So after watching Mike Ruppert's analysis of American geo-politics from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Afghanistan I watched a documentary about him called "Collapse" and, fuck, the title really isn't hyperbole. A few years ago a physicist (whose name I forget) published a paper measuring energy use as a function of the size of the global economy. His conclusion was a bigger economy is directly correlated with increased energy use. Seems like a no brainer. We use energy to make things, ship them, build stores to sell them; we use energy getting to work, at work, in whatever industry or profession we are part of and that's all necessary to make money to buy shit. So more things getting made and sold equals more energy use. But it was the corollary that made people freak out; if energy use has to decrease in the future (either by choice to avoid catastrophic climate change or as a result of decreased oil supply) then the economy has to shrink too. Economists said he didn't know shit about the economy. He said he didn't need to since the correlation was so accurate and so universal. Any time we have either a measurement or an estimate of the energy use for a particular period and a measurement or estimate of the size of the economy for the same period (from different sources and compiled independently of each other) the same relationship applies. Ruppert has taken this (and other sources) as a way of predicting our future with oil demand significantly exceeding supply and his conclusion is don't even bother running for the hills, if you aren't there already you're too fucking late.
Again, the problem with evaluating this kind of information (or doom-speak) is evaluating both the information and the conclusions drawn from it. Ruppert doesn't make it easy for people to dismiss him. Collapse is a presentation of his conclusions without much supporting evidence. But where he has time to provide his evidence he is slow, careful, and meticulous. The one very obvious flaw in his reasoning is he starts with a conclusion in mind. In the case of American foreign and domestic policy, he started with his experience of being on the receiving end of an attempted recruitment by the CIA for the purpose of bringing cocaine into the US. He took that and started trying to figure out how wide-spread the problem was and what the motivations could be. In that particular case his end point (that the US government is dependent of laundering drug money for liquidity) is only mildly controversial since everyone knows the CIA is the biggest drug cartel in the world. But getting from "drug smugglers" to "completely dependent on drug profits to prevent economic collapse" is a big leap. He does have evidence (as he sees it) and isn't obviously a maniac. I think I posted a link to a Taibbi article about banks laundering $9B in drug money. That's the tip of a very large iceberg. The estimates for total drug money laundered through the US are between $500B and $1T a year.
I think an honest person has to wrestle with a whole bunch of conflicting motives in evaluating any evidence like Ruppert's. First there is the desire to believe things are generally alright. This not only helps one sleep at night but also excuses a general political apathy. Then there is the desire to dismiss truly alarming information as false simply because it is alarming. One must also acknowledge the fear of accepting really radical ideas because you don't want to seem "bug-fuck" or bat-shit or crazy as a sack of assholes. I think most people would have completely rejected the statement, "The most powerful bankers in the world are completely incompetent, viciously avaricious criminals who knowingly break laws every day and the rest of us are absolutely at their mercy" at any time before 2008. Being in the minority, being very fucking scary, and sounding like a crazy person does not necessarily make one wrong.
My handy rule for figuring out who is a crazy fuck and who is genuinely frightening is the coincidence rule. To borrow yet again from William Gibson, there has to be room for coincidence. If everything you see becomes part of the conspiracy then you've gone off the deep end. Anyone who manages to make something at the scale of the whole world seem either simple or all-encompassing is just crazy. One of Ruppert's strengths is he shows how ever stage of the arguments he makes has a motive people can understand (and one that is documented). He was a cop and still needs motive, means, and opportunity to make his case.
Ruppert sometimes seems like a crazy person. It's not that he doesn't allow for coincidence, it's that he just has that jangling, sketchy quality really bug-fuck people have. I suppose if you have been carefully compiling evidence that your government is a giant criminal clusterfuck for 20+ years and still people won't listen to you - despite the mounting evidence of collusion, criminal behaviour, the revolving door between government and corporations, private prisons being stocked with millions of "drug offenders" while the CIA and the White House use the marines to guarantee the flow of heroin into the country - I guess that would frustrate the fuck out of a person and make them seem a little nutty.
Still, the basis for my conviction Ruppert both believes what he is saying and likely isn't crazy at all is the comparison between him and Alex Jones. At no point does Ruppert obviously distort facts, invoke a great conspiracy, mention the Rothschild family, talk about a New World Order, tie in gun control or death panels. He steers a wide berth around the topics that always pop up in Bat-Shit Crazy Whack-A-Mole. I think of him, at the moment, as a guy I would prefer not to believe.
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