A small tool to view real-world ActivityPub objects as JSON! Enter a URL
or username from Mastodon or a similar service below, and we'll send a
request with
the right
Accept
header
to the server to view the underlying object.
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"type": "OrderedCollectionPage",
"orderedItems": [
{
"type": "Like",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:1513180272009416710",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "Life itself is the best game of all time. Every soul chooses the circumstances of its incarnation given the possibilities that its accrued eperiences allow for. ",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/followers",
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/100000000000000519"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1513180272009416710",
"published": "2023-06-07T13:58:09+00:00",
"inReplyTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/100000000000000519/entities/urn:activity:1512859562145746948",
"source": {
"content": "Life itself is the best game of all time. Every soul chooses the circumstances of its incarnation given the possibilities that its accrued eperiences allow for. ",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066/https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:1513180272009416710/like"
},
{
"type": "Like",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915218590612615168",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "I'm just wondering if any of this will actually show up, or if I'm just typing into a black hole using my old-time bow-tie analog connection on my Ye Olde Windowes XP machine which I DOWNGRADED from Windows ME right when I [acquired] it. Until recently, I was hooked up via smoke signals through a typewriter hooked up to a gramophone playing good old Audio Games and not them fancy \"video\" games all them young whippersnappers play. ",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915218590612615168",
"published": "2018-11-30T12:31:55+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "I'm just wondering if any of this will actually show up, or if I'm just typing into a black hole using my old-time bow-tie analog connection on my Ye Olde Windowes XP machine which I DOWNGRADED from Windows ME right when I [acquired] it. Until recently, I was hooked up via smoke signals through a typewriter hooked up to a gramophone playing good old Audio Games and not them fancy \"video\" games all them young whippersnappers play. ",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066/https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915218590612615168/like"
},
{
"type": "Like",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915226924966309888",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "<a href=\"https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915226924966309888\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915226924966309888</a>",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915226924966309888",
"published": "2018-11-30T13:05:02+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915226924966309888",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066/https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915226924966309888/like"
},
{
"type": "Like",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915227288772833280",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "<a href=\"https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915227288772833280\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915227288772833280</a>",
"to": [
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],
"cc": [
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],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915227288772833280",
"published": "2018-11-30T13:06:29+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915227288772833280",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066/https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915227288772833280/like"
},
{
"type": "Like",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915228578872651776",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "My visit to The Great Pyramid @ Giza March 2013. The title photo was taken that same day. A creepy and depressing place, especially inside the King's Chamber. My latest theory postulates that the pyramids were constructed as part of a pyramid scheme. ",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915228578872651776",
"published": "2018-11-30T13:11:37+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "My visit to The Great Pyramid @ Giza March 2013. The title photo was taken that same day. A creepy and depressing place, especially inside the King's Chamber. My latest theory postulates that the pyramids were constructed as part of a pyramid scheme. ",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066/https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915228578872651776/like"
},
{
"type": "Like",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915236997013729280",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "Yeah, THAT Guy<br /><br />Remember that 1960s show \"That Girl?\" well, this is the kookier Daliborean version of everything the show was never about, IF that makes any sense.<br /><br />One can make the case that Minds dot com is increasing my level of freedom because it's increasing the volume of complexity in my field of awareness. I only say that because the inverse is true for the opposite. People with the least amount of freedom (prisoners, people confined to hospital beds, etc.) have the least freedom and complexity. Question is whether that's causation or correlation. I have no experience with social media to speak of. Never been on BookFace or any of that. I DO have my own webpage on my old corporate server but I have no idea how to use it. I guess if I never use it and just keep it there for the next 20 years I can sell it as an antique on whatever auction site will be globally dominant in 2038, like eScam where all you'll have to do is click \"Post the Item You're Thinking of Right Now\" where, by virtue of its complete integration with AI, you'll just have to visualise an item in your mind to post it. But since the future always brings unexpected hardships, by 2038, all Post Offices will be located on the tops of very high artificial mountains (for security reasons, I'm sure) requiring you to climb 322 steps to reach, and about an hour's waiting time which you'll be able to reduce by making a voluntary blood donation. Painlessly and conveniently, of course, because we'll all have canulas permanently in our veins by then.Just as now, it will be illegal to discriminate against certain groups of favoured people, specifically those suffering from Brainial Weirdosis, also known as NUTS (Neurotic Underlying Tension Syndrome), like that guy who KNEW that my name translates from Bullshit as \"The Son of Jesus\" and had it all planned out for me to lead an expedition of 12 men, each having the same first names as the 12 Apostles to some mountaintop in Arizona that has a radio tower on it, and raise a big wooden Ankh on top of it. Yeah, THAT guy.<br />So how did I ever meet THAT guy. The year was 1886 and I was attending NJIT. He had transferred from a neighbouring college into my Calculus class. The only quirky thing I noticed about him was that anytime someone would talk to him or ask him a question, he'd look at his watch before answering or responding. Whatever. NEXT DAY he comes into class wearing sunglasses, and again, I thought nothing of it. After class, I'm sitting in the Student Centre looking over my notes and enjoying a cigarette and he comes up to me looking like he's being followed by agents or something (shifty eyes and all). The first thing he says to me is \"Do you know why I have to wear sunglasses?\" I thought about that for a second and said \"I don't know, glaucoma? A fashion statement?\" He explained to me that my Aura was so bright that he needed the sunglasses to keep from going blind. OK, right then I should have known that the REAL reason for the sunglasses was sheer I N S A N I T Y because even at that tender age, I was pretty sure that no human Aura can ever blind anyone, at least not their physical eyes. <br />As time went on, I found out that he was into a lot of the same \"alternative\" topics I was, specifically Astral Travel, and told me of an occult bookstore in Manhattan, where we went the next day. Somewhere in upper Manhattan, and we parked a few blocks from it. On the way there we passed one of those hole-in-the-wall type \"churches\" with a big sign out front that said \"Jesus Saves.\" He thought the sign was beautiful and asked me \"so, is it true that YOU can save people\" \"Well, I can save people MONEY, if that's what you mean,\" I said. Then he told me about how I'm supposed to be both the son AND the reincarnation of Jesus because that's what my name means translated from Bullshit, and asked if he could hold my hand for a few seconds so that he could receive some of my healing energy. Again, whatever.<br />We get to my car and there's a parking ticket on it for 40 Dollars and I said \"see, even the reincarnation of the son of the son of Man can get a parking ticket in Manhattan.\" He immediately found some parallel with some part of the Jesus mythos and even offered to pay it. I didn't really care because compared to what I had just spent at that bookstore, the 40 Dollars was not that much. I was only thinking about the books. <br />So one day, I'm sitting at home and he calls me, saying that he DESPERATELY needs my help and that I have to go over to his house. It wasn't that far, so fair enough. I get there, and he explains that I'm the only person he knows who writes in Old German (Schwabach) script because as a child, I had lived in northern Germany where that was still taught in school. My mission (should I choose to accept it) involved writing down an ancient curse from some library book he had borrowed onto a piece of crumpled paper he had found, then wrapping a black rock in the paper, and then addressing a box with the name and address of some woman. As it turned out, the rock was \"evil\" and he had found it by the side of a road, so he KNEW it had to be evil, and its intended recipient was his former girlfriend. \"That was rather ODD,\" I thought, after he had explained all the mechanics of what I had just helped him do. <br />I'm extrapolating this in my mind: woman gets box in mail. Box contains piece of asphalt wrapped in GIBBERISH. Her first thought? Well, WHO ELSE would mail her such a stupid thing but THAT guy. \"And he probably got that whacky Czechoslovakian friend of his to write that thing\" she might have thought, had she known of my existence. <br />Fast forward about 2 weeks. I am carless, but in need of going to a party at my friend's house, so I give him a call, hoping to get a ride (more like a \"writhe,\" it turns out). Anyway, party was great. Drank about 18 beers that night and STILL managed to beat every single person at Chess. Basically dominated the only chessboard in the house. THAT guy drank nothing. As the wee hours approach it gets down to just me, my friend Scott and THAT guy, and he keeps insinuating that he needs to kiss Scott on the lips. None of us are gay, or even poly-gayic or whatever, so I'm thinking \"what the FUCK?!?!\" He starts getting more aggressive and then catches Scott unaware and gets him in a death-grip and tries to kiss him. We manage to get him off of Scott, at which point he's like \"allright, time to go home.\" The writhe back was silent and uneventful, save for the fact that I was extremely pissed at THAT guy. Couldn't even find an IR-rational explanation for what had happened. <br />After that I made a point of just staying away from him. However, he kept calling me and wouldn't leave me alone. So I hatched an evil plan and clued my other friend in on it. As pre-arranged, I was able to hear everything said by both parties. My friend called him up and gave him a cock-and-bull story about how we had been in The Village and I had attacked two gay guys and stabbed each of them in the top of the skull. I could hear him gasp, while I could barely contain my laughter. Then he said methodically: \" I know why he did that. It was to prevent their risen Kundalini from rising out of their Crown Chakras!\" The lead-up to that fictitious story had been that I'm actually violently hateful of all gays (I'm NOT. I don't CARE), and that I was secretly plotting to kick his ass. It worked. He never contacted me again.<br />Last I heard about him was that he had gone out to Arizona by himself, and had somehow managed to get himself arrested for stealing a can of soda. Out of a parked Lear Jet. Because GOD told him to do it. Yeah, there's things you just can't make up. ",
"to": [
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
],
"cc": [
"https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/followers"
],
"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915236997013729280",
