the month to focus efforts on “eradicating stigma, extending support, fostering public education and advocating for policies that prioritize the well-being of individuals and families affected by mental illness.”

The topic of suicide is an important part of this conversation. As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, it is a truly global issue, even though estimated rates vary around the world. For example, according to OECD data, out of every 100,000 men in the United States an average of 23 committed suicide in 2021, while for women the average was close to six per 100,000. In several countries these figures are even higher, such as in South Korea, Lithuania and Hungary.

You will find more infographics at Statista

While there are significant differences between countries, one pattern is clear to see: the rates of men taking their own lives are higher than women in each of the 15 countries selected here.

South Korea and Lithuania had the highest rates of suicide among men in 2022 (out of the countries reporting data), at 34.9 and 33.1 cases per 100,000 population, respectively.

For women, South Korea and Japan had the highest rates of the selected countries, with 14.9 and 9.8.

If you or somebody you know are in need of help, you can find a list of suicide crisis lines and website for countries around the world here.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials found evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines caused multiple deaths before claiming that there was no evidence linking the vaccines to any deaths, The Epoch Times has learned.

(Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Envato Elements)

CDC employees worked to track down information on reported post-vaccination deaths and learned that myocarditis—or heart inflammation, a confirmed side effect of the vaccines—was listed on death certificates and in autopsies for some of the deaths, according to an internal file obtained by The Epoch Times.

Myocarditis was also described as being caused by vaccination in a subset of the deaths.

In other cases, the CDC workers found that deaths met the agency’s definition for myocarditis, that the patients started showing symptoms within 42 days of a vaccine dose, and that the deceased displayed no virus-related symptoms. Officials say that after 42 days, a possible link between the vaccine and symptoms becomes tenuous, and they list post-vaccination deaths as unrelated if they can find any possible alternative causes.

In cases with those three features, it’s “absolutely” safe to say that the vaccines caused the deaths, Dr. Clare Craig, a British pathologist and co-chair of the Health Advisory and Recovery Team Group, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Despite the findings, most of which were made by the end of 2021, the CDC claimed that it had seen no signs linking the Moderna and Pfizer messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to any deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

CDC officials in a letter to The Epoch Times dated June 13, 2023, said that there were no deaths reported to the VAERS for which the agency determined “the available evidence” indicated Moderna or Pfizer vaccination “caused or contributed to the deaths.”

The agency also said that evidence from seven deaths from thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome following the Johnson & Johnson vaccination suggested that the vaccine led to people dying.

“That’s a scandal, where you have information like this and you continue to put out this dishonest line that there’s only seven deaths and they’re all unrelated to the mRNA vaccines,” Dr. Andrew Bostom, a heart expert based in the United States, told The Epoch Times.

The CDC is “concealing these deaths,” he said.

A CDC spokeswoman, presented with the file and dozens of questions about it, said that “determining a person’s cause of death is done by the certifying official, physician, medical examiner, or coroner, who completes the death certificate.”

The spokeswoman declined to explain why the CDC doesn’t consider autopsies or death certificates as evidence of causality, the criteria that would establish vaccine-caused deaths, or whether the numbers have been updated since 2023. She also declined to answer questions about specific deaths outlined in the file, citing “privacy and confidentiality.”

People who die in the United States with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 are counted as COVID-19 deaths. That count has included a number of deaths from unrelated causes. The CDC also in 2023 advised death certifiers to include COVID-19 on certificates even if the deaths happened years after COVID-19 infection.

“They are taking the exact opposite approach to COVID deaths! Every death after a test was a COVID death. No death after a vaccine is a vaccine death!” Dr. Craig said. She questioned what it would take for the CDC to admit that the vaccines have caused some myocarditis-related deaths.

More People Died

The file, acquired by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request, has never before been reported. The file was obtained after U.S. authorities rejected another Freedom of Information Act request for the autopsies themselves. The file outlines the agency’s investigation into reports submitted to VAERS of suspected cases of myocarditis or a related condition, pericarditis, following COVID-19 vaccination.

