The Orlando Sentinel reported this morning on a Florida candidate for U.S. Senate, Augustus Sol Invictus, who has admitted to killing a goat and drinking its blood in a pagan ritual of thanks after fasting and praying for a week in the Mojave Desert.

The chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida, Adrian Wyllie, who was the Libertarian candidate for governor last year, has denounced Invictus, saying that the 32-year-old politician wants to lead a civil war, is trying to recruit neo-Nazis to the party, and is a sadistic goat-slaughterer. Apparently this is just a bit too much for some of the Libertarians in Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel’s report, Invictus has admitted to at least the accusation of goat sacrifice: “I did sacrifice a goat. I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans. I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness ... Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”

Prior to this Senate run, Augustus Sol Invictus’ claim-to-fame was an unhinged, rambling departure memo renouncing his licenses to practice law, his diplomas, his affiliation with Rollins, DePaul, and the University of South Florida, his United States citizenship, his membership in the Roman Catholic Church, his law firm, his publishing company & poetry journal, and all of his material possessions:

I am of genius intellect & cultured, well-educated & creative, well-mannered & refined. I am God’s gift to humankind where the English language is concerned, and I also happen to have a basic knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian. I am musical & artistic; I am athletic & possessed of militant self-discipline; and I am many other things… I am everything you ever wanted to be.

I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War I would begin it myself. Mark well: That day is fast coming upon you. On the New Moon of May, I shall disappear into the Wilderness. I will return bearing Revolution, or I will not return at all.

War Be unto the Ends of the Earth.

If Florida’s track-record of weird is any indication, we suspect that Augustus Sol Invictus will not be the last crypto-fascist, pseudo-Satanist, blood-drinking Libertarian we see come out of Florida in the upcoming elections.

Video of Augustus Sol Invictus “campaigning”:

Via: Orlando Sentinel

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Florida Man’: New documentary explores why Florida is so goddamned weird

Gregory McLaughlin, Randy Rush - The Front

A pair of eye-opening, no-budget documentaries on the (surprisingly great) glam, punk, and new wave music history of Florida have surfaced. These documentaries, primarily focused on the 1980s hyper-obscuro bands of the Miami scene, are a window into a musical history that, probably because of its geographical distance from the rest of the country, has been virtually ignored.

Punk rock historian, and author of the excellent Crate Digger: An Obsession With Punk Records, Bob Suren, who is constantly alerting me to new old bands I’ve never heard, sent me a link to Greg McLaughlin’s You Tube channel—a veritable treasure trove of Florida new wave and punk history. And get this—most of it’s actually really great.

McLaughlin led The Front, an early ‘80s punky, new-wave-ish quintet from Miami, with a sound reminiscent of San Francisco’s The Mutants or John Foxx era Ultravox. These guys were legitimate outsider weirdos who could have been huge if they had been from New York or LA or, hell, even Athens, GA. McLaughlin’s You Tube channel is chock full of clips of The Front as well as other Florida bands that no one north of Tallahassee’s ever heard of. Most of these bands may have released one or two singles if they were lucky. The Front had two.
 

 
McLaughlin has collected a lot of this footage, as well as interviews, into two documentaries: Invisible Bands and The Front -The Band That Time Forgot. The former chronicles Florida’s DIY music history from ‘60s garage punk bands through ‘80s new wave, power pop, and punk. The latter deals more specifically with McLaughlin’s own band, The Front, but also delves into the ‘80s Florida music scene, with bands such as The Eat, Cichlids, Screamin’ Sneakers, and Charlie Pickett and the Eggs.

Both documentaries are charmingly “no budget,”—fun in spite of their utter lack of any production value. Both could use a lot of fat-trimming, and would benefit greatly from about 30 minutes worth of cuts each. I think this is a problem film makers often face when they are too close to their subject matter.  The Front documentary loses focus about half way through and just starts including footage from loads of ‘80s contemporary local bands. Thankfully, all of the music (from a slew of unknown bands—“Killed By Death” greats, The Eat, are the most famous band featured, if that gives you any frame of reference)  is fantastic, even if the document itself is overlong and disjointed. Some of the footage repeats between the two documentaries, and if you’re not a patient person you may find yourself wanting to skim around a bit, but the music is totally worth it. There are some major gems to be unearthed here.