"published": "2018-11-30T13:45:04+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Yeah, THAT Guy\n\nRemember that 1960s show \"That Girl?\" well, this is the kookier Daliborean version of everything the show was never about, IF that makes any sense.\n\nOne can make the case that Minds dot com is increasing my level of freedom because it's increasing the volume of complexity in my field of awareness. I only say that because the inverse is true for the opposite. People with the least amount of freedom (prisoners, people confined to hospital beds, etc.) have the least freedom and complexity. Question is whether that's causation or correlation. I have no experience with social media to speak of. Never been on BookFace or any of that. I DO have my own webpage on my old corporate server but I have no idea how to use it. I guess if I never use it and just keep it there for the next 20 years I can sell it as an antique on whatever auction site will be globally dominant in 2038, like eScam where all you'll have to do is click \"Post the Item You're Thinking of Right Now\" where, by virtue of its complete integration with AI, you'll just have to visualise an item in your mind to post it. But since the future always brings unexpected hardships, by 2038, all Post Offices will be located on the tops of very high artificial mountains (for security reasons, I'm sure) requiring you to climb 322 steps to reach, and about an hour's waiting time which you'll be able to reduce by making a voluntary blood donation. Painlessly and conveniently, of course, because we'll all have canulas permanently in our veins by then.Just as now, it will be illegal to discriminate against certain groups of favoured people, specifically those suffering from Brainial Weirdosis, also known as NUTS (Neurotic Underlying Tension Syndrome), like that guy who KNEW that my name translates from Bullshit as \"The Son of Jesus\" and had it all planned out for me to lead an expedition of 12 men, each having the same first names as the 12 Apostles to some mountaintop in Arizona that has a radio tower on it, and raise a big wooden Ankh on top of it. Yeah, THAT guy.\nSo how did I ever meet THAT guy. The year was 1886 and I was attending NJIT. He had transferred from a neighbouring college into my Calculus class. The only quirky thing I noticed about him was that anytime someone would talk to him or ask him a question, he'd look at his watch before answering or responding. Whatever. NEXT DAY he comes into class wearing sunglasses, and again, I thought nothing of it. After class, I'm sitting in the Student Centre looking over my notes and enjoying a cigarette and he comes up to me looking like he's being followed by agents or something (shifty eyes and all). The first thing he says to me is \"Do you know why I have to wear sunglasses?\" I thought about that for a second and said \"I don't know, glaucoma? A fashion statement?\" He explained to me that my Aura was so bright that he needed the sunglasses to keep from going blind. OK, right then I should have known that the REAL reason for the sunglasses was sheer I N S A N I T Y because even at that tender age, I was pretty sure that no human Aura can ever blind anyone, at least not their physical eyes. \nAs time went on, I found out that he was into a lot of the same \"alternative\" topics I was, specifically Astral Travel, and told me of an occult bookstore in Manhattan, where we went the next day. Somewhere in upper Manhattan, and we parked a few blocks from it. On the way there we passed one of those hole-in-the-wall type \"churches\" with a big sign out front that said \"Jesus Saves.\" He thought the sign was beautiful and asked me \"so, is it true that YOU can save people\" \"Well, I can save people MONEY, if that's what you mean,\" I said. Then he told me about how I'm supposed to be both the son AND the reincarnation of Jesus because that's what my name means translated from Bullshit, and asked if he could hold my hand for a few seconds so that he could receive some of my healing energy. Again, whatever.\nWe get to my car and there's a parking ticket on it for 40 Dollars and I said \"see, even the reincarnation of the son of the son of Man can get a parking ticket in Manhattan.\" He immediately found some parallel with some part of the Jesus mythos and even offered to pay it. I didn't really care because compared to what I had just spent at that bookstore, the 40 Dollars was not that much. I was only thinking about the books. \nSo one day, I'm sitting at home and he calls me, saying that he DESPERATELY needs my help and that I have to go over to his house. It wasn't that far, so fair enough. I get there, and he explains that I'm the only person he knows who writes in Old German (Schwabach) script because as a child, I had lived in northern Germany where that was still taught in school. My mission (should I choose to accept it) involved writing down an ancient curse from some library book he had borrowed onto a piece of crumpled paper he had found, then wrapping a black rock in the paper, and then addressing a box with the name and address of some woman. As it turned out, the rock was \"evil\" and he had found it by the side of a road, so he KNEW it had to be evil, and its intended recipient was his former girlfriend. \"That was rather ODD,\" I thought, after he had explained all the mechanics of what I had just helped him do. \nI'm extrapolating this in my mind: woman gets box in mail. Box contains piece of asphalt wrapped in GIBBERISH. Her first thought? Well, WHO ELSE would mail her such a stupid thing but THAT guy. \"And he probably got that whacky Czechoslovakian friend of his to write that thing\" she might have thought, had she known of my existence. \nFast forward about 2 weeks. I am carless, but in need of going to a party at my friend's house, so I give him a call, hoping to get a ride (more like a \"writhe,\" it turns out). Anyway, party was great. Drank about 18 beers that night and STILL managed to beat every single person at Chess. Basically dominated the only chessboard in the house. THAT guy drank nothing. As the wee hours approach it gets down to just me, my friend Scott and THAT guy, and he keeps insinuating that he needs to kiss Scott on the lips. None of us are gay, or even poly-gayic or whatever, so I'm thinking \"what the FUCK?!?!\" He starts getting more aggressive and then catches Scott unaware and gets him in a death-grip and tries to kiss him. We manage to get him off of Scott, at which point he's like \"allright, time to go home.\" The writhe back was silent and uneventful, save for the fact that I was extremely pissed at THAT guy. Couldn't even find an IR-rational explanation for what had happened. \nAfter that I made a point of just staying away from him. However, he kept calling me and wouldn't leave me alone. So I hatched an evil plan and clued my other friend in on it. As pre-arranged, I was able to hear everything said by both parties. My friend called him up and gave him a cock-and-bull story about how we had been in The Village and I had attacked two gay guys and stabbed each of them in the top of the skull. I could hear him gasp, while I could barely contain my laughter. Then he said methodically: \" I know why he did that. It was to prevent their risen Kundalini from rising out of their Crown Chakras!\" The lead-up to that fictitious story had been that I'm actually violently hateful of all gays (I'm NOT. I don't CARE), and that I was secretly plotting to kick his ass. It worked. He never contacted me again.\nLast I heard about him was that he had gone out to Arizona by himself, and had somehow managed to get himself arrested for stealing a can of soda. Out of a parked Lear Jet. Because GOD told him to do it. Yeah, there's things you just can't make up. ",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/1224165562058285066/https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915236997013729280/like"
},
{
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"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715/entities/urn:activity:915592869589868544",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/915210870739443715",
"content": "Marxism - Ñeñeñism<br /><br />No, that's not a misprint. Let me explain. As someone who was born in a communist country, and whose family suffered greatly under that system, you could say that NO ideology on earth is more odious to my sense of fairness than that, with the possible exception of government-subsidised MURDER. <br />Couple of years ago I was a [my friend's] party at his apartment in NYC, 1989 to be exact, and I had come there late but word quickly spread that I was \"in the house.\" Apparently there was a hot debate raging there about the differences between eastern European communism and Chinese communism. This debate was (obviously) centered around a young man I had never seen before who seemed to have gone out of his way to look exactly like Trotsky, right down to the glasses, which, when I intentionally looked through them when looking him directly in the eye I saw were just window glass (LOL!). One of them \"intellectuals,\" a term I absolutely HATE, especially when people try to pin that label on ME. Believe me when I say this, but this guy was an intellectual, and used all the right fifty-kopeck words to try and make the case that eastern European communism is really no different from Chinese communism because they're both good (!). I guess you could argue that eastern European shit is no different from Chinese shit and that both are good (as fertiliser). <br />As luck would have it, I also happened to have a Soviet 100 Ruble banknote in my wallet I had bought off my friend for 2 Dollars because he had bought a whole stack of these literally around the corner from there. Why did he buy them? Actually, that's a long and stupid story in and of itself, so moron that later. I bought it off him because I collect currency and didn't yet have one like it. <br />Somehow I get billed as \"THE EXPERT\" on Czechoslovakian communism and seated right next to Trotsky Lite. After all, how many Czechoslovakians does the average person in the US in 1989 know, 0.0001 maybe? How many books have any of these people read on communism as practiced in the CSSR? I knew right then and there that this was gonna be fun. LOTS of fun. <br />Trotsky Lite seemed to be a very gullible young man, and so I started out by pointing out the \"fact\" that he was pronouncing the name \"Lenin\" and \"Leninism\" completely wrong, and that the proper \"Russian\" way to pronounce them was \"Ñeñeñ,\" and \"Ñeñeñism\" all while doing my hardest to keep a straight face. I came [THIS CLOSE] to cracking up several times when he actually started saying it that way because \"ñe-ñe\" (or \"nye-nye\") would be the Slovakian or Polish way of saying \"no-no\" and I had had the presence of mind to make that up on the spot. Sometimes I surprise myself like that.<br />Anyway, it wasn't much of a discussion because I pretty much held my own and made the case that they both sucked, especially after having ghost-written a paper comparing the economies of the USSR, China, and the USA for someone. <br />The discussion shifted to communist vs. Capitalist economies and luckily somebody had a newspaper I could use to prove my point (this WAS 1989 after all) where I clearly and unambiguously proved that the Soviet Ruble was worth about USD 1.50. It was and it WASN'T because that was the rate at which the US government was accepting repayment from the Soviets for their shipments of wheat under the Lend-Lease Act. It's real market value was a fraction of that. In that instant, I whipped out the 100 Ruble note and said, \"so yeah, this is worth about 150 Dollars, but I'm willing to sell it for just 100 since I probably won't be going to the Soviet Union anytime soon\" the implication being that HE WAS going to the Soviet Union sometime soon. Actually, the Soviet Union was going to relocate to the USA over the next few decades, but that would be a theme for yet another story. Although Mr. Fake Proletariat, Fake Glasses, College-Educated, Grew-up-on-a-cul-de-sac, Wannabe Trotsky Lite didn't buy the note from me, somebody else DID, and I felt exactly like I had just passed a counterfeit banknote. Then again, STUPIDITY ISN'T FREE, and some people pay for their stupidity with their lives, while whoever bought that piece of paper only paid using money. A good deal for both parties, I'd say. The banknote WAS genuine, after all.<br />Needless to say, I didn't stick around too long after that and quickly made my way back to my car. \"NO parking ticket\" I though, considering that another 40 Dollars to my virtual credit. <br />Fast forward a couple of years and I'm watching videos about eastern European communism and I come across a discussion show where one of the guests actually pronounced \"Leninism\" as \"Ñeñeñism!\" I rewound it several times to make sure my ears weren't deceiving me. They weren't. He really WAS that stupid. I did write his name down but lost it in the sea of similar notes that follow me around everywhere. The name sounded almost like Thurston Howell III but I honestly can't remember, so as a result I can't even post a link to the video I mentioned. But yeah, he's out there all right. Thinking he's pronouncing it correctly. Because a Czechoslovakian \"expert\" told him so. ",
"to": [
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],
"cc": [
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"tag": [],
