[AlCzervik]

Denial Stops Here - From 9/11 To Peak Oil and Beyond

I was really annoyed by the first 15-20 minutes of this disc. There was absolutely no substance, and it was just Mike talking about what a helpful and influential service he provides. I almost threw out the disc.

Early on, you get a little review of his thoughts on 9/11, which might not be necessary since he has a whole separate DVD about those events. Still, it's interesting for those who haven't heard him speak about it.

There is a quick analysis of the peak oil basics. The majority of the presentation is about the coming geopolitical implications. Mike gets rocking and rolling here and does a great job of telling you what's coming. He can really scare the crap out of you while getting his point across. The presentation just flies by as Mike spins his way around the globe. He really does some amazing work here. It will be interesting to see if his position that nothing will happen with Iran holds up to reality. He said if we have any type of traditional invasion, all of his preparation advice may be for naught and to soon basically kiss life as we know it goodbye. Yes, it is Ruppert hyperbole, but I think he's right that an invasion of Iran would really hit home big time at a minimum.

Mike wraps up with some keen insight on money issues. Then, he finishes on a very positive note about the hope for local solutions. While the majority of the presentation will leave you depressed and wanting to get drunk and forget about life, the conclusion raises you up somewhat and moves the viewer in a positive direction.

All in all, I'd say it was worth the $25 spent. There is nothing really new or earth shattering for Ruppert fans or peak oil geeks, but I think this would be a great complement to The End of Suburbia for peak oil newbies. As I said, the beginning is atrocious, but it really picks up after that. It is a long presentation, and can easily be broken up into segmented viewings. One last thing, the quality of some of the audio and video isn't great at times because some of it was filmed by amateurs. Just turn up the volume and you'll be fine. Grade: B+.

[Bandidoz]

I've got to like it more over time. Skipping the material at the beginning and the end makes it more watchable (Start at "More Elephants coming at us"). This is what I thought after first watching it:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')'d give it 2/5, maybe 3/5 ( http://www.copvcia.com/ )

I've seen a lot of critiscism of Ruppert recently - and this film does him no favours by appearing to be very self-indulgent. In short, it's "Crossing the Rubicon" for people with a short attention span.

In Rubicon there was a reasonably progressive flow. However this is like a disjointed scrapbook of video clips accompanied with insipid backing music. The material is collated from several presentations, with mixed audio quality. In some parts the interleaving is almost at the sentence level, making it difficult to follow.

Some sentences are duplicated, and in places the topics jump around, most noticeably where his rebuttal to the "The Stone Age didn't run out of stones" argument is developing, to then jump into "activists should not be poor". Cringeworthy.

The second time I watched it, it seemed better.

The best sections are "China" and "Permaculture and Climate", which also seemed to be the most coherent, as well as providing some new information.

There is a lot of useful information, snippets, and a few gems such as.....
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'f')or me the issue is no longer about saving the world
the world doesn't want to be saved, forget it
I'm here to save you

[linlithgowoil]

i cant take any more of ruppert really. he really is the loony fringe of peak oil and he is almost single handedly destroying the credibility of peak oil claims.

9/11 was not a conspiracy. it is pretty easy to come up with some facts that look like a conspiracy but most of the time its just plain old simple incompetence.

9/11 was also totally unrelated to peak oil, but related to the hatred of America and its foreign policy by angry muslims from the middle east, which policy itself is certainly guided by the securing of oil - so i suppose you could say it is very indirectly linked.

$25 for a dvd though? bloody hell.

[backstop]

Linlithgowoil -

I think you miss the point about Ruppert's work.

Not only has he done a great deal more than almost everyone on this site to bring PO to public attention, he has also specifically nixed the development of fringe opinion falling into the belief that it is mere Oil Lobby spin.

With regard to 11/9, it seems to me obvious that it was a conspiracy by the sheer number of aircraft hitting key buildings all on one morning.

The question is surely over to what extent this was an inside job.

While there are a thousand strands of evidence being ignored by TPTB,
two in particular appeal to me.