More after the jump…

 
Goddamn you, Florida, you’ve gone and done it again. Jonathan Restrepo, of Coral Springs, FL, jumped out of his girlfriend’s car on South Ocean Boulevard while allegedly high on meth and decided it would be a good idea to surf the tops of people’s moving cars. According to reports, he had it in his head someone or something was after him. What better way to escape your imaginary foes than by jumping on top of random cars and thereby insuring that real police would be after you? It IS Florida, so this story totally makes sense. I mean, it just does.

The driver who shot the video (which is below) said “He was running around like a monkey with his tongue out, waving his arms in the air, jumping on top of cars.”

Mr. Restrepo, who surrendered to police, is currently out on bond after being charged with numerous offenses.

 
via WPBF 25 News and h/t Death and Taxes

 
Jon Stewart has called Florida “America’s Wang,” and it does seem like the state’s strong peninsular properties somehow attract people who are on the end of their rope. In Florida Man, Sean Dunne’s endlessly quotable and surprisingly poignant documentary about worn-out and inebriated layabouts in the Sunshine State, the viewer meets a wide variety of beercan philosophers in the course of 50 minutes, many of whom have tales to tell, of the government’s economic dependence on the incarcerated, of the heady thrills of a lifetime of brawling, of the murderous tendencies of pill addicts, of the undeniable pleasures of an impromptu three-way underneath a pier on a beach.

I’m tempted to call this movie “the real Fight Club,” but that’s not right. It’s “Old Drunk Guy Parking Lot”—a majority of the footage was obtained outside various bars, motels, laundromats, and tattoo parlors, and certainly a majority of the interviewees, if not nearly all of them, have booze sloshing around their system. However, it’s hard to state anything equivocal beyond the two facts laid down in the title—it’s in Florida, and it’s about males. Not all of them are old, and not all of them are drunk. Taken together, however, there’s an unmistakable commonality among the worn-out old dudes who were willing to interact with Dunne and his crew. As one guy says, “When I moved here I was a damn Yankee. I got upgraded to redneck.” (Come to think of it, “Upgraded to Redneck” isn’t a bad alternate title for the movie.)
 

 
To his credit, Dunne had not much in the way of an agenda when he started the movie, letting serendipity dictate the content. As he says,
 

Basically we just drove around aimlessly, stopping any time we saw something or someone that interested us and one thing would lead to another and the universe would pull us in one direction or another. Most of what you’re seeing in the final film is the entirety of our interaction with these guys. It was quick and to the point and I didn’t even interview people besides the occasional “Any words of wisdom?” So what we got was a whole bunch of people telling stories and talking about whatever was on their mind. It was a strange and exciting journey that took us to a lot of places we didn’t expect.

 
This succession of cocksure, mostly unemployed or “retired” drifters or near-drifters may be the most resonant depiction of Florida since Errol Morris’s Vernon, Florida, with which it shares more than a little in terms of directorial strategy. I’m tempted to lard up this post with the hard-won wisdom the movie’s subjects spout. The fellow whose footage opens the movie is a dessicated George Carlin-looking cat with a handlebar mustache who just lives to tussle. “I love to make people bleed, I swear to God I do,” he says. “Once you get to Florida, you don’t ever want to go back north,” is the questionable premise of a superannuated barfly wearing a U.S. Navy trucker hat.

Moments after declaring, “I’m not a drunk,” an elderly African-American fellow jokes that “Ace Liquor Store over there” is “my second home.” In the next sequence the owner of the same store says, memorably, “Here in the liquor store, we see probably 50% of the people arrive by either foot or by bicycle, because they all have DUIs,” adding that most of his problem drinkers “eventually pass away. If you have a drinking problem, handle it.”

There’s much more, but it’s better experienced firsthand. If you have a hour to kill, you could do a lot worse than spending it with this hardy bunch of dipsomanaical survivors. Watch it below:
 

Going through the metal detectors… just like Jesus used to to do
 
Photographer Daniel Cronin traveled far from his secular home of Portland, Oregon to the ancient and sacred land of Orlando, Florida to visit The Holy Land Experience, a Biblical theme park owned and operated by the Trinity Broadcasting Network (the station now run by that half-assed, pink haired Tammy Faye knock-off, Jan Crouch). It’s is about as chintzy as you’d expect—lots of suspiciously Nordic-looking Jesi, a disorienting sense of anachronism with costumed employees running the snack stands and metal detectors, the gory crucifixion reenactment, a slightly Rococo color palette—the works, really.