"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/915592869589868544",
"published": "2018-12-01T13:19:10+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Marxism - Ñeñeñism\n\nNo, that's not a misprint. Let me explain. As someone who was born in a communist country, and whose family suffered greatly under that system, you could say that NO ideology on earth is more odious to my sense of fairness than that, with the possible exception of government-subsidised MURDER. \nCouple of years ago I was a [my friend's] party at his apartment in NYC, 1989 to be exact, and I had come there late but word quickly spread that I was \"in the house.\" Apparently there was a hot debate raging there about the differences between eastern European communism and Chinese communism. This debate was (obviously) centered around a young man I had never seen before who seemed to have gone out of his way to look exactly like Trotsky, right down to the glasses, which, when I intentionally looked through them when looking him directly in the eye I saw were just window glass (LOL!). One of them \"intellectuals,\" a term I absolutely HATE, especially when people try to pin that label on ME. Believe me when I say this, but this guy was an intellectual, and used all the right fifty-kopeck words to try and make the case that eastern European communism is really no different from Chinese communism because they're both good (!). I guess you could argue that eastern European shit is no different from Chinese shit and that both are good (as fertiliser). \nAs luck would have it, I also happened to have a Soviet 100 Ruble banknote in my wallet I had bought off my friend for 2 Dollars because he had bought a whole stack of these literally around the corner from there. Why did he buy them? Actually, that's a long and stupid story in and of itself, so moron that later. I bought it off him because I collect currency and didn't yet have one like it. \nSomehow I get billed as \"THE EXPERT\" on Czechoslovakian communism and seated right next to Trotsky Lite. After all, how many Czechoslovakians does the average person in the US in 1989 know, 0.0001 maybe? How many books have any of these people read on communism as practiced in the CSSR? I knew right then and there that this was gonna be fun. LOTS of fun. \nTrotsky Lite seemed to be a very gullible young man, and so I started out by pointing out the \"fact\" that he was pronouncing the name \"Lenin\" and \"Leninism\" completely wrong, and that the proper \"Russian\" way to pronounce them was \"Ñeñeñ,\" and \"Ñeñeñism\" all while doing my hardest to keep a straight face. I came [THIS CLOSE] to cracking up several times when he actually started saying it that way because \"ñe-ñe\" (or \"nye-nye\") would be the Slovakian or Polish way of saying \"no-no\" and I had had the presence of mind to make that up on the spot. Sometimes I surprise myself like that.\nAnyway, it wasn't much of a discussion because I pretty much held my own and made the case that they both sucked, especially after having ghost-written a paper comparing the economies of the USSR, China, and the USA for someone. \nThe discussion shifted to communist vs. Capitalist economies and luckily somebody had a newspaper I could use to prove my point (this WAS 1989 after all) where I clearly and unambiguously proved that the Soviet Ruble was worth about USD 1.50. It was and it WASN'T because that was the rate at which the US government was accepting repayment from the Soviets for their shipments of wheat under the Lend-Lease Act. It's real market value was a fraction of that. In that instant, I whipped out the 100 Ruble note and said, \"so yeah, this is worth about 150 Dollars, but I'm willing to sell it for just 100 since I probably won't be going to the Soviet Union anytime soon\" the implication being that HE WAS going to the Soviet Union sometime soon. Actually, the Soviet Union was going to relocate to the USA over the next few decades, but that would be a theme for yet another story. Although Mr. Fake Proletariat, Fake Glasses, College-Educated, Grew-up-on-a-cul-de-sac, Wannabe Trotsky Lite didn't buy the note from me, somebody else DID, and I felt exactly like I had just passed a counterfeit banknote. Then again, STUPIDITY ISN'T FREE, and some people pay for their stupidity with their lives, while whoever bought that piece of paper only paid using money. A good deal for both parties, I'd say. The banknote WAS genuine, after all.\nNeedless to say, I didn't stick around too long after that and quickly made my way back to my car. \"NO parking ticket\" I though, considering that another 40 Dollars to my virtual credit. \nFast forward a couple of years and I'm watching videos about eastern European communism and I come across a discussion show where one of the guests actually pronounced \"Leninism\" as \"Ñeñeñism!\" I rewound it several times to make sure my ears weren't deceiving me. They weren't. He really WAS that stupid. I did write his name down but lost it in the sea of similar notes that follow me around everywhere. The name sounded almost like Thurston Howell III but I honestly can't remember, so as a result I can't even post a link to the video I mentioned. But yeah, he's out there all right. Thinking he's pronouncing it correctly. Because a Czechoslovakian \"expert\" told him so. ",
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"content": "Involuntary Telepathy and Its Possible Relation to Schizophrenia<br /><br />Telepathy. YES, it's a PROBLEM. Especially when it happens unexpectedly or uncontrollably which was sometimes the case when I was still drinking, and now that I think about those horrific days, it was one of the main reasons I did quit drinking permanently, never to return. This was no ordinary drinking. I was consuming 2-4 liters (up to 6) of wine a day and surprisingly it wasn't affecting the quality of my waking intelligence, it's just there was very little of it because I would sleep for most of the day. After 35 years of this shit, I had to let it go like taking a dump you've been suppressing for a long time. Weekdays required 2 liters every evening and starting Friday night it was a non-sexual orgy of wasteful liquidation. I was STEADfast in my WAYS or Way-Stead (wasted) all the time. The first instance of uncontrollable telepathy happened a few years ago. I was completely sober, but I couldn't sleep because I kept seeing a TV screen with various images. Sometimes these were movies, commercials, interviews, everything you would experience when watching TV. There was no sound, but if I focused on it intensely, I would get some, and it was in a language I didn't understand, but recognised as Italian, a language I do NOT speak. I kept the sound on during the commercials when they flashed the logo and found out I was looking at RAI 2 or Rai Due. Although I do have a satellite TV I hadn't watched it in 6 years and the last time I did watch RAI 2 briefly was in Italy in 1995. To make sure that this wasn't some delusion I called up a friend of mine who has that channel on her TV and asked her to put it on, with the sound off. Then started describing EXACTLY what she was seeing. She freaked out. Then I freaked out. The paradoxical thought that crossed my mind was that if this is schizophrenia, then it's no wonder that it drives people insane. This went on for 2 days, and I called her again later on to do that same verification, with the same result. The phenomenon I was experiencing was quite real. But WHY? Why was I receiving transmissions into my brain from an Italian TV station at least 1000 km away? To make the transmissions stop, I tried tin foil, but that worked only partially. The quality of the transmission was such that I was completely unaware of it, but when I closed my eyes, it would come in with 100% clarity in about 10 seconds and stay there in my field of closed-eye vision. In desperation, I took an appropriately sized stainless-steel pot and deformed it to fit my head. I grounded it via the grounding terminal on a power plug and it worked. I also discovered that it worked even when the grounding was disconnected. I then lined the inside with some polypropylene foam for a better fit and tried to sleep. Although the TV was now greatly attenuated to just being shadowlike, I discovered I could also control it by looking away from it. Being the inquisitive type, I decided to play around and see if I could make that TV screen a computer monitor, and I could. So I mentally connected with Google and did a search for the first crazy word that popped into my head, and that was \"ornithopterics\" and started pulling up Images of that, but like the TV, the signal was blurry and required focus to see. When I took the pot off my head I was not able to control the images in any way. I was getting Rai 2 and that was it. The only reliable way to not receive the transmissions was to stay awake, which I did for about 3 days. Then the closed-eve images started fading until they were completely gone. The second such incident happened to me while I was sleeping. I had a dream where I was interacting normally with people I didn't know. I did recognise a few of them from seeing them around my town. The weird thing was that I was speaking in a foreign language which I recognised as Bulgarian, and reading some webpages in Bulgarian, and speaking it to various people I was interacting with. I don't speak Bulgarian, by the way, and I don't know HOW I knew that that was what it was. I wasn't getting any whole scenes of life, but just like 5-second snippets of life. I had no idea what was going on because I didn't recognise any of my surroundings at all. Then I looked outside the window and realised that I was looking at my own house across the street, and was looking down at the used car lot making sure all the cars were OK, because in the dream, they were all MY cars. IN the dream, I also went to sleep and had a dream about having to return a deep pot I had borrowed from an Englishwoman who had lent it to me, and meeting up with her in front of the Rewe supermarket and telling her I would do so shortly. At that moment I started panicking because I realised I was inside the head of the Bulgarian guy who lives in the apartment house across the street from me. I had literally met this man only once in my life 5 years ago for about 5 minutes when he rang my bell to complain that one of my tenants had parked his car in his used-car lot. Unusually enough, I found out that he also spoke some Czech because he had lived there for a few years doing what he did in Weiden: selling used cars. It wasn't a problem. I called my renter and asked him to move the car and all was OK. What happened next defied explanation. I had fully awakened from the dream and went to the bathroom. As I was leaving, I looked at the mirror but could not see my own face, but an older man's face. It was most likely the Bulgarian guy but I wasn't sure because I couldn't remember what he looked like. I then went back to bed and closed my eyes. What followed was something between a dream and waking life, and I saw his wife. Not her body but just her beautiful and radiant smile. I could see that her multicoloured and undulating soul was full of humour and playfulness and I experienced a sexual encounter with her that lasted for only 2 minutes or so. After that, I was myself again. The first such incident of uncontrollable telepathy happened in New York. I met one of my friends for dinner and he was with a friend of his I had never met before. I just KNEW this guy and without even realising it, I addressed him by his name (coincidentally it was the same name as my friend), and asked about his retired parents who lived in Dubai. I had no reason to suspect this, much less know it because both these guys were anglo-Americans. The really crazy thing was that HIS first impression was the same as mine: he KNEW me (without knowing me in \"real\" life), and it didn't strike him strange at all that I knew about his parents' retirement in Dubai. It was only toward the end of the evening that we both realised how unusual the situation had been that we had just experienced. I quickly discovered that these unusual flashes of insight I was getting about other people were coming from THE OTHER PEOPLE THEMSELVES. This never happened while I was actually under the influence but only afterwards. It rarely (actually never) happened with people I knew very well. One time I was waiting at a crosslight and there were many people around me. I started seeing myself from a 360 degree perspective and saw that my shirt was sticking out the back of my pants, something I wouldn't feel because I have diminished bodily sensations, but upon reaching back I discovered that was the case and corrected it. Since then I've had many such glimpses into other people's minds, but this happens a lot less frequently AND I can do this at will, sometimes, but not very accurately. Incidents like these gave me hope because they gave me PROOF sufficient for ME that there exist higher dimensional states and that we are all non-material spirits. For the sake of my own sanity in THIS life it's a good thing that telepathy doesn't happen uncontrollably and all the time. I too have a life I want to live. Since I've also done many UNCANNILY SUCCESSFUL workings with divination, especially with the use of a pendulum, I know that my extrasensory powers are mostly in the domain of the RECEPTIVE aspects of the phenomenon. I've had very little success with doing pro-active things like Magick or Sorcery. As usual, I could write a whole book on this but I have to cut it off for now because I have other matters to attend to.",