1/. The Taliban's Foreign Affairs Minister, appalled at the prospect of predictable retaliation, sent his senior advisor to Pakistahn to meet with the US ambassador and a very senior CIA rep, where he warned them directly of the impending attack.
The ambassador is on record as responding to press questions about this "We get so many warnings . . . "

2/. In the 50 years or 18,250 days that airliners have been pouring into US airspace and Al Quaeda's merciless fundamentalist struggle has been waged,
it was the one day that a US vice-president had unprecedented personal control of a massive air defence excercize - that removed fighter cover from New York & Washington - that the planners chose to attack.

That's 1 day in 18,250 days. Quite some odds eh ?

What Ruppert's logic may be for integrating talk of 11/9 with PO I should be interested to hear.

Regards,

Backstop

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('linlithgowoil', 'i') cant take any more of ruppert really. he really is the loony fringe of peak oil and he is almost single handedly destroying the credibility of peak oil claims.

.

[stu]

Or maybe the guy's trying to be logical Matt.

I've read three books on 9/11 and have yet to be totally convinced.

Yes there maybe a lot of suspicious things if you want to believe they're suspicious but some of the claims are ridiculous. What about the Vreeland claim?

Link

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')uppert and Vreeland assert that Canadian court records back up Vreeland. But court decisions in his case have questioned his credibility. In one, Judge Archie Campbell observed, "There is not even a threshold showing of any air of reality to the vast conspiracy alleged by the applicant." Judge John Macdonald wrote, "I find that the Applicant is an imaginative and manipulative person who has little regard for the truth.... the testimony that he developed the theory for anti-Star Wars technology in 1986, based on high school courses, personal interest and perhaps a law clerk's course and a 'Bachelor of Political Science' degree is simply incredible." Nor did he he believe Vreeland was a spy or that he had smuggled documents out of Russia.

[backstop]

Stu -

thanks for the outline but at face value I simply cannot see how it holds water.

First, if the invasion was "to control resources" why the utter incoherence in occupation planning - why the gift to the insurgency of 390,000 kgs of high and ultra-high explosives, ideal for IEDs, why the focus on "democracy" rather than just a new puppet tyrant to replace the one that went bad, . . . . etc

Second, Oil exports have declined since the invasion, and I see no redeployment of forces to effectively counter that decline.

Third, America would be the loser by any order to its oil companies to ship the stuff home and end its sale on the open market. If, ignoring points 1/. & 2/. , the goal were to ensure its provision to the open market, then the choice of policy towards Iran seems utterly incongruous.

I rather wish Ruppert would spare the time to discuss these issues on this site. Busy man no doubt.

regards,

Backstop

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('backstop', 'S')tu -

thanks for the outline but at face value I simply cannot see how it holds water.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')irst, if the invasion was "to control resources" why the utter incoherence in occupation planning - why the gift to the insurgency of 390,000 kgs of high and ultra-high explosives, ideal for IEDs, why the focus on "democracy" rather than just a new puppet tyrant to replace the one that went bad, . . . . etc

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')'ve read three books on 9/11 and have yet to be totally convinced.

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Search FTW a bit deeper and you will see that Ruppert advertises books about all sorts of conspiracies.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/store/index.shtml

This therefore provides a bridge between those who believe in the New World Order and Peak Oil.

[ubercynicmeister]

I won't be buying Mike Ruppert's DVD, not because I don't believe there's a whole lot more to "9/11" than the official version, but because I think the "whole lot more" is much more pedestrian: simple cluelessness on the part of those who really don't know, didn't want to know, couldn't care less, and were too caught up in their own greed to do anything except adopt the ostrich position.

They got their kick in the rear end for their troubles, too, and the only thing I think was bad about it was that the "powers that be" weren't the victims, instead of thousands of quite powerless "ordinary" people. Think about it: if the entire Legislative Assembly and all members of the House of Review and Head Of Government of your own country were found dead tomorrow morning, would you cry, or celebrate?

