Call Me Stormy

Finding righteous currents in turbulent times

Archive for the tag “Germany”

Germany’s Erotic Zoos Face Ban

The German Parliament is moving to reinstate laws against sex with animals after a pronounced rise in the number of bestiality cases. The Germans struck down bestiality as a criminal offense in 1969, but now a reversal appears imminent, amid signs of increasing zoophilia. Some farmers are reportedly pimping out their sheep and pigs for sex acts. There are even erotic zoos that people can visit to abuse animals including goats and llamas.

Michael Kiok, the chairman of a German zoophile group called ZETA, defended keeping bestiality legal. “Mere concepts of morality have no business being law,” Kiok said.

What a strange line of reasoning. If laws governing human behavior are completely divorced from morality, then humans have been reduced to barnyard animals. Who believes this is what the founders of Western Civilization, even those advocating libertarian principles, had in mind?

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Go! Girl! Go! — Veintidos

Brigitte Helm as Maria drives the men crazy in Metropolis. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film is often considered the first great science fiction classic of the silver screen. Helm actually plays two roles, as a virtuous Maria and a wild and wanton robotic Maria, controlled by the inventor Rotwang, to do his evil biding.

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Go! Girl! Go! — Uno

We trust you enjoyed our three-month series, The World of Beers, featuring hot, funny, bizarre beer commercials from all around the globe. Having pretty much exhausted that topic — by presenting more than 75 of the best commercials out there — we’re now ready to move on.

Our new series, Go! Girl! Go!, will run through the balance of 2012. Every afternoon, we’ll highlight a different dance scene from movies made around the world — from Hollywood to Bollywood, from Tokyo to Rome. A few of these terpsichorean displays will be funny, and a few others bizarre, but the vast majority involve more basic elements, namely, the world’s most beautiful, scantily clad babes showing off their sultry, seductive moves in exotic settings. If that’s not your cup of tea, you’ve got the wrong blog!

We kick things off with Debra Paget doing a snake dance in The Tomb of Love. An American actress best known for appearing in The Ten Commandments and opposite Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender, Paget shows a more uninhibited side as the temple dancer Seetha in this 1959 drama. Shot on location in India and Germany, it’s one of the last films by the great director Fritz Lang, who catapulted to fame with Metropolis in the 1920s. The dialogue is in German, but fortunately, there’s not much talking to distract from Paget’s performance. She could put a cobra in a trance, and does!

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World of Beers LXXIV

On tap tonight: Rostocker pils, Germany.

Preflight safety tips for the beer drinker.

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Rubicon

So how do you get a cabbage, a sheep and a wolf across a river one by one without the sheep eating the cabbage and the wolf devouring the sheep? That’s the brain-teasing riddle at the heart of Gil Alkabetz’s Rubicon, a rib-tickling animated short that’s full of laugh-out-loud scenes. This was an official German entry at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, and picked up 13 prizes on the global festival circuit. Alkabetz was born in Israel, but has been based out of Stuttgart, Germany, since 1995. H/T Animation Blog

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World of Beers XLIII

A DAY OF BACON

On tap tonight: Eichhof, Germany.

Tread lightly when your kitchen has been wired by Rube Goldberg, and you’ve got competition from a mighty big slab of bacon wanting to bogart your last beer.

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Gangnam Parodies, Round Two

A few weeks back, we introduced eight “Gangnam Style” parodies from Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Italy, Norway and the United States. With Psy’s mega-pop hit now surpassing 250 million views on YouTube, the parodies just keep coming, often from new corners of the world. There are now thousands of versions. Here are eight more new ones we’ve found worth checking out.

From Malaysia, “Super Hero Style.”

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From India, “Rajini Style,” showcasing Bollywood matinee idol Rajinikanth, Asia’s highest paid actor since Jackie Chan.

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From the United States, “Kim Jong Style,” taking a few potshots at the North Korean dictator. H/T Barely Political

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From Brazil, Galo Frito’s “Vou Te Encoxar.” Naturally, the sexiest of the bunch.

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From Russia, “Europa Plus Style.” Funny business in Moscow from Russia’s most popular commercial radio station.

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From Philippines, “Pinoy Gangnam Style,” featuring Eric Tai aka Eruption, and a host of Filipino celebrities.

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From Germany, Alexander Bohm’s “Gangnam Style: Auf Deutsch.” Bohm specializes in making German-language spoofs of pop songs from abroad.

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And finally, from Australia, “Aussie Battler Style” from Fitzy and Wippa, a breakfast radio show hosted by comedians Ryan Fitzgerald and Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli, broadcast in Sydney.

