Here is a short synopsis from DownWithTyranny http://downwithtyranny.bl...all-your-worst...


Chapter 4: Where Was Poppy?

Poppy Bush has claimed not to remember where he was on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. That’s odd, since almost every other American alive at that time can recall where he or she was. Poppy’s amnesia become stranger still-- or perhaps, more understandable-- when declassified documents show (1) that he was working in Dallas for the CIA at the time, and (2) that he called the FBI from a town near Dallas at the very hour Kennedy’s death was being announced.

In that call, Bush Sr. introduced himself as a private citizen, and offered a supposed tip about a possible suspect-- a man who turned out to be innocent, and to have ties back to Bush himself. Though the tip was a red herring, it served a clear purpose: to establish that Poppy was not in Dallas at the time of his call. Baker exhaustively explores Bush’s activities that week and day, which included spending time with a top CIA expert on removing government leaders. He also dissects a peculiar Nov. 22 letter purportedly written by Barbara Bush and published by her decades later, that explains-- too artfully by half-- the couple’s movements at the time.

Baker reveals the deep animus toward President John Kennedy harbored by the Bushes and their friend, CIA director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster. And he describes the dramatic, sudden changes in the lives of both Prescott Bush and his son in the wake of that firing.

Chapter 5: Oswald’s Friend

In 1976, a letter arrives for CIA director George H. W. Bush. His aides assume it is from a crackpot-- the writer claims that some kind of net is closing in on him, and attributes this to his having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Bush acknowledges to his perplexed staff that he actually knows the man, who is an anti-communist Russian émigré named George de Mohrenschildt. Poppy Bush confirms in an internal memo that de Mohrenschildt did indeed have some connection to Oswald-- but says he cannot recall the details of the Oswald connection. This is strange, stranger still for the head of the US spy agency.

Bush writes back to de Mohrenschildt that he has nothing to fear. Yet within a year the man is dead from a shotgun blast to the head. The official verdict is suicide. Baker begins a lengthy exploration of de Mohrenschildt’s ties to the Bush family, and to oil interests generally, dating back many decades. And he details the previously unknown military-oil-intelligence pipeline that brought anti-communist Russians out of the Soviet Union and settled them in Dallas, where they were plugged into business and society at the highest level.

We learn of de Mohrenschildt’s involvement with lucrative oil investment schemes in Cuba that were upset by Fidel Castro’s revolution, and his ties to what is described as a “private CIA” serving the interests of wealthy Americans abroad. Also revealed are De Mohrenschildt’s links to many figures identified in one way or another with the JFK assassination story-- from Abe Zapruder, whose footage of the assassination became a crucial piece of the conventional narrative of that day, to the leader of a military intelligence unit whose members included many members of the Dallas police department, and whose associate forced himself into the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_pi...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d83...

But what is surely the strangest film about our doomsday fantasies arrives this Friday(. Called "Collapse," it features a spell bindingly weird one-man monologue by Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD officer and investigative journalist who believes that we are about to run out of oil, an event sure to plunge the world into a state of collapse since Ruppert is convinced that our entire world economy is built on an unsustainable addiction to petrol. If you ever thought it was impossible to top Beck's over-the-top fantasies, listen to Ruppert, who says that "what I see now is the end of a paradigm that is as cataclysmic as the asteroid event that killed almost all the life on Earth, and certainly the dinosaurs."

The film is directed by Chris Smith, who has made a number of documentaries about oddball characters pursuing impossible dreams -- his 1999 film "American Movie" chronicled the story of a hapless slacker trying to make a $3,000 homemade horror film. But what makes "Collapse" so sneakily compelling is that we have no inkling of what Smith thinks of his subject. Filmed with one camera over the course of two days in the basement of an abandoned meatpacking plant in downtown L.A., "Collapse" is a hermetically sealed package, open to whatever interpretation we might bring to it. It allows us the same freedom we have in watching Beck's show -- we can take it as gospel, be appalled by its wild, undocumented claims or simply watch bemused, appreciating Ruppert's gifts as a performer.

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To say that Ruppert is Beck's psychic twin would be an understatement. Beck comes from the right and Ruppert seems to live on the left -- he believes, for example, that we invaded Iraq for its oil reserves, arguing that we have no intention of ever leaving the country since "we built an embassy compound in Baghdad that's bigger than Vatican City." But both men transcend politics, since no amount of partisan posturing could justify their gloomy certainty about the future.

Asked by Smith at one point in the film if he's ever been called a conspiracy theorist, Ruppert offers the kind of answer you'd expect from Beck. "Of course," he says triumphantly. "But I don't deal in conspiracy theory. I deal in conspiracy fact." Once you get past his brisk dismissals of every form of alternative energy ("Ethanol is an absolute joke -- it takes more energy to make ethanol than you can make burning it"), Ruppert's view of the future isn't so different from Beck's. Neither man is an optimist. If they were optimists, they'd be out of business. What fuels them is a chronic pessimism that is surely born out of years of personal anxieties and career setbacks. Beck is a recovering alcoholic with ADHD while Ruppert, even though Smith offers us little personal biographical information, is clearly a man without family ties who appears to live alone with his dog.