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A strange thing happened to a friend of mine the other day. She was at work when she noticed a coworker looking rather sullen in the corner of the office. She went to ask what was wrong, when suddenly her coworker broke into fits of wailing and sobbing. The woman’s shoulders convulsed with such force as she cried, that my friend assumed there must have been a death in the family, or that someone close to her was sick or dying. My friend immediately tried to comfort her and ask what was wrong.

This is what she was told:

FEMA was building camps to round up and annihilate Christians. The roundup would start soon, but it would move slowly and quietly. Whole families would disappear and not be heard from again, but it would be made to look like they simply moved out of town. Christian children, her children, would be gassed and put into plastic coffins. Two of the woman’s friends had already moved out of the country. Others were following soon. She intended to join them as soon as she could save up enough money. But finances were tight and it might be too late.

What made this incident especially strange for my friend was that her coworker was not unintelligent or incompetent. She spoke three languages, was good at her job, and had managed to raise three children, by herself, at a relatively young age. The whole FEMA camp thing is pretty 2008, yet the woman’s fear was so palpable that she still called me to double-check.

Putting aside the obvious questions about why the government, composed of Christians, run by Christians, largely for the benefit of Christians, would round up 90 percent of the country and put them into camps, the online FEMA camp rumors were debunked ages ago, most thoroughly by Popular Mechanics – who then sent their editor-in-chief on Glenn Beck’s show twice to set the paranoiacs straight. One of the supposed U.S. government concentration camps is actually a North Korean prison camp. The other is a train yard in the Midwest somewhere, while the third is a National Guard base in Michigan. This information isn’t hard to look up. The Popular Mechanics piece is among the first things to pop up when you search for FEMA camps. Yet the rumors and paranoia still persist.

As soon as my friend told me this story, I had to know how much FEMA-fear was still out there. I posed the question on the social networking site Reddit, which is known for having a fairly sophisticated readership, and received more paranoia in reply than I would have expected.

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After reading all the fallout on Yahoo! Sports from the Anderson Silva/Demien Maia fight, about how Silva is a disgrace to mixed martial arts and how UFC fuhrer Dana White is at his wit’s end trying to figure out what to do with the guy, I finally took the time to sit down and watch the fight. And you know what? Dana White and Yahoo! Sports are full of shit. Plain and simple.

The obvious fact was that Maia was simply outclassed from the start. He couldn’t touch Silva. In the second round, Silva stood directly in front of Maia with his hands at his sides, head motionless, for seconds at a time. Maia didn’t even throw a punch. Silva basically took the last three rounds off and Maia’s face was still a bloody mess by the end of the fight.

And people want to blame Silva for the bad fight?

Look, I don’t blame Maia either. He didn’t belong in the ring with Silva. He was terrified from the start. Twice I saw him fall to the ground in anticipation of punches that never landed.

This fight was Dana White’s fault.

White and his fanbois at Yahoo! say Silva should have used his killer instinct to finish Maia like Tyson used to do to his opponents in his prime. But this isn’t boxing. Silva is one of the most dangerous men on the planet, in a sport where he’s punching his opponents in the head with practically his bare hands. Does White want Silva to kill somebody in the ring? Is that what he means by killer instinct? Because when you place two fighters so wildly unmatched in the same cage, there’s a distinct possibility that could happen.

Silva has made it abundantly clear from previous fights he will not finish people who don’t belong in the ring with him. And, you know what, I don’t blame him. Demien Maia is a great fighter and would absolutely destroy me if I ever crossed him in a dive bar, but putting him up against Anderson Silva would be like sending Bobby Fischer to play the local YMCA champ. Or sending Paul Pfeiffer to beat up Wayne (All you kids out there need to look that reference up if you don’t get it. Hours of great television in store for you).

Silva may have clowned Maia, but he’s a warrior. He’s clearly got a code. He wants to fight the best. He doesn’t want to bully people who can’t stand with him. And he’s shown repeatedly he’ll only bring his game if he’s fighting someone who challenges him. This shouldn’t be that hard *Dana White* to figure out.

Yes, the Maia fight only happened because Vitor Belfort pulled out. Chael Sonnen was too beat up from his last fight to make this card. So why not set Silva up with a heavyweight if there’s no one else? Why should Maia get a title shot just because he’s the only middleweight healthy enough to fight? Silva has said he he’d like to take on Brock Lesnar one day. Put him in with a big guy and see how he does. How about a fight with Cro-Cop or Nogueira? How great would that have been? Heavyweights past their prime, but still great tests for the smaller Silva.

Instead we got the fight with Maia, the results of which anyone could have seen coming.

As fellow True/Slanter Matt Taibbi has astutely pointed out in the past few weeks, New York Times columnist David Brooks is an elite-gargling wind bag — a powerful enabler of the sociopathic greed of America’s upper crust. But Brooks’ column last month  on what he calls “Wal-Mart hippies,” is right about one thing: conservatives in the Tea Party Movement are appropriating the techniques of the great 20th century peace/social justice movements. Of course Brooks’ column completely missed larger point of the phenomena: he seems to think these folks represent a genuine social movement –”fighting the man” as it were, rather than serving the interests of the moneyed elite.

“The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers,” Brooks wrote, “want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.”

Actually, they don’t. The true foot soldiers of the Tea Party  want to deport Mexicans, not pay their taxes, crack some liberal skulls and make sure our next president is white, and preferably airheaded. The dregs of the Tea Party movement don’t seem intelligent enough to realize they’re dupes in a cynical political ploy to paralyze the government so the robber barons in our midst can continue sucking the national coffers dry. Using the rhetoric and methodology of the peace and justice movement gives them the illusion of legitimacy — at least for the time being — which is exactly what Rick Santelli, Freedom Works and the rest of conservative think tanks and media players who planned the Tea Party Movement had in mind.

