RIP RUPpert: Back to the Wilderness.

A Voice from the Wilderness has been Silenced.

Reading this morning of Mike Ruppert's death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, reminded me of Hunter Thompson's similar fate, and made me pause from  my usual internet meanderings to stop and reflect on the man who inflamed my mind into starting, among other things, this blog. 

On my desk , sandwiched between Taleb's, "Fooled by Randomness" and Kindleberger's, "Manias, Panics, and Crashes" sits Mikes seminal volume, "Crossing The Rubicon". It has such a place of prominence because I shared with Mr. Ruppert, who started the first site I ever subscribed to, "From The Wilderness", the, what to us was the self-evident, idea that oil was not just another commodity. It was an energy source as vital to the running of the modern economy, military, and State as the sun is to plants in providing the full spectrum domination of the planet from which photosynthesis is derived, and without which all life perishes. Which also, if the theory of the fossil derivation of oil we all subscribe to, is correct (there is a much-maligned alternative definition, referred to as abiotic oil, which posits that oil is instead produced by internal processes of the earth) means that we all live on the byproducts of the sunlight that gave rise to prehistoric biota, and is therefore a gift, or curse, that spans eons of time before being presented to mankind, with unforeseen consequences that, as we now know, wreak havoc with the natural planetary checks and balances as it collapses time, bridging, Jurassic Park-like, the millions of years between the carboniferous and the present, to ultimately visit upon us the conditions of prehistoric time, as it unleashes a Pandora's Box of furies along with its wonders.

But Mike was more down to earth about the unctuous underpinnings of our modern existence, and what CTR is mostly about is Peak Oil, Corruption of government as the very highest levels, and the complicity of the Bush administration, mostly in the person of Dickhead Cheney, in the horrific crimes committed on 9/11/2001.

In 2004, long before the rest of us were aware of it, and there are still millions in denial of it to this day, he wrote (p451) that "our government and economy operates as a system of organized crime", one of the main theses of this blog. So it is no wonder that he had such a contempt for the snakepit of crooks that ran it. 

But unlike me, Mike Ruppert had the backing and the expertise, and the "fire in his belly' to dig up and document the many pertinent facts, that are still ignored, regarding the many co-incidents of that day and the many links and intertwined ties between the Bushies, big oil, the Saudis, Pakistanis, banking, and money. Piles of money. Money flowing in such torrents as to take your breath away. But not in torrents to the economy, but instead redirected via such institutions as BCCI, Halliburton, Carlysle Group, Enron, Delta Oil, tax havens in the Cayman Islands, Unocal, Bechtel, and the CIA, into the pockets of the notorious crime syndicate and their friends that had ensconced themselves in the seat of Power.  

The motive for their crimes, and the justification for their actions Mike hypothesized to be Peak Oil: 

"At some point between 2000 and 2007, world oil production reaches its peak; from that point on, every barrel of oil is going to be harder to find, more expensive to recover, and more valuable to those who recover and control it. Dick Cheney was well aware of the coming Peak Oil crisis at least as early as 1999, and 9/11 provided the pretext for the series of energy wars that Cheney stated, "will not end in our lifetime and began with  the so-called "war on terror" which is actually a war for the world's last remaining hydrocarbon reserves".

He goes on to state that:

 "We live in a global economic system based on endless growth, and that growth is only possible with endless hydrocarbons to burn. Demand for oil and gas is increasing at staggering rates; after peak, there will be demand that simply cannot be met, and energy prices will rise inexorably."  

The peak to which he refers was indeed reached, it is generally agreed, in 2005. From there oil prices escalated until in 2008 they also peaked, at $147.00/bbl, crashing the economy as it exposed bets that could never be covered and fraud for which none of the perpetrators would ever be prosecuted. But because one company, Halliburton, flush with billions from its non-competitive contracts awarded to it by its CEO-in-Chief in the White House, was drilling in the Bakken in North Dakota (again ...at $11/bbl, the price when the junta took office, it simply wasn't profitable. The real plan of the attack on Iraq being, not to GET their oil, but to keep it in the ground so as to constrain supplies, raising its price and THEN redeploy Halliburton technology to "save the day"), the Eagle Ford formation in Texas, and the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, augmenting conventional reserves with tight oil, the fumes of the oil-age, which keeps us limping along in the manner we do today while our leaders pretend that our economy is "in recovery", as though it simply had an alcoholic binge from which it will stagger on to greater heights: it won't.

