Oct 092021
 


Pablo Picasso Carnival Bistro [Study] 1908

 

The Unforgivable Sin (VanDen Bossche)
All You Need To Know About Vaccine Failure In One Incredible Chart (Berenson)
Joe Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Doesn’t Exist. It’s Just A Press Release (Fed.)
No FDA-Approved COVID-19 Shots Available (LC)
Covid-19 Vaccine Negative Effectiveness As Low As Minus 86% (TE)
No Biden, You’re Wrong (Denninger)
Los Angeles County Sheriff Refuses to Enforce Vaccine Mandate (SN)
The Mark of the Beast (Jim Kunstler)
Ottawa Will Ban All Unvaccinated People From Leaving Canada (Ici)
Inventor of mRNA Banned By The New England Journal of Medicine (Hope)
Bellingcat Officially Labelled ‘Foreign Agent’ By Moscow (RT)
Russia Is Not To Blame For Soaring Gas Prices – Merkel (RT)
Tesla Move Came After California Legislator Tweeted ‘f-k Elon Musk’ (SFGate)

 

 

 

 

@DrEliDavid: After vaccinating over 85% of its population, Singapore finally flattened the curve, but along the wrong axis:

 

 

“..that vaccination of youngsters and children will provide them with improved protection from contracting severe disease is a textbook example of scientific nonsense..”

The Unforgivable Sin (VanDen Bossche)

One wonders how it is possible that while it has now been reported that vaccinated shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people (1), the vaccinated are still protected against severe disease whereas the unvaccinated are said to be unprotected. So, how can one explain that viral shedding and transmission and hence, viral replication no longer seem to be impacted by the vaccine whereas the opposite still applies to the occurrence of (severe) disease? Based on their study results, the authors from the above-mentioned report (1) conclude that there is no significant difference in viral load between groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic people who became infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. So, again: Considering that vaccinees shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people, how could one even postulate that unvaccinated people are susceptible to severe disease whereas vaccinees are still largely protected from severe disease? Frankly speaking, this doesn’t make any sense at all.

[..] As the mechanism of immune defense in vaccinees is totally different from the one at play in unvaccinated individuals, the mantra of mass vaccination stakeholders that vaccination of youngsters and children will provide them with improved protection from contracting severe disease is a textbook example of scientific nonsense. Their irrational, erroneous extrapolations lead people to believe that they should get their children vaccinated whereas there is barely any more catastrophic immune intervention one could think of. In line with the intrinsic functional properties of innate, multi-specific Abs, healthy children and youngsters are NOT ‘naturally’ susceptible to any Sars-CoV-2 lineage but exclusively acquire such susceptibility as a direct consequence of functional suppression of their well-established innate immune capacity due to a rapid re-exposure event or, even much worse and long-lived, due to vaccination.

The likelihood of rapid re-exposure to Sars-CoV-2 after previous infection dramatically increases when highly infectious variants expand in prevalence. Such an expansion in prevalence directly results from mass vaccination campaigns as mass vaccination turns vaccinees into an excellent breeding ground for naturally selected S-directed immune escape variants. So, unless there is any contradiction in the above reasoning and unless somebody could explain how similar viral replication and transmission dynamics in vaccinated as compared to unvaccinated individuals could lead to dissimilar clinical manifestations of infection, we can only conclude that the scenario is the following: Vaccination of children and youngsters is turning off their broadly protective innate immunity in exchange for S-specific vaccinal Abs that are becoming increasingly useless since their neutralizing capacity becomes more and more eroded as a result of enhanced escape of Sars-CoV-2 from neutralizing Abs [NAbs] (a trend that has been clearly confirmed by molecular epidemiologists (8)).

Resistance to the neutralizing effect of vaccinal Abs that are nevertheless still able to bind Sars-CoV-2 virions and thereby outcompete protective innate Abs is likely to enhance the susceptibility of vaccinees to ADE (Ab-dependent enhancement of disease). Unless virology and immunology are being rewritten, I cannot imagine how mass vaccination of our youngsters and children will not lead to an even more disastrous outcome of all the scientifically irrational and unjustifiable vaccination efforts. Not only will this dramatically increase the children’s risk to succumb to (accelerated) Covid-19 disease but it will also take away the highly efficient capacity of healthy, unvaccinated people to diminish the dangerous, ever rising viral infectious pressure in the population.

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From a study into substance abuse.

