From the Wilderness
A fun website, I peek at occasionally:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
I just read the founder, Mike Ruppert, left the country a month ago after a break-in at his office:
http://copvcia.com/free/ww3/081606_burning_bridge.shtml
I listened to a 1997 speech he offered tracing the CIA involvement in drug running, apparently to fund their under-the-table activities.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7009998324250484369&q=Mike+Ruppert&hl=en
A strong mind certainly, and I listened to him not necessarily to accept his truths, but more to evaluate his mental state. Impossible to tell anything, but I heard a mind determined to connect the dots, and my skeptic, not wanting to contradict him, but just thinking perhaps he's batting 90% truth, perhaps 10%, but whatever the incorrect hypothesis fraction, myself that's where I WORRY, and I would be more likely to PROTECT my mental sanity and say, maybe, I don't know, rather than accept.
I must imagine it takes a lot of mental and emotional energy to hold the bigger picture in view, always holding up provisional truth, building a house of cards always one piece away from taking him in the completely wrong direction.
I wonder how many SMARTER people could take his intellect and passion and misdirect it for their own aims, and how much he could become an unintended tool. That conspiracy world is too much for me, and I'll admit that. I'm a skeptic as a self defense, not because I'm not gullible. I take people at their word, and I have a hard time believing people openly lie. Sure I see the old "shame" thing - people lie when their egos are in danger of bruising, but for greater power? Yes, I believe it, but only abstractly, not in the case of any individual person apparently speaking their truth.
Well, I also know there's mental illness as well, and smart people, good at connecting the dots, they use their talents too well, and can't turn it off when it is hurting their mental balance. Heck, I can qualify there, except for a little sleep and conforting forgetfulness to life's little existential crises.
I connected to Mike most through the "peak oil" movement, although he "joined" that one somewhat late in his game. He became a spokesman for them merely for the forcefulness of his mind and passion that something is afoot, and he was a believer.
Now with oil prices comfortably in the low $60's, the short term fears are reduced, and reasonable doubt can return to the reasonable - that probably "peak oil" isn't quite here yet. WHILE we know it's still coming, WE, those believers that the free lunch must end. Just because the sun rose yesterday, doesn't mean it'll always rise like we expect. We who wait, and while we wait we read the signs, we listen to the forecasts and wonder when.
My "grounding" if I have ANY, is mostly on good fortune so far in life, so I'll let it carry me along - sorry Mike - and try to live reasonably responsibly with my good fortune now. I accept it could be taken away, and I accept MY OWN mental stability is at stake, so I'm glad for a little corner of the world to care for.
Certainly Mike's world view is disturbing to me. I can consider power corrupts and all that. At least my money isn't too much supporting the crazy debt economy. Could drug profits really be supporting unground "shadow government" organizations? Well, I suppose no worse than underground "mob" doing the same. Both focus wealth in ways that can corrupt.
Poor Mike sees the "honest American" as complicit in the crimes of his government, for not standing up for truth, for not risking his own comfort and security to help expose the corruptions around us. Certainly his moral arguments are true to all, in cases like Nazi Germany and the concentration camps, and may come to that in American herself, sooner than we could imagine.
Heck if I know what I'd do if a hidden police state slowly took over, and people disappeared, with just enough grease to keep us from speaking up to our little truths.
Certainly I accept a government that can declare human beings as "unlawful combatants" and lock them up for years without a trial or access to communicating with their friends and family. That's not a good sign that we're heading down a good road.
One thought about Mike, heading off to Venezuela, I wonder if he is perhaps an idealist, to imagine that there's less corruption or injustice there. It is easier to find "new friends" than to trust them, or be any safer to know more of their ways of expressing power.
I think Mike would have been better off to abandon the conspiracy world, and work with the "realocalization" movement to build a smaller world of dependency where trust could be earned through time rather than through merely common enemies. Perhaps he even wanted to step down into that simpler world, but his powerful mind couldn't let go of the bigger picture he's spent a lifetime trying to sort out.
I don't know what's true, and I don't know how much corruption can be brought to light fast enough that justice can be served. I'm glad there's people who will fight the good fight. I am yet perhaps like Mike, seeing the system as the problem, but fearing the "solution" may seem too small for our imagination - subsistence farming, some children to remember us, and a moment in the sunlight. It seems a small destiny when we can imagine bigger things.
