I think ironraven's interpretation has a lot of merit. Hardly sinister. And I for one would applaud the notion of a victory garden as a civic duty on par with voting. Aside from the practicalities of getting some exercise and growing some healthy food, it gives people a psychological boost -- a small island of control in a sea of uncertainty. My 2c.

Plus I don't think Malthus realized that nitrogen fixing would be perfected by a chemist. Of course, there will be some limit to what the planet can support.

The situation in Japan may give us clues as to how things might go.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/04/japan-disaster-peak-oil

Psst... Doug, I was joking about the Vegan aliens.

The aliens aren't vegans?

Dang, and I've been hanging on to this entirely vegan bottle of MacAllan 12yr. for many long years. Thought it might be useful for such an occasion -- potent justification, in spite of all other evidence, for the continued existence of Humans and Earth.

I suspect that the aliens are coprophytic--which would explain all the anal probe stories. Tinfoil hats should protect our politicians...

Sue, I think this LA Times article touches a bit on some of these things you are observing and feeling in your gut.

Until I just read this article, I was thinking that all these backorders and delays at stored food companies like Mountain House were due to big government contracts caused by all the disasters lately or maybe the 2012 crowd getting a head start. But now that I read this article, maybe I've been completely missing the sentiments of people like the couple in this news story who are doing things like storing food long term for a number of different reasons and not just disaster preparedness. People who are not poor or out of work, but who are insecure nonetheless and worry about the future, as Blast was also pointing.

There is always another Oh-Oh! coming.

There was WW2, and the Cuban missile crisis, and Vietnam (the war, anti-war, and financial results), TMI, yearly floods and buzzards, a major financial crisis every ten years (each bigger than the last because 'it came out of the blue'), a couple of oil shocks, recession, inflation, stagflation, mass layoffs, riots, hurricanes, a couple of earthquakes, and the occasional serial killer.

In addition we get it all in living color, surround-sound, with color commentary, and large doses of political/religious/economic spin. A hurricane can't come ashore without some religious fanatic claiming it is God's wrath for laughing at an off-color joke or licking stamps with too much feeling. The financial sector is clearly into bed wetting as good news, bad news, no news, and the blithering of the town drunk all cause panic. The dead bodies haven't cooled yet and some political reporter has to ask the politician what he thinks about it. Which is then followed by an extended piece on how the event, and the politician's reaction, will shift the straw polls and results in the coming election. And that is the legitimate media.

Then you have WND, Beck, Jones, et al just making stuff up. Stories invented out of whole cloth about FEMA camps for political/religious prisoners and specially made cars for transporting them. The former never existed and the later turned out to be rolling stock used for transporting cars. But you can still find references to these non-events on the internet. Lies never die as long as they play on people's predispositions.

Point here is there are real scary things out there. And things that get made even more scary by constant media attention and harping. A few blocks burns in a major city during a riot, a tiny fraction of the area, and a hundred million people load guns and look out of their window suspiciously at their neighbors. Instead of being suspicious how about going out and talking to them? If you know the neighborhood you will know long ahead of time if people are going to riot. That's how you stay alert. Peeking around window shades isn't half as effective.

The human brain is structured for keeping up with what is going on in a small tribe and the local area. For millions of years learning of a death was learning about a death of someone you knew. Someone you saw daily. Their death was a warning that danger was very near in both space and time.

Now we get danger signals, emphasized by technology, broadcast from thousands of miles away, involving people we feel sorry for (empathy is another human trait) but with whom we will never have any contact with. A cougar lunches a hiker and millions of people get scared of large cats. The vast majority of those people are not in danger. I wonder how many hikers spend so much time looking for cougars that they forgot to look where they were going and fell off a cliff? I bet you could make a small fortune collecting dropped backpacks, and returning them for a fee, if you could convincingly fake a cougar call. The fear that they might seriously hurt themselves, or run off a cliff and kill themselves, makes that option less attractive.

A local survivalist spent a lot of money and effort collecting gear, for the riots and breakdown of order. Last year he found out he has advanced osteoporosis. He stepped off his front porch and his ankle broke. In his forties he has the bones of a ninety year old. He had to give up shooting his pistols when his arm started to hurt after a day at he range and X-rays showed several bones were cracked. Doctors think that his poor diet and lifelong habit of getting most of his water in the form of sodas has something to do with it. He uses crutches off and on and looks to be heading toward doing his fighting from a Hover-round.

I don't razz him about it and help any way I can, he is a good guy and I like him, he can be very funny, but it is ironic that after running scared about the 'golden hoard' and civil collapse it is the soda that was the bigger threat to his health and well being. I also want to be on his good side. Eventually he is going to get around to selling his gear, he can't work and the bills don't stop, and I'd like to be near the head of the line. I'd like to think of this as enlightened self-interest.

I'm not that worried about the Russians, the Taliban, the Feds (who know me quite well already), the Japanese reactors or the wrath of your Deity.

I do worry about the dumbass in the minivan behind me who's yapping on the phone or the guy at work that doesn't know/care what he's doing and the havoc he will wreak.