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"content": "Involuntary Telepathy and Its Possible Relation to Schizophrenia\n\nTelepathy. YES, it's a PROBLEM. Especially when it happens unexpectedly or uncontrollably which was sometimes the case when I was still drinking, and now that I think about those horrific days, it was one of the main reasons I did quit drinking permanently, never to return. This was no ordinary drinking. I was consuming 2-4 liters (up to 6) of wine a day and surprisingly it wasn't affecting the quality of my waking intelligence, it's just there was very little of it because I would sleep for most of the day. After 35 years of this shit, I had to let it go like taking a dump you've been suppressing for a long time. Weekdays required 2 liters every evening and starting Friday night it was a non-sexual orgy of wasteful liquidation. I was STEADfast in my WAYS or Way-Stead (wasted) all the time. The first instance of uncontrollable telepathy happened a few years ago. I was completely sober, but I couldn't sleep because I kept seeing a TV screen with various images. Sometimes these were movies, commercials, interviews, everything you would experience when watching TV. There was no sound, but if I focused on it intensely, I would get some, and it was in a language I didn't understand, but recognised as Italian, a language I do NOT speak. I kept the sound on during the commercials when they flashed the logo and found out I was looking at RAI 2 or Rai Due. Although I do have a satellite TV I hadn't watched it in 6 years and the last time I did watch RAI 2 briefly was in Italy in 1995. To make sure that this wasn't some delusion I called up a friend of mine who has that channel on her TV and asked her to put it on, with the sound off. Then started describing EXACTLY what she was seeing. She freaked out. Then I freaked out. The paradoxical thought that crossed my mind was that if this is schizophrenia, then it's no wonder that it drives people insane. This went on for 2 days, and I called her again later on to do that same verification, with the same result. The phenomenon I was experiencing was quite real. But WHY? Why was I receiving transmissions into my brain from an Italian TV station at least 1000 km away? To make the transmissions stop, I tried tin foil, but that worked only partially. The quality of the transmission was such that I was completely unaware of it, but when I closed my eyes, it would come in with 100% clarity in about 10 seconds and stay there in my field of closed-eye vision. In desperation, I took an appropriately sized stainless-steel pot and deformed it to fit my head. I grounded it via the grounding terminal on a power plug and it worked. I also discovered that it worked even when the grounding was disconnected. I then lined the inside with some polypropylene foam for a better fit and tried to sleep. Although the TV was now greatly attenuated to just being shadowlike, I discovered I could also control it by looking away from it. Being the inquisitive type, I decided to play around and see if I could make that TV screen a computer monitor, and I could. So I mentally connected with Google and did a search for the first crazy word that popped into my head, and that was \"ornithopterics\" and started pulling up Images of that, but like the TV, the signal was blurry and required focus to see. When I took the pot off my head I was not able to control the images in any way. I was getting Rai 2 and that was it. The only reliable way to not receive the transmissions was to stay awake, which I did for about 3 days. Then the closed-eve images started fading until they were completely gone. The second such incident happened to me while I was sleeping. I had a dream where I was interacting normally with people I didn't know. I did recognise a few of them from seeing them around my town. The weird thing was that I was speaking in a foreign language which I recognised as Bulgarian, and reading some webpages in Bulgarian, and speaking it to various people I was interacting with. I don't speak Bulgarian, by the way, and I don't know HOW I knew that that was what it was. I wasn't getting any whole scenes of life, but just like 5-second snippets of life. I had no idea what was going on because I didn't recognise any of my surroundings at all. Then I looked outside the window and realised that I was looking at my own house across the street, and was looking down at the used car lot making sure all the cars were OK, because in the dream, they were all MY cars. IN the dream, I also went to sleep and had a dream about having to return a deep pot I had borrowed from an Englishwoman who had lent it to me, and meeting up with her in front of the Rewe supermarket and telling her I would do so shortly. At that moment I started panicking because I realised I was inside the head of the Bulgarian guy who lives in the apartment house across the street from me. I had literally met this man only once in my life 5 years ago for about 5 minutes when he rang my bell to complain that one of my tenants had parked his car in his used-car lot. Unusually enough, I found out that he also spoke some Czech because he had lived there for a few years doing what he did in Weiden: selling used cars. It wasn't a problem. I called my renter and asked him to move the car and all was OK. What happened next defied explanation. I had fully awakened from the dream and went to the bathroom. As I was leaving, I looked at the mirror but could not see my own face, but an older man's face. It was most likely the Bulgarian guy but I wasn't sure because I couldn't remember what he looked like. I then went back to bed and closed my eyes. What followed was something between a dream and waking life, and I saw his wife. Not her body but just her beautiful and radiant smile. I could see that her multicoloured and undulating soul was full of humour and playfulness and I experienced a sexual encounter with her that lasted for only 2 minutes or so. After that, I was myself again. The first such incident of uncontrollable telepathy happened in New York. I met one of my friends for dinner and he was with a friend of his I had never met before. I just KNEW this guy and without even realising it, I addressed him by his name (coincidentally it was the same name as my friend), and asked about his retired parents who lived in Dubai. I had no reason to suspect this, much less know it because both these guys were anglo-Americans. The really crazy thing was that HIS first impression was the same as mine: he KNEW me (without knowing me in \"real\" life), and it didn't strike him strange at all that I knew about his parents' retirement in Dubai. It was only toward the end of the evening that we both realised how unusual the situation had been that we had just experienced. I quickly discovered that these unusual flashes of insight I was getting about other people were coming from THE OTHER PEOPLE THEMSELVES. This never happened while I was actually under the influence but only afterwards. It rarely (actually never) happened with people I knew very well. One time I was waiting at a crosslight and there were many people around me. I started seeing myself from a 360 degree perspective and saw that my shirt was sticking out the back of my pants, something I wouldn't feel because I have diminished bodily sensations, but upon reaching back I discovered that was the case and corrected it. Since then I've had many such glimpses into other people's minds, but this happens a lot less frequently AND I can do this at will, sometimes, but not very accurately. Incidents like these gave me hope because they gave me PROOF sufficient for ME that there exist higher dimensional states and that we are all non-material spirits. For the sake of my own sanity in THIS life it's a good thing that telepathy doesn't happen uncontrollably and all the time. I too have a life I want to live. Since I've also done many UNCANNILY SUCCESSFUL workings with divination, especially with the use of a pendulum, I know that my extrasensory powers are mostly in the domain of the RECEPTIVE aspects of the phenomenon. I've had very little success with doing pro-active things like Magick or Sorcery. As usual, I could write a whole book on this but I have to cut it off for now because I have other matters to attend to.",
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"content": "Coins Gone Wild<br /><br />Collecting ANYTHING is almost certainly a manifestation of social deformity. People collect all sorts of stupid things, like \"collectibles\" where I shudder even when contemplating some of the things people collect. My old boss at the stock exchange collected porcelain. As a true banker, she had a main collection at her house, with \"branches\" set up at her son's house, a couple of storage facilities in Prague, and her office. My old lawyer collected irons, as in those used for ironing bits of cloth. Apparently she was even an expert on the history of ironing as a SCOURGE on humanity which persists even in today's modern age when we have polyamide, polyesther, elasthan, spandex, and other wonderful materials. <br />You could say my coin collecting started out innocently enough at around 9 years of age. A coin here, a coin there, but it turned into INSANITY. Back in those innocent days I measured the size of my collection by the number of pieces I had of various coins, or types of coins. Later on, that became pounds. When I moved back to Europe for the 3rd time (and theoretically lived happily ever after) it was kilos, and these days there are coins I measure in how many percent of the total mintage I own. <br />If coins were shares of stock, you could say that I'd have a seat on the boards of directors of a couple of them. Usually such a situation happens by accident when I come across a collection consisting of a large amount of one single coin, and I wind up buying it. Then I continue to add to it, and so on. The most notable instance of such a phenomenon was actually an auction for a single coin. I emailed the seller, and asked \"heeeyyy, you got any more of these?\" and he (almost always a \"he\" in this business) said he did. At this point you should be hearing the \"Jaws\" movie theme song slowly building up.So, I had him call me up and it turned out he had a SHITLOAD of these and that he was willing to transact outside of the Aukro auction venue in person. We agreed on a price, and I set about getting the money. In those days I had 19 different bank accounts and transferring all that money to one where I could withdraw it would take too long. The guy would only wait till Saturday, but the money would arrive in my account on Monday. This was a problem. BUT I worked in a bank. Hey, I was the branch MANAGER of that bank. What follows next should actually be edited/censored/filtered, and oh, if you're my former boss, please cover your eyes. [redacted] Then drove all alone in my little minivan 500 km halfway across Europe to meet a complete stranger and hand him a stack of cash that could buy you a HOUSE. Right now you should be hearing that \"Jaws\" theme song pretty clearly. <br />Owing to the fact that I'm probably the luckiest guy alive this side of the Atlantic, and I actively rely on said luck, the deal went through exactly as planned. We met at a shopping mall and went into a restaurant and \"did the deed\" right there. He was actually a pretty cool guy who had taken over his father's factory after he had died. His father had bought the coins in bulk directly from the Czech mint and all the boxes bore its insignia. <br />The money came through as expected, and nobody was any the wiser. Since I now found myself the proud new owner of well over 10% of all the coins minted of this particular high-value Silver commemorative coin, I started buying more, and quickly discovered the mechanics of the \"cornering the market\" paradox. If nobody out there KNOWS that you have this many coins of that population, nobody else is interested in selling them to you (or anyone else) and therefore the price stagnates. So I basically started telling people about this situation and even told the CEO of the bank about it. The next time I saw him he told me as an aside that he had himself bought about 40% of the population of a different coin. I asked him how, and he said that the Czech mint produces the coins and distributes them to all the regional branches of the Central Bank, as well as key branches of the top banks. There they sit until someone buys them. All he did was contact them, asked how many they had, and bought them all (of that one type). Simple as that. <br />Well, I did the exact same same thing. Called up all the regional branches, and basically bought everything my little heart desired (and my little purse could afford). That was then.