As with all televangelist ventures, The Holy Land Experience (which is legally a non-profit) has been mired in controversy. Founded by Marvin Rosenthal (who was born Jewish before his conversion, if you hadn’t guessed), the park attracted the ire of the Jewish Defense League who protested its opening believing it to be a ploy to convert Jews to Christianity. Of course it wouldn’t be Christian edutainment without some alleged misappropriation of funds—the HLE manages to avoid paying property taxes (amounting to $300,000 a year) by reclassifying itself as a “museum,” as opposed to, you know, a theme park. Also, HLE Director and CEO Jan Crouch has been accused (by her own granddaughter, no less) of ripping off both the Trinity Broadcasting Network and the park. For two years during The Holy Land Experience’s construction, her two pampered pooches (both Maltese, a toy breed) got their own luxury hotel room adjoining her own.

You know… just like Jesus’s pups!
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
A Florida—go figure—woman living in a senior community caught her neighbor hand-feeding an alligator. “She would bring food back and forth and feed him and he would hang out there all day with her,” Lynette Miller said.

Miller captured video of the woman in Port St. Lucie last year and says she saw her multiple times feeding the gator. “She nicknamed the gator Puppy Puppy. She would yell at him and he would come,” Miller said.

Other neighbours also saw the gator. “I would hear ‘puppy, puppy, puppy.’ I thought the woman was calling for her husband. But she said ‘no, I am calling for the alligator,’ ” Grace LaPlace said. Neighbours say they saw the woman feeding the gator all different kinds of food including cereal.

If this lady was a character on The Walking Dead I’m pretty sure the other humans would just shoot her.
 

Via Arbroath

 
“They gave me some raw waffles,” starts the woman’s story, “and I told him that I don’t want the waffles.”

Do I really need to say where this wacky-ass 911 phone call over raw waffles happened? Do I really?

Tampa. Florida.

 
Via Arbroath

Stevie Wonder and Nelson Mandela

During his concert Sunday in Quebec City, Stevie Wonder declared he would not be playing Florida again until the abolition of “Stand Your Ground,” the law that allowed George Zimmerman to go free after murdering Trayvon Martin. His impassioned speech to the crowd:

The truth is that—for those of you who’ve lost in the battle for justice, wherever that fits in any part of the world—we can’t bring them back. What we can do is we can let our voices be heard. And we can vote in our various countries throughout the world for change and equality for everybody. That’s what I know we can do.

And I know I’m not everybody, I’m just one person. I’m a human being. And for the gift that God has given me, and from whatever I mean, I decided today that until the “Stand Your Ground” law is abolished in Florida, I will never perform there again. As a matter of fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state or in that part of the world.

Because what I do know is that people know that my heart is of love for everyone. When I say everyone I mean everyone. As I said earlier, you can’t just talk about it, you have to be about it. We can make change by coming together for the spirit of unity. Not in destruction, but in the perpetuation of life itself.

Wonder is no stranger to artistic boycotts. He was a part of a wave of musicians who refused to play South Africa’s Sun City resort to protest apartheid, even penning a song, “It’s Wrong (Apartheid)” to raise awareness. It’s possible Wonder’s declaration could spark a trend of boycotts to shame Florida into overturning its draconian laws.

Of course, boycotts today don’t really have the same cultural context they once did for Apartheid. Last November, Wonder himself played a concert for Israeli Defense Forces, in spite of emphatic demands from activists for artists to boycott Israel in protest of the Palestinian occupation. Overwhelming international public sentiment opposed Apartheid, which was easily identified as cut and dry racial segregation, but for the west, the topic of Israel is mired in Islamophobia, and is much more difficult to organize around. Likewise, we have a lot of paranoid, reactionary gun nuts in this country, and artists might argue that playing Florida isn’t an endorsement of a single law. Regardless, I do think famous spokespeople (for better or worse) help steer the national dialogue, and we need to do everything we can to keep focus on the abolition of the “Stand Your Ground” law.
 

 
Via Vulture

 
Thanks to Andru Reeve.

 
File this one under: What the fuckity-fuck?