If there is any doubt about just how cynical the wealthy can be in adopting these techniques for their own ends, take a look at 51-year-old real estate developer Henry Nunez. Following in the tradition of civil rights leaders like Gandhi and King, Nunez has gone on a hunger strike. For the better part of a week, in advance of a city council election in his home city of Arcadia, California, Nunez claims to not have eaten a thing.

“I’m not a freak,” he told the Pasadena News-Star. “I’m an educated man. I’m not a radical. I’m a conservative.”

He’s also absolutely shameless. What is Nunez fighting for, you may wonder?

To put his chosen candidates on the city council — so they can change the city density code to allow for five-story buildings instead of the current three. Yes, this man is hunger striking over the zoning code.

As you could probably guess, Nunez isn’t some kind of eccentric architectural advocate — he stands to make a killing from such a zoning change.

From the Pasadena News-Star:

Nunez, who has developed housing projects in cities such as Upland and Monrovia, admits, too, that he has a personal interest in his election goals. Nunez, who is an executive officer and past chairman of the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership, would love to be the primary developer of multi-million mixed-use projects between Colorado Boulevard and Huntington Drive.

The funniest part is that Nunez, who weighs 245 pounds, is subsisting on Mountain Dew and protein shakes. He’s probably going to put on weight by the time he’s done.

What isn’t funny is the long term effect of people like Nunez and the Tea Partiers. There aren’t that many effective non-violent techniques out there that have been successfully employed to affect social change. Using them in service of the elite renders them completely useless for the rest of us. Not only does the cynical appropriation of these techniques allow their users to borrow the legitimacy of the past, but it renders these techniques completely ineffective in the future. Do snowboarding, skateboarding, skydiving ect. really seem that EXTREME anymore after all those friggin’ Mountain Dew commercials? Once the counter-culture is hijacked, there’s no going back.

Can you imagine what would happen now if a few hundred anti-war activists went on a hunger strike to pull the troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq? The media will trot out Nunez to appear on every talk show in the country. Tonight on CNN: “Is hunger striking really a big deal?”

And, of course, Blackwater, KBR and the other companies that make killings off the wars, will probably rally a counter pro-war hunger strike — with hundreds of people surviving on Mountain Dews and protein shakes.

The non-violent techniques of the social justice movement are now effectively useless. The EXTREME movements of Gandhi and King have “Done the Dew.” Which strikes me as a far more serious consequence than any short term plans to undermine the health care bill.

H/T LA Daily

Image by Brian U via Flickr

I blew a tire in Orange County the other day. It exploded going 85 on I-5, leaving me stranded for several hours at a freeway adjacent mini-mall. It was fairly a harrowing experience. Not the actual car accident, which was actually fairly benign – more the unwanted time spent in the O.C.

Waiting to get my tire fixed, I found my way to an upscale mall-restaurant, overlooking a bleached gray parking lot with the interstate beyond. A sleek but generic Asian/Hawaiian theme pulled the place together, and ambient corporate rock covered up the sound of cars whizzing past us at 80 miles per hour.

A group of businessmen sat next to me at the bar, Fox News on the TV in front of us, drinking wildly expensive fruity cocktails and talking shop. There’s something deeply unsettling about people willing to pay twelve bucks for a designer cocktail in a freeway adjacent corporate lei lounge. These guys were clearly filthy rich. All the world’s resources marshaled in their favor and this was the best they could do?

This thought swirled over and over in my head and left me strangely terrified.

Staring out the tinted front window of the restaurant into the blinding parking lot, rows of chain stores and packed freeway beyond, I suddenly realized something important: I have seen the apocalypse and it looks like Orange County.

I’m not being snarky. I mean this quite literally. Imagine, if you will, what kind of existence humans would live after a nuclear holocaust — people using hermetically sealed vehicles to transport themselves to hermetically sealed, corporate-controlled living, working and commercial environments. Little nature, little unmediated social interaction, little activities that don’t require cash.

Sounds a lot like Orange County, no? Orlando too, which just so happens to be the other “city on the hill” of the American conservative imagination.

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Learned this one the hard way the other night.

Out at the pub in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, I found myself unable to choose between a pint of Guinness or the house lager, both of which sounded spectacular at the moment.

The solution? Whiskey of course. Instead, I stupidly ordered a Black and Tan.

An Irish friend immediately turned to me and said, “Calling a drink a ‘Black and Tan’ would be like calling a drink ‘Gestapo’ in Israel.” He then explained the “Black and Tan” were a brutal English police force in the early 20th century, that terrorized the Emerald Isle. To hear him describe it, the English basically found the most shell shocked WWI vets they could dig up, paid them a few shillings, gave them new uniforms and sent them to Ireland to do as they pleased.

Here was the basic attitude of the force, as told by a divisional commander at the time:

“If a police barracks is burned or if the barracks already occupied is not suitable, then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the occupants thrown into the gutter. Let them die there – the more the merrier.

Should the order (“Hands Up”) not be immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching (a patrol) carry their hands in their pockets, or are in any way suspicious-looking, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties some time. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you nopoliceman will get into trouble for shooting any man.”

Lt. Col. Smyth, June 1920

Lesson learned.

So what do the Irish call a Black and Tan? A “Half and Half.” And if for some reason you can’t remember that, better just to stick with whiskey my friends. Stick with whiskey.