All You Need To Know About Vaccine Failure In One Incredible Chart (Berenson)

This study was large and well-conducted. It used a database that covers 85 million Americans in 63 health-care organizations. It was published Oct. 5 in World Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed journal. People were included if they’d had no Covid infection before vaccination and had been “fully vaccinated” – that is, 14 days after the second dose. The researchers wound up examining medical records of about 580,000 Americans, 30,000 with a substance use disorder, 550,000 without. They found that just over 7 percent of people with a use disorder wound up with a breakthrough infection between January and August, compared to 3.6 percent of those without. Okay. Set aside the small group of users and focus only on the 550,000 people in the non-using group. They had a 3.6 percent chance of infection for fully vaccinated people over eight months, January to August.


But eight months is really about four months. Why? These are BREAKTHROUGH infections, and the average vaccinated American was not “fully” vaccinated until mid-April. (Remember, too, that “breakthrough” infections do not include the two weeks after the first dose, when vaccine efficacy is somewhere between zero and negative.) So 1 in 28 “fully vaccinated” people was infected over the four months when the vaccines were at peak effectiveness. Because vaccines work! — But story gets worse. Much worse. The researchers stratified the risk of infection by month, January through August. Here’s that chart – for the 550,000 people WITHOUT a substance use disorder, in other words the vast majority of the sample.


Time trend of incidence rates (cases/person-day) of breakthrough COVID-19 infection in patients with and without substance use disorder (SUD)

The rate of breakthrough infections rose FIVE-FOLD between July and August (and roughly 20-fold from March to August). By the way, the scale here represents the rate of breakthrough infections PER DAY. In other words, in August, those 550,000 fully vaccinated people had a roughly 1 in 200 chance of being infected each day. (Which translates into about a 7 percent chance for the month, which doesn’t match the 3.6 percent total infection rate for this group for the entire time period. It is possible the data does not cover the entire month. Nonetheless the trend could not be clearer.) As the researchers explained: A similar trend was observed in the non-SUD population: the rate of breakthrough infection steadily increased from 0 cases/person-day in January 2021 to 0.0009 cases/person-day in June 2021, and then reached 0.0049 cases/person-day in August 2021 (5.4 times faster than in June 2021)


It is simply impossible to argue about vaccine failure any more. Whether it’s because of the Delta variant, waning antibodies, or some combination, the vaccines simply don’t provide infection (and thus transmission) protection. The only studies that show anything like 80 or 90 percent protection after a few months are those the companies have funded. Maybe they provide some protection against serious cases – hospitalizations and deaths – for longer, but we don’t know how long, and that efficacy declines too.

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There is no mandate, and there are no FDA approved shots available -in America. It’s a curious game.

Joe Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Doesn’t Exist. It’s Just A Press Release (Fed.)

Yes, we’ve heard all about Joe Biden’s alleged vaccine mandate for private companies employing 100 or more people. It was all over the news even before he announced it on September 9. His announcement has jeopardized the employment of millions of Americans and increased worker shortages in critical domains such as health care. There’s only one problem. It’s all a mirage. Biden’s so-called vaccine mandate doesn’t exist — at least, not yet. So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.

That’s why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate haven’t yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan. According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements.

Despite what you may have been falsely led to believe by the media fantasy projection machine, press statements have exactly zero legal authority. “There is nothing there yet that gives employers any mandate,” Stephanie McFarland, spokeswoman for the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told me Oct. 6. “The president made an announcement on this asking OSHA to do it, but we’ve not yet seen anything come from it yet,” she also said. When the state agency gets any further information, she said, they’ll review it. To impose the public perception of a mandate, the Biden administration is following an unusual rule-making process it also employed earlier this year, called an emergency temporary standard (ETS).

The spring ETS rule took nearly six months to issue. Meanwhile, companies are telling reporters their vaccine mandates will have at the latest December deadlines. (For those who can’t calendar, that’s four months after Biden’s non-existent mandate was proclaimed. According to OSHA, an ETS takes up to six months to go into effect after the initial mandate is issued in the Federal Register — which, again, for the proclaimed 100-employee mandate hasn’t happened yet.) Lawyers for big business were blunt about their love for this mandate mirage: “Everybody loves this cover,” Minneapolis employment lawyer Kate Bischoff told Bloomberg Law in September. “Many were already looking down the road at doing this, but the fact that they get to blame Biden is like manna from heaven.”

