The latest New York Times report on the Nord Stream pipeline bombing is something else. According to NYT’s anonymous US government sources, the pipelines were blown up by a “pro-Ukrainian group” who had no known connections to any military or intelligence agency, but somehow had all the information, skills, diving equipment and military explosives necessary to carry out such an attack.
It’s actually insulting how stupid it is. It reads like a small child lying about who broke the lamp in the living room; “Uhh, some bad guy came in and broke it, then he left. He was wearing a black cape and had a twirly mustache.” At least respect us enough to make up a better lie than “Yeah it turns out it was just some random people with a boat, man! It’s crazy I know!”
They literally wrote an entire article without ever addressing how bizarre it is to just keep referring to the alleged perpetrators as just a “group”. Like that’s a thing. “Yeah you know, one of those Groups we’ve all been hearing about in the news. You know Groups, they sail around the world destroying international undersea energy infrastructure.”
Imagine having to tell this Scooby Doo-esque tale about a yacht of Ukraine-loving mischief-makers who pranked Europe’s energy supply like it’s a real thing. Like, “Oh come on, who among us has not taken a boatload of military explosives to go blow up international pipelines for fun with their friends?”
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I’m finding myself growing more and more enraged at the way war with China is being aggressively pushed in Australia. There’s nothing more evil than starting a completely needless war for power and profit. The people who are pushing this monstrous depravity should be afraid to go out in public.
My suspicion is that the supposed Covid biowarfare attack was a very tightly run black operation, with its details probably known only to the smallest possible circle of participants; and given the horrifying consequences for our own country and the world, I doubt that any of those individuals will ever come forward as whistle-blowers. But if some of them do, Seymour Hersh would surely be the journalist they would be most likely to contact, and it might be very fitting if his last major expose were to so closely parallel the one that originally launched his storied career more than a half-century earlier.
A few days ago, the UN Security Council held hearings on the accusations by Seymour Hersh that the Biden Administration had illegally destroyed Europe’s $30 billion Nord Stream pipelines. Hersh is one of America’s most renowned journalists and the previous week he had revealed the exact details of the attack, an obvious act of war against Germany, our close NATO ally.
The story is arguably as big as anything in Hersh’s towering half-century career, but with very few exceptions his revelations and the UN session it prompted have been totally ignored by our entire mainstream media, so that only a sliver of the Western public may ever hear of those facts and recognize their importance. For example, our government’s recent shoot-down of several errant American weather balloons seems to have received at least 100x greater news coverage.
Even among well-educated, intelligent individuals, the overwhelming majority probably still draw their knowledge of the world primarily from mainstream sources and if an event is ignored or downplayed by these, its importance will be doubted.
But although our Western media almost entirely ignored these developments, the Security Council session on the destruction of some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure attracted testimony from leading American public figures.
Ray McGovern had spent 27 years as a CIA Analyst, rising to direct the Soviet Policy division, chairing the National Intelligence Estimates group during the Reagan Administration, and serving as the Presidential Briefer on intelligence matters. He explained that twenty years ago, the American government had used fraudulent claims of Saddam’s WMDs to justify our disastrous Iraq War, doing so with the assistance of our subservient media. And today, our media is supporting the extreme recklessness of our current government policy towards Russia and Ukraine, which risks a nuclear confrontation.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University spoke as well, emphasizing the enormously grave consequences of this unprecedented act of international terrorism, and the very limited number of nations that could have been responsible. He noted that Hersh has now provided a comprehensive account of the attacks and one that closely matches the very suspicious public statements made by President Joseph Biden and other senior officials in his administration regarding the need to eliminate the pipelines. Prof. Sachs is a figure of the highest possible international reputation and he used unusually strong language in speaking to the UN Security Council membership.
My research has led me to conclude that there’s an elite conspiracy to enslave us all and turn us all into brainwashed automatons mindlessly enacting the wishes of our rulers in a cruel dystopia built by the powerful, for the powerful.
Haha, just kidding. That already happened.
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Step one is learning that the mainstream consensus worldview is a lie, and that we’ve been fed power-serving propaganda since we were children about our society, our nation, our government and our world. Most people haven’t even made it to step one yet.
Step two is getting clear on how we’ve been lied to. A lot of people who make it past step one get mixed up here. Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals, elite conspiracies to make all our kids transgendered or whatever, because their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government. They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia, because their worldview prohibits them from recognizing that we’re already living in a power-serving mind-controlled dystopia.
Others simply don’t go far enough in extracting the mainstream worldview from their minds and don’t inquire deeply enough into what’s really true. Plenty of self-identified socialists and anarchists still buy into bogus mainstream narratives about empire-targeted governments, or still buy into to the power-serving dynamics of party politics. Step two takes a lot of hard, sincere, intellectually honest work sorting out fact from fiction.
