I know it's late on a Saturday, so it's hard to get lots of attention, but I have a real question for the community:
What do you think of Mike Ruppert and Chris Martenson? Are they scams, or prophets?
More below the fold.
I've been reading Michael Ruppert on and off for years, beginning with his Crossing the Rubicon book. On the one hand, I thought he showed a strong streak of paranoia, mixed with a certain amount of both arrogance and victimhood. Still, his research appeared to be solid, and others echoed his conclusions, so I tried to get past both the CT and the drama and figure out if he was right.
I had lost track of him (the last I had heard, he had retired and left the country), then stumbled across both his latest book, Confronting Collapse, and his latest web site, CollapseNet.com. I went out and bought the book, and discovered that he is basically saying that peak oil and economic collapse are coming sooner rather than later, and since governments aren't doing anything about it, we need to get prepared ourselves.
So, I checked out the web site, only to discover that to read anything more than the home page and the launch video, you have to subscribe. $10 a month isn't that much, but I wondered what I would find on the other side of the credit card. I decided to do some research.
While doing that research, I came across Chris Martenson's site. It's a much more mature site, with a good deal of content. There is the well-known "Crash Course" -- a series of videos that explain Martenson's view of the current situation and how it's going to change over the next twenty years. I watched almost all of the CC, and found it to be pretty straight-forward. It's alarming, without being alarmist, but comes to much the same conclusion as Ruppert: debt and consumption can't continue in the face of declining energy resources and increasing population, and change is coming. One big difference between the two is the timeline -- Ruppert seems to be talking about change happening right now, while Martenson talks about the next twenty years.
While Ruppert requires the subscription to get to anything beyond the home page, Martenson asks for more money ($30 a month) but only for "advanced" features, like his exclusive newsletter. You can watch the entire Crash Course and read the blog for free, for example.
So, Kossacks, here's my question: Are these guys just out to make money, or is there value in following either of them? What do you think of their sites and their theories? I really do want your opinions, if you have read their stuff and have some insight for me. Thanks!