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“The FDA did a bait and switch by announcing it approved its “first COVID-19 vaccine” in order to push the “vaccine” mandates and protect the Pfizer pharmaceutical company from legal liability. The Pfizer injection, on the other hand, is still considered experimental under U.S. law.”

No FDA-Approved COVID-19 Shots Available (LC)

There are currently no fully FDA-approved licensed COVID shots available. All COVID shots remain under federal Emergency Use Authorization, meaning individuals have the “option to accept or refuse” the product. On September 22, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a follow-up letter to the original approval to Pfizer pharmaceutical company that stated, “having concluded that revising this EUA is appropriate to protect the public health or safety under section 564(g)(2) of the Act, FDA is reissuing the August 23, 2021 letter of authorization in its entirety with revisions incorporated to authorize for emergency use the administration of a single booster dose of COMIRNATY.”

On page 6, footnote 12 of that letter the FDA clearly states, “Although COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) is approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older, there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution to this population in its entirety at the time of reissuance of this EUA. Additionally, there are no products that are approved to prevent COVID-19 in individuals age 12 through 15, or to provide: an additional dose to the immunocompromised population, or a booster dose to the authorized population described in this EUA”.

On August 23, 2021, the FDA sent an approval letter to Pfizer regarding the BioNTech injection, Comirnaty. The letter states: “Under this license, you are authorized to manufacture the product, COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA, which is indicated for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 16 years of age and older.” The FDA did a bait and switch by announcing it approved its “first COVID-19 vaccine” in order to push the “vaccine” mandates and protect the Pfizer pharmaceutical company from legal liability. The Pfizer injection, on the other hand, is still considered experimental under U.S. law.

There is a legal difference between products approved under authorization of emergency use (EUA) compared with those the FDA has fully licensed. The FDA issued another letter for the existing Pfizer shots which confirms they are still under EUA, are not fully approved, and has a liability shield. That means people must be told the risks and benefits, and they have the “option to accept or refuse” the product. The federal Emergency Use Authorization law and the FDA, including the FDA Fact Sheet, state unequivocally that each person has the “option to accept or refuse” the shots.

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See yesterday, The Vaxx is Dead.

Covid-19 Vaccine Negative Effectiveness As Low As Minus 86% (TE)

The efficacy of all available vaccines combined is as low as – 85.71% within the 40-49 age group, and as high as – 3.4% in the 30-39 age group. This shows that the Covid-19 vaccines are making people more susceptible to catching Covid-19, rather than preventing cases of Covid-19 by the claimed 95%. By combining the numbers provided for all age groups over the age of 30, we have been able to calculate an average vaccine effectiveness of – 47.69%, and we’re definitely seeing this in the number of confirmed cases by vaccination status.


Between week 36 and week 39 of 2021 there were 41,149 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the unvaccinated over 30’s, 14,649 confirmed cases in the partly vaccinated over 30’s, and a frightening 243,373 confirmed cases in the fully vaccinated over 30’s. The new UK Health Security Agency report proves without a shadow of a doubt that the Covid-19 vaccines do not work, and actually make the recipients worse.

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“He lied and he knew it. Those who he wants to fire if they won’t follow his dictatorial Mengele-style mandate know it too; many of them see it every day because they’re health-care workers.”

No Biden, You’re Wrong (Denninger)

Yesterday Biden scolded us all about how “vax mandates work.” Well, not really. Yes, you might get people who are over-levered (their fault) and unable to erect the middle finger to “comply.” But in doing so you permanently destroyed their willingness to put 100% into their job. Now they are all pissed off, working only to the minimum required to not get fired, they hate their boss, they hate the company, they hate every screaming Karen who wagged their finger at them, they hate Biden and they’d like to see all of them bankrupt, gone, even dead. In today’s tight labor market you can’t replace them either; who are you going to hire? The bong-smoker you paid for a year to sit around and get stoned? How joyous and hopeful is such a person? Are they inclined to spend on luxuries?

Take on more leverage and build businesses, families and prosperity? When you threaten to force them to do whatever you demand again — and again — and again — even at the cost of their own health, money and life? The economic damage from this is permanent. So is firing those who won’t comply. Oh, they’ll go find something else to do — but odds are those independent thinkers are the top 5 or 10% of any organization. Get rid of them and it’s like firing five ordinary people for the one you did. Of course nobody thinks of that, but then again not many people are smart when it comes to this sort of thing. They should be — but they’re not. Never mind the defense contractors. The problem is much worse there. A handful of people are key resources. They leave, the project isn’t deliverable anymore because it can’t be completed and you can’t just go hire a replacement because of necessary security clearances.

