[300winmag]

I understand... but I remember reading some things back then from people who seemed just a little too excited at the prospect of exercising their survival skills should the worst happen, if you know what I mean.

I'm never excited about exercising certain skills I've learned, other than looking competent on the firing range. The Y2K disaster never happened, but I had a chance to try out a few of my survival skills/tools during the Great Blackout last August. I was mildly pleased with the results, but I never wanted a huge power failure, and still don't want another one. Multiply that by 1,000,000% for the Y2K disaster, and square THAT for a civil war.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

You're a sensible person. Unfortunately, not everyone is.

I used to lurk at some pretty strange places online in the 90s... I read more than a few messages and articles from people who were hoping for the system to crash. Some of them were conservative, some liberal, some I-don't-know-what. Every political philosophy attracts extremists of one sort or another, and more than a few of those extremists think "the system" is broken, and the only way to fix it is to wipe it away and start fresh.

I'm not one of them, but I like reading different opinions.

[Ramius]

Hey there... I wish the issues were as clear as the old Y2K stuff we had to deal with. But such is not the case. These people actually would prefer for harm to happen to the U.S. if there were some way that they could take partisan credit for it somehow.

Yah know... even back in my Clinton-hating years I had many fears of what he might be capable of doing. But I would never, ever, have wished for evil to happen on U.S. soil just so it would make him look bad.