<br />Nowadays the Czech Mint produces way too many coins and as of 2010, all of these are basically bullion with little added value. You might be better off buying kilo bars of Silver or Gold, although Silver and Gold coins do have a leveraging effect because in some sense they CAN be regarded as derivatives where if the price of Gold goes up by 5%, Gold coins will go up by 10-20% as a rule of thumb. <br />Should you, dear reader contemplate collecting anything, I'd suggest doing so only as a long-term investment. The insanity aspect I mentioned would best be exemplified by an incident I observed at the Kolbenova flea market in Prague. It's huge, and there's sellers of all manner of junks and garbages there. In some respects it's like a \"Premium\" Dumpster where you might find about 20 different people selling coins on any given weekend. My friend and I were checking out one such seller who was right next to a guy with a table full of Kinder Egg toys [facepalm]. Guy comes up to the Kinder Egg table looking like The Incredible Hulk, and who probably couldn't walk through a door without having to turn sideways. In the deepest baritone voice he says to the seller, \"oh, that's the Santa series, I heard about those.\" I lost it right there and couldn't stop cracking up like crazy. Had to cover my eyes and walk away. I mean, technically these are CHILDREN'S TOYS and here you have a guy who could probably lift a tractor with his penis checking them out. In a different time and a different place, he might have been interested in \"investing\" in Beanie Babies. Oh the pain. <br />The phenomenon of Beanie Babies fascinated me when it was an ongoing \"thing\" and people were paying up to 15,000 USD for these (basically) bags of beans. It reminded me of the Cs. As in the letter \"C.\" This was an actual fad in Czechoslovakia in the early 80s where people started going CRAZY about plastic shower-curtain rings shaped like the letter C. <br />Oh, and by the way, don't tell anybody about this. Wouldn't want people thinking we're a nation of whackos. I myself found this out only after having lived in Czech Republic for 12 years, and when I DID FIND OUT, it explained perfectly why some people had chains of these plastic shower-curtain rings hanging somewhere, inconspicuously, in their houses as a Mark of Shame that should appropriately bear the title \"Never Again,\" like on some Holocaust Memorial plaque. <br />It started out innocently enough. Some guy wanted to hang a shower curtain in his bathroom. Problem was that back then during the dark and damp days of communism, these were made by only one company and sold in opaque paper bags each containing 20 of these rings. These were all of different colours.The price was negligible, only about 0.10 Crowns (0.2 US CENTS) so the guy bought 20 bags of them because he wanted them all to be of the same colour, where he would simply throw out the ones he didn't need. Fair enough, right? The problem was that this guy was an accountant. When he emptied the bags he discovered that certain pieces were less common than others, and made a chart of these, as well as all the different manufacturing error varieties. He wound up buying more of these bags of plastic shower-curtain rings and did a whole statistical analysis. Somehow that little chart of his made it into the newspapers and the C fad was in full swing. The rarest were the G-shaped rings, as well as any varieties of purple or clear plastic ones. The first collectors were kids, because the rings were cheap and somehow, pop culture welcomed this phenomenon with open arms. Michael David even came out with a (not very good) hit single about a young girl who collects these plastic shower-curtain rings.<br />Things started getting out of had, WAY out of hand. The prices for plastic shower-curtain rings shot through the roof. The government started cracking down on plastic shower-curtain rings, and passed a decree where you could only buy one bag of them per day AND you had to show ID to do so. The Black Market went crazy as well. People were selling them exactly the same way as drugs are sold in the west or illegal foreign currencies in the east- street-corner hustlers, various barter markets, newspaper ads, etc. The price shot up to over 500 CROWNS per ring, which back then was one week's average salary. People would wear them around their necks as jewelry, even very rich and prominent celebrities. People got robbed and beaten for their plastic shower-curtain rings. Bribes were paid using bags of them, and people considered them an \"investment.\" Since every demand usually finds an appropriate supply, some enterprising Vietnamese businessmen decided to started importing \"fake\" plastic shower-curtain rings. The prices started going wild, but eventually collapsed. Lots of people lost lots of money on that, and I'll betcha ANY MONEY there's some guy out there, somewhere in Czech Republic with a barn FULL of them who's hoping that the Cs will make a comeback. Of course, nowadays people don't talk about the Cs, at least not in polite society. But they're out there. Not just the plastic shower-curtain rings, but those toxic memes that brought about this phenomenon. <br />here's the WikiPedia page on that (in Czech):<br /><a href=\"https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Céčka\" target=\"_blank\">https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Céčka</a><br /><br />",
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"content": "Coins Gone Wild\n\nCollecting ANYTHING is almost certainly a manifestation of social deformity. People collect all sorts of stupid things, like \"collectibles\" where I shudder even when contemplating some of the things people collect. My old boss at the stock exchange collected porcelain. As a true banker, she had a main collection at her house, with \"branches\" set up at her son's house, a couple of storage facilities in Prague, and her office. My old lawyer collected irons, as in those used for ironing bits of cloth. Apparently she was even an expert on the history of ironing as a SCOURGE on humanity which persists even in today's modern age when we have polyamide, polyesther, elasthan, spandex, and other wonderful materials. \nYou could say my coin collecting started out innocently enough at around 9 years of age. A coin here, a coin there, but it turned into INSANITY. Back in those innocent days I measured the size of my collection by the number of pieces I had of various coins, or types of coins. Later on, that became pounds. When I moved back to Europe for the 3rd time (and theoretically lived happily ever after) it was kilos, and these days there are coins I measure in how many percent of the total mintage I own. \nIf coins were shares of stock, you could say that I'd have a seat on the boards of directors of a couple of them. Usually such a situation happens by accident when I come across a collection consisting of a large amount of one single coin, and I wind up buying it. Then I continue to add to it, and so on. The most notable instance of such a phenomenon was actually an auction for a single coin. I emailed the seller, and asked \"heeeyyy, you got any more of these?\" and he (almost always a \"he\" in this business) said he did. At this point you should be hearing the \"Jaws\" movie theme song slowly building up.So, I had him call me up and it turned out he had a SHITLOAD of these and that he was willing to transact outside of the Aukro auction venue in person. We agreed on a price, and I set about getting the money. In those days I had 19 different bank accounts and transferring all that money to one where I could withdraw it would take too long. The guy would only wait till Saturday, but the money would arrive in my account on Monday. This was a problem. BUT I worked in a bank. Hey, I was the branch MANAGER of that bank. What follows next should actually be edited/censored/filtered, and oh, if you're my former boss, please cover your eyes. [redacted] Then drove all alone in my little minivan 500 km halfway across Europe to meet a complete stranger and hand him a stack of cash that could buy you a HOUSE. Right now you should be hearing that \"Jaws\" theme song pretty clearly. \nOwing to the fact that I'm probably the luckiest guy alive this side of the Atlantic, and I actively rely on said luck, the deal went through exactly as planned. We met at a shopping mall and went into a restaurant and \"did the deed\" right there. He was actually a pretty cool guy who had taken over his father's factory after he had died. His father had bought the coins in bulk directly from the Czech mint and all the boxes bore its insignia. \nThe money came through as expected, and nobody was any the wiser. Since I now found myself the proud new owner of well over 10% of all the coins minted of this particular high-value Silver commemorative coin, I started buying more, and quickly discovered the mechanics of the \"cornering the market\" paradox. If nobody out there KNOWS that you have this many coins of that population, nobody else is interested in selling them to you (or anyone else) and therefore the price stagnates. So I basically started telling people about this situation and even told the CEO of the bank about it. The next time I saw him he told me as an aside that he had himself bought about 40% of the population of a different coin. I asked him how, and he said that the Czech mint produces the coins and distributes them to all the regional branches of the Central Bank, as well as key branches of the top banks. There they sit until someone buys them. All he did was contact them, asked how many they had, and bought them all (of that one type). Simple as that. \nWell, I did the exact same same thing. Called up all the regional branches, and basically bought everything my little heart desired (and my little purse could afford). That was then.\nNowadays the Czech Mint produces way too many coins and as of 2010, all of these are basically bullion with little added value. You might be better off buying kilo bars of Silver or Gold, although Silver and Gold coins do have a leveraging effect because in some sense they CAN be regarded as derivatives where if the price of Gold goes up by 5%, Gold coins will go up by 10-20% as a rule of thumb. \nShould you, dear reader contemplate collecting anything, I'd suggest doing so only as a long-term investment. The insanity aspect I mentioned would best be exemplified by an incident I observed at the Kolbenova flea market in Prague. It's huge, and there's sellers of all manner of junks and garbages there. In some respects it's like a \"Premium\" Dumpster where you might find about 20 different people selling coins on any given weekend. My friend and I were checking out one such seller who was right next to a guy with a table full of Kinder Egg toys [facepalm]. Guy comes up to the Kinder Egg table looking like The Incredible Hulk, and who probably couldn't walk through a door without having to turn sideways. In the deepest baritone voice he says to the seller, \"oh, that's the Santa series, I heard about those.\" I lost it right there and couldn't stop cracking up like crazy. Had to cover my eyes and walk away. I mean, technically these are CHILDREN'S TOYS and here you have a guy who could probably lift a tractor with his penis checking them out. In a different time and a different place, he might have been interested in \"investing\" in Beanie Babies. Oh the pain. \nThe phenomenon of Beanie Babies fascinated me when it was an ongoing \"thing\" and people were paying up to 15,000 USD for these (basically) bags of beans. It reminded me of the Cs. As in the letter \"C.\" This was an actual fad in Czechoslovakia in the early 80s where people started going CRAZY about plastic shower-curtain rings shaped like the letter C. \nOh, and by the way, don't tell anybody about this. Wouldn't want people thinking we're a nation of whackos. I myself found this out only after having lived in Czech Republic for 12 years, and when I DID FIND OUT, it explained perfectly why some people had chains of these plastic shower-curtain rings hanging somewhere, inconspicuously, in their houses as a Mark of Shame that should appropriately bear the title \"Never Again,\" like on some Holocaust Memorial plaque. \nIt started out innocently enough. Some guy wanted to hang a shower curtain in his bathroom. Problem was that back then during the dark and damp days of communism, these were made by only one company and sold in opaque paper bags each containing 20 of these rings. These were all of different colours.The price was negligible, only about 0.10 Crowns (0.2 US CENTS) so the guy bought 20 bags of them because he wanted them all to be of the same colour, where he would simply throw out the ones he didn't need. Fair enough, right? The problem was that this guy was an accountant. When he emptied the bags he discovered that certain pieces were less common than others, and made a chart of these, as well as all the different manufacturing error varieties. He wound up buying more of these bags of plastic shower-curtain rings and did a whole statistical analysis. Somehow that little chart of his made it into the newspapers and the C fad was in full swing. The rarest were the G-shaped rings, as well as any varieties of purple or clear plastic ones. The first collectors were kids, because the rings were cheap and somehow, pop culture welcomed this phenomenon with open arms. Michael David even came out with a (not very good) hit single about a young girl who collects these plastic shower-curtain rings.\nThings started getting out of had, WAY out of hand. The prices for plastic shower-curtain rings shot through the roof. The government started cracking down on plastic shower-curtain rings, and passed a decree where you could only buy one bag of them per day AND you had to show ID to do so. The Black Market went crazy as well. People were selling them exactly the same way as drugs are sold in the west or illegal foreign currencies in the east- street-corner hustlers, various barter markets, newspaper ads, etc. The price shot up to over 500 CROWNS per ring, which back then was one week's average salary. People would wear them around their necks as jewelry, even very rich and prominent celebrities. People got robbed and beaten for their plastic shower-curtain rings. Bribes were paid using bags of them, and people considered them an \"investment.\" Since every demand usually finds an appropriate supply, some enterprising Vietnamese businessmen decided to started importing \"fake\" plastic shower-curtain rings. The prices started going wild, but eventually collapsed. Lots of people lost lots of money on that, and I'll betcha ANY MONEY there's some guy out there, somewhere in Czech Republic with a barn FULL of them who's hoping that the Cs will make a comeback. Of course, nowadays people don't talk about the Cs, at least not in polite society. But they're out there. Not just the plastic shower-curtain rings, but those toxic memes that brought about this phenomenon. \nhere's the WikiPedia page on that (in Czech):\nhttps://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Céčka\n\n",