CDC employees, starting in April 2021, contacted health care providers and other agencies to obtain medical records, death certificates, and autopsies as they sought to confirm whether each report was legitimate.

The file shows the CDC examined 3,780 reports through April 13, 2023, a small number of which were duplicates. Among the reported cases, 101 resulted in death.

In one instance, a 37-year-old man started suffering symptoms that can be caused by myocarditis, such as shortness of breath, shortly after receiving a Moderna COVID-19 shot. The man collapsed three days after vaccination and was soon pronounced dead.

Dr. Darinka Mileusnic, the medical examiner who examined the man, said in an autopsy report that the patient died of “post vaccination systemic inflammation response” which caused, among other problems, acute myocarditis, according to the CDC file.

The CDC worker who was assigned to look into the death wrote that it was “evident of a sudden death post second dose of Moderna vaccine.”

“One of the factor[s] to death [sic] is acute myocarditis. There are other findings related to VAE [vaccine adverse event] and non vaccine related. Thus, it can’t be distinguished that only vaccine may have caused the death,” the CDC employee wrote.

Dr. Mileusnic declined a request for comment through her employer, the Knox County Regional Forensic Center in Tennessee. The center said it would only provide an autopsy report if the decedent’s name and date of death were provided. The CDC file did not include names.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta on Aug. 25, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

After another man, 24, died on Oct. 27, 2021, about two months after receiving a second Pfizer injection, his health care provider diagnosed him with myocarditis. An autopsy listed “complications of COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis” as the cause of death, according to the file.

A post-mortem test for COVID-19 returned negative, there were no viral organisms found in post-mortem testing of the heart, and there were no other signs of viruses causing the myocarditis, the notes show.

Another vaccine recipient, a 77-year-old man, was found dead at home on Nov. 14, 2021. The autopsy confirmed the man had pericarditis and listed the cause of death as “complications from the COV-19 booster,” according to the file.

The CDC worker who looked at that case said it met the CDC’s definition of pericarditis based on the autopsy and death certificate but noted there were comorbidities such as coronary artery disease that were listed as contributing to the death. The patient also received shots against influenza and shingles about two months before death, so “it is difficult to say that COV-19 vaccine alone caused pericarditis,” the worker wrote.

A voicemail left for the man’s doctor was not returned.

Among other deaths in the CDC file are:

A male, whose age was redacted, suffered sudden cardiac death in April 2021 following a Johnson & Johnson vaccination. He was diagnosed with myocarditis, which was confirmed by the medical examiner. A CDC worker stated that the case did not technically meet the agency’s case definition, but they would “consider probable subclinical myocarditis, given the histopathological findings.”
A 21-year-old woman who died in 2021 after seizures and cardiac arrhythmias following Pfizer vaccination was found on autopsy to have lymphocytic myocarditis. The CDC listed her case as confirmed myocarditis with no evidence of viral causes.
A 45-year-old man was found dead in his bed in 2021 after Moderna vaccination but testing for myocarditis and pericarditis was not performed.
A 55-year-old woman who was “found unresponsive in [a] field” in 2021 after Johnson & Johnson vaccination was confirmed on autopsy to have myocarditis and to have suffered a cardiac arrest. The death met the CDC’s case definition but concurrent upper respiratory infection “makes viral myocarditis a potential alternative cause,” a CDC worker stated. The medical examiner declined to comment.
People receive a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination site organized by Amazon in downtown Seattle on Jan. 24, 2021. (Grant Hindsley/AFP via Getty Images)

Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson did not return requests for comment.

Lot numbers for the vaccines injected into people who died were among the information in the file redacted by the CDC. Some vaccine lots have caused significantly more problems than others, according to CDC data obtained by the nonprofit Informed Consent Action Network.

Deaths in other countries from vaccine-induced myocarditis have been reported in journals, including deaths among young people. More deaths from vaccines in cases that didn’t include myocarditis have been confirmed by international authorities. Death certificates obtained by The Epoch Times from several U.S. states have also listed the COVID-19 vaccines as causing or contributing to dozens of deaths.

