In regards to my theory about cheneire energy,I'm looking into it. I would describe that theory in its current state with words like "interesting", "conspiratorial", and "unsubstantiated". I'd give it a solid 5-6% chance of actually having happened. There is at least a kernel of truth here.

I just looked up Cheneire. I see that it was the first U.S. company to export liquefied natural gas and that it signed a big natural gas deal with France 11 months ago. Is there something else or is that it?

If that's it, that's not much.

I feel insulted jerkface.

I just looked it up and they are the largest LNG exporter in the US and 70% of their production goes to Europe. Why is that not much? They are one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pipelines not working.

Ron DeSantis might be the biggest beneficiary if Trump died under mysterious circumstances tomorrow. If that happened, would you jump to the conclusion that Trump probably was killed by DeSantis or at the direction of DeSantis? Of course not.

Many companies like Amazon benefitted financially from the global pandemic. Do you believe that people working at the direction of Jeff Bezos may well have engineered and released COVID-19? Of course not.

And the reason is because there is no evidence other than the benefit.

Any time a significant global event happens, there are a lot of parties that benefit, financially or otherwise. And many benefit very significantly. Picking one of those entities, and making the case based primarily on the fact of that benefit, is how a great many completely horseshit conspiracy theories begin.

Making the case that a party stood to benefit might be a necessary condition for any plausible theory that involves intentional action. But it isn't remotely sufficient.

We all still love you, Bryce.

ok good .

If that was a routine patrol you would see a grid pattern over the water like an oval shaped grid box, and the P-8 didn't come out of Germany where P-8's who would do a patrol over that area are based. He came in and joined a KC-135 refueller (using callsign BART12) over Poland and circled with him refueling for about 45 minutes, then immediately left that pattern, flew directly over the pipes (as they tried to scramble it's location where you see the zig zag returns), descended to about 10K feet while making one or two loops over the pipes then he left towards the same area he came from, it was an unusual flight.

There's still too many questions such as if it was a routine patrol why was it masked as "n/a" with no callsign? Plus the HEX code wasn't even listed in the database (hex code is part of the aircrafts registration used in it's transponder). This didn't appear to be a normal patrol which is why I posted this, of course it isn't "proof" but it was a very suspicious mission.

That's certainly a lot of impressive sounding words.

Needless to say, if a state actor wants to damage an underwater pipeline and the world is watching, they're not going to do it with what is essentially a military Boing 737.

Which summarizes the problems with many conspiracy theories easily: Dumb crap that uses scary sounding buzzwords, which take far too much effort to reply too and is probably best ignored.

Definitely no conspiracy involved in this one

On a surface level, we don't know much except the nord stream pipeline was indeed destroyed, there WAS a detectable explosion in 3 different places, and the explosions occurred 80-100 meters deep.

That's all we know. It's a bit too sophisticated for a small party to have possibly pulled this off, and a very risky proposition for whatever party did this.

I would agree that this looks Russian more than any other party. They are one of six-seven states who could have possibly done this. While the motive isn't crystal clear it's there; it's a high risk move that pits a russia disentangling itself from the west against the shareholders of the pipeline in Denmark and Germany.
It's at a level of sophistication that "feels"very Russian, and the clips of biden and nuland, along with the emergency United Nations meeting both felt quite immediate in a way that could be seen as pre planned by the Russians. It fits their mo of behaviors and decisions that are a bit self destructive as well as destructive.

Still , even then , the idea that Russia did this is also conspiratorial without evidence. Now is the time for speculation because now is the time we know the least. This event IS a conspiracy.

I like the idea that that's been pushed in this thread that it had to be Russia because they control the waters there (or some nonsense like that), as if Germany and Denmark have no undersea monitoring capabilities.

If we assume willful sabotage, it does not require a very complex operation. There is some depth involved, but you could use a small dive team rigged for technical diving or small remotely controlled submersibles to deliver explosives. The dive gear or submersibles is commercially available and not horribly expensive. Nor would it be hard to steal. You could do the entire thing from a small craft.