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"content": "Graffiti near the CZ / DE border. \"Hebe deinen Kopf, dann siehst du keine Grenzen,\" (\"Lift up your head, and you won't see any borders (limitations)'). I like how they made the \"f\" in \"Kopf \" look like an Ankh.",
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"content": "Graffiti near the CZ / DE border. \"Hebe deinen Kopf, dann siehst du keine Grenzen,\" (\"Lift up your head, and you won't see any borders (limitations)'). I like how they made the \"f\" in \"Kopf \" look like an Ankh.",
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"content": " The Pyramid Shape and Its Effects on Conservation of Angular Momentum<br /><br />I've been fascinated by the pyramid shape for decades, and have done my own research on it. In addition to having read many books and watched many videos on the subject, I also visited the Great Pyramid at Giza and checked out the insides in March 2013.<br />Trust me, no amount of videos will ever convey the creepiness and overwhelming size of it, or even the layout. Once you're inside it's pretty simple to understand, but still impossible to explain. You enter through a normal sized excavated hole, the one Al-Mamun made in the 8th century when he was looking for treasure. He was the first person inside and found nothing except 3 things, and one of them, the sarcophagus, is still there. The other two were a wooden ruler, and a \"piece of glass that could bend without breaking.\" Sounds like plexiglass to me. Both of the latter have since disappeared. After expending all that effort, I'm sure Al-Mamun and his men must've been pretty pissed. <br />Once you enter, the entrance to the ascending passage is on the left. This passage is about 1 x 1 meter and inclined upwards, so you have to assume a crouched position to ascend it. At the top you have the Grand Gallery and a horizontal passage to the Queen's Chamber. The Grand Gallery is 8 meters high and is as the same angle as the ascending passage. At the top you have to (again) crouch down to get into another 1 x 1 meter passage, which briefly opens up to a normal height and then AGAIN you have to assume a crouched position for another stretch before you get inside the King's Chamber. The first thing I did was feel the inside of the sarcophagus and found that it's polished all the way into the corners, but the outside is rough. That's IMPOSSIBLE to do even today. Only way you can have a polished interior corner is by assembling it from 3 pieces of polished flat planes.To me this meant that the inside was a high priority and that the measurements had to be exact. <br />A plainclothes employee of the Ministry of Antiquities stationed in there approached me and asked me for a cigarette. It was my last one but I gave it to him anyway because I had more in the taxi I had taken there. He lit it, and I was shocked that you could smoke inside the Great Pyramid. He gave the standard Zahi Hawass party-line about the \"monument\" and I didn't really care. I was fascinated by a young woman (obviously American) who was doing some kind of a ritual dance by herself. She seemed to be in another world. How did the MoA employee know that I smoked, and how did he know that I speak English? I wouldn't have been surprised if he addressed me by my first name. ALL Egyptians speak good English, so the fact that he did too didn't surprise me. I only spent about 15 minutes in there before I found the guy's commentary kind of annoying so I left. Going DOWN those narrow passages was actually more difficult than going up, and I emerged into the fresh desert air a sweating mass of wet protoplasm. My hair was a mess (viz photo my taxi driver took). <br />I had previously made models of the Great Pyramid from cardboard and had done all the usual tests, and established the fact that this was a real phenomenon. I had kept water in it, and had a cardboard box with the same interior volume as a control. I had 2 lemon trees and watered one with the pyramid water ONLY for a whole year and the other one with water only from the box. The pyramid-watered one was more robust and healthier but this was too subjective. I also did other experiments with seedlings, dried fruit, and coffee, and got the same results.<br />The problem was that these observations were still too subjective. Over the course of several months I found out that the pyramid effect is most powerful when 2 sides are exactly aligned to true north. This is more complicated than it sounds, but I did get it right using Google Maps, Paint Shop Pro, a ruler, and trigonometry. I taped one of the sides to the basement's xylolite tiled floor so I could easily put things in and remove them. I had dumpster-dived a 1970s hard drive of 460 kB (I know!!). Thing was huge, about 60 x 60 x 100 cm. I had extracted the hard drive platter assembly which was perfectly balanced on 2 ball bearings and measured about 50 cm in diameter. When placed on a flat surface and spun by hand, it would spin for a long time. I made a power drill attachment out of old printer parts and kitchen implements which I could use to spin the platters to a constant speed every time. <br />Since both the control box and the pyramid were both aligned to true north and I knew the platters would spin for about 6.5 minutes, I would spin it, then cover them with either the pyramid or the box, then wait the 6 minutes, and observed the ending phase of the spin by removing the box or the pyramid (since I couldn't see inside). Later, I had cut small windows in the sides and observed the platters with a flashlight. <br />Since I no longer have any of the raw data (or the pyramid) from these experiments because I had moved 3x since then, I can only go from memory about the conclusions I had reached. When spun in the open air, or inside the control box, the platters spun for 6 m 20s + or - 2 seconds over about 40 tries. Inside the pyramid, they were spinning for 5 to 6 seconds LONGER than the controls. That's about 1 PERCENT. This should NOT be happening according to normal physics. <br />Either the MASS of the platters increased, which increased the momentum (and therefore inertia) of the platter, or the SPEED was increased, or TIME was being contracted. Another possibility would be that FRICTION was being lessened. Either way, this was a provable and demonstrable method to establish the fact that certain key physical constants were being altered inside the pyramid. <br />Medical tests done on volunteers inside the pyramid detected marked changes in their blood before entering a pyramid, and after being in it for just 15 minutes where all their values went toward the normal levels, the same amount of time I myself spent in there but felt nothing. Only in retrospect did I later realise that that 15 minutes in there cured my Egyptian water-induced diarrhea I accidentally got by taking a multivitamin and accidentally taking a drink from the faucet not realising I was in Egypt. <br />The whole time I was inside it, I felt like this had been a MACHINE at some point in the distant past, and that this thing was OLD, very, very OLD. Not 5,500 years old, but about 10x that. At least that's what I felt. <br />I'm also pretty sure that the pharaoh Khufu didn't build it, but merely added the casing stones, and that's what took him 20 years, which would be about right. No way could he have moved 2.3 MILLION stone blocks weighing up to 70 TONS over 600 km, and shaped them to about the size of a car that reaches to my chest in 20 years given the much smaller Egyptian population at that time. When Al-Mamun had discovered it, he had to break in because it had no door or windows. Why would anyone build a HUGE building and put just 3 tiny rooms in it connected by these weird passages and NOT put in any doors or windows? Would anyone ever build a house like that? Khufu probably had no idea what it was for, so he simply covered it up, and made it into a mega-decoration, then designated it a monument. <br />Maybe Khufu did it to make it into a FOREIGN-CURRENCY GENERATOR and that it served the same purpose then and now, with tourists coming to see this huge thing and paying money to do so. Cost me 70 Pounds Egyptian (like 6 USD) to go inside and I still have the ticket. After all, Greek historians had visited it in antiquity and commented on it in their writings. <br />In the future, I will be doing more experiments with bigger models (walk-in sized) made of wood as soon as I can create the space for it. From research done at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the early 2000s it was found that a pyramid doesn't have to have the same angle of inclination as TGP, but that that is in fact the MINIMUM angle you need to get the effect. A precise alignment to true north is also required. I have 2 steep pyramids 93 cm high made of Lexan plexiglass and one of them 1.5 meters from me has a steel pendulum suspended on a polymer monofilament inside it. I periodically check on it to see if anything I'm experiencing is affecting it psychokinetically but have so far NOT observed any effects, but then again, that's only been here for 2 weeks. We shall see. Clearly, I need to do more research and conduct more experiments.",
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"content": " The Pyramid Shape and Its Effects on Conservation of Angular Momentum\n\nI've been fascinated by the pyramid shape for decades, and have done my own research on it. In addition to having read many books and watched many videos on the subject, I also visited the Great Pyramid at Giza and checked out the insides in March 2013.\nTrust me, no amount of videos will ever convey the creepiness and overwhelming size of it, or even the layout. Once you're inside it's pretty simple to understand, but still impossible to explain. You enter through a normal sized excavated hole, the one Al-Mamun made in the 8th century when he was looking for treasure. He was the first person inside and found nothing except 3 things, and one of them, the sarcophagus, is still there. The other two were a wooden ruler, and a \"piece of glass that could bend without breaking.\" Sounds like plexiglass to me. Both of the latter have since disappeared. After expending all that effort, I'm sure Al-Mamun and his men must've been pretty pissed. \nOnce you enter, the entrance to the ascending passage is on the left. This passage is about 1 x 1 meter and inclined upwards, so you have to assume a crouched position to ascend it. At the top you have the Grand Gallery and a horizontal passage to the Queen's Chamber. The Grand Gallery is 8 meters high and is as the same angle as the ascending passage. At the top you have to (again) crouch down to get into another 1 x 1 meter passage, which briefly opens up to a normal height and then AGAIN you have to assume a crouched position for another stretch before you get inside the King's Chamber. The first thing I did was feel the inside of the sarcophagus and found that it's polished all the way into the corners, but the outside is rough. That's IMPOSSIBLE to do even today. Only way you can have a polished interior corner is by assembling it from 3 pieces of polished flat planes.To me this meant that the inside was a high priority and that the measurements had to be exact. \nA plainclothes employee of the Ministry of Antiquities stationed in there approached me and asked me for a cigarette. It was my last one but I gave it to him anyway because I had more in the taxi I had taken there. He lit it, and I was shocked that you could smoke inside the Great Pyramid. He gave the standard Zahi Hawass party-line about the \"monument\" and I didn't really care. I was fascinated by a young woman (obviously American) who was doing some kind of a ritual dance by herself. She seemed to be in another world. How did the MoA employee know that I smoked, and how did he know that I speak English? I wouldn't have been surprised if he addressed me by my first name. ALL Egyptians speak good English, so the fact that he did too didn't surprise me. I only spent about 15 minutes in there before I found the guy's commentary kind of annoying so I left. Going DOWN those narrow passages was actually more difficult than going up, and I emerged into the fresh desert air a sweating mass of wet protoplasm. My hair was a mess (viz photo my taxi driver took). \nI had previously made models of the Great Pyramid from cardboard and had done all the usual tests, and established the fact that this was a real phenomenon. I had kept water in it, and had a cardboard box with the same interior volume as a control. I had 2 lemon trees and watered one with the pyramid water ONLY for a whole year and the other one with water only from the box. The pyramid-watered one was more robust and healthier but this was too subjective. I also did other experiments with seedlings, dried fruit, and coffee, and got the same results.