Conspiracies do happen: the way the CIA runs most of the world's drug cartels as a way of financing it's callow schemes is one of 'em. But "9/11" can be accounted for by what we've seen as "operational policy" since then, and by business as well as most Western Governments: a consistant underestimation of the abilities of "the baddies"; a consistant ignoring of the activities of "the baddies" until someone gets clobbered; a consistant dismissal of all concerns about "the baddies" from one's underlings ; a consistant arrogance and refusal to learn from the past (the past is dead, says one economist, "we've made recessions obsolete"); a consistant and demonstrably pig-headed clinging to a "pollyanna" optimistic "upbeat" laugh-at-troubles "seeing the wolrd through rose-coloured-glasses" and utter contempt for anyone who might be seen as even the slightest bit "contrarian".

This is evidenced by the way they talk about the latest business calamity, the latest bit of bad news from the Environment, the latest bit of disasterous news about the "war on terror": keep telling everyone the positive side of things, never allow anyone to "talk something down". Ayn Rand (Virtue of selfishness) has more to do with this than Niccolo Machiavelli, or Lord Shang (who makes Machiavelli look harmless).

Peak Oil is being treated the same way, where everyone has to dismiss any talk, however slight, of any troubles with any of the energy supplies on this planet. Or You'll Be Talked Down To. Sneered at. "Denile" (there's that Egyptian River, again!) has little or nothing to do with this. This is more like an indulgent Aunt being presented with a precocious child who has made ignorant suggestions about this-or-that topic that the Aunt considers herself to be more informed about. The Aunt smiles and belittles the kid, if she wants 'em to shut up. She would not bother with "denile" any more than she'd consider taking the kid on in an intellectual discussion/ debate.

Especially if the kid's right.

Think about it.

[backstop]

Matt -

My questions were shaped to gut the resource-war hypothesis, and plainly didn't express my views, as you've landed up nowhere near. Sorry bout that !

While I certainly see the logic of the coterie-profits hypothesis, and I think it would be difficult to assemble an evidence-based refutation, I think there is a further motivation in play that reduces it to a matter just of incidental profiterring.

The drift of US politics has for practically a century been about expanding the hegemony of US asset capitalism, against which the ideology of communism has been the constant adversary.

We're now in a position where, apart from Kerula, the only avowedly communist state happens also to be the one rising rival superpower, China.
Thus I suggest that Cheyney's utterly consistent escalation of tensions around oil, HAS to relate to a strategy regarding China.

The most obvious such strategy seems to me an update of the Reagan/Weinberger approach transposed to Peking, namely:

"We'll push them up a growth curve until they go bust."

The mechanics are arguably :
1/. to pour in $ investment in exchange for cheap tat supplies to the US;
2/. to stress the system for a few years by a steadily escalating oil-price;
3/. to spike the global oil price and perhaps disrupt supply to crunch the Chinese economy into sudden hard recession;
4/. to topple by popular protest a purportedly incompetent, corrupt and bloody-handed ruling elite and replace it with something more to Washington's taste.

It is possible of course that this scenario has been and may yet play out by sheer accident, but given the stakes in play, doesn't that seem rather unlikely ?

regards,

Backstop

[Bandidoz]

This thread has gone off topic.....
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('stu', 'L')ogically this sounds ridiculous because why would a country go to this much trouble for a finite resource?

[stu]

Bandidoz is right, this thread has gone off-topic.

Whilst I applaud Rupperts efforts to educate people about PO, doing it in the context of a 9/11 conspiracy just gives ammo to the people who label PO as cultish. About a year ago I might have given some of the theorys a lot of credibility but now some of them make me laugh. This video , for example, asks us to believe that the planes were aimed at the exact point where explosives were placed and that these explosives were detonated split seconds before the impact. This is on top of explaining away the fate of all the passengers on the Pentagon plane if it was actually a missile that hit it.