Overruling

The file and a tranche of emails also obtained by The Epoch Times shows the agency started intervening shortly after the vaccines were introduced in post-vaccination cases that led to death and sometimes overruled the certifier.

Take the case of a 23-year-old man who left home on April 13, 2021, to go for a jog and was found dead on the side of the road. His death occurred four days after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Read more here…

It’s been no secret that the fiercest and most sustained criticism of Israel’s military operation in Gaza has come from Global South countries. Many of these have also supported South Africa’s taking Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC) on allegations of genocide.

But now the next big step is taking place: governments are formally severing ties with Israel and expelling diplomats. On Wednesday Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that his country will cut relations with Israel over what he called its “genocidal” war against Palestinians. He said this will be formally initiated starting Thursday.

Gustavo Petro, center. Colombian President’s Office

“Tomorrow (Thursday) diplomatic relations with the state of Israel will be severed… for having a genocidal president,”  Petro told a May Day rally in Bogota.

“If Palestine dies, humanity dies, and we will not let it die,” he said at one point in the speech. Petro is Colombia’s first ever leftist president, and he proclaimed that “democratic peoples cannot allow Nazism to reestablish itself in international politics.”

However, Bloomberg has noted that his motives could partly be to distract from the ongoing economic crisis in the country:

Petro is looking to counter large anti-government rallies that took place on April 21 and said his administration will send a package of bills to congress meant to boost economic growth.

The package will include measures that force the financial sector to provide cheap financing to productive sectors, Petro said.

“It will consist of bills that generate forced investment in the Colombian private financial system aimed at credits for small, medium, and large industries, agriculture, and tourism in Colombia, to reactivate the country,” he said.

President Petro has for months been a fiery vocal critic of Israel, having first threatened to sever relations with Israel back in March. Already Bolivia had cut ties with Israel by the end of October as the Gaza offensive entered full swing.

NOW – Socialist president of Colombia: “Tomorrow diplomatic relations will be broken with Israel due to having a genocidal president.”pic.twitter.com/FbkVBnaHIn

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 1, 2024

At that time Foreign Minister Israel Katz had condemned the Colombian leader’s call to cut ties, writing on X that his support for “the Hamas murderers who carried out terrible acts of slaughter and sexual crimes against babies, women and adults is a disgrace to the Colombian people.”

“Israel will continue to defend its citizens and will not give in to any pressure or threats,” Katz had declared at the time. Israel has already halted security exports to Colombia as of last year following the worsening rift with Bogota in the wake of Oct.7.

Tel Aviv fears that such dramatic actions by Global South and non-aligned governments could spread, damaging trade in some corners of the globe and its standing on the world stage. A similar domino-effect momentum also happened in the late 20th century with apartheid-era South Africa.

Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Trump campaign on Tuesday issued a rebuke of the Commission on Presidential Debates’ refusal to move up its debate schedule until after millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, calling it “unacceptable” and a “grave disservice” to the electorate.

Former President Donald Trump departs Trump Tower for Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City, on April 15, 2024. (Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

In a statement, former President Donald Trump’s campaign representatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles intensified criticism of the body that sponsors all general election presidential debates. Previously, they had requested debates to be held “much earlier” than the commission’s planned first debate in mid-September.

The Trump campaign repeated its argument that voters deserve to hear from both candidates before they begin casting their votes.

“The Presidential Debate Commission’s schedule does not begin until after millions of Americans will have already cast their ballots. This is unacceptable, and by refusing to move up the debates, they are doing a grave disservice to the American public who deserve to hear from both candidates before voting begins,” the statement read.

The statement comes after the nonprofit commission told Fox News that it would stick with its debate schedule, which was released last November. Four debates are planned: three presidential and one vice presidential.

The first presidential debate takes place on Sept. 16 at Texas State University in San Marcos; the second takes place on Oct. 1 at Virginia State University in Petersburg; and the third takes place on Oct. 9 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The commission said that it “is proceeding with production and broadcast plans at its four debate sites as also announced on November 20, 2023.”

