Stefanie Heminger, who hosts her very own really rad rock and roll website where she interviews seminal artists like Papa Roach, Reo Speedwagon and Ron Jeremy has given Rick Perry her full-bodied endorsement.
Heminger’s rock and roll roots are pretty impressive. According to her bio…
...she started touring, hanging and learning from the pioneers of Rock Music. You might of seen her on Playboy TV, Playboy Radio XM, MTV, Telemundo, Album cover of Murderdolls, or back up dancing for several artists.
This has got to have Obama shaking in his loafers and Rick Perry happier than a homosexual in a pickle patch.
The excitement is palpable, spine-tingling and borderline unbearable.
Stick with this. The Jesus vibe is upped to the point where spiritual frenzy sends the God-meter into the red.
If you judge a person by the company he keeps, Rick Perry is nuttier than a port-a-potty at a peanut festival. (Regional humor. I live in Texas).
At most large gatherings where music is part of the entertainment, there will be bad apples who insist on taking drugs to allegedly heighten the experience. See what these drugs do to a bunch of young Christian kids in the shocking last two minutes of this video. Brown acid?
The interview below with the Texas Tribune was done during Rick Perry’s successful run for re-election as Governor of Texas last year. In it, I hear an echo of George W. Bush’s good ol’ boy stupidity that is frightening. Listen and look. Do you recognize the lack of focus, the evasiveness, the failed logic, the goofy chuckle and aw shucks who gives a shit about the facts attitude we had in the White House for 8 long and ugly years? The resemblance in style, or lack of it, between Bush and Perry is uncanny.
Perry’s approach to sex education reminds me of Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, in which Reich theorizes that
Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.
Perry and his creationist state board of education eliminated two six month sex education classes in Texas schools in 2004 and replaced them with abstinence-only education, which, to my mind, is not education. In 2010, Texas had a teen birth rate more than 50% above the national average. It also led in the rate of repeat teen pregnancy .
Female college students have to get parental consent to get birth control in parts of Texas.
Eliminating sex education in the schools and replacing it with a rule of abstinence keeps teenagers in the dark about sex at a time when they should be given the guidance and tools to approach sex intelligently. Telling kids to suppress their sexuality is like telling a Priest to keep his hands off the altar boys. You want to see sexual suppression at work, just take a look at the Catholic Church or the Nazis…or Texas.
Teenagers with a healthy, informed approach to sex are more inclined to make the right choices about when, where and how. Keep em stupid and they’ll do stupid things. Making it impossible for them to get birth control and guilt tripping them with religious screeds just makes things worse. Thus, we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation in Texas. Additionally, there’s a sexually transmitted disease boom in the state. “Just say no” seems to be saying yes to syphilis, gonorrhea and HIV. The philosophy of ignore it and it will go away just doesn’t work.
Imagine having Rick Perry counsel your kid on sex.
While England tries to come to terms with the rioting of the last seven days, politicians and pundits, of both the right and left persuasion, are still using the looting as a means of point-scoring against their traditional enemies on the other side of the fence. ‘Twas ever thus, etc. But at what point are both sides going to be honest, put their hands up and admit that they have both made mistakes?
Call names all you want, pick holes in opposing ideologies all you want, but it’s fair to say that the pontifications of the left and the knee-jerk reactions of the right are neither going to satisfactorily explain what has been happening, or prevent it from happening again. More useful, I think, is to look beyond the cyclical, circular arguments of politics. This piece from the blog potlatch has a fair stab at detaching the riots from dead end political dialogs, and has valid criticisms of both the left and the right:
The dilemma for the Left, and for sociologists, is the following: whether or not to trust people’s own understanding of what they’re doing. And if a young looter says nothing about politics or inequality, and displays no class consciousness, to what extent can a culturally sensitive democratic socialist disagree with them? For sure, the Old Left would have no problem re-framing the behaviour of an egomaniac teenager burning down his neighbour’s shop in terms of class. That’s what crude Marxist ‘critical realism’ meant. But the New Left, along with the ‘cultural turn’ in sociology, was meant to be slightly more capable of listening.
...
Strangely, other than the repeated mantra that there is “no excuse” for looting, I’ve been surprised by how guarded the political classes have been on this occasion. I assumed that moralistic rhetoric would be raining down by now, focused on absent fathers, bringing back the birch, national service and banning computer games. But no. Could it be that the absence of politics, of sociological rationale, and of socialist ambition in these events means that they are, from a Rightwing perspective, comparatively safe?