Matt- You seem to be asking me to believe that Bush and Cheney were paid money by Exxon or Chevron or whichever oil company to cook up a reason to invade Iraq just so that they could get there hands on oil that was otherwise unobtainable. Considering the war is costing a billion dollars a week this theory doesn't seem realistic to me becuase it would involve paying off a hell of a lot more people then Bush and Cheney.

Yes there are some elements of the 9/11 story that seem suspect, what happened to the CCTV footage of the pentagon crash for example, but when I think logically about it I just don't buy Rupperts version of events. I'm aware you may ""worship at the temple of Ruppert" and you could possibly trace info from your site to the State of the Union address (Barlett quotes LATOC, Bartlett admits to meeting with Bush for an hour and discussing PO etc) you get the picture. My point is that if people were to read between the lines of your website or even glance at FTW and believe what they see then the serious discussion about PO is gone because straightaway somebody will be in the mindset of a conspiracy theorist and will thus embark on the discussion from that angle. This is counter productive to serious issues that matter like production rates and reserves etc. I wonder how many people have been put off the topic because of the conspiracy angle? DVD's like this may inform but at the same time hinder the discussion on PO and it's implications.

This is an issue that should be getting the same coverage as climate change and not one that is constantly being linked to conspiracy nuts.

A final thought.... Part of the storyline of the bestselling book The DaVinci Code is based on the writings of an extreme right wing nut from the 50's who faked a document which claimed to show who all the leaders of the Priory of Sion were.

Most conspiracies involving the NWO stem from a document known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document has consistently been proven as fake in numerous courts around the world.
Link

What I'm saying is that it is very possible to put together a cache of information and angle it in a certain way so as to convince many people of your beliefs. Even if they are far out. That's how I basically see this DVD.

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Matt- You seem to be asking me to believe that Bush and Cheney were paid money by Exxon or Chevron or whichever oil company to cook up a reason to invade Iraq just so that they could get there hands on oil that was otherwise unobtainable. Considering the war is costing a billion dollars a week this theory doesn't seem realistic to me becuase it would involve paying off a hell of a lot more people then Bush and Cheney.

[MattSavinar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')y point is that if people were to read between the lines of your website or even glance at FTW and believe what they see then the serious discussion about PO is gone because straightaway somebody will be in the mindset of a conspiracy theorist and will thus embark on the discussion from that angle.


This is counter productive to serious issues that matter like production rates and reserves etc. I wonder how many people have been put off the topic because of the conspiracy angle?

[Jake_old]

And I've just watched it and its a good DVD.

Ruppert is wrong about some stuff, like his idea that demand destruction could in some way be instigated. The evidence provided was something like PNAC. They talk about demand destruction but it in no way means they are instigating this event. Is that a logical fallacy?

He makes these leaps of faith a lot, but I think he believes what he says.

I'm certainly a fan of ruppert again and I at least agree that TBTB don't give a damn about ordinary people.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MattSavinar', 'I')n order to be totally convinced, I think you would need a trial complete with testimony, documents that have yet to be released, etc.

That is never going to happen. In criminal law, you have a probable cause hearing prior to ever going to trial. At that point, there is no jury. The only question the judge is looking to answer is "Is there enough evidence that a trial is warranted." The prosecution does not have to totally convince him the accussed is guilty. Just that there is probable cause to believe a crime took place.

I think that there is enough evidence out there from the popular 9/11 books and publications to get a trial at this point.

See what I mean? You're asking the Ruppert's of the world to do what is essntially impossible for a prosecuter in real life, which is prove something beyond a resaonable doubt sans discovery.

[stu]

Matt

It's not so much that I'm afraid of being labelled a loony (I couldn't care less what people think of me) it's about how to approach the issue of oil depletion.

Do we inform people of the basic issues and implications of PO in a rational, logical manner and offer solutions, or do we start blathering on about government conspiracies and alleging that 9/11 was a cover up to lead us into a new dark age?

[CrudeAwakening]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('stu', ' ')(bold added)
Logically this sounds ridiculous because why would a country go to this much trouble for a finite resource? .