Step three is learning what to do about all this, and beginning to take action. This means working to spread awareness of what’s really going on and helping others to make it through steps one and two, because the only thing that ever leads to lasting positive changes in human behavior is an expansion of consciousness. The more people make it to step three, the more people there are to help wake up everyone else.
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Without the US military who would protect the world from hobby balloons and natural gas pipelines?
The US empire’s responsibility for the Nord Stream bombing is going to become one of those open secrets that everyone knows but nobody officially confirms, like Israel’s nuclear arsenal (which just as an aside Sy Hersh also helped expose).
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Free speech is meaningless and worthless if you don’t use it to oppose real power. In western “democracies” the majority of people are so effectively propagandized into speaking in alignment with the interests of the western empire that they may as well be taking orders on what to say at gunpoint.
In totalitarian regimes you say what your rulers want you to say because they physically coerced you using the threat of violence. In “free democracies” you say what your rulers want you to say because they psychologically coerced you using propaganda. The end result is the same.
Reagan once joked about Soviets thinking they are free because they’re allowed to criticize the US government as much as they like, but really that was just projection. Westerners think they have free speech, but they never use that “free speech” to criticize the tyrannical empire they live under.
Free speech is held as an important human right because it helps the people put a check on power. If you’re not using it for that, you may as well not have it. Your speech is only free insofar as you can criticize real power, and insofar as you actually do so.
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The reason I often use the phrase “the political/media class” is because it’s all one class, one social caste. They’re not actually separate in any meaningful way.
Whenever I talk about the hundreds of military bases the US empire is circling our planet with I always get people saying “We only have all those foreign bases because those foreign governments want us there for protection!”
Yes, yes I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that the US subverts, impoverishes and destroys any weaker nation that refuses to facilitate its military interests.
Foreign US military bases are “protection” in the same way extortion payments to the Mafia are “protection”.
Foreign governments don’t allow US military bases on their territory to protect themselves from their neighbors, they do it to protect themselves from the US.
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One of the strangest things the mainstream worldview asks us to accept is that the US government (A) should be the leader of the entire world and (B) wants to be the leader of the world solely for righteous and beneficent reasons.
Anyone else who wants to rule the world gets called a megalomaniac. We all grew up watching movies and shows about evil villains who want to rule the world. Yet the mainstream worldview asks us to accept that the US government wants to rule the world because they want to promote freedom and democracy.
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It’s easy to see the flaws in other countries, cultures and societies. It’s much harder to see the flaws in our own.
It’s easy to see the problems with other political parties and ideological factions. It’s much harder to see the problems with our own.
It’s easy to see how other groups are propagandized. It’s much harder to see how our own group is propagandized.
It’s easy to see how others are misguided and delusional. It’s much harder to see how we ourselves are misguided and delusional.
The further away from ourselves we look, the easier it is for us to find fault. But it doesn’t benefit anyone for us to find problems in the distant other. The closer to home we look, the more good we can do with what we find.
Bombshell No. 1: Seymour Hersh’s Feb. 8 report that President Joe Biden authorized the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines built to carry cheap Russian gas to Europe.
Bombshell No. 2: The Washington Post today ended the Establishment media embargo on Hersh’s damning report, mentioning its findings and even including a link to his article.
The Post’s article by Karen DeYoung, no rogue reporter, bore the headline, “Russia, blaming US sabotage, calls for UN probe of Nord Stream.” DeYoung reported on the UN Security Council meeting yesterday at which Russia called for a special United Nations commission to investigate the explosions that blew up the Nord Stream undersea pipelines. DeYoung also noted that Professor Jeffrey Sachs and I gave short briefings at the beginning of the Security Council session.
Here’s an edited summary account by the UN of our testimony at the Security Council session:
SACHS: As the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines on 26 September 2022 constitutes an act of international terrorism and represents a threat to peace, it is the Council’s responsibility to take up the question of who might have carried out the act, help bring the perpetrator to justice, pursue compensation for the damaged parties and prevent such actions from recurring in the future. Countries need full confidence that their infrastructure will not be destroyed by third parties.
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines required a very high degree of planning, expertise and technological capacity, he continued, adding that only a handful of State-level actors have both the technical capacity and access to the Baltic Sea to have carried out this action. These include the Russian Federation, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Norway, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, either individually or in some combination.
Sweden has perhaps the most to tell the world about the crime scene; that country has kept the results of its investigation secret from the rest of the world. It has refused to share its findings with the Russian Federation and turned down a joint investigation with Denmark and Germany.
Pointing to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s detailed account of the Nord Stream destruction, he said his work attributes the Nord Stream destruction to a decision ordered by
United States President Joseph R. Biden and carried out by United States agents in a covert operation. The Biden Administration has described Hersh’s account as “completely and utterly false” but did not offer any information contradicting Hersh’s account and/or any alternative explanation.