The Trump campaign had pressed the commission to provide debates sooner and with greater frequency, particularly now that both 2024 contenders have secured the necessary delegates to become their respective parties’ presumptive nominees.

In a letter penned to the commission earlier this year, the Trump campaign wrote: “The Commission must move up the timetable of its proposed 2024 debates to ensure more Americans have a full chance to see the candidates before they start voting, and we would argue for adding more debates in addition to those on the currently proposed schedule.”

The Trump campaign’s push for earlier debates comes as President Trump applies pressure on President Joe Biden to engage in head-to-head debates.

The Biden campaign has largely avoided addressing debates directly with President Trump, but last week, President Biden said that he’s “happy” to debate President Trump.

“I am, somewhere, I don’t know when,” President Biden said when asked about debating his Republican opponent during an interview with radio personality Howard Stern. “I’m happy to debate him.”

Following these remarks, President Trump took to Truth Social to press the president for a debate.

President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign stop at Hillsborough Community College’s Dale Mabry campus in Tampa, Fla., on April 23, 2024. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

“Crooked Joe Biden just announced that he’s willing to debate! Everyone knows he doesn’t really mean it, but in case he does, I say, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, ANYPLACE, an old expression used by Fighters,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social.

In March, following his State of the Union address, President Biden said that a debate with President Trump “would depend upon his behavior.” The Biden administration has also cited concerns over finding a fair moderator.

Last week, following President Biden’s remarks agreeing to debate, President Trump suggested any location, including the White House, as a venue.

President Trump, according to the campaign’s Tuesday statement, remains committed to debating President Joe Biden “anytime, anywhere, anyplace.”

His campaign suggested on Tuesday that he could circumvent the body that’s sponsored all general election presidential debates for decades.

“We are committed to making this happen with or without the Presidential Debate Commission. We extend an invitation to every television network in America that wishes to host a debate, and we once again call on Joe Biden’s team to work with us to set one up as soon as possible. The American people deserve it,” Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles added.

The commission’s schedule includes a vice presidential debate on Sept. 25 at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

The Epoch Times contacted the Commission on Presidential Debates for comment.

A whistleblower at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems died Tuesday morning following a struggle with a ‘sudden, fast-spreading infection,’ the Seattle Times reports.

45-year-old Joshua Dean, a former mechanical engineer and quality auditor from Wichita, Kansas, alleged that Spirit leadership ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, including ‘mechanics improperly drilling holes in the aft pressure bulkhead of the MAX.’ When he brought this up with management, he said that nothing was done about it. So he filed a safety complaint with the FAA – and said that Spirit had used him as a scapegoat while they lied to the agency about the defects.

“After I was fired, Spirit AeroSystems [initially] did nothing to inform the FAA, and the public” regarding the bulkhead defects, said Dean in his complaint.

In November, the FAA suggested to Dean in a letter that his claims had merit, writing “The investigation determined that your allegations were appropriately addressed under an FAA-approved safety program,” adding “However, due to the privacy provisions of those programs, specific details cannot be released.”

Dean also gave a deposition in a Spirit shareholder lawsuit.

The shareholder lawsuit alleging that Spirit management withheld information on the quality flaws and harmed stockholders was filed in December. Supporting the suit, Dean provided a deposition detailing his allegations.

After a panel blew off a Boeing 737 MAX plane in January, bringing new attention to the quality lapses at Spirit, one of Dean’s former Spirit colleagues confirmed some of Dean’s allegations. -Seattle Times

He had been in good health, and ‘was noted for having a healthy lifestyle,’ according to the report.

He had been in critical condition for two weeks, according to his aunt Carol Parsons, who said he became ill and went to the hospital due to breathing difficulties. He was intubated, after which he developed pneumonia and then MRSA, a serious bacterial infection.

His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was airlifted from Wichita to a hospital in Oklahoma City, Parsons said. There he was put on an ECMO machine, which circulates and oxygenates a patient’s blood outside the body, taking over heart and lung function when a patient’s organs don’t work on their own. -Seattle Times

Doctors had considered amputating both hands and both feet.

