Thursday, June 17, 2010

Why I Like Mike

He's been smeared with as many negative labels as a toxic waste disposal. Crackpot. Fear-monger. Lunatic. Agent provocateur. Disinformation artist. Legend in his own mind. And my personal favorite, "batshit insane conspiracy theorist".

So who is the real Mike Ruppert? Looking back at the blog posts that I have made over the last eight months, I've either quoted Michael C. Ruppert, written posts about him or inspired by his ideas in roughly half of all my posts. Why do I keep coming back to such a controversial figure? There might be a connection that I feel with his beginnings as an LAPD narcotics investigator. He resigned from the LAPD just a year after my father requested a transfer out of there. There might also be a geographical connection; we both consider southern California our home and spent pivotal moments in Ashland, Oregon.

The real reason is timing. In 2004, I was searching all over the internet trying to make sense out of why our government, seemingly so obsessed with our national security in the aftermath of 9/11, would deliberately blow the cover of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, or gag a fired FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds. My search for the truth led me to discover a wide range of compromising links between government agencies, organized crime and corporate profits. These links included activities such as nuclear proliferation, narcotics profiteering, arms sales and global terrorism. Labeling these connections "serpentine links", I documented all of this in the first and second editions of American Judas. During my research in the summer of 2004, I also came across evidence of conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks that the Kean Commission set up to investigate the truth had either missed or deliberately omitted. It was also during this time that I learned about the concept of Peak Oil and the possibility that such a watershed event in the history of human civilization might be imminent. While I found these huge revelations fascinating, at the time they appeared to be disconnected.

All of that changed for me when I read Michael Ruppert's speech at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on August 31, 2004 and purchased his book Crossing the Rubicon the following month. Here was someone who had been researching all of the issues I had, for much longer than I had, and found a connective thread in all of them. What I called "serpentine links" is what he used in connecting the dots to create what he calls a "map" of the way the world works. In later years, after more research, I came to appreciate the credit he gave to Peter Dale Scott in defining this world through the term Deep Politics. But at the time I was astounded by what Ruppert unveiled: Peak Oil was the underlying financial motive for orchestrating 9/11. Coincidentally, the "maestro" behind that orchestration was the same dark figure that I had pinned in my American Judas investigation for orchestrating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame: Dick Cheney.

I don't know Mike Ruppert. I've only met him once, when he was gracious enough to autograph my copy of A Presidential Energy Policy at the November 13 screening of Collapse. For all I know he could be guilty of all the terrible things his critics, and they are legion on the internet, have said about him. So why do I like Mike? More often than not, I find that his research corroborates my own understanding of where our country has been and the direction we are headed. While I may not agree with his predictions about when certain events may occur, I agree with him about 90% of the time about what is coming down the pike and that we need to be prepared for it in any way we can.

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With that in mind, I want to recommend the DVD of Collapse, which was just released on Tuesday, June 15. The movie really holds up upon second viewing. The bonus features do a wonderful job of enhancing the experience, both in the deleted scenes from the movie and the 2010 update of Mike Ruppert filmed a few months ago. Watch it and make up your own mind about what he has to say. I can't think of anything better to say about Collapse than what Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert had to say about it: "I think you owe it to yourself to see it". Considering that only one previous time in his four decade career of film reviews has Ebert ever said this about a movie, and that film, An Inconvenient Truth, went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary, that is about as high as praise can get.

ON EDIT: If you've got an hour to kill, this lecture that Ruppert gave in Vermont on May 13 is an excellent update.

2 comments:

Tanya @ TeenAutism said...

Interesting. I'd like to see Collapse also. When was Mike in Ashland?

Robert Paulsen said...

He was in Ashland in 2006. He had moved his now defunct company From The Wilderness there and shortly afterward his offices were burglarized and computers smashed. He now lives in Culver City.