Jared Diamond on why societies collapse

He took it for granted that Noha will be lucky if she just managed to escape a nervous breakdown.

January 16 An avalanche hits the village Súðavík in Iceland, killing 14 people.

Why on Earth? And if you haven't read Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, I totally recommend that you do.

In one post, Zurayk points to the fear in the US and Israel of a collapsing regional order I think the US and Israel are more concerned about the revolution in Egypt than Mubarak himself.

After 1985, and before the break up of the Soviet Union, we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view.

We get droughts, increased desertification, crashing food systems, water scarcity, famine, forced migration, political instability, warfare, crisis.

This has been the springtime this year a huge collapse. That happened in about a month, the loss of all that ice.

The collapse of the Balkans meant that Germany was about to lose its main supplies of oil and food.

The resulting weight of people caused a retaining wall to collapse, killing 39 fans, mostly Italians.

But only two percent don't know the effect that the debacle in Argentina will have on the IMF's monetary policy seems a contradiction.

I was afraid of a tsunami what I didn't realize was there was a greater terror in Haiti, and that was building collapse.

As with the pneumonic form of bubonic plague, it was associated with breakdown of lung tissue which would cause blood to appear at the lips.

They were men who had been contractors, or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom, and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support.

In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five point framework a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society.

And by regretted it, I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street.

In Prince William Sound, Port Valdez suffered a massive underwater landslide, resulting in the deaths of 30 people between the collapse of the Valdez city harbor and docks, and inside the ship that was docked there at the time.

We're going to be up there in just a few more weeks, and we expect that it's probably retreated another half a mile, but if I got there and discovered that it had collapsed and it was five miles further back, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.