Even though many deny we ever reached peak oil production, claiming it to be a fiction (Cambridge's Cera's Yergin being the most infamous), the actuality we are at today reflects the prognostications made in 2004 by Mr. Ruppert almost to the dollar: 

"The resulting economic catastrophe may see oil hit $100 per barrel before the end of this decade. Oil not only keeps us warm and moves our cars, it is used to make all plastics and is, together with natural gas, the most important ingredient keeping modern agriculture afloat. It is a little known fact that for every 1 calorie of food energy produced, 10 calories of hydrocarbons are consumed."

We eat oil. 

Without cheap oil, billions of people will freeze or starve and unfortunately, there is no combination of renewable energy sources that can replace oil and gas consumption without massive conservation efforts that are nowhere in sight. (They still aren't).

Cheney knew about this.

There are no national plans for conservation in America. As Dick Cheney has stated, "The American way of life is not negotiable."  (A phrase our current President picked up on and re-iterated, together with his speech made while accepting the Nobel peace prize in which he re-iterated Cheney's threat that War (this time to keep the peace, as European leaders uncomfortably squirmed in their seats) will not end in our lifetime, revealing that his so-called "Hope" was Hype). Many industry experts have been speaking to the reality of Peak Oil for some time. One of those experts - perhaps the most prominent in the world - was in Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG).

Just four days after Dick Cheney became Vice President he convened the NEPDG.  Among the experts whose opinion Cheney paid for (with taxpayer dollars) was Matthew Simmons, one of the most respected energy investment bankers in the world. Simmons has been speaking out about Peak Oil for years, and there is no question that the urgent story of Peak Oil is what he told Cheney's NEPDG. 

The content of the NEPDG documentation has been illegally withheld from the American public with a rubber stamp of approval from the Supreme Court. FTW has always contended that the deepest, darkest secrets of 9/11 are in those documents. That's why they've been guarded so tightly."

As revealed in Rachel Madcow's documentary on the Iraq War, Cheney chided the Democratic opposition for the Presidency in 2000 for not having any such plan. But what the documentary, nor Ms Maddow, nor any Democrat or journalist bother to point out is that, from the Republican point of view, held to this day, is that "planning" by, of all things, The Federal Government, smacks of well, planning, and that makes it Central Planning, which is a hallmark of Communism, and therefore evil. Had the Democrats put forth an Energy Plan before Cheney the RNC would have ripped them a new one for being  Dirty Commies (Washington DC's maybe?). But an energy plan put together by private individuals for their own profit who get invited right into a secret meeting with the Vice President to negotiate how big their piece'll be? No problem.

I bring up the above factoid to illustrate the complicity of the Democrats and liberal journalism in the many-faceted attacks on our freedoms that was the central topic of both CTR and FTW, including TIA, which the revelations made by Snowden proved the existence of, and PROMIS software, which Ruppert warned about that: 

"lays out the connections between the providers of  PROMIS software (stolen from the Inslaw corporation in the 1980s by the US Justice Department and others) and the network of terrorist financing (sustained with US blessing) that has pervaded U.S covert operations for years (any who doubt this nexus still exists should peruse Seymour Hersch's article in The London Review of Books about the Sarin gas attack  in Syria and the covert channels by which they obtained it). That deep-political relationship is at its strongest in the Bush administration, whose Saudi and Pakistani ties go back decades. 

Dick Cheney, James Baker, GHWB, Dubya, and the people in and around the once and future American ruling junta have financially live links to the Muslim Brotherhood milieu that formed part of BCCI and, more recently, al Qaeda (this is also the context of a fascinatingly influential relationship among Kermit Roosevelt, GHWB, and Adnan Khashoggi). Nazis and their admirers are the third piece in the triangle, connected to Islamists since the Muslim Brotherhood's creation in 1928 by Hitler ally Hasam al-Banna, and connected to the Bush clan through decades of interdependence with American oil and intelligence elites - including the Rockefellers (Standard Oil) and the Harrimans (Brown Bros. Harriman / Kellogg Brown and Root / Halliburton)."

All of which reminds us of what we should know about criminal justice but seem to have forgotten, along with President Obama, who thinks we should just "forget about the past" as we "conquer the future",  but which Mike reminds us of in "Crossing the Rubicon". Which is that "criminals who are not brought to justice will commit more crimes". But since "governments have been turned into franchise operations of corporations" justice has been bought and paid for, and whereas Mike thought bringing this information to the public was of vital concern in order to turn back this tide, his suicide, methinks, was an act of despair as he realized that the only reaction ever to be wrung from the American public despite all  his work was a simple shrug and tacit capitulation to the fact that "That's The Way it Is".