RAY MCGOVERN: Mr. Hersh attracts whistle-blowers because of his perfect record of protecting their identities and accurately publishing what they reveal, despite Government attacks. While some are now smearing Mr. Hersh, such critics do not themselves have a good record of credibility…
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) more than doubled in size, despite its promises not to. When Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin noted that the country had to annex Crimea due to a February 2014 coup, and due to the prospect that medium-range ballistic missiles will be placed in already operational systems in Romania and Poland. Despite being disguised as anti-ballistic missile systems, they can easily accommodate hypersonic missiles.
Absolute crickets. That is the sound in the major mainstream media — both foreign and domestic — following the charges by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States led a covert operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
“In some ways I think MSM’s more or less ignoring Naftali Bennett’s comments on aborted early-March Ukraine negotiations is even less excusable than ignoring the Hersh story,” Wright said in an email exchange with RS. “MSM can always say Hersh is now just a freelancer and was relying basically on a single anonymous source, etc — but Bennett is an eyewitness to what he’s describing, and he’s the former prime minister of Israel!”
Absolute crickets. That is the sound in the major mainstream media — both foreign and domestic — following the charges by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States led a covert operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
The story, released on Hersh’s new Substack last week, unleashed a Twitter war between Hersh’s defenders and detractors, but a simple Google search betrays a dearth of mainstream coverage, with only brief reports by Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, The Times (UK) and the New York Post (a conservative holding of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire). The Washington Times editorial board, also squarely on the right, wrote sympathetically about it on Monday, and Newsweek has covered it as well.
All other newspapers of record — the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal — and European outlets — BBC, the Guardian, and most German newspapers (an interview on Berliner Zietung dropped late Wednesday ) — have ignored it. Tucker Carlson and other hosts covered it on FOX News, another Murdoch staple, but the rest of the cable news circuit — CNN, MSNBC — are seemingly on board with what appears to be a total MSM blackout.
Maybe not an entire blackout: Business Insider published an unflattering report topped with this unwieldy headline: “The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin.”
Moving outside of this relative void to social media and Substack, there appears to be two primary lines of open attack against Hersh’s reporting, which details the story of a covert unit of expert U.S. Navy divers, directed from the very top of the Biden administration, engaged in sabotage plans that were set into motion “in December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine.”
First, critics are seeking to discredit Hersh, who has spent the last 50 years embarrassing the U.S. government with myriad exposes (many of them published in major outlets like the New York Times and New Yorker). His most prominent revelations include the My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in Vietnam, the massive CIA spy program against Americans called Operation Chaos (for which the New York Times called him the “Teller of Truth”) in 1974, and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in 2004. Nevertheless, detractors accuse him of engaging in conspiracy theories, sloppy reporting, and bad sourcing.
Second, they point to what appears to be “single sourcing” in Hersh’s Substack report (though he is much more ambiguous about this in his interview with Radio War Nerd this week). Additionally, Twitter and Substack sleuths, using OSINT (open source intelligence,) say they’ve found holes in the details (like the class of minesweeper ship involved and where it was located the day Hersh claims the explosives were planted) that cast doubt on his entire story.
But the questions raised about Hersh and his reporting (appropriate or not) do not explain the lack of mainstream coverage of his extremely detailed, 5300-word article, which under any other circumstances should have opened the floodgates of journalistic inquiry. Here remains an extraordinary mystery: Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, which run from Russia to Germany, are majority owned (51 percent) by Russian Gazprom, along with German, Dutch and French stakeholders, and had at one time accounted for 35 percent of the energy the EU was importing from Russia (via Nord Stream 1)?
Additionally, is Hersh correct in highlighting statements from U.S. officials, from Biden on down, as possible tell-tale signs that they wanted to take down Nord Stream 2 long before the Russian invasion? Did Washington have an interest in cutting it off, and would it have gone so far as to sabotage it and then blame the attack on Russia? Why did top State Department official Victoria Nuland say she was “gratified” it was now “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”?
Germany, Sweden, and Denmark are reportedly conducting separate investigations into the pipeline explosions. Last fall the Swedes confirmed it was “gross sabotage” and that the attack had the markings of a “state actor.” After a flurry of elite media and official Washington figures pointed fingers in Russia’s direction, the Washington Post published an unusually off-script report two months ago quoting “European officials” asserting that there was “no evidence” that Russia was behind the attack.
But that was in December, and, until Hersh’s explosive allegations, the story had been languishing in news cycle purgatory. Now, following his claims, the absence of any real reporting on the subject seems even more striking.
When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down. And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs. This is the protection racket by omission and commission.
My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries. I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:
There are great puddles of blood on the world where’s it all going all this spilled blood is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk funny kind of drunkography then so wise . . . so monotonous . . . No the earth doesn’t get drunk the earth doesn’t turn askew it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons rain . . . snow hail . . . fair weather never is it drunk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It doesn’t give a damn The earth
But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.