According to St. Petersburg police, 34-year-old Jarvis Sutton of St. Petersburg, Florida, called 911 approximately 80 times on Sunday for some Kool-Aid, weed and burgers to be delivered to him.

Sutton admitted to making the calls. When the cops arrested him, he actually started to gnaw on “the foam attached to the metal caging in the back of a police cruiser.”

I guess he was really hungry?

Sutton faces charges of misusing the 911 system.

Via WLWT and Brian Braun!

 
Rick Scott, the vile, freaky clown who is the governor of Florida has announced that his state will not take that DIRTY Medicaid money as mandated by the ACA to subsidize the purchase of health care by THE POORS.

As The Daily Beast’‘s Michael Tomasky reports, Scott’s announcement means that at least several hundred thousand—if not many more—of Florida’s poorest families and individuals (those who are up to 133% above the poverty line) will not receive subsidies to purchase health insurance which would be 93% covered by the Feds anyway:

Funny. I seem to remember a time when Scott was quite eager to take Medi-CARE money! That wasn’t his. You remember what I’m talking about.

So this is what social programs mean to Scott. As a private-sector businessman, something to steal from. As a public “servant,” something to play political games with. Floridians will die so that he can be first in the wingnut line.

I don’t know the precise number, but in a state that size, surely a couple million people/families who’ll be eligible for care under the new law in 2014—families of four earning up to $88,000 are eligible for the subsidies—will be denied the chance to buy coverage at subsidized rates because Scott has refused this money. From a policy perspective, this is the next battleground, the pressure point of resistance for the hard-shell ideologues. How many states will really sacrifice billions in federal dollars for the sake of ideology, and how many will do it before the election so they get a gold star from Rove?

Those interested in what we used to call facts may want to read through this nice primer from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which describes the Medicaid transfer from the feds to the states and explains how the federal government will actually be picking up 93 percent of the costs over the next nine years.

If you lived in Florida and you were having a hard time coping like a lot of people are these days—let’s say that maybe you have a handicapped child and have lost your job for the sake of this thought experiment—and you watched last week’s SCOTUS announcement and cried tears of joy that your kid would finally be able to get medical care without making the rest of your family homeless, and now you get THIS NEWS that a mutant shitstain on humanity like Rick Scott is going to deny your kid healthcare because he wants brownie points with the fucking Tea party, what would you think about doing to Rick Scott?

Ponder that for ten seconds. Don’t even give yourself the luxury of a full minute. What comes to mind that you would want to do to Rick Scott?

And if you, dear reader, are thinking what I am a thinking… have a look at the trailer for the powerful (and very underrated I feel) 2002 film, John Q.

Will life imitate art? In the case of Rick Scott, let’s hope it fucking does!
 

 
More early 80s synthpunk madness, this time from South Florida’s Futurisk. These guys are pretty obscure and information on them is limited, but according to their website they formed in 1979 when teenager Jeremy Kolosine won some time in a recording studio, and their music was usually:

recorded by Richard Hess and the band in the rooms of Ron K’s house. The drum sound, gotten in a bathroom, rocks, even today. Reportedly, Futurisk may have been the 1st synth-punk band in the American South…or something, and 1981’s track ‘Push Me Pull You (pt. 2)’ was an early pre-‘Rockit’ excursion into electro-funk.

The revival of interest in the band was sparked when James Murphy included one of their tracks on a DFA mix for the French boutique Colette in 2003. Last year the Minimal Wave label released a retrospective of the band’s work called Player Piano, and earlier this year the band put out a remix 12” of the track “Lonely Streets”, one of whose remixes came from the mighty Chris Carter. Here’s a couple of videos of Futurisk in action:

Futurisk - “Meteoright”
 

 
After the jump the original video for the classic “Army Now”, and more Futurisk…
 
If you like what you hear, and you want to pick up Player Piano, you can get it here.

 
Meet Sean Hannity‘s new BFF, retired Lieutenant Colonel Allen West.  He’s running for Congress in Florida next year, but, thanks to this speech, there’s already some growing Fox-centric hype buzz about West running for President in 2012.  I find it amazing—and galling—that, along with Sarah Palin, West is demanding “We Take Back America!”  Back from what, exactly?  The still-developing 300+ days of Obama, or the previous 8 bloody, costly years of Bush rule?!