It takes a year or more to get a new TS approved. Does that new engineer also need SCI or (god forbid) SAP access for your nice project? That takes even longer. Never mind those who “go along” and play nice-nice with your “mandate”; how sure are you they’re still loyal and not willing to stab the United States in the back? After all you just ****ed them so….. you didn’t think this through very well, did you? What happens when two months after their wife gets jabbed — because you demanded it as she’s on the health insurance plan at the company — she gets breast cancer? Now how loyal is that person? Of course there were the lies. You won’t “get” Covid if you get jabbed, so said Biden. Biden’s own government has analyzed that and found it is not true — of those over 65 as of August 7th 60% of the hospitalized Covid-19 cases were fully vaccinated. It’s almost-certainly higher now. He lied and he knew it. Those who he wants to fire if they won’t follow his dictatorial Mengele-style mandate know it too; many of them see it every day because they’re health-care workers.

Read more …

“The issue has become so politicized. There are entire groups of employees that are willing to be fired and laid off, rather than get vaccinated.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff Refuses to Enforce Vaccine Mandate (SN)

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has refused to enforce a local vaccine mandate, saying he would risk losing up to 10 per cent of his workforce if he did. After his department’s budget was cut by $145.5 million in June 2020, partly as a result of the ‘defund the police’ movement, Villanueva says he already faces losing hundreds of officers. Enforcing COVID vaccine mandates would further cripple the force at a time when homicides have surged 31 per cent in the first six months of 2021 compared to last year. “This is like the worst of two worlds right here, so we have to pick and choose,” said Villanueva, adding that he would lose 5-10 per cent of his staff “overnight” if he enacted the Los Angeles City Council’s mandate, which was passed on Wednesday. “I’m not forcing anyone,” said Villanueva.


“The issue has become so politicized. There are entire groups of employees that are willing to be fired and laid off, rather than get vaccinated.” The mandate, which is one of the strictest in the nation, goes into effect in November 4 and forces anyone wishing to enter bars, restaurants, gyms and other venues to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a negative test. It also makes the jab compulsory for city employees, a massive problem given that 24% of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 12,000 employees last month sought religious or medical exemptions to the vaccine mandate. Villanueva’s refusal to enforce the mandate follows his insistence that mask mandates are not “backed by science” and that he wouldn’t be enforcing that either.

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“Your “vaccine” makes people sick. Soon, it will be self-evident everywhere that this “vaccine” is just another side of your boutique sickness.”

The Mark of the Beast (Jim Kunstler)

The Covid-19 spell breaks. The beast thought it was a good idea to deprive millions of their livelihoods just to get its way and force them to submit to a medical experiment conceived in the utmost bad faith. You say your “vaccine” is defeating the plague that you schemed to create and beset the world with? We know exactly what you did. We know that most of the people getting sick now are the “vaccinated.” Look what happened in Israel. Too far to see? Look right here in Vermont. Your “vaccine” makes people sick. Soon, it will be self-evident everywhere that this “vaccine” is just another side of your boutique sickness.

Meanwhile, you’ve cleverly destroyed medicine itself by forcing the firings of nurses, doctors, and the people who clean up the hospitals. The people will not forgive you for this reckless and craven stupidity. And, of course, nobody knows the long-term effects of your jabbing spree. Has every vaxed-up person got a controlled demolition underway in their organs and blood vessels? Why are there suddenly a striking number of heart attacks and strokes tallied in Great Britain? Concerning, ya think? They’re counting, at least. In America, we’re not even tracking. This now-sinister enterprise called “The Science” doesn’t really want to see any numbers, and if any happen to come up, its minions like to play games with the math, which can tell any story they want it to.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere an energy crisis is upon us — but you knew it was there all along, or you should have known. Things don’t work well when the fossil fuels get scarce or pricey or have to come from so far away that getting them is beyond your control. When these things happen, everything you need costs more and some things quit working altogether. The EU bureaucrats thought they would force a dozen countries to go “green” by sheer force of will. They thought that blocking the Nordstream 2 pipeline — designed to bring Russian natgas to the West — was a good idea. “Joe Biden’s” first act in office was to shut down the Keystone pipeline. Look now, there’s color in the treetops and the temperatures are falling. That frost on the pumpkin isn’t so charming when there’s also frost inside your windowpanes.