Right now it feels like the same old arguments are getting trotted out again and again, people are not willing to budge from their positions and open up to new ideas, and no real, genuine progress is being made to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Either it’s time for a new kind of politics, or it’s time to accept that politics is not going to solve the problems we face - surely I can’t be the only to feel that the ENTIRE political system, both left AND right, have failed us?
Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg was interviewed on BBC Radio Nottingham by Alan Clifford yesterday, about the English Riots.
Clifford quizzed Clegg on the 20% reduction in police number, his views on the rioters, and whether Clegg’s own conviction for arson at the age of 16 had given him any insight into their actions.
‘I’d drunk too much, I was irresponsible, criminal’
He revealed he had set fire, whether by accident or design was left unclear, to a prize collection of cacti. Cole Morton, who carried out the interview wrote:
First, though, I want to know if this readiness to please means he’ll confess to the unvarnished truth about an episode he once passed off as ‘a drunken prank’. My understanding is that it was much more than that. It was arson, actually. He could have gone to jail, ending his chances of a political career before it had even begun. The property he destroyed, deliberately, was priceless. Can we talk about the cactus?
‘Oh, the cactus,’ he says, placing his head in his hands for a moment, then rubbing his face. ‘I just behaved very, very badly. I was on an exchange in Germany and I drank far, far, far too much. I was a teenager. I lost it, really.’
Lost it? He does seem genuinely agitated. ‘What I mean is I was drunk…’ Yes, he said that. What on? ‘They had this beer brewed in monasteries near Munich. Kloster Andechs. Unbelievably strong. Which clearly I couldn’t take.’
Clegg was 16 years old, a public schoolboy abroad. So what happened? ‘Yeah… I, erm, I was at a party and I drifted into a greenhouse with a friend, saw it was full of cacti and lit a match to find our way, as there were no lights on. The flame accidentally touched one of the cacti, which glowed rather beautifully.’
Was it an accident, then? He looks at me. Only at first, it seems. ‘We did that to a fair number of the cacti. Not really knowing what we’d done.’
I can’t help but laugh, at the story and the look on his face, but he objects. He treated this like a joke when, cleverly, he made it public at a fringe meeting in 2007, before the leadership election. He doesn’t think it’s so funny now. ‘No, it’s not… I mean, genuinely.It was the leading collection of cacti in Germany.’
The greenhouse belonged to a professor of botany whose life’s work had been to gather and nurture exotic specimens from all over the world. ‘He’d been to the jungles of Brazil and stuff to find these cacti.’
The boys weren’t arrested, because they ran away. ‘We didn’t know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we’d drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally. Next morning, one of the organisers of the exchange rang me up and said, “We know you did this.” I came clean.’
The boys were taken off to see the professor, who was livid, but he was somehow persuaded not to press charges. ‘Instead they created a kind of community punishment for us. Me and the other bloke ended up having to dig communal flower beds in the baking sun. Then I spent the summer with my mum, going round one specialised garden centre after another, trying to replace some of the cacti. Of course they were tiny, and his were all large.’
To all the moronic idiots quick to jump down the throats of people looking for the causes of the English riots with the meaningless soundbite “That’s not an excuse!” aqquaint yourself with the angry wisdom of London cab driver Mark McGowan. At a time when public discourse has been overrun by a sea of armchair pundits (many of whom live nowhere near riot stricken areas) it’s refreshing to hear the opinions of AN ACTUAL Cockney geezer. GO ON MY SON!
And if you still don’t get it, if you still think that people bringing up issues of social inequality are somehow “excusing” what the looters have done then ask yourself this - how long are YOU going to keep on excusing and endorsing the acts of the criminal classes at the top of our society who allowed this to happen? Because by sticking your fingers in your ears and parroting that bullshit “not an ecuse!” line YOU ARE.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote “Fite Dem Back” in 1978.
“Writing is a political act and poetry is a cultural weapon.” Linton Kwesi Johnson.
fashist an di attack
noh baddah worry bout dat
fashist an di attack
wi wi fite dem back
fashist an di attack
den wi countah-attack
fashist an di attack
den wi drive dem back
Time magazine, of all places, has published a “Top 10 British Riot Songs of the Early ‘80s.” Check it out here. There’s a few smart choices, including “Fite Dem Back.”
