There’s always some mystery in the news that provides a blank page for fantasy thinking. This week’s mystery has initiated a storm of speculation: What happened to cause leaks in Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2, designed to send gas to Germany? The speculation runs from rational to delusional.

A good example of more rational speculation is by Jed Babbin at the Spectator: He thinks Russia is the most likely suspect:

Germany, Sweden, the United States, and other NATO nations would not have attacked the pipelines. There has been some speculation among U.S. conservatives that we were responsible for the pipeline attacks. That’s clearly wrong for two reasons.

First, we have no motive for doing so, despite President Joe Biden’s February statement claiming: “If Russia invades Ukraine… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Destroying Nord Stream 2 only hurts our European allies. There’s no reason to do so.

Second, Biden is too gun-shy to order any such strike. He and Secretary of State Antony Blinken would certainly consult with Germany and France before doing so, and they would have vetoed the move.

We may never know which nation did it, but Russia is -- despite its protestations -- the most likely suspect. 

In one sense I think he's correct. In another, I think he's wrong. That is to say, I think Russia is at fault but not because it deliberately caused the leaks which may render the pipelines at worst, irreparable, or, at best, out of commission for months.

You see, I’ve seen firsthand the incompetence and lack of maintenance when I worked in the USSR and you’ve seen it too, if you watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine with poorly designed and maintained equipment. A blogger named LawDog with pipeline experience sets out a very plausible scenario to me:

Two explosions, 17 hours apart. No military is going to arrange for two pipes in the same general area to be destroyed 17 hours apart. Not without some Spec Ops guy having a fit of apoplexy. One pipe goes up in a busy shipping lane, in a busy sea, and everyone takes notice. Then you wait 17 hours to do the second -- with 17 hours for people to show up and catch you running dirty? Nah, not buying it.

The Nord pipelines weren’t in use. To me, that means it’s time for maintenance! Hard to maintain pipes when product is flowing.

Pipelines running methane, under saltwater, require PMCS [Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services] quicker than you’d think, and more often than you’d believe.

I would bet a cup of coffee that any of the required weekly and monthly checks and services since the Russians took over have been pencil-whipped. (See Andreev Bay 1982.) 

He notes they twice shut the pipelines down for maintenance -- in July of 2020 and July of 2021. Both times they had issues restarting it. Moreover, there were four major disruptions in gas flow from December 21 through April 22.

He concedes “hostile actions are a possibility” but lists how many things can cause a rupture in an undersea pipeline: The most significant to him is the formation of “hydrate plugs” which under certain circumstances are formed from the natural gas/methane in the pipelines and preventing them requires constant work “requiring vigilance, expertise, diligence and constant water removal.” If they are not removed, the solid hydrates can cause cracks and fires. To clear these plugs in pipelines this size requires weeks of “Slow depressurization from both ends simultaneously.”

In 2000, he notes, the Russians tried to remove a hydrate plug from a pipeline in Siberia using a butane torch and they ruptured the pipe and destroyed “several miles of very expensive pipeline.”

Both Nord Stream pipelines were fully charged with natural gas and just sitting at the bottom of the sea -- 'Hundreds of millions of cubic meters of explosive “gaseous hydrocarbons being transported by Russians, and subject to Russian maintenance.”

This theory, while not definitive in the absence of evidence, is persuasive enough to me that the finger pointing at everyone else should take a long pause. It’s pure speculation, while the need for constant maintenance of undersea gas pipelines and Russian incompetence is not.

On the other hand, we do have some evidence to support our suspicion that the federal government used and still uses social media to censor anti-administration news. 

The administration gave millions in tax dollars to four private groups which worked with social media to censor “massive amounts of social media posts they considered misinformation” during the last national election:

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.  

Three liberal groups -- the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP -- were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.

In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs -- shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone -- for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with "monitoring intensif[ying] significantly" the week before and after Election Day.

I do not know of a single conservative poster on Facebook right now who has not received warnings, had posts blocked, have had their feeds restricted until well after the midterms, or were outright banned.

The administration’s unconstitutional misuse of federal funds to target their opposition continues in other ways as well. The odious, highly politicized Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is also involved.

The CDC awarded a Soros-backed pro-migrant nonprofit $7.5 million under the guise of pandemic-related support for "LATINX ESSENTIAL WORKERS AS HEALTH PROMOTERS," and aimed "to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate impacts among Latinx and Latin American immigrants," according to an analysis by the Daily Caller.

The group, Alianza Americas, is currently suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other Florida officials over migrant flights to Martha's Vineyard earlier this month.

The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros' Open Society Network.

Alianza Americas is “focused on improving the quality of life of all people in the U.S.-Mexico-Central America migration corridor.” The membership-based group, which Soros’ Open Society Foundations network (OSF) sent almost $1.4 million to between 2016 and 2020, was awarded a $7.5 million CDC grant in February 2021, according to a grant listing reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. -- Daily Caller

The CDC funds were distributed under a program called "Protecting and Improving Health Globally: Building and Strengthening Public Health Impact, Systems, Capacity and Security."

It seems to me that an administration with a well-considered agenda that warrants popular support would not have to go to such lengths to block contrary views. I hope the predictions of a Red Wave at the midterms will result in severe penalties for those who used our tax revenues to shut up the opposition. And I remind you that the best definition of fascism, in my view, is a coordinated state-corporate system which works to silence all opposition to an autocratic government.