\nThe problem was that these observations were still too subjective. Over the course of several months I found out that the pyramid effect is most powerful when 2 sides are exactly aligned to true north. This is more complicated than it sounds, but I did get it right using Google Maps, Paint Shop Pro, a ruler, and trigonometry. I taped one of the sides to the basement's xylolite tiled floor so I could easily put things in and remove them. I had dumpster-dived a 1970s hard drive of 460 kB (I know!!). Thing was huge, about 60 x 60 x 100 cm. I had extracted the hard drive platter assembly which was perfectly balanced on 2 ball bearings and measured about 50 cm in diameter. When placed on a flat surface and spun by hand, it would spin for a long time. I made a power drill attachment out of old printer parts and kitchen implements which I could use to spin the platters to a constant speed every time. \nSince both the control box and the pyramid were both aligned to true north and I knew the platters would spin for about 6.5 minutes, I would spin it, then cover them with either the pyramid or the box, then wait the 6 minutes, and observed the ending phase of the spin by removing the box or the pyramid (since I couldn't see inside). Later, I had cut small windows in the sides and observed the platters with a flashlight. \nSince I no longer have any of the raw data (or the pyramid) from these experiments because I had moved 3x since then, I can only go from memory about the conclusions I had reached. When spun in the open air, or inside the control box, the platters spun for 6 m 20s + or - 2 seconds over about 40 tries. Inside the pyramid, they were spinning for 5 to 6 seconds LONGER than the controls. That's about 1 PERCENT. This should NOT be happening according to normal physics. \nEither the MASS of the platters increased, which increased the momentum (and therefore inertia) of the platter, or the SPEED was increased, or TIME was being contracted. Another possibility would be that FRICTION was being lessened. Either way, this was a provable and demonstrable method to establish the fact that certain key physical constants were being altered inside the pyramid. \nMedical tests done on volunteers inside the pyramid detected marked changes in their blood before entering a pyramid, and after being in it for just 15 minutes where all their values went toward the normal levels, the same amount of time I myself spent in there but felt nothing. Only in retrospect did I later realise that that 15 minutes in there cured my Egyptian water-induced diarrhea I accidentally got by taking a multivitamin and accidentally taking a drink from the faucet not realising I was in Egypt. \nThe whole time I was inside it, I felt like this had been a MACHINE at some point in the distant past, and that this thing was OLD, very, very OLD. Not 5,500 years old, but about 10x that. At least that's what I felt. \nI'm also pretty sure that the pharaoh Khufu didn't build it, but merely added the casing stones, and that's what took him 20 years, which would be about right. No way could he have moved 2.3 MILLION stone blocks weighing up to 70 TONS over 600 km, and shaped them to about the size of a car that reaches to my chest in 20 years given the much smaller Egyptian population at that time. When Al-Mamun had discovered it, he had to break in because it had no door or windows. Why would anyone build a HUGE building and put just 3 tiny rooms in it connected by these weird passages and NOT put in any doors or windows? Would anyone ever build a house like that? Khufu probably had no idea what it was for, so he simply covered it up, and made it into a mega-decoration, then designated it a monument. \nMaybe Khufu did it to make it into a FOREIGN-CURRENCY GENERATOR and that it served the same purpose then and now, with tourists coming to see this huge thing and paying money to do so. Cost me 70 Pounds Egyptian (like 6 USD) to go inside and I still have the ticket. After all, Greek historians had visited it in antiquity and commented on it in their writings. \nIn the future, I will be doing more experiments with bigger models (walk-in sized) made of wood as soon as I can create the space for it. From research done at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the early 2000s it was found that a pyramid doesn't have to have the same angle of inclination as TGP, but that that is in fact the MINIMUM angle you need to get the effect. A precise alignment to true north is also required. I have 2 steep pyramids 93 cm high made of Lexan plexiglass and one of them 1.5 meters from me has a steel pendulum suspended on a polymer monofilament inside it. I periodically check on it to see if anything I'm experiencing is affecting it psychokinetically but have so far NOT observed any effects, but then again, that's only been here for 2 weeks. We shall see. Clearly, I need to do more research and conduct more experiments.",
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"content": "So Where Do I Put the 4 Inches?<br /><br />One could say that my relationship with various pieces of furniture I've had is a complex one. Needlessly complex and frustrating, but then again, you could say that about almost any category of day-to-day items, especially when they involve me.<br />I generally prefer furniture made of wood. Sounds rather obvious until you consider the fact that very little modern furniture is actually made of wood. Most is made of fibreboard, particle board, pressboard, chipboard, laminate, plywood or some other wood IMPOSTOR and usually coated with a veneer of teflon-infused plastic such as formica. Aside from the fact that particle board, the most common culprit, usually contains heptane-based glue and formaldehyde, which are both carcinogenic and allergenic, it also contains actual cement to make it fire-resistant, water resistant, and give it some added weight. Particle board has some advantages, but these are only for the manufacturer and not the ultimate consumer that has to live with it. The main advantage is that it comes in consistent sheets of nearly any length or width where finding trees that large would be next to impossible. Since it doesn't have any \"grain\" to it, it can be cut and machined from any direction. It has a predictable coefficient of flexibility, and other constants. <br />For the consumer, these are not real advantages. The formaldehyde in particle board can and does evaporate over a period of up to 10 years, after which the piece becomes more brittle and weaker. It's planned obsolescence, really. A shelf made from particle board will deform under pressure, but unlike one made from real wood, never returns to its original shape after the pressure has been removed. Particle board also has a tendency to absorb moisture, and then swell. If you spill some coffee under a piece where the particle board is exposed, it will seep into a much larger area and it will expand, deforming the particle board substrate and cracking the formica veneer. If the piece has to be moved, a piece made of particle board weighs much more than the same sized piece made from real wood, and if it breaks, then good luck trying to glue it back together. <br />You could say that this trend of manufacturing fake wood out of real wood to make into furniture made to look like real wood is a microcosm of what's wrong with modern society: uniformitarianism. Everything has to look the same. <br />Once upon a time those noble trees beautified our landscapes and each one was majestic and unique. These truly gentle giants served as homes for various animals and even other plants. Then someone cut them down and put them in a machine and now they're all the same. They're also DEAD, and even their souls have left their lofty trunks and limbs. <br />Not saying we shouldn't cut down any trees, it's just that we might need a little less technology and a little bit more wisdom in how we do this. When left uncared for, the woods overgrow with dead material accumulating there and cause forest fires because people no longer use the dead wood as a home heating fuel. If you look at any photographs from the 1800s with forests in them, those forests were CLEAN. No dead wood anywhere. Modern sensibilities and sentimentality have replaced pragmatism, and nowadays very few people heat their homes with wood.<br />I did that for 4 years and I still have one of my woodburning stoves from that time. It's useful as a backup in case gas heating gets to be too expensive, or Russia decides to cut of its gas supplies to Germany. While it was a lot of work to keep the house warm those 4 years, I had the added advantage of not only having gotten all that wood for free, but had made a part time microcareer out of it by helping my friend liquidate several buildings that had housed livestock on an old farm he had bought. Ironically enough, I learned a lot about construction by deconstructing those buildings, plank by plank, piece by piece, by hand.<br />While in general, modern furniture has no character or \"soul,\" I try to cohabit only with furniture that has meaning to me, or that had meaning for someone else. What piece of furniture could be more personal than a coffin? Well, guess what, I HAVE one. Sounds morbid, I know. But let me explain. <br />The year was 2014 and I was looking for used furniture by cruising the local Sperrmull, which is a bulk garbage day here in Germany. I was looking for a specific type, something having a multitude of narrow drawers, like for papers and such. I found 2 nightstands that each had 4 drawers with brass handles. The wood looked vaguely like marble and the pieces seemed well-made and robust. The architectural analogue would be something between Baroque and Romanesque. Next day I had a better look at them at my house and deemed them worthy of being MINE. Cleaned them off, and inside I found a plaque. It stated that the pieces had been made in 1923 from the coffin of a monk named Brother Konrad who died on 21 April 1894 in Altotting, Germany.<br />Back in 1923 wood was in high demand for only one purpose: to make more banknotes because Weimar Germany was in a hyperinflationary meltdown. It actually WAS common practice to disinterr coffins and re-bury the dead in cardboard boxes. Not only was wood needed to make paper, but the winter of 1922-1923 was an especially cruel one, and wood was also needed for home heating purposes. Mentally I tried connecting with this Brother Konrad, and I didn't get anything. Later, I was preparing a meal and could feel his smile on my soul and [almost] heard him say \"so, you found it. It's yours.\" All I can say is THANKS Brother Konrad. They're nice pieces, and the fact that they used them for your coffin means you were LOVED. <br />I also try to have furniture that meant something or DID something great.<br />My current office actually consists of 100% of the original furniture from the Kladno branch of the RM-System, the Czech National Securities Exchange, where I was the branch's leader and actually had used it in that capacity before all the branches got upgraded to brand new furniture because Fio Bank, which bought and now owns the RM-S, it's board of directors also owns a furniture warehouse and a couple of other businesses unrelated to banking or finance. <br />Since the RM-S was founded in 1991 to oversee the original coupon privatisation program and later served as Czechoslovakia's first securities exchange in 50+ years, that furniture must have been made under the old communist regime. That being known, it must have been very expensive in its day, being the \"El Grande\" model by any modern measures. It was no doubt made for some wealthy communist fat-cat. It's soul is both bleak and austere, but at the same time radiates enormous wealth. After all, it oversaw the overturn of my country from a standardised conveyor-belt \"workers paradise\" to the KICK-ASS country it is today. <br />I even have the cheap cloth-covered office chair imbued with the farts of those special humans who brought about the de-bullshitisation of my country, and one of them wound up becoming the director of the whole securities exchange. I myself sat in the same chair and drove the same desk I do now. Honestly, you have no idea how much fear and insecurity I felt being put behind THIS DESK RIGHT HERE, and how I trembled inside anytime a client came in,.especially if they carried any kind of inconspicuous-looking paper or plastic bag. These usually wound up containing huge sums of cash I'd have to count by hand without making a mistake. I never did make a mistake, by the way, and I kept all the \"Property of RM-System, Evidentiary No. xxxx-xxxxx\" on all the pieces.