Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 15 May 2020Loki, Loki, Loki. When will you learn that your actions have consequences?
Alternate title: HAIRCUT PRANK GONE WRONG (I ALMOST DIED! NOT CLICKBAIT)
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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World War Two
Published on 11 May 2019As the Allied troops in central Norway are evacuated and the Norwegian troops there surrender to the Germans, the Allied position around Narvik is still quite strong. With the addition of roughly 5000 Polish soldiers, the French, British and Norwegian force will prove to be a formidable foe for the Germans up North. This week however, the war drastically changes as not three but four Neutral countries are invaded. The Phoney War is ultimately over.
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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Ben Ollerenshaw and Wieke Kapteijns
Map animations: EastoryColorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius Jääskeläinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Sources: IWM (A 7644), IWM (A 7637), IWM HU 55505, Bundesarchiv, Photos from the Jonatan Myhre Barlien photo collection.
Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
The Phoney War is over. This is the week that many have been anxiously waiting for (how did they know something big was going to happen). We have some great episodes coming up, which are like this one only as great as they are because of the amazing effort that our team puts in creating them. As is very apparent in this episode, Eastory’s maps take these videos to the next level. Every week we’re stunned by his level of detail and the amazing value that is added by these maps. As the war enters a new phase, so do we. Next week will see the first of our roadtrip to France specials going live as well as the longest weekly episode we have written up until now.Cheers,
Joram
Extra Credits
Published on 8 Dec 2018Writer Rob Rath talks about all the cool stories and facts we didn’t get to cover in the already expansive Viking Expansion series.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
7:08 – Rob learns he has a linguistic tic about being able to correctly distinguish “ancestor” and “descendant”
17:10 – Olga of Kiev scared Matt to death… really though…
25:23 – Walpole Connection
28:05 – what’s next on Extra HistorySome other works to check out: The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings, by Lars Brownworth / The Vikings, by Else Roesdahl / Podcast: Norse by Northwest
Extra Credits
Published on 24 Nov 2018The Scandinavians stumbled on Iceland, at first on accident — then, gradually exploring it — and finally intentionally migrating there because despite the clash of glaciers and volcanoes, Iceland was full of uninhabited empty land — perfect for settlers and saga-writers.
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Corvus Corax
Published on 25 May 2018The new album “SKÁL” – OUT NOW ► http://hyperurl.co/corvuscorax
With “the voice of the icelandic wind” Arndis Halla!
http://arndishalla.isMusic by Corvus Corax
Lyrics: traditionalVideo Credits:
Produced by Swieding Medien
Executive Producer: Corvus Corax & Doro Peters
Second Camera: Sarah Wieding, Serge Foly & Halldór Sveinsson
Color Correction: Sarah Wieding
Filmed, Edited & Directed by Ronald Matthes
The Great War
Published on 21 Jul 2018
KnowledgeHub
Published on 17 Feb 2017The Vikings were infamous in the Middle Ages for their raids against the coasts of Northern Europe. Their age however was quite brief in the span of time, only 300 years. What caused the end of the Vikings?
Published on Dec 1, 2016
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
Published on 23 Jan 2016
Indy sits in the chair of wisdom again to answer your questions. This time we tell you how the food was like in the trenches and what role Andorra and Iceland had in World War 1.
In Nautilis, Adam Piore talks about the project to thoroughly map Icelanders’ DNA:
In the ninth century there was a Norwegian Viking named Kveldulf, so big and strong that no man could defeat him. He sailed the seas in a long-ship and raided and plundered towns and homesteads of distant lands for many years. He settled down to farm, a very wealthy man.
Kveldulf had two sons who grew up to become mighty warriors. One joined the service of King Harald Tangle Hair. But in time the King grew fearful of the son’s growing power and had him murdered. Kveldulf vowed revenge. With his surviving son and allies, Kveldulf caught up with the killers, and wielding a double-bladed ax, slew 50 men. He sent the paltriest survivors back to the king to recount his deed and fled toward the newly settled realm of Iceland. Kveldulf died on the journey. But his remaining son Skallagrim landed on Iceland’s west coast, prospered, and had children.