What a lot of people don't realize is that it isn't like "NATO watches Russia and Russia watches NATO" and that's it. Everyone state with surveillance in the Baltic sea will be watching all other actors in the Baltic sea. NATO isn't a hierarchy that encompasses everything about the armed forces or military intelligence of member states. Member states do not share everything, the cooperation is not absolute and they will be very happy to spy and monitor each-other: Spying and monitoring allies is as close to risk-free intelligence as you can get.

Speculation is fine, but jumping to conclusions is dangerous. As I've written many times in the Ukraine-thread. The necessary ingredients for world wars are misconceptions, misunderstandings and mistakes. Speculation should also follow fact and complete knowledge, not hastily googled factoids to support the conclusion people wanted to make in the first place.

When all these warships sail, airplanes fly and buttons on missile systems are pressed, it's not "Blinken vs Lavrov" or rooms full of seasoned diplomats that will ultimately determine if a war escalates. Nor are these organizations filled to the brim with the seasoned veteran officers of Hollywood legend that always make the right choice. You'll have a bunch of tired 20-year olds, many with too little training, scared to put their mates at risk, scared to die, with stress levels of the charts and seconds to make critical decisions.

Tired 20 year olds?

He is talking about people in the military

Except no one said that.

Bridge officers, platoon leaders, pilots and so forth. You'll find experienced types, inexperienced types, skilled people and idiots.

An airplane drifting off course, a vessel navigating erroneously, a misinterpreted radar contact, a malfunctioning missile or simply good old fashioned imagination.

If you add governments jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst and a hefty dose of paranoia to that, you can get interesting results.

Like in the Able Archer incident of 1983, where we almost started a nuclear holocaust for absolutely no reason... only a month after we almost started a nuclear holocaust for no reason. A key incident before both events was the wrongful downing of a Korean civilian airliner (Korean Air Lines Flight 007) with nations basically accusing each-other in language not to dissimilar to what we see now.

We know for sure the Navy Seals weren’t involved. If they were 5 books on the operation would have been published by now.

That's a fair point.

Twitterverse told me Russia did it because it gets Gazprom out of contractual fines for turning the spigot off and then can also tell Europe to blame America for freezing this winter as they had no reason to blow it up themselves.
Pretty wild event when you think about it.

I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. I understand how NATO works. It's just a lot easier to write "Nato" than a large number of organizations. I understand why it was created and have read many books on the subject and have personally discussed this with people at the pentagon and people in congress(not ukraine in particular obviously) I do not draw any conclusions hastily and have a lot of experience in complex high risk scenarios.

I understand a small team of divers with equipment could have done this. I am saying in practice, in the middle of the baltics, it becomes really difficult for a third party to do this. When I say it's an operation at Russia's level of sophistication , I did not mean to imply it was an extremely sophisticated operation but rather as a dig against Russia.

Complete knowledge is a pretty ridiculous standard, they don't even require complete knowledge in court. Note that when you said speculation should also follow fact, I began my post with a paragraph that says the facts.

I think your commitment to hard truths or as you said in another thread "only what's useful" misses the fact that most plans are not based on hard truths and when you get to a certain level, sure some guy making 400k a year at a think tank might mostly deal with other highly intellectually capable people, who by the way are usually interested in entertaining ideas they don't agree with, but most of your important conversations don't involve understanding useful things- that's like 5% of conversations if that. It turns out it's really really hard to decide what information is and isn't useful. They more often involve building consensus.

I didn't know the decision to blow up the nordstream pipeline was done by a sweaty 20 year old.

Certainly agree mistakes from less than stellar half wits can lead to disasters more so than swift professionals steering us there. That wording was just odd on first read for me

it might have been Poland or the US:
here they are explaining why they come to such conclusions:

the Russians can just turn it off, as sanctions to sanctions. why would they blow it up?

and why did Biden say he would terminate those pipelines if putin doesn't stop the war??

Clearly Biden said that in order to goade Putin into doing it himself.