[eastbay]

I would have deleted the cussing. It added nothing.

And the ding-a-ling monkey thing. Goodness! That would definitely have been snipped out too. That was so manufactured. No such silly thing ever occurred and all the viewers know it.

Aside from that, it was an excellent first-timer movie.

[pablonite]

The man just seemed to crack up in 2003-04. What do you think the most likely explanation?

Saw this last night and yeah, it looks like all the doom is taking a toll on this guy. For some reason every time he lit a smoke is started reminding me of that Gnarls Barkley, Crazy?

And when you’re out there, without care, yeah I was out off touch.
But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough, I just knew too much.

He needs to settle down and grab a day job for a year or so, get laid too probably. He did great work!
Glad to hear he is kicking back plucking a guitar, hope he makes his rent!

[shortonsense]

Does anyone know where we can donate him some cash?

He has his paypal information and address on his blog for checks and donations and whatnot.

Here is an address for when he was begging for October rent money.

http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/2009/09/from-mike.html

[mos6507]

all the doom is taking a toll on this guy.

Which is understandable, I think. I don't think it's possibly to take doom lightly unless you are in denial of it (as you are with GW at least).

[admin]

SPOILER: It's 2 hrs of Mike Ruppert talking..

http://peakoil.com/wp-content/uploads/collapse.avi




Collapse, directed by Chris Smith, is an American documentary film exploring the theories, writings and life story of controversial author Michael Ruppert. Collapse premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2009 to positive reviews.

Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who describes himself as an investigative reporter and radical thinker, has authored books on the events of the September 11 attacks and of energy issues. His detractors call him a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist.

Director Smith interviewed Ruppert over the course of fourteen hours in an interrogation like setting in an abandoned warehouse basement meat locker near downtown Los Angeles. Ruppert’s interview was shot over five days throughout March and April of 2009. The filmmakers distilled these interviews down to this 82 minute monologue with archival footage interspersed as illustration.

The title refers to Ruppert’s belief that unsustainable energy and financial policies have led to an ongoing collapse of modern industrial civilization.

[Tanada]

The whole movie is still up for free on YouTube, click this link or just search for it. Hard to believe he died just five years after this was filmed. If you have never seen this I recommend you watch it. It immediately predates the 'fracking miracle' that brought on the current lower prices, but that doesn't make the predictions totally invalid, just premature.

https://youtu.be/q5TpVfGbEME

[KaiserJeep]

This was the movie that sparked my interest in the topic of Peak Oil.

However, I have to point out that when he made this film, and for years before and years after, Michael Ruppert was mentally ill. He confidently predicted collapse again and again, and repeatedly relocated among like-minded individuals, and waited for collapse to occur. When again and again, it did not occur as predicted, he gave in to his despair and died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

The message is, do not get too involved with waiting for collapse, thinking about collapse, and predicting the time and manner of the collapse. Having thought about this for a few years, I now believe that there never will be any event that one would recognise as a "collapse". There are 7.4+ billion individuals upon the surface of this planet, and almost all of them don't believe that collapse will occur for any reason whatsoever. In the parlance of computer software, that is the default position, especially when most humans don't even understand that they could be believing in Doom. So in their ignorance, they get up every morning and go to work, quietly plugging away, no matter what their personal circumstances, at making the wheels of human civilization keep turning. Their efforts constitute a massive amount of momentum that cannot be denied, the Earth abides, civilization continues, and there simply will not ever be a blighted landscape with "Mad Max" walking around in it, fighting cannibal biker outlaws. While you are mourning that tragedy, I should note that one should not be expecting zombies either.

Now I would recommend that each of you read Kunstler's words in his short book The Long Emergency. So sorry, but there is no movie version, with a terribly sincere and concerned and even evangelistic prophet of doom like Mike Ruppert. But as they say, that's the whole point. Most likely, Doom isn't happening for the human race, aka the Kudzu apes.

Instead, after the oil peak (which I personally believe happened in 2008) there will be a centuries-long, gradual power-down, accompanied by lots of shrill speechifying on the part of politicians of all political persuasions, as they all promise to bring back the good times of cheap fossil energy, if only we would vote for them.