The lights may be going out in your house, but that will finally switch on the light in your brain. You’ve been played. The global economy of interdependent super-systems is breaking apart. It seemed like a good idea at the time when the beast put it together… the Lexus and the Olive Tree and all that reassuring bullshit… and now times have changed. Now the supply lines are choking on their own hyper-complexity as each nation in the global “community” has to contend with its own bad decisions and the fragilities they have exposed. Chinese factories don’t work so well without Australian coal. Here’s an idea: maybe someday Australia will get back to work and learn how to make something with its own coal. (America, are you alert?)

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Google translate.

Ottawa Will Ban All Unvaccinated People From Leaving Canada (Ici)

The information went unnoticed. By confirming on Wednesday an announcement already made in the middle of the summer, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his team unveiled some details concerning the compulsory vaccination for civil servants, but also for travelers. Until now, airlines have expected compulsory vaccination for all passengers who board a plane within the country. This measure will be implemented from October 30. But the federal government is preparing to go even further. Starting this fall, no one will be able to leave Canada without being properly vaccinated. Vaccination requirements will apply to all travelers aged 12 and over who are air passengers on domestic, transborder or international flights departing from a Canadian airport.

Extract from a Transport Canada press release: “In an exchange of emails, the Department of Transport confirmed to Radio-Canada that this requirement does indeed apply to all travelers, Canadians or not, who would like to leave the country from Canadian airports. We will invite operators to determine how best to leverage the appropriate tools to implement these requirements for travelers.” “There are already rules and extensive restrictions on travelers entering Canada from abroad , says Sara Johnston, spokesman for the Department of Transport. Indeed, since the beginning of September, only adequately vaccinated tourists can enter Canada. However, temporary workers and foreign students who do not have their two doses of vaccines recognized by Canadian authorities have the right to arrive, but are subject to screening tests and a 14-day quarantine.

As soon as this regulation comes into force, the latter may not be able to leave Canada. A transition period until November 30 will allow travel without being vaccinated, provided they present a negative molecular test for COVID-19 carried out in the 72 hours prior to travel. In addition, Transport Canada promises to issue new directives by that date “concerning travel restrictions for unvaccinated temporary foreign workers or foreign students who wish to take a connecting flight as part of their return trip to Canada.”

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“..banned from reading..”

Inventor of mRNA Banned By The New England Journal of Medicine (Hope)

Today, a new level of totalitarianism was reached when Dr. Robert Malone was banned from reading the New England Journal of Medicine. We are accustomed to censorship by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook; we are accustomed to professionals getting fired for not submitting to vaccination, but this feels different. Dr. Robert Malone discovered in-vitro and in-vivo RNA transfection and invented mRNA platform technology while he was at the Salk Institute in 1988. He is thus, the father of the modern mRNA vaccine technology, and he has spoken out against its recent misuse in the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, there has been retaliation, more than one would expect in a free society. Here is a level of retribution one would typically find in Russia or China, not in the United States of America. This country used to be the model for free speech.

[..] Now it seems that a recent email from The New England Journal of Medicine has banned Dr. Robert Malone. On October 7, 2021, Dr. Malone reported the following: “For your information, I have now been banned from reading the New England Journal of Medicine. They have blocked my IP address. I wonder how many others have been blocked?” I wonder, was Professor Albert Einstein ever locked out of his office at Princeton? I know that many did not understand the complex equations he wrote, even the sharpest physicists of his day. It was only AFTER real-world experiments such as the total eclipse of the sun in 1919. This eclipse proved his calculation from his Relativity Theory that gravity could bend sunlight. Moreover, it made him a worldwide celebrity.

However, Dr. Malone’s predictions about mRNA vaccine technology have not yet come to pass. When they do, perhaps he too will be accorded the same respect as Einstein. But does the world truly have to await the harsh results? Can’t we be a little bit smarter this time?

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“He who pays the piper calls the tune, you know. And if you receive funding from abroad, there are strong reasons to believe you are taking orders from those who pay you.”

