Icelandic internet bank Icesave has closed its doors. The Icelandic government has told the UK chancellor that it cannot pay back the money of UK depositors.
posted on Oct 8, 2008 - View this thread

The collapse of holiday firm XL has prompted the largest airlift in British history as emergency flights were put in place to bring 22,000 very angry people home. Even Bruce Dickinson has been helping out.
posted on Sep 15, 2008 - View this thread

Learning from history's mistakes? In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA), run for 35 years by a man nicknamed Yoda, published an 85-page report titled "Military Advantage in History" (PDF). Drawing on Sun Tzu, Jared Diamond and Roman historian Titus Livius, the book analyzes the rise & fall of the empires of Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon's France and attempts to plot a course for a Pax Americana that can avoid the pitfalls that led to the collapse of those earlier kingdoms. (via)
posted on Aug 5, 2008 - View this thread

The dramatic collapse of a Danish wind turbine was captured on video. Someone thoughtfully made a slow motion version. Apparently, there were two such collapses within a week.
posted on Apr 29, 2008 - View this thread

Flowers are losing their smell. The discovery could be one of several factors in the "colony collapse disorder" that is wiping out honey bees around the world. Even a brief glance at the titles of the news articles on Wiki reads a bit frighteningly, as do the previous mentions here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
posted on Apr 17, 2008 - View this thread

America's debtor prisons.
posted on Jan 25, 2008 - View this thread

It could have been the greatest disaster in US history. On January 18, 1978, 30 years ago today, the 1400 ton 2 1/2 acre roof of the Hartford Civic Center, covered by a blanket of snow and ice, suddenly and completely collapsed, damaging almost all of the seats underneath. Just four hours earlier there was a basketball game packed with 5000 fans. Had it collapsed then, many, if not most, of the fans and players could have died.
posted on Jan 18, 2008 - View this thread

The I-35W bridge by the University of Minnesota campus has collapsed. The bridge, one of the most heavily traveled freeway bridges in the Twin Cities metro area, collapsed around 6:05 this evening. Sections of the freeway are said to be floating in the Mississippi as cars are stranded on standing portions of the bridge. Slideshow of images. Real-time updates at MPR.
posted on Aug 1, 2007 - View this thread

Is Neo-tribalism [rand.org, PDF, 297 KB] humanity's future? An ideology influenced by the Ishmael series by Daniel Quinn and that predicts the collapse of society and the necessity of ”walking away”, it's growing globally with neo-tribes already established. The Anthropik Tribe's goal is to ultimately form a "functional hunter-gatherer tribe in the future". Anthropik is part of The Appalachian Confederation, a /neo-tribal league/tribe of tribes/rhizome/ with it's own council, annual festival and plans for an army. Also, check out this movie about modern tribalism.
posted on Jul 14, 2007 - View this thread

4/29 Truth Movement. As already noted within three minutes of the post on the Oakland highway collapse going up this weekend, the successful melting of steel by fire has riled up the 9/11 skeptic-baiters. See also: the entire internet.
posted on May 1, 2007 - View this thread

This handy comparison guide can help you prepare for our turbulent future with lessons from other people's turbulent recent past.
posted on Dec 8, 2006 - View this thread

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science, invention, space travel, colonisation, immortality, water shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse, extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI, Asia, economics, demographics, goverance, cities. What is your prediction?
posted on Oct 5, 2006 - View this thread

"Every man for himself. I was irrationally convinced that if one particle of that sinister cloud managed to touch me I would die."
posted on Sep 11, 2006 - View this thread

NewsFlashFilter: Hundreds killed in Hajj stampede in what is known as the Stoning of the Devil ritual earlier today. Sadly, this type of tragedy at a Muslim hajj is quite common given the huge crowds.
posted on Jan 12, 2006 - View this thread

Collapse of civilization: Not necessarily a bad thing Many will no doubt find the foregoing discussion of collapse depressing or pessimistic. In “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse”, John Michael Greer hints at why this is, writing, “Even within the social sciences, the process by which complex societies give way to smaller and simpler ones has often been presented in language drawn from literary tragedy, as though the loss of sociocultural complexity necessarily warranted a negative value judgment. This is understandable, since the collapse of civilizations often involves catastrophic human mortality and the loss of priceless cultural treasures, but like any value judgment it can obscure important features of the matter at hand.” Greer goes on to characterize collapse in terms of ecological succession. …Collapse happens precisely because it improves our lives—and it happens when the alternative is no longer tolerable.
posted on Dec 27, 2005 - View this thread