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Have Cardboard, Will Travel

Israeli inventor Izhar Gafni has designed a bicycle that costs $9, can carry weights of up to 485 pounds and last two years or longer. The beauty of his bicycle: It’s constructed from cardboard. Gafni is now approaching investors and hopes to mass-produce his bikes soon in Israel, Europe and North America. H/T Geek Press

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Meanwhile, in Germany, Tom Hambrock and Juri Spetter have unveiled the FLIZ, another new bicycle that’s pedal-free. Their design is based on the world’s first bicycle, the “Laufrad,” created by German inventor Karl Drais in 1817. It also operated without pedals. H/T iOwntheWorld

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Yonder

Under the sea, the world’s a different, colorful and awe-inspiring place in Emilia Forstreuter’s short animation. The German artist explains, ” By repeating simple forms I wanted to build a world with its own shapes and organisms. Basic movements extracted from nature shall give the shapes a living feeling. The goal was to create an alternate world that seems foreign yet at the same time familiar.” To see additional works by Forstreuter, visit her website at http://www.emiliaforstreuter.de/

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The Goose-Stepping Democrats

Three Democratic dimwits have made headlines by playing the Nazi card against Republicans. South Carolina’s Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian was among these slanderous slugs, likening his state’s governor, Nikki Haley, to Hitler’s down-in-the-bunker mistress Eva Braun. Here’s how Harpootlian explained his outrageous claims.

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Harpootlian admits he engaged in hyperbole and mudslinging, citing the heat of political combat as his excuse. One might be inclined to forgive him, except his comments came in tandem with similar charges leveled by Kansas Democratic Labor Committee president Pat Lehman and John Burton, the Democratic party chairman from California, who both asserted that the GOP had taken a page out of Joseph Goebbels’ playbook by spreading “The Big Lie” during the Republican Convention in Tampa.

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So, are the Democrats getting swept up in the fever-pitch of their emotions, or are they engaged in a cold, calculated effort to plant a false, half-cocked meme? In answer to that, let’s dial the clock back to when the GOP waged the good fight against Obamacare. How did US Congressman Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, react to the opposition? Listen to him speak on the floor of the House.

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In short, the Democrats have been persistently pounding the drum, engaging in a bombastic and brazen campaign to tar Republicans with the stench of Nazism. The biggest problem with that? It’s the Democrats whose policies, by and large, replicate those of Adolf Hitler. How, you ask? Let’s examine the brutal truths.

  • Between 1933 and 1939, in the build-up to WWII, Hitler’s National Socialist government collected revenues of 62 billion marks, but spent 101 billion marks, disregarding the ever-increasing deficits while amassing a national debt exceeding 38 billion marks. Sound familiar?
  • To try to stimulate Germany’s economy and erase the deficits, Hitler abolished the gold standard and enacted Keynesian policies, involving large governmental and public works projects as a means to close the gap and reduce unemployment. Ring a bell?
  • At the same time, Hitler pushed a trade policy called autarky — designed to discourage open and free trade with other nations, except for vital, raw resources needed to develop Germany’s military arsenal. When President George W. Bush took office, the United States had free-trade agreements in place with only three nations — Canada, Mexico and Israel. Bush negotiated 14 additional such agreements. President Obama has negotiated none on his own, but did sign into law pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea put into motion in the Bush years.
  • Hitler consolidated and nationalized key German industries, viewing capitalism with disdain as being brutal and unjust. He presented himself as a champion for workers’ rights, but insisted the workers submerge their individual wills to the collective good of the whole, as embodied by the state.  Interesting that the Democrats showcased a video at their convention in Charlotte on the theme “We All Belong to the Government.”

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  • Hitler hated smoking, was a vegetarian, an ardent environmentalist and favored stringent gun control measures for the general public. Does that sound like any Democrats you know?
  • The Nazis were the first government to widely disseminate contraceptives as part of a larger policy, involving enforced sterilizations and euthanasia, aimed against non-Aryans. How many speakers in Charlotte railed about contraceptives? Essentially, everyone who took the podium. True, they talked about birth control as a right, and not as something sinister. But they did not present it as a God-given right, having already removed any religious reference whatsoever from their party platform.
  • They also had stricken the platform’s longstanding language to proclaim Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. I’m not going to argue that decision equates morally with Hitler’s extermination of 6 million Jews. But I will say this, and say it without hesitation. When I meet people who are anti-Semitic these days, they are not generally right-leaning wingnuts, but rather the loons who occupy the so-called “Progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. These folks have grown more strident and shrill over the last few years, emboldened in their arrogance by the false messiah they put into the White House.

Is Obama Der Fuehrer? Are Democrats his brownshirt disciples? Unlike Misters Harpootlian, Burton and Cohen, and Ms. Lehman, I’ll give the donkey’s asses the benefit of the doubt. Few of them, I’m convinced, know enough about history to understand just how dangerously naive, or potentially insidious, their policies are. That said, it’s incumbent upon the rest of us, whether we’re Republicans, Libertarians, independents or otherwise — to push back and do whatever we can to restrain and ridicule the worst of the Democrats’ extremist tendencies.

I won’t attempt to tell you what you must do, because that’s really your own individual call to make, in accordance with your own religious and political beliefs.  All I’ll say here: The Democrats should be looking into the mirror before slinging around allegations of Nazism. Shame on them and their enablers in the media, Hollywood and academia. When you’re talking Nazism, the boot fits them a lot more closely like a glove, than ever could be applied to any of us who believe in free markets, the free exchange of ideas and individuals exercising independent thought.

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