We ourselves, and our children and their children, will lead lives of increasing discomfort, that will for each human bloodline one day cross over into something better described as quiet desperation, as the age of cheap oil ends. This is already happening for Third World countries in Asia and Africa. As they die, the First World will slowly come to grips with new and less energy-intensive lifestyles. Some bloodlines will survive, and some will quietly perish. Think of it as evolution in action.

We will survive as a species, and some will even prosper in an age where energy is more expensive. There will be many fewer humans, and each survivor will be haunted by the images of mass suffering, recorded in bit-perfect digital images and video, for all time, to illustrate what happens when one species conquers the Earth and subjugates all others.

So sorry to break the news to you, but simply because you have the means and the time and inclination to be reading my words, most likely you are going to live, and whether or not you want to keep going to work in your nasty-smelling city, or retire into rural splendor, is a decision you do get to make, unless your preference is to postpone such a decision until one day you just die in place from old age.

Again, sorry to be so blunt about it, but we are most of us citizens of the First World going to make it, aside from the quirks of fate. There is even room in our sorry lives for some joy and a string of Merry Christmas's to come.

[Tanada]

I often try to convince fast crashers that collapse is not a singular event but a process. I am not sure I ever convinced a single one because fast crash is a mindset that holds attraction for some individual.

If you had grabbed an average Roman living in Rome fifty years after the sack in the mid 400's they would have told you something along these lines. "Sure things are bad today and we are not as powerful as we were, but one day soon things are going to turn around and we will have glories greater than anything in the past."

The important thing to realize is, they sincerely believed that, for the most part. I can sympathize with exactly where they were mentally because I look at the closed bridge about three miles from my house and I say to myself one day soon the township/county/state will replace that small bridge and traffic will be able to resume travel over that obstacle and resume its former pathway.

Other than the fast crash mindset humans are predisposed to expect things to not get any worse tomorrow than they were today, and if they do get worse we mentally picture the situation as a temporary aberration.

Collapse is a process, it will have rapid places where the fast crashers will be ready to bug out and it will have long plateaus possibly even with a few improvements locally that help temporarily. But our species is extremely adaptable, that is why under absolutely primitive technological conditions we occupied ecological niches from the high Arctic all the way to the southern tip of South America. If some boat had been shipwrecked in Antarctica before it was discovered by Europeans there are fair odds they would have found an Antarctic culture living there that mirrored the Inuit and other tribes living in the High Arctic. Antarctica is the only serious land mass humans did not 'inhabit' when they were still technologically primitive but the main reason is not the climate, it is the fact that the passage from South America to the Antarctic Peninsula is broad and treacherous even with a modern steel hulled ship. If you are willing to live on Penguins and Seals and Walrus and whatever Wales you can catch you could build a viable community in Antarctica the same way humans built communities in the harshest conditions in the North. In this case the penguins and seals lucked out because nobody survived the passage until the the 1800's and even then it was very risky with a lot of lives lost in the exploration.

[Shaved Monkey]

If you had grabbed an average Roman living in Rome fifty years after the sack in the mid 400's they would have told you something along these lines. "Sure things are bad today and we are not as powerful as we were, but one day soon things are going to turn around and we will have glories greater than anything in the past."

They just needed to elect someone who would make Rome great again

[Ibon]

In the parlance of computer software, that is the default position, especially when most humans don't even understand that they could be believing in Doom. So in their ignorance, they get up every morning and go to work, quietly plugging away, no matter what their personal circumstances,

The default position is that we are sentient and mortal and all the imbalances our species has caused really stems from this fact. There is no other explanation as to why we so willingly submit to living unconscious lives.

[KaiserJeep]

In the parlance of computer software, that is the default position, especially when most humans don't even understand that they could be believing in Doom. So in their ignorance, they get up every morning and go to work, quietly plugging away, no matter what their personal circumstances,

The default position is that we are sentient and mortal and all the imbalances our species has caused really stems from this fact. There is no other explanation as to why we so willingly submit to living unconscious lives.

Certainly there are other explanations. Most people do not possess two wits to rub together. Most of the rest navigate through existence in an unconscious state by preference. The few of us remaining exist in a constant state of total amazement at what is happening around us, the tiny minority who are both aware and who care.