Skallagrim’s children had children. Those children had children. And the blood and genes of Kveldulf the Viking and Skallagrim his son were passed down the ages. Then, in 1949, in the capital of Reykjavik, a descendent named Kari Stefansson was born.
Like Kveldulf, Stefansson would grow to be a giant, 6’5”, with piercing eyes and a beard. As a young man, he set out for the distant lands of the universities of Chicago and Harvard in search of intellectual bounty. But at the dawn of modern genetics in the 1990s, Stefansson, a neurologist, was lured back to his homeland by an unlikely enticement — the very genes that he and his 300,000-plus countrymen had inherited from Kveldulf and the tiny band of settlers who gave birth to Iceland.
Stefansson had a bold vision. He would create a library of DNA from every single living descendent of his nation’s early inhabitants. This library, coupled with Iceland’s rich trove of genealogical data and meticulous medical records, would constitute an unparalleled resource that could reveal the causes — and point to cures — for human diseases.
In 1996, Stefansson founded a company called Decode, and thrust his tiny island nation into the center of the burgeoning field of gene hunting. “Our genetic heritage is a natural resource,” Stefansson declared after returning to Iceland. “Like fish and hot pools.”
Simon Black contradicts the media narrative that Iceland has “recovered” from the melt-down of their banking sector:
It was a spectacular collapse. And the first of many. Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, etc. were soon to follow.
Yet unlike the bankrupt countries of southern Europe, Iceland dealt with its economic emergency in a completely different way.
Politicians here are proud that they never resorted to austere budget cuts that are so prevalent in Europe.
They imposed capital controls. They let the banks fail. And, as is so commonly trumpeted in the press, they ‘jailed their bankers and bailed out their people.’
Today, Iceland is held up as the model of recovery. Famous economists like Paul Krugman praise the government for rapidly rebuilding the economy without having to resort to austerity.
This morning’s headline from The Telegraph newspaper sums it up: “Iceland has taken its medicine and is off the critical list”.
It turns out, most of these claims are dead wrong.
[…]
Meanwhile, the government ended up taking on massive amounts of debt in order to bail out the biggest bank of all – Iceland’s CENTRAL BANK.
This was a bit different than the way things played out in the US and Europe.
In the US, the Fed conjures money out of thin air and funnels it to the government.
In Iceland, since the Kronor is not a global reserve currency, the government had to go into debt in order to funnel money to the Central Bank, all so that the currency wouldn’t collapse.
As a result, Iceland’s state debt tripled, almost overnight, in 2008. And from 2007 until now, it has increased nearly 5-fold.
Today, the government is spending a back-breaking 17.3% of its tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt.
And this is real interest, too. Iceland’s central bank owns very little of the government debt. The rest is owed to foreign creditors… putting the country in an extremely difficult financial position.
At the end of the day, the Icelandic people are responsible for this. They were never bailed out. They were stuck with the bill.
Meanwhile, although unemployment in Iceland is low, wages are even lower. And the weak currency has brought on double-digit inflation.
So while people do have jobs, they can hardly afford anything.
This is most prevalent in the housing market, most of which is underwater. Interest rates have jumped so much that many Icelanders are now on negative amortization schedules, i.e. their mortgage balances are actually INCREASING with each payment.
In Forbes, Tim Worstall sums up the real problem facing Cypriots:
There’s a very large portion of the European political elite who believe, take on faith (for there’s certainly no convincing real world evidence about it) that the creation of the euro is part of the inevitable creation of the European State. And as such it is entirely irreversible. It’s not just that people once in the euro shouldn’t leave it: it’s that it is simply inconceivable that anyone ever would leave it. Either wish to leave it or be allowed to leave it.
Wherein lies the danger to said European dreams and it’s tiny Cyprus that poses said danger.
As both Krugman and Yglesias point out, the Cypriot banking system is bust, gone. Even if it needn’t have happened this way having the system closed for at least a week is going to lead to bank runs when they finally reopen. The economy is most certainly going to stutter if not be deeply depressed as a result of that banking system going. Given that a substantial part of the economy is about offshore finance, and that that’s not going to survive the banking system crash, there will also, whatever else happens, be substantial declines in GDP.