I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.
For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media. And the people who believe them.
It is not easy. No matter how obviously absurd the claims about Chinese “spy” balloons, the shooting down of unidentified flying objects, reports of how Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, all the support for presidents and prime ministers who shill for the war industries, etc. – a list that could be extended indefinitely on a daily basis – these media are relentless in presenting government propaganda juxtaposed with trivia.
When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down. And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs. This is the protection racket by omission and commission.
If Putin and senior Russian officials had said what Biden and senior US officials have been saying about how much they hate the Nord Stream pipelines and how great it is that they were bombed, every member of the western political/media class would blame Russia for the bombing, and we would never hear the end of it
Russia would stand nothing to gain by bombing its own pipeline whose gas flow it could control on its own end, while US officials are openly acknowledging that the US benefits from it directly. It’s just so silly how imperial spinmeisters are falling all over themselves to dismiss a claim they all privately know is true because it’s so glaringly obvious.
This is actually as sinister as it gets, because Sweden, Denmark and Germany, and the whole EU, know that if you really confront the Empire, in public, the Empire will strike back, manufacturing a war on European soil. This is about fear – and not fear of Russia.
Never underestimate a wounded and decaying Empire collapsing in real time.
Imperial functionaries, even in a “diplomatic” capacity, continue to brazenly declare that their exceptionalist control over the world is mandatory.
If that’s not the case, competitors may emerge and steal the limelight – monopolized by US oligarchies. That, of course, is absolute anathema.
The imperial modus operandi against geopolitical and geoeconomic competitors remains the same: avalanche of sanctions, embargos, economic blockades, protectionist measures, cancel culture, military uptick in neighboring nations, and assorted threats. But most of all, warmongering rhetoric – currently elevated to fever pitch.
The hegemon may be “transparent” at least in this domain because it still controls a massive international network of institutions, financial bodies, politicos, CEOs, propaganda agencies and the pop culture industry. Hence this supposed invulnerability breeding insolence.
Panic in the “garden”
The blowing up of Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) – everybody knows who did it, but the suspect cannot be named – took to the next level the two-pronged imperial project of cutting off cheap Russian energy from Europe and destroying the German economy.
From the imperial perspective, the ideal subplot is the emergence of a US-controlled Intermarium – from the Baltic and the Adriatic to the Black Sea – led by Poland, exercising some sort of new hegemony in Europe, on the heels of the Three Seas Initiative.
But as it stands, that remains a wet dream.
On the dodgy “investigation” of what really happened to NS and NS2, Sweden was cast as The Cleaner, as if this was a sequel of Quentin Tarantino’s crime thriller Pulp Fiction.
That’s why the results of the “investigation” cannot be shared with Russia. The Cleaner was there to erase any incriminating evidence.
As for the Germans, they willingly accepted the role of patsies. Berlin claimed it was sabotage, but would not dare to say by whom.
This is actually as sinister as it gets, because Sweden, Denmark and Germany, and the whole EU, know that if you really confront the Empire, in public, the Empire will strike back, manufacturing a war on European soil. This is about fear – and not fear of Russia.
The Empire simply cannot afford to lose the “garden.” And the “garden” elites with an IQ over room temperature know they are dealing with a psychopathic serial killer entity which simply cannot be appeased.
Meanwhile, the arrival of General Winter in Europe portends a socio-economic descent into a maelstrom of darkness – unimaginable only a few months ago in the supposedly “garden” of humanity, so far away from the rumbles across the “jungle.”
Well, from now on barbarism begins at home. And Europeans should thank the American “ally” for it, skillfully manipulating fearful, vassalized EU elites.
Way more dangerous though is a specter that very few are able to identify: the imminent Syrianization of Europe. That will be a direct consequence of the NATO debacle in Ukraine.
From an imperial perspective, the prospects in the Ukrainian battlefield are gloomy. Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) has seamlessly morphed into a Counter-Terror Operation (CTO): Moscow now openly characterizes Kiev as a terrorist regime.
The pain dial is incrementally going up, with surgical strikes against Ukrainian power/electricity infrastructure about to totally cripple Kiev’s economy and its military. And by December, there’s the arrival on the front lines and in the rear of a properly trained and highly motivated partial mobilization contingent.
The only question concerns the timetable. Moscow is now in the process of slowly but surely decapitating the Kiev proxy, and ultimately smashing NATO “unity.”
The process of torturing the EU economy is relentless. And the real world outside of the collective West – the Global South – is with Russia, from Africa and Latin America to West Asia and even sections of the EU.
The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.
This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.
The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.
That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.
Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.
The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.
The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers – would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.
German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.
As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.
Cui bono?
Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.
Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to rabid US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.
It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.
MCViewPoint 