Bellingcat Officially Labelled ‘Foreign Agent’ By Moscow (RT)

The Russian Ministry of Justice has included Netherlands-based digital investigations team Bellingcat in a list of ‘foreign agents’ published on Friday, along with journalists working for US state-run media RFERL and the UK’s BBC. In a statement, officials in Moscow confirmed that the organization, founded by British blogger Eliot Higgins in 2014, was among the outlets handed the designation, along with American-owned online current affairs site MNews. Nine individuals were also labelled ‘foreign agents,’ including employees of the Russian arm of the BBC, RFERL, 7×7 and television channel Dozhd. Dozhd, also known as TV Rain, was given the same status as an organization in August. Bellingcat has won a number of awards, in the West, for investigations into a number of issues, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the east of Ukraine and the alleged poisoning of jailed opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

However, Russian officials insist that the group maintains close ties to Western spy agencies and receives confidential information to form the basis of its revelations. Russia’s foreign intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin said in August that Bellingcat “is needed to exert pressure either on the country, or on individuals and legal entities.” Bellingcat is funded by the US government, through the National Endowment for Democracy, and reportedly maintains financial ties to the British and Dutch governments, alleging that it reserves its harshest criticism for politically convenient opponents of those nations, most prominently Russia. Others have also claimed that confidential information used by the group as part of their investigations had likely been passed on by Western intelligence agencies in order to publish their narrative without their direct involvement. Bellingcat denies these charges and maintains that it is independent.

Groups handed the ‘foreign agent’ designation are required to include it prominently in their published materials when operating in Russia. Bellingcat, however, has little if any footprint within the country, working through affiliated organizations. While there has been an outcry in recent weeks over a sharp increase in the number of groups and media outlets branded with the status, the Russian government insists that it is a proportionate response to attempts to interfere in the country’s domestic affairs. “If you get money from abroad to partake in domestic political activities – say so explicitly,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. “He who pays the piper calls the tune, you know. And if you receive funding from abroad, there are strong reasons to believe you are taking orders from those who pay you.”

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“..within the framework of the existing contracts..”

Russia Is Not To Blame For Soaring Gas Prices – Merkel (RT)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has rejected suggestions that the increased price of gas is due to Russian policy. Instead she has pointed the finger at the EU’s own approach asking whether the bloc could have acted differently. Speaking on Wednesday, Merkel noted that Russia has never refused to deliver gas and has fulfilled its contractual obligations. “That’s why we should ask the question: was enough gas ordered, or is the high price at the moment maybe the reason for not ordering so much?” Merkel asked, according to London’s Financial Times. The European Union has sought to move gas trading to the spot market in recent years, whereas Russia has consistently preferred long-term contracts, often as long as 25 years.


Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed at the reluctance of the bloc to sign longer deals as a cause for rising prices. The view of outgoing Chancellor Merkel was also reflected on Wednesday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who recalled that Russian gas corporation Gazprom is pumping as much gas as it can “within the framework of the existing contracts,” insisting that Moscow is playing no role in the raised prices. In September, a group of around 40 members of the European Parliament called on the EU to investigate Gazprom, alleging that it was abusing its dominant position on the market by deliberately pushing the value up. It was suggested that Moscow is intentionally limiting gas supplies to Europe as a means to speed the launch of the controversial pipeline Nord Stream 2, which was recently completed.

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Is this what they call “woke”?

Tesla Move Came After California Legislator Tweeted ‘f-k Elon Musk’ (SFGate)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed Friday that his company’s move to Texas was, in part, inspired by a California lawmaker’s incendiary tweet to him. The tweet in question? “F—k Elon Musk,” from progressive California Assemblywoman Lorena S. Gonzalez. Musk’s confirmation came in response to a fawning Tesla blog post, claiming that “Musk selflessly tried to resist the actions of the government” by reopening a Fremont factory in violation of Alameda County’s COVID-19 precautions in 2020. For context, Musk sued the county over the stay-at-home order that shut down the company’s factory, and dropped the suit 11 days later.


The Tesla fan blog — headlined “Tesla Moved its HQ to Texas Following Explicit Offer from California Assemblywoman” — calls out Gonzalez for tweeting out an expletive to Musk, saying the tweet “indicates serious problems in the apparatus of the state.” Musk tweeted, in response to the article and its headline, “Exactly.” Gonzalez was nonplussed, tweeting that the CEO “makes too much of his money from taxpayer subsidies in CA to pull out.” This comment is in reference to the fact that Tesla will keep its California factories. “And, yes, he’s still awful,” she added on Twitter. “Worth $200 billion & left his janitors hanging during the pandemic.” She later tweeted screenshots of her being harassed on Twitter and Instagram by Tesla enthusiasts.

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