I just read this book.

Empire, by Orson Scott Card

There is a website i use called Heritage-history dot com, they have all kinds of stuff oon various history, including several on the roman history, greek, russian, chinese, japaese, and stuff on ww1. i mean you can look through the genres. its vast.

In a bid to make its BRICS membership more acceptable, Nigeria to sell oil for local currency; but hey, California is going to have $50 hr for McD auto flippers.

link to Nigeria

Putin is right in that the dollar and SWIFT were abused by the Biden Adiministration. Like his boss Bathhouse Barry, everything he touches turns to sh*t.  It's akin to driving top gamblers out of your casino and pretty soon the gamblers find another casino.

You got it.  So what we should all be asking ourselves is what are we going to do about that if / when in our lifetime we do experience those events.

One important thing to remember about the Roman Empire's collapse is that it was precipitated by germans who learned as much as they could from the Romans and took over. It also had the benefit of finally civilizing their barbaric, savage nature and actually making them into a civilized peoples.

IMO...No.

Civilizations and empires have fallen many times before Rome and since. While history may rhyme, what we're facing today is a fundamentally different problem.

Until WWII there really wasn't such a thing as anthropogenic existential risk. We simply didn't have the technological capability. Because of exponential and now exponentiating (AI and genetic) technological progress, we're facing a proliferation of catastrophic and existential risks across the board, economic, military, cultural, ecological, and political... at the same time, technological innovations demand social change at a rate that doesn't allow for nearly enough analysis of the consequences whether we try to look forward or backward. Our institutions are failing and the causes are obscured by the thousand things that have changed since they were instituted.

Daniel Schmactenberger has a wonderful analogy for this in the discovery of the plow. Before the plow, humanity seemingly universally was animistic, living in tribal groups below Dunbar's number (150 people, give or take) hunting and gathering and changing very little. Once the plow was introduced it became obligate immediately everywhere the technology reached, because societies that didn't adopt the new technology were destroyed in war by those that did. Animism gave way to dominionism everywhere, you couldn't very well revere the spirit of the ox while you forced it to pull with a whip. Agriculture leads to large complex organization, to surplus production, private property, economics, formal government, classes, slavery, specialization... everything we think of as civilization. He's much more eloquent than I am on many topics but you get the idea. That all resulted from one very crude technological advance.

You could look at industrialization/fossil fuels as another epochal change or maybe just an explosive accelerant. Either way, our population has increased 16 fold, our economic activity per capita by orders of magnitude and the rate of technological change by some multiple of that, and that is only increasing with computing and AI and genetic editing and automation such that things like biological weapons, slaughter bots, misinformation, cyber and propaganda warfare can no longer be contained and culture cannot begin to adapt.