Apocalypse Pretty Soon?

From The Day After Tomorrow

Some of you may have noticed that I have a fondness for conspiracy theories and end-of-the-world scenarios. I don’t know why that is, but it’s probably for the same reason that I enjoy horror movies and post-apocalyptic novels like A Canticle for Liebowitz. Maybe it had something to do with growing up in the fifties in the shadow of “The Bomb.”

Anyway, instead of accomplishing something useful yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time reading this blog by Dmitry Orlov. Orlov was born in the USSR and emigrated to the US at the age of 12. During several trips back to the USSR, he had a close up view of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. He described himself and his “comparative theory of superpower collapse” in a talk he gave in San Francisco on February 13.