The New York Times commissioned Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins to travel around the United States and take photographs of abandoned construction projects left in the wake of the housing and securities market collapse.
posted by acb on Jul 7, 2009 - 263 comments

Lester R. Brown, of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, has an article in May's Scientific American magazine: "Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?" In the article he addresses three major food-security threats: increased demand, due to the burgeoning population and diversion of staples for energy production; water shortages due to "mining" of fossil aquifers; and topsoil depletion as a result of over-farming. The result? Civilization's demise, not through superpower conflict, but through chaos and failed states. [more inside]
posted by Kadin2048 on Apr 23, 2009 - 42 comments

There have been a lot of descriptions of our new president, but being in "full commanding denial" is a new and, sadly, insightful one. Clusterf*ck Nation's Jim Kunstler observes that the bailout "is predicated on the idea that the mechanisms of wealth production -- even of illusory wealth, such as the fortunes created by trading securitized unpayable debt -- can keep chugging along, spinning off limitless additional suburban villas, chain stores, car trips, and deep-fried snacks." For a different view, the folks over at the excellent Baseline Scenario have been doing some interesting thinking about The Cultural Costs of Bailout Nation. For an even bigger big picture view, Dmitry Orlov's original analysis of the USSR vs. USA collapse in Superpower Collapse Best Practices seems to be even more resonant in his recent appearances. Maybe it's time to give Full Commanding Denial another chance ....
posted by Adamchik on Mar 25, 2009 - 80 comments

Twilight Of The Autocrats: Will the global economic downturn usher in a new era of democracy, or will things only get worse? [first link via]
posted by Inspector.Gadget on Mar 24, 2009 - 16 comments

When Wrekin Construction went into administration last week, it blamed the Royal Bank of Scotland for demanding repayment of an overdraft. However, the 2007 accounts show that among the assets of the company is a ruby it called the "Gem of Tanzania". Wrekin had bought the stone off one of its shareholders for £11m worth of shares - more than four times the record for a single ruby at auction. [more inside]
posted by Electric Dragon on Mar 16, 2009 - 20 comments

A mysterious internet forum poster named Reinhardt has the financial conspiracy theorists abuzz this week ahead of a predicted "event" coming this Friday. He first surfaced last July by predicting to the day the bad week in September kicked off by the Lehman Brothers collapse on the 15th. [more inside]
posted by ewagoner on Feb 11, 2009 - 47 comments

Thriving in the Age of Collapse. (Via Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2009.) [more inside]
posted by ottereroticist on Jan 5, 2009 - 22 comments

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the award-winning book The Black Swan, (previously), was interviewed recently by Charlie Rose: A conversation about economics with Nassim Taleb (as well as Time Magazine.) Taleb is more pessimistic than Nouriel Roubini, (previously, previously) who thinks that the total sum for this current global meltdown may be somewhere between 10-20 Trillion US dollars.
posted by gen on Dec 5, 2008 - 19 comments

Second Great Depression? We should be so lucky. Or so Dmitry Orlov says. Orlov, an engineer who watched the collapse of the Soviet Union, argues that the United States is well into a similar process of collapse. In Orlov's model, collapse is divided into five stages: financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. The first one is currently happening, and the next two are guaranteed to follow; as for cultural collapse, that happened a long time ago, but people were to narcotised by consumerism to notice. And things look set to get very, very dire indeed, with runaway hyperinflation, shortages, the breakdown of political institutions, the fragmentation of the US, and, if the "social collapse" stage is reached, roaming gangs and ethnic cleansing.
posted by acb on Dec 3, 2008 - 65 comments

Russian professor and information warrior, Igor Panarin, has predicted the collapse and breakup of the USA. (Potential artists' renderings 1 2) The interview was originally reported in the Russian newspaper, Izvestia. (Google Translated) The prediction has been met with varying levels of credulity, scoffed at by some and embraced by others. The prediction, which goes so far as to speculate exactly how the US might reorganize, was posted to Drudge and has offended many bloggers who, while excited by the prospects of secession, are insulted by the insinuation that the south may go Hispanic and not Confederate.
posted by Telf on Nov 26, 2008 - 106 comments

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. [more inside]
posted by Happy Dave on Oct 8, 2008 - 84 comments

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. [more inside]
posted by chuckdarwin on Sep 15, 2008 - 31 comments

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 by scalefree on Aug 5, 2008 - 36 comments

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 by Fuzzy Skinner on Apr 29, 2008 - 93 comments

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 by allkindsoftime on Apr 17, 2008 - 22 comments

America's debtor prisons.
posted by geos on Jan 25, 2008 - 81 comments

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. [more inside]
posted by eye of newt on Jan 18, 2008 - 37 comments

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 by baphomet on Aug 1, 2007 - 310 comments

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 by Foci for Analysis on Jul 14, 2007 - 166 comments

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 by pokeydonut on May 1, 2007 - 114 comments

This handy comparison guide can help you prepare for our turbulent future with lessons from other people's turbulent recent past.
posted by hexatron on Dec 8, 2006 - 48 comments

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 by MetaMonkey on Oct 5, 2006 - 54 comments

"Every man for himself. I was irrationally convinced that if one particle of that sinister cloud managed to touch me I would die."
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Sep 11, 2006 - 48 comments

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 by OpinioNate on Jan 12, 2006 - 117 comments

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 by halekon on Dec 27, 2005 - 45 comments

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 by jefgodesky on Aug 18, 2005 - 57 comments

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 by mk1gti on Jun 14, 2005 - 131 comments

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [oh and, also see :]
posted by kliuless on Dec 28, 2004 - 30 comments

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 by dobbs on Dec 8, 2003 - 12 comments

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 by Frank Grimes on May 3, 2003 - 28 comments

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 by thedailygrowl on Nov 26, 2002 - 9 comments

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 by stbalbach on Aug 6, 2002 - 47 comments

Collapse: Here's an amusing little time-waster from Shockwave.com.
posted by MiguelCardoso on Mar 6, 2002 - 29 comments

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 by mkn on Nov 15, 2001 - 19 comments

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 by tranquileye on Oct 6, 2001 - 16 comments

Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel perched 8,366 feet high in the Peruvian Andes, might collapse at any time.
posted by lagado on Mar 11, 2001 - 5 comments

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 by Steven Den Beste on May 3, 2000 - 3 comments