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine... For as much as MeFites object to apocalyptic thinking, there sure is a lot of it We've had apocalyptic literature since the Second Temple period, and it heavily influenced the origins of both Christianity and Islam. It serves a strong psychological function for persecuted minorities. And more than a few predictions that have failed miserably, often based on scriptural exegesis. What does that say about modern predictions about global warming or peak oil? Do the failed predictions of Nostradamus mean that Joseph Tainter was wrong?
posted on Aug 18, 2005 - View this thread

Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition And 'Inside Job' Was it real or was it Memorex? Will we ever know? Tin-Foil hat theories or good, hard science?
posted on Jun 14, 2005 - View this thread

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [oh and, also see :]
posted on Dec 28, 2004 - View this thread

At least one person is dead when Toronto theatre The Uptown (a frequent haunt of my childhood) collapses. The 2000 seat Uptown was built in 1920 and closed in September of this year, right after the Toronto International Film Festival, which regularly used the theatre for its screenings. Ignoring a Cinema Treasures' petition, and heartfelt articles from local media, Famous Players, the theatre's owners, decided to sell the building to a condo developer after losing a two year battle with The Ontario Human Rights Commission, who were insisting that the venue be made wheelchair-friendly. Oddly, as I was walking past the site last night, I considered contacting the demolition company about what was being done with the theatre's sign when it finally came down.
posted on Dec 8, 2003 - View this thread

Old Man in the Mountain Collapses - The rocky icon that New Hampshire chose for the reverse of its state quarter succumbed to winds, rain and freezing temperatures.
posted on May 3, 2003 - View this thread

Is the Internet in danger of collapse from a disaster or terrorist attack? The Internet was a product of DARPA and designed during the Cold War because it was thought that the centralized phone system networks providing most or all of the National Defense communications networks- used at that time would not survive a nuclear attack disabling our ability to communicate with our troops. At the suggestion of the RAND Corporation and a number of Scientists the design scheme was to make the Internet a system with no central control in order to make it difficult for an enemy to disable our countries ability to communicate during a War. Has the decentralized Internet now become a threat to our very Centralized Goverment that initially created it-and other Goverments? Why would terrorist organizations want to destroy something that they in fact use themselves? Or perhap the researchers are right that the emergence of large centralized hubs brought forth by the increased commercialization of the Net has in fact made the Internet more vulnerable to attack or disaster! Perhaps there are lessons in this story regarding the whole Centralization/ Decentralization dichotomy that Goverments, and Individuals can learn from?
posted on Nov 26, 2002 - View this thread

What a real depression looks like. Total collapse of the middle class, malnutrition, starving bands of marauders eating road-kill, it's every survivalists dream come true. Until last year, Argentines were part of the richest, best-educated and most cultured nation in Latin America. Not anymore.
posted on Aug 6, 2002 - View this thread

Collapse: Here's an amusing little time-waster from Shockwave.com.
posted on Mar 6, 2002 - View this thread

The stuff from which Myth is made. A recent discovery of a meteor impact crater in the middle-east, dating around 2300BC, is shedding new light on the decline of many cultures and the rise of many legends.
posted on Nov 15, 2001 - View this thread

Movie critic Roger Ebert says that if your interest is in using the Internet, not getting rich from it, then stock prices are insignificant. "The Internet Bubble has been compared to the Tulip Craze, when 17th-century investors bid the price of Dutch bulbs to insane heights. Both bubbles burst. The collapse of the Internet economy was inevitable, and clears the way for sane and reasonable rebuilding. Good news: There are more tulips in the world than ever before."
posted on Oct 6, 2001 - View this thread

Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel perched 8,366 feet high in the Peruvian Andes, might collapse at any time.
posted on Mar 11, 2001 - View this thread

And from the "No Shit, Sherlock!" file comes today's entry:

Inadequate wiring of logs and weak oversight of the building of a "complex and dangerous structure" were factors to blame for the deadly bonfire collapse at Texas A&M University last fall, an investigation commission said Tuesday.

Funny, I thought space aliens had done it, working with Elvis and Bigfoot.
posted on May 3, 2000 - View this thread