Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Blasted Assumptions
Which came first, the pipeline failures or the explosions? Do not be too quick to answer, as our media, left, right, and populist have done. Some on the right seem to be playing the same game the American left played from the dawn of the Cold War to 2015. No one is blaming America for the world’s ills, no, just the corrupt capitalism warmongers, uhh, the forever war neocons and the powers behind President Biden.
AND.
There is a very solid basis for suspecting the U.S. government instigated the Nord Stream pipelines explosions. First, understand that the order of events could have been 1. Pipeline rupture, 2. Massive explosion as escaping gas ignited or what seemed explosions but were actually massive releases of natural gas under very high pressure, 3. Surface signs of gas escaping. This scenario does not require explosives to be set on the underwater pipeline by submarine or robots.
Then look back to President Reagan’s response to the first oil and gas pipeline from Russia to Western Europe. He had the CIA sell bad pipeline software to the KGB, that was in the black or grey market for pipeline technology. After running long enough to cloud suspicion, the software caused pumps and valves to wildly malfunction, causing surges that created pressure well beyond the fail point of pipeline welds.
The results were massive explosions below nuclear weapon magnitude.
So, we did it before. AND.
We all know that one of our pipeline systems was shut down for days after ransomware infected their controls. We feared catastrophic failures and even explosions. No one has been arrested or droned, at least to public knowledge. Oh, we were told the hackers likely had ties to Russia, but who is really to say? Software, rather than plastic explosives and deep water subs or robots, opens a much wider field of suspects. It has been done before.
Whatever the news, however persuasive the commentator, it ain’t necessarily so.
Published in General
How do two pipelines suddenly have significant problems within a day. If it wasn’t sabotage, that’s quite a coincidence.
I really do want to beg off this whole train of thought. It’s seems that anything even potentially injurious to the reputation of the US, is now a conspiracy theory.
Here are two paragraphs from what I wrote to a Ricochet friend about it all, intending them to come at the end of my last missive on the topic.
“It seems to me, as untrained in engineering, that though what he [lawdog] presents is hypothetically possible, it is not at all probable. It is possible that a meteorite could hit my house or that I could be struck by lightning. But if I hear a boom (or actually four booms) and immediately feel pain, it’s far more likely that I was shot. Yes, the clip-clops you hear coming down the Chicago street may be a zebra, but it is very unlikely.”
AND
“This is why I have questions and then have argued with those who say, seemingly only as a matter of idle speculation in many cases, that blaming this twin pipeline crisis on Russian incompetence or on natural causes is only the latest in attempting to avoid consideration of the awkward and possibly ugly truths in detail.”
Added: The comment of mine that you quoted was intended as ironic. My response to you may not answer your question directly but I think you can get the sense of it.
I realized that you were being ironic and was posting my responses for other people.
I find the Russian incompetence argument questionable. First teams for doing such projects are not usually from a single country. There are going to be multiple subcontractors.
The 4 explosions on 2 different pipelines in which Nato was conducting military exercises within weeks of the explosions, warnings to the German government of what was to come as a way of gauging their reaction, and the words of American officials implicating the US lead to a conclusion of American complicity. It’s not ‘blame America first. It’s a matter of realizing the American government is filled with criminals who don’t care whether Germany freezes and starves. Just a delayed Morgenthau Plan.