The Soviet Collapse "The document which effectively concluded the history of the Soviet Union was a letter from the Vneshekonombank in November 1991 to the Soviet leadership, informing them that the Soviet state had not a cent in its coffers."
posted by bitmage
on Nov 19, 2010 -
28 comments
It is not our role to take power. It is our role to make the powerful frightened of us. And that's what we've forgotten. Give up that dream! Chris Hedges talks neoliberalism and neofeudalism, the civil rights movement, Camden, Obama, Clinton, Tea Parties, moral nihilism, inverted totalitarianism and corpocracy, NAFTA, welfare reform, health care, labor, poverty, Yugoslavia, post-industrial capitalism, economic crisis, imperial collapse, socialism, and democracy, among other things.
[more inside]
posted by gerryblog
on Apr 24, 2010 -
51 comments
Chronic budget deficits, compounding debt and unfunded liabilities suggest the US financial situation will not be remedied, wiping out military funding. Surplus world oil production could disappear entirely by 2012, and reach a 10 million barrel a day shortfall by 2015. Coalition military operations would become essential to protecting US national interests. According to this year's remarkably candid United States Joint Forces Command
Joint Operating Environment report (PDF), anyway.
posted by falcon
on Apr 7, 2010 -
49 comments
"Although the word “entitlement” fits, it’s been used so frequently as to have become inadequate to capture the preening self-regard, the obliviousness to the damage that high-flying finance has inflicted on the real economy, the learned blindness to vital considerations in the pay equation. Getting an education, or even hard work, does not guarantee outcomes. One of the basic precepts of finance is that of a risk-return tradeoff: high potential payoff investments come with greater downside.
But how did that evolve into the current belief system among the incumbents, that Wall Street was a sure ride, a guaranteed “heads I win, tails you lose” bet?"
Yves Smith
writes an essay on 'indefensible men.'
posted by ennui.bz
on Mar 19, 2010 -
38 comments
SLJaredDiamondOp-Ed: As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability. [more inside]
posted by gerryblog
on Dec 11, 2009 -
52 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
