Ok, here's how it's going down. The U.S. presidential election is coming up in November, right now democrats and republicans seem to get along worse than they ever have, and a brilliant court ruling says that folk can make anonymous donations to campaigns for unlimited amounts of dollars. So what's going to happen is someone is going to cheat. They're going to take those unlimited funds, that could be donated by anyone in the world, and try to buy the election, and it's going to work. For a few weeks anyway, then someone will figure out what happened and call shenanigans on the cheating bastards. The cheating bastards will deny it, even though it will become really obvious, and the other side will scream like hell and try to call the election unfair and take the cheater out and put their guy in. At this point the Federal gov will stop working as they have their little power struggle, confidence in the U.S. will be shaken/ruined which will be the last bullet in the head of our stupid economy, markets will crash, money will quickly begin to be worthless. Our crashing economy and worthless money will wreck things all over the world, dragging other economies down into the gutter with us, once all the other economies start to go down, ours will go down faster, which will make theirs go down faster. People will panic when their money is worthless, this panic combined with no federal government will scramble the rest of our little society up good, once some folk stop doing their jobs, society becomes less efficient and this only speeds up all the other nasty things going on. Frantic irrational people will raid the stores, food supplies will be used up in about 6 weeks. The supplies could last much longer if people wouldn't take more than they can store, but they will, once the electrical power gets unreliable most of the food will rot before its eaten. So now were down to hunting, farming and robing. As food in cities runs low, people will begin to move, and road crews will form. These road crews will be on all roads in and out of cities and will be made of the stupidest, most violent militant fools your town has to offer. So watch out for them. Hunting will only be good for about 6 months, by then all the large animals will have been hunted to extinction or really close to it. Again, they could last much longer but most folk don't know how to preserve meat, so they'll have to hunt more than they would really need to. So now we have run out of store food, and have hunted out all the large animals, road crews at this point will be the first to switch to eating people, but everyone else will follow shortly after. This will continue until the population of the world is down to a small enough number that people can wander around for weeks at a time without seeing anyone else. 500 million worldwide or so. Probably less. People will be grouped around the coasts, pretty much back to square one.
Here's the fun part. The election that starts all this is in November, it'll take a few weeks for the cheating to become obvious enough to cause a major divide, and maybe another week or two to really cause big trouble for the world economy, putting the date for this end of the world scenario right about the end of december, which lines up nicely with the old Mayan end of the world date. So if there's a big surprise this election, you'd be best to get some good friends, and set up camp on a remote section of a well traveled road, so you can start robing them poor pilgrims as they flee their starving town. Cheers