So we're all corrupted by our ambition perhaps, those of us who want to see the invisible world around us and know the future, and know what costs it will bear for our excesses.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
I just read the founder, Mike Ruppert, left the country a month ago after a break-in at his office:
http://copvcia.com/free/ww3/081606_burning_bridge.shtml
I listened to a 1997 speech he offered tracing the CIA involvement in drug running, apparently to fund their under-the-table activities.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7009998324250484369&q=Mike+Ruppert&hl=en
A strong mind certainly, and I listened to him not necessarily to accept his truths, but more to evaluate his mental state. Impossible to tell anything, but I heard a mind determined to connect the dots, and my skeptic, not wanting to contradict him, but just thinking perhaps he's batting 90% truth, perhaps 10%, but whatever the incorrect hypothesis fraction, myself that's where I WORRY, and I would be more likely to PROTECT my mental sanity and say, maybe, I don't know, rather than accept.
I must imagine it takes a lot of mental and emotional energy to hold the bigger picture in view, always holding up provisional truth, building a house of cards always one piece away from taking him in the completely wrong direction.
I wonder how many SMARTER people could take his intellect and passion and misdirect it for their own aims, and how much he could become an unintended tool. That conspiracy world is too much for me, and I'll admit that. I'm a skeptic as a self defense, not because I'm not gullible. I take people at their word, and I have a hard time believing people openly lie. Sure I see the old "shame" thing - people lie when their egos are in danger of bruising, but for greater power? Yes, I believe it, but only abstractly, not in the case of any individual person apparently speaking their truth.
Well, I also know there's mental illness as well, and smart people, good at connecting the dots, they use their talents too well, and can't turn it off when it is hurting their mental balance. Heck, I can qualify there, except for a little sleep and conforting forgetfulness to life's little existential crises.
I connected to Mike most through the "peak oil" movement, although he "joined" that one somewhat late in his game. He became a spokesman for them merely for the forcefulness of his mind and passion that something is afoot, and he was a believer.
Now with oil prices comfortably in the low $60's, the short term fears are reduced, and reasonable doubt can return to the reasonable - that probably "peak oil" isn't quite here yet. WHILE we know it's still coming, WE, those believers that the free lunch must end. Just because the sun rose yesterday, doesn't mean it'll always rise like we expect. We who wait, and while we wait we read the signs, we listen to the forecasts and wonder when.
My "grounding" if I have ANY, is mostly on good fortune so far in life, so I'll let it carry me along - sorry Mike - and try to live reasonably responsibly with my good fortune now. I accept it could be taken away, and I accept MY OWN mental stability is at stake, so I'm glad for a little corner of the world to care for.
Certainly Mike's world view is disturbing to me. I can consider power corrupts and all that. At least my money isn't too much supporting the crazy debt economy. Could drug profits really be supporting unground "shadow government" organizations? Well, I suppose no worse than underground "mob" doing the same. Both focus wealth in ways that can corrupt.
Poor Mike sees the "honest American" as complicit in the crimes of his government, for not standing up for truth, for not risking his own comfort and security to help expose the corruptions around us. Certainly his moral arguments are true to all, in cases like Nazi Germany and the concentration camps, and may come to that in American herself, sooner than we could imagine.
Heck if I know what I'd do if a hidden police state slowly took over, and people disappeared, with just enough grease to keep us from speaking up to our little truths.
Certainly I accept a government that can declare human beings as "unlawful combatants" and lock them up for years without a trial or access to communicating with their friends and family. That's not a good sign that we're heading down a good road.
One thought about Mike, heading off to Venezuela, I wonder if he is perhaps an idealist, to imagine that there's less corruption or injustice there. It is easier to find "new friends" than to trust them, or be any safer to know more of their ways of expressing power.
I think Mike would have been better off to abandon the conspiracy world, and work with the "realocalization" movement to build a smaller world of dependency where trust could be earned through time rather than through merely common enemies. Perhaps he even wanted to step down into that simpler world, but his powerful mind couldn't let go of the bigger picture he's spent a lifetime trying to sort out.
I don't know what's true, and I don't know how much corruption can be brought to light fast enough that justice can be served. I'm glad there's people who will fight the good fight. I am yet perhaps like Mike, seeing the system as the problem, but fearing the "solution" may seem too small for our imagination - subsistence farming, some children to remember us, and a moment in the sunlight. It seems a small destiny when we can imagine bigger things.
So we're all corrupted by our ambition perhaps, those of us who want to see the invisible world around us and know the future, and know what costs it will bear for our excesses.
posted by Ares Olympus at 11:33 PM
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