<br />Since my woodburning-stove-heating days partially overlapped with my employment at the RM-S, when it came time to simultaneously move the branch and get new furniture I asked if I could take it for use as firewood. My boss said \"sure\" and even helped me load it on my friend's flatbed truck after taking pictures of each piece and crossing them off on a form. <br />Like my own personal oddysey, the Kladno City branch had itself had its own oddysey before we had met up inside the Coconut Building, and YES, there is a Coconut Building that used to be the Communist Party County Headquarters of Kladno (means \"positivity\" in Czech) and had the nickname of The Communist Church (KOmunisticky KOStel, or KOKOS (\"coconut\") put together) the bus stop in front of it even says \"Kokos.\" The building itself is shaped like an open book. <br />Having moved over 20x and emigrated EIGHT TIMES you could say I've moved a lot of furniture in my life. Also bought and sold a couple of houses. Back when I lived in the USA I was invited to come look at a house with my parents and their friends, who were also Czechs. They always wanted me along because even at that tender age I had a knack for spotting the deal-breakers in any piece of real estate, like the occasional bullet-hole-through-the-front-door type thing. THAT actually only happened once, but still. These friends of my parents were both high-school teachers from Czechoslovakia, but had been relegated to manual labour jobs after their relocation (escape) to the USA. Their English was not very good. Somehow they had learned to call furniture \"furnishings\" and pronounced it exactly like \"four inches.\" I knew exactly what they were talking about the whole time, like when they said \"yes, vee put the 4 inches there, and there too.\" The realtor was a Hispanic lady who \"got\" the fact that we were all immigrants with varying degrees of English abilities and pulled my mom aside and asked her \"excuse me, why do they keep talking about four inches? Is the house 4 inches too small or too big?\" Much hilarity ensued and we never did tell them about the Four Inches. You could say it was just too funny to mention. <br />",
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"content": "So Where Do I Put the 4 Inches?\n\nOne could say that my relationship with various pieces of furniture I've had is a complex one. Needlessly complex and frustrating, but then again, you could say that about almost any category of day-to-day items, especially when they involve me.\nI generally prefer furniture made of wood. Sounds rather obvious until you consider the fact that very little modern furniture is actually made of wood. Most is made of fibreboard, particle board, pressboard, chipboard, laminate, plywood or some other wood IMPOSTOR and usually coated with a veneer of teflon-infused plastic such as formica. Aside from the fact that particle board, the most common culprit, usually contains heptane-based glue and formaldehyde, which are both carcinogenic and allergenic, it also contains actual cement to make it fire-resistant, water resistant, and give it some added weight. Particle board has some advantages, but these are only for the manufacturer and not the ultimate consumer that has to live with it. The main advantage is that it comes in consistent sheets of nearly any length or width where finding trees that large would be next to impossible. Since it doesn't have any \"grain\" to it, it can be cut and machined from any direction. It has a predictable coefficient of flexibility, and other constants. \nFor the consumer, these are not real advantages. The formaldehyde in particle board can and does evaporate over a period of up to 10 years, after which the piece becomes more brittle and weaker. It's planned obsolescence, really. A shelf made from particle board will deform under pressure, but unlike one made from real wood, never returns to its original shape after the pressure has been removed. Particle board also has a tendency to absorb moisture, and then swell. If you spill some coffee under a piece where the particle board is exposed, it will seep into a much larger area and it will expand, deforming the particle board substrate and cracking the formica veneer. If the piece has to be moved, a piece made of particle board weighs much more than the same sized piece made from real wood, and if it breaks, then good luck trying to glue it back together. \nYou could say that this trend of manufacturing fake wood out of real wood to make into furniture made to look like real wood is a microcosm of what's wrong with modern society: uniformitarianism. Everything has to look the same. \nOnce upon a time those noble trees beautified our landscapes and each one was majestic and unique. These truly gentle giants served as homes for various animals and even other plants. Then someone cut them down and put them in a machine and now they're all the same. They're also DEAD, and even their souls have left their lofty trunks and limbs. \nNot saying we shouldn't cut down any trees, it's just that we might need a little less technology and a little bit more wisdom in how we do this. When left uncared for, the woods overgrow with dead material accumulating there and cause forest fires because people no longer use the dead wood as a home heating fuel. If you look at any photographs from the 1800s with forests in them, those forests were CLEAN. No dead wood anywhere. Modern sensibilities and sentimentality have replaced pragmatism, and nowadays very few people heat their homes with wood.\nI did that for 4 years and I still have one of my woodburning stoves from that time. It's useful as a backup in case gas heating gets to be too expensive, or Russia decides to cut of its gas supplies to Germany. While it was a lot of work to keep the house warm those 4 years, I had the added advantage of not only having gotten all that wood for free, but had made a part time microcareer out of it by helping my friend liquidate several buildings that had housed livestock on an old farm he had bought. Ironically enough, I learned a lot about construction by deconstructing those buildings, plank by plank, piece by piece, by hand.\nWhile in general, modern furniture has no character or \"soul,\" I try to cohabit only with furniture that has meaning to me, or that had meaning for someone else. What piece of furniture could be more personal than a coffin? Well, guess what, I HAVE one. Sounds morbid, I know. But let me explain. \nThe year was 2014 and I was looking for used furniture by cruising the local Sperrmull, which is a bulk garbage day here in Germany. I was looking for a specific type, something having a multitude of narrow drawers, like for papers and such. I found 2 nightstands that each had 4 drawers with brass handles. The wood looked vaguely like marble and the pieces seemed well-made and robust. The architectural analogue would be something between Baroque and Romanesque. Next day I had a better look at them at my house and deemed them worthy of being MINE. Cleaned them off, and inside I found a plaque. It stated that the pieces had been made in 1923 from the coffin of a monk named Brother Konrad who died on 21 April 1894 in Altotting, Germany.\nBack in 1923 wood was in high demand for only one purpose: to make more banknotes because Weimar Germany was in a hyperinflationary meltdown. It actually WAS common practice to disinterr coffins and re-bury the dead in cardboard boxes. Not only was wood needed to make paper, but the winter of 1922-1923 was an especially cruel one, and wood was also needed for home heating purposes. Mentally I tried connecting with this Brother Konrad, and I didn't get anything. Later, I was preparing a meal and could feel his smile on my soul and [almost] heard him say \"so, you found it. It's yours.\" All I can say is THANKS Brother Konrad. They're nice pieces, and the fact that they used them for your coffin means you were LOVED. \nI also try to have furniture that meant something or DID something great.\nMy current office actually consists of 100% of the original furniture from the Kladno branch of the RM-System, the Czech National Securities Exchange, where I was the branch's leader and actually had used it in that capacity before all the branches got upgraded to brand new furniture because Fio Bank, which bought and now owns the RM-S, it's board of directors also owns a furniture warehouse and a couple of other businesses unrelated to banking or finance. \nSince the RM-S was founded in 1991 to oversee the original coupon privatisation program and later served as Czechoslovakia's first securities exchange in 50+ years, that furniture must have been made under the old communist regime. That being known, it must have been very expensive in its day, being the \"El Grande\" model by any modern measures. It was no doubt made for some wealthy communist fat-cat. It's soul is both bleak and austere, but at the same time radiates enormous wealth. After all, it oversaw the overturn of my country from a standardised conveyor-belt \"workers paradise\" to the KICK-ASS country it is today. \nI even have the cheap cloth-covered office chair imbued with the farts of those special humans who brought about the de-bullshitisation of my country, and one of them wound up becoming the director of the whole securities exchange. I myself sat in the same chair and drove the same desk I do now. Honestly, you have no idea how much fear and insecurity I felt being put behind THIS DESK RIGHT HERE, and how I trembled inside anytime a client came in,.especially if they carried any kind of inconspicuous-looking paper or plastic bag. These usually wound up containing huge sums of cash I'd have to count by hand without making a mistake. I never did make a mistake, by the way, and I kept all the \"Property of RM-System, Evidentiary No. xxxx-xxxxx\" on all the pieces.\nSince my woodburning-stove-heating days partially overlapped with my employment at the RM-S, when it came time to simultaneously move the branch and get new furniture I asked if I could take it for use as firewood. My boss said \"sure\" and even helped me load it on my friend's flatbed truck after taking pictures of each piece and crossing them off on a form. \nLike my own personal oddysey, the Kladno City branch had itself had its own oddysey before we had met up inside the Coconut Building, and YES, there is a Coconut Building that used to be the Communist Party County Headquarters of Kladno (means \"positivity\" in Czech) and had the nickname of The Communist Church (KOmunisticky KOStel, or KOKOS (\"coconut\") put together) the bus stop in front of it even says \"Kokos.\" The building itself is shaped like an open book. \nHaving moved over 20x and emigrated EIGHT TIMES you could say I've moved a lot of furniture in my life. Also bought and sold a couple of houses. Back when I lived in the USA I was invited to come look at a house with my parents and their friends, who were also Czechs. They always wanted me along because even at that tender age I had a knack for spotting the deal-breakers in any piece of real estate, like the occasional bullet-hole-through-the-front-door type thing. THAT actually only happened once, but still. These friends of my parents were both high-school teachers from Czechoslovakia, but had been relegated to manual labour jobs after their relocation (escape) to the USA. Their English was not very good. Somehow they had learned to call furniture \"furnishings\" and pronounced it exactly like \"four inches.\" I knew exactly what they were talking about the whole time, like when they said \"yes, vee put the 4 inches there, and there too.\" The realtor was a Hispanic lady who \"got\" the fact that we were all immigrants with varying degrees of English abilities and pulled my mom aside and asked her \"excuse me, why do they keep talking about four inches? Is the house 4 inches too small or too big?\" Much hilarity ensued and we never did tell them about the Four Inches. You could say it was just too funny to mention. \n",
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"content": "Clowns In Our Midst, (part 2,297)<br /><br />They live among us. Scarcely a day goes by without their pernicious influence. In medieval Europe, doctors would wear characteristic garb that included brightly-coloured clothing, a conspicuous hat, and even makeup. Presumably this was done to give them credibility, since any clothing other than modified burlap sacks was considered upper-class. Today, we would instantly recognise this costume as a CLOWN. <br />Just like modern circus clowns, these doctors would play tricks, do some rudimentary sleