These postcards, handed out by a German chocolate company at the turn of the century, attempted to predict what life might have been like in the year 2000 based on the developing technology of those days. I think my favorite is either the city with a ceiling or the weather machine… But wouldn’t they have been mutually exclusive?

X-Ray Surveillance Machine

Weather Machine

Aqua Train

Walking on Water

Broadcasting Sound & Images

Underwater Boat / Submarine

Escalator / Moving Walkway

Movable City Blocks

Flying Contraptions

City w/ Ceiling

Hot Air Family Zeppelin, pre-Hindenburg

Arctic Vacation Fly-By

Via The Card Mine

A Russian professor says the United States of America will disintegrate within the next year due to a fiscal meltdown. For ex KGB and Russian national security advisor, Igor Panarin, this claim is nothing new as he first made it in 1998 when the US economy was doing well. But now, due to the world economic crisis and the possibility of Japan transferring their monetary reserves from US dollars into another currency, his prediction has garnered new attention (surprisingly enough, even from the Wall Street Journal).

Panarin says that the US is in such great debt, that it will, by 2010, no longer be able to remain sovereign. His map indicates which parts of the US will be absorbed into which countries. Thank goodness the Midwest becomes Canadian! Now we won’t have to drive over the border to get our prescriptions filled!