Collapse/Las Vegas/Cold Fusion…

Recently Collapsenet.com, the website focusing on issues of peak oil, climate change, and surviving the coming economic/ecological collapse, featured a trailer for a documentary they’ve been working on regarding Las Vegas, one of the most glaring victims of current and potentially upcoming severe, collapse. On one hand it exists in the middle of the desert with few natural resources, and on the other it’s an energy sucking mega metropolis completely reliant on an enormous amount of incoming cheap energy. Not to mention the idea that the city is essentially “made and sustained by losers”; a business model which relies heavily on addiction and loss.

Signs of said collapse are already present. Shut down establishments, housing bubble bursts, declining tourist turnouts in recent years (though it does appears numbers are being reported as UP in 2012; the real factors of which are unclear, and likely wouldn’t consider off factors such as Nevada’s pot farming tripling in the last few years, and the reality that the American populace have clearly lost their mind, to the point of the absurd):

LAS VEGAS (FOX5) –

A new slogan was unveiled Wednesday for downtown Las Vegas.
“Every City Has a Soul” was the winning tag line of more than 1,200 online votes.

A few years back, a prime-time special on peak oil/resource depletion somehow squeeked by and was featured on one of the main networks (can’t recall the title). It depicted a look at what the near future would look like as cheap energy ran out and collapse took effect. One segment animated a travel through a now deserted, decrepid Vegas, occupied only by rogue gangs looking to hijack passer by’s. Extreme, but portrayals of doom and gloom usually accept a crashed and burned scenario, bringing back the city to it’s desolate desert origins.

Left out of the conversation of course, is the influx of near future Cold Fusion possibilities. Collapsenet’s documentary will likely not include this (we already presented former Collapsenet frontman Mike Ruppert Cold Fusion answers to his alternative energy talking points, which were more or less dismissed…link to follow).

What happens in Vegas, won’t stay in Vegas this time around, as many aspects of Collapse are already occurring worldwide, and likely to worsen. How, when, to what degree the coming age of Cold Fusion will halt, repair, replenish or rebuild the situation entirely is unclear. The thought of Vegas folding it’s hand first, and Cold Fusion appearing second might sound preferable to some, but at the rate things are happening on the Fusion front, and the desperate soul labeling – seems to be somehow slightly working – attempt to hold on to current paradigms will mean the technology gets thrusted towards upholding the loser model.

Of course the Vegas scenario presents a larger question overall on how the technology will be used more for nostalgia upholding rather than new, healthier more fulfilling ways of existing.

It’ll be interesting to watch the completed Collapsenet Vegas documentary, and then fill in the blanks of how the implications of CF may alter the doom and gloom predicted and portrayed.

CollapseNet’s First Full-Length Documentary To Focus On Las Vegas Trailer from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.

Major Peak Oil figure leaves Collapse-mind to help “birth new paradigm”; is cold fusion next?

Former Los Angeles, California police officer turned Uber-Doomer Michael C. Ruppert is leaving Collapsenet, the organization he helmed that was developed as a response to Peak Oil. [visit]

Collapse by Michael C. Ruppert
Named after his book Confronting Collapse and the documentary movie Collapse that he starred in, Collapsenet gathered resources where one could connect with others preparing “lifeboats” for a post-petroleum world.

In a video farewell posted on the site, he said, “My usefulness is at an end here……There’s a major evolution occurring right here, right now.” [watch]

Citing major cyber-attacks that almost took them down, the drying up of cash-flow, and serious illness in the core leadership, he ultimately realized, “I don’t think it does you, or me, or anybody, any good, anymore, to have me reading all these stories everyday to tell us things we already know: multiple systemic failures are occurring everywhere.”

“Fukushima is the single greatest threat to human existence, it’s uncontrolled, it can’t be fixed by the Japanese; climate change is out of control; the Gulf of Mexico is destroyed; economic collapse is absolutely irreversible; Peak Oil is here; and I now live in a country that’s an open fascist dictatorship.”

“I don’t need to talk anymore about that.”

“I know what’s coming after these next few absolutely amazing months that lie before us, is going to be upheaval, like none of us have ever imagined, or ever experienced.”

Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert
Mike Ruppert has written several books including Crossing the Rubicon, the meticulously researched and referenced account of how oil, power, and politics connected events surrounding 9/11. He published a newsletter From the Wilderness for many years and posed the Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Any Alternative Energy, which we asked cold fusion researcher Jed Rothwell to answer. [read]

Now, Ruppert will be traveling alone to focus on writing a new book. He says, “I get to go and live in my spiritual world…. That’s where I’m being called right now.”

“I see no need to fight in this world or to live in it anymore from the material standpoint. There are other types of consciousness that are equally, or more, effective in helping to change or accelerate this change of consciousness that I see taking place on this planet.”

In exiting the Collapse mind-set, Ruppert is following former Life After the Oil Crash‘s Matt Savinar, who left curating gloom headlines to focus on more positive pursuits of sustainable living. Tom Whipple, the Falls Church News-Press writer who regularly assessed collapse action, also diverged from the message of doom by writing about the recent developments in the low energy nuclear reactions LENR field.

Even Gerald Celente had broken from painting the maddening portrait of a corrupt marketplace to highlight the one bright spot by stating how cold fusion and new energy “is the greatest investment opportunity of the 21rst century.” [read]

However, few Peak Oilers have abandoned the focus on surviving the coming crash to even consider a future with abundant energy. Cold Fusion Now has contacted several senior members of the collapse and post-carbon community to alert them to new developments in the cold fusion sector, to no avail.

Many still do not know the phenomenon is real. Many remain skeptical of any “technological fix” that claims clean, dense energy. Also, a lack of understanding of the word ‘nuclear’ frightens many, unaware that ‘nuclear’ does not equate to ‘radioactive’.

It was in 2004 that I myself learned about Peak Oil at a movie screening of The End of Suburbia at which Michael Ruppert spoke afterwards. I remember the audience response: stunned to a stupor at the consequences. Many people had their world changed that evening, including myself. It wasn’t until later that year when Media Ecologist Bob Neveritt told me that cold fusion was real did I then see the possible future ahead.

“How can it be that we have this imminent doom and gloom, as well as what I feel in my heart is the coming of a golden age?”, Ruppert asks. “Well that’s a mystery that we’ll have to find out. But we all have to find out in our own ways.”

Now, Ruppert is correctly identifying the current Mystery Landscape, the ground from which the figure of cold fusion is emerging. But do humans really have a second chance at a “golden age”?

Media ecology reveals the feedback loop between technology and human behavior. “We shape our tools, and our tools shape us”, said Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

Cold fusion will not ‘save’ Petroleum Man. The set of services and disservices of fossil fuel technology will rust away, as will the Mind of Man who built it.

Instead, like wildflowers through the sidewalk cracks, a new set of services and disservices will emerge, composed by a new technology that sets a different mental imprint on humans.

The consciousness of a new paradigm is intimately connected with an ethical energy source, free, and democratic, with access for all: ultra-clean energy from cold fusion.

The rest is up to each and every one of us, to evolve in kind.

C’mon over to our house, Mike! Welcome!

Cold Fusion Now!

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