Collapse by Michael Ruppert is available at Netflix.com (just a fact not a plug) and it’s a movie worth watching, sort of. The whole movie is a long series of shots of Mike, sitting in a tomb, talking about many of the usual downers of modern society, with a bit of emphasis on American society, politicians and oil. He claims he isn’t really a conspiracy theorist because he deals with obvious facts. Pointing to the obvious facts of modern society, when you choose to look for the dark side, can be very dark indeed, darker than his tomb. In fact, I believe, it is far darker than he portrays it because he never really approaches the huge strides humanity is making toward an unpredictable moment of a thermonuclear Doomsday. He stays with a more comfortable and predictable collapse of our over-consumptive civilization. He acknowledges that one time resources can be used up, which is obvious, but doesn’t mention that those who maximally exploit those one time use resources are the very ones who get richest now and who will be best positioned to survive when the collapse finally happens. The movie ends with him being threatened with an eviction notice for non-payment of rental fees on his home, because he doesn’t have enough money, so by his own measure it appears he won’t be among the survivors.
The question arises, how can we expect a man to take care of the world who can’t take care of himself? He does claim in the movie that everyone, including himself, should take care of themselves. He makes a desultory claim that everyone should be self sufficient but also makes the case that that is impossible because food crops need fertilizer and that, along with most everything else in modern society, is dependent upon mineral oil pumped out of the ground. He claims that approximately half of that oil that was in the ground has already been pumped out, gone away, permanently gone, because of human consumption. He only alludes to the simple fact that, with a much larger current population and more people living at a higher standard of living, the remaining oil will be consumed even quicker.
The usual suspects are picked up by this ex-LA detective and he puts them close together; he puts the dots close together so it is easy to see the connections. There are no serious problems with his facts or the analysis of what brought various problems into being, and he even brings in Darwinian adaptation to local environment as being a human trait. The problem which he appears to see but refuses to acknowledge is the inevitability of that Darwinian adapting process as being the cause of the coming catastrophe. He implies that we should simply change the way we are doing things and everything would be much better and might even work out okay in the long run. He sees the population explosion, politics and technology as being the primary problems, but I doubt very much if he would support a population control measure that would totally eliminate technology and bring human population down to one hundred million people in one hundred years. He would probably fight that extreme legal control more vigorously than anyone if it were made into enforced worldwide law.
To achieve that population goal, without simply murdering billions of people, would require choosing fifty million women and permitting them and only them to have two children. Everyone else would be sterilized. Obviously, that is horrible and politically impossible, as it should be, but the alternative is even worse. The natural trend now in progress is a continuation of the population explosion, which, according to Ruppert, will lead to absolute shortages of essentials of life, especially oil. That will bring about worldwide strife and an atomic war which would soon escalate to a Doomsday catastrophe in which billions of people are killed.
The Doomsday Clock is past Midnight and still running
Absolutely no one wants either of these to happen, including me. To illustrate the Doomsday aspect of atomic weapons I “improved” the Atomic Scientist’s Doomsday Clock by setting it to a few minutes after midnight. The idea is to show that the explosion of the first Atomic Bomb at Alamogordo at 1945-07-16=12\29\45t was the true midnight from which the Doomsday Clock should be set running.
Perhaps this countdown clock (calendar) for the collapse of civilization should have been timed from Thomas Malthus’ Population studies, or Watt’s steam engine which needed mineral coal or oil, or perhaps even the development of the county fair prizes which led to the patent system for new and useful ideas. Or perhaps human Doom was set in motion by the first woman who turned to her girlfriend and said yum when referring to some fine young man. That act set the genetic evolution in motion which led to modern humans and thus to our problem. Each of these was a turning point in humanity’s quest for a better world. We now live in a wonderful world but very unfortunately one which will soon Collapse by one of the seen but uncontrollable factors. Probably the collapse will be even more tragic than Ruppert predicts because there isn’t any way out. What can you do until Doomsday arrives?
Enjoy the life you have been given and participate fully with your opportunities.