re: #367 Thanos

Yeah, so this Fema Camp meme goes all the way back to Carter, one of the key books was Howard Ruff’s “How to Survive During the Coming Bad Days”. The militia and survivalist crazies took it from there and elaborated on his theme.

I remember even some of the more sane people were sucked in, Jerry Pournelle was writing articles on how to make radiation air filters out of toilet paper rolls for basement fallout shelters.

Well, let’s not forget - nuclear war appeared to be a distinct possibility for quite some time, and we had not much in the way of civil defense preparations. Some of the whackiness was general and free-floating (such as we see now) and some had its roots in very tangible realities.