“It was brutal what he went through,” said Parsons. “Heartbreaking.”

Dean was fired in April 2023, after which he filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, alleging he had been terminated in retaliation for blowing the whistle.

He was represented by the South Carolina law firm that represented Boeing whistleblower John “Mitch” Barnett, who was found dead in an ‘apparent suicide’ in March in Charleston.

Barnett was in the middle of giving depositions suggesting that Boeing retaliated against him over complaints related to quality issues when he was found dead from a gunshot wound.

The Charleston County Coroner’s Office reported Barnett’s death appeared to be “from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Almost two months later, the police investigation into his death is still ongoing. -Seattle Times

“Whistleblowers are needed. They bring to light wrongdoing and corruption in the interests of society. It takes a lot of courage to stand up,” said Brian Knowles, one of Dean’s lawyers. “It’s a difficult set of circumstances. Our thoughts now are with John’s family and Josh’s family.”

In March, Boeing was rumored to be in talks to buy Spirit, as both companies have come under increasing pressure from airline customers and federal regulators to shore up quality issues following a January 5th incident in which a door plug blew out mid-flight on a 737 MAX 9.

Alaska Airlines flight #AS1282, a Boeing 737 MAX 9, experienced a rapid decompression after the loss of a large panel that included an emergency exit door on the left side of the plane.
The flight made a safe return to Portland (PDX).pic.twitter.com/KH4gs0X4o6

— Aviation Safety Network (ASN) (@AviationSafety) January 6, 2024

Four days later, United Airlines found “loose bolts” on 737 MAX doors following an emergency inspection.

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

Dozens of Google workers who were fired for protesting the tech giant’s cloud deal with the Israeli government filed a complaint on Monday with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over their termination.

The complaint, obtained by The Washington Post, alleges that Google violated the workers’ rights by “terminating and/or placing them on administrative leave in response to their protected concerted activity, namely, participation (or perceived participation) in a peaceful, non-disruptive protest that was directly and explicitly connected to their terms and conditions of work.”

The workers are seeking reinstatement of their jobs and back pay, alleging that Google had “unlawfully retaliated” against them for engaging in “peaceful” protest, Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, was quoted as saying by the New York Post.

No Tech for Apartheid, the group organizing the protests, claimed that Google fired over 20 workers on April 23, including non-participating bystanders.

This adds to the 30 workers fired last week for their involvement in sit-in protests at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, bringing the total number of terminated workers to over 50 people.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The protests targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus that provides artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli government.

The fired workers contend that the system is being lethally deployed in the Gaza war.

“Google’s aims are clear: the corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them,” the group said in an April 23 press release.

“In its attempts to do so, Google has decided to unceremoniously, and without due process, upend the livelihoods of over 50 of its own workers,” it added.

The activist group has vowed to continue organizing until their demands are met: for Google to “drop Project Nimbus and stop powering Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza now.”

Project Nimbus was signed in 2021. It involves joint cloud computing and AI services provided by Google and Amazon to the Israeli government. Google has said that the program is not being utilized for military or intelligence purposes.

Google has said that it fired the workers after gathering details from coworkers who were “physically disrupted” and it identified employees who used masks and didn’t carry their staff badges to hide their identities. Google didn’t specify how many were fired.

In a blog post on April 18, Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted that workers will be on a short leash as the company intensifies its efforts to improve its AI technology at a pivotal moment in the industry and, potentially, humanity. He did not openly refer to a specific incident.

“But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Mr Pichai wrote.

“We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally,” he added.

It’s not the first time Google workers have protested against some of the company’s ventures and its approach to AI development.

A previous protest by employees in 2018 resulted in Google’s termination of a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense called “Project Maven.” The contract was largely focused on assisting armed forces with military video analysis.

Despite this, Google has remained largely unaffected by the internal uproar.

From a financial perspective, the company continues to flourish through revenue obtained through its main sources, primarily digital advertising and a dominant search engine.