It’s most certainly true that leaving the euro will cause all of those things to happen. But if they’re going to happen anyway then why not leave the euro? Why not bring back the Cyprus Pound? That is, do an Iceland?
[. . .]
But here’s the thing: there’s still that religious insistence among the federasts that the euro is irreversible, a part of the future of the politics and economy of the continent. And if Cyprus does leave and does recover without too much paid then what reason for Greece, or Spain, Portugal, to stay in? If going bust and going back to one’s own currency is, as Iceland showed (although they kept, rather than went back to), less painful that the austerity required to stay in the euro then, well, why stay in the euro?
From his weekend column:
Iceland managed to create three massive global banks. The economy itself is tiny: Iceland has the same population as Coventry, although arguably the scenery is better. That’s really not big enough to support a lot of globally competitive export industries. Iceland had three: fish, aluminium smelting and tourism. Four if you count Björk. Can you blame them if they fancied dabbling in something a bit sexier, such as investment banking?
Investment banking is sexier than Björk?
I don’t think investment banking even manages to be sexier than aluminium smelting these days, but eight or nine years ago it must have seemed like a great gig. So these Icelandic banks borrowed loads of cash and used it to buy pretty much anything they wanted. In particular, they bought from each other at rather ebullient levels, which made for substantial profits on paper. The whole thing was a classic bubble.
And when the flow of loans dried up?
The banks crashed and there was clearly nothing the government could do to save them – they were far too big. And the party came to a grinding halt.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
No. It’s hard to understand why anyone wanted to lend them the money, and just as hard to understand why they thought they could instantly learn the craft of global investment banking.
Tristin Hopper in the National Post on the continued interest in Iceland for a currency union with Canada:
Icelanders are united on the need to ditch the krona. However, the country’s reigning Social Democrats want the Euro, while the opposition Progressive Party has been pushing for the Canadian dollar since last summer. As resource economies, Canada and Iceland’s economic cycles are more likely to be in sync, loonie proponents argue. Also, Canada is home to about 200,000 people of Icelandic descent, more than anywhere else in the world. “I see that connection helping the public in Iceland accepting a new currency,” said Mr. Gudjonsson.
So far, the loonie appears to be winning. A March Gallup poll showed public approval for the loonie easily pulling ahead of the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Norwegian krone.
The mechanics of the swap would be the easy part. A party of Icelanders officials would simply fly to a Canadian bank and arrange a $300-million withdrawal. The final pile of multicoloured bills — no larger than two photocopiers — would then be shipped across the North Atlantic and loaded into ATMs and bank vaults over a weekend. (While there is far more than $300-million in the Icelandic money system, the country currently only has $300-million worth of krona coins and bills in circulation.)
Short of imposing its own Iceland-style currency controls, the Bank of Canada has no choice in the matter. “We will do it unilaterally without asking,” said Mr. Valfells. “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
Update: In a totally unrelated development, if Iceland adopts the loonie to replace the krona, we may get more interesting stories like this one from our new Icelandic friends. It’s got all sorts of elves, norse gods, and politicians. Much more fun than our current troll-versus-troll stories out of Ottawa.
He’s ticked off at an article at the Guardian, blaming “neoliberals” for the Greek crisis:
In what paranoid fantasy is what is happening in Greece neoliberal?
The actual neoliberal position (recently affirmed at our meeting in the underground secret headquarters under the volcano that sank Atlantis) is that the euro itself was and is a bad idea as it’s not an optimal currency area. And if there is to be a euro then Greece should not be a part of it. Since it is, and it’s bust, then it should default and devalue.
In short, the neoliberal solution is the Icelandic one, not the Irish, Greek or Portuguese.
So how come we neoliberals (as you know, the modern incarnation of the Green Lizards, Rosicrucians and Illuminati all rolled into one) are getting blamed for the entire fuck up that is happening precisely because no one will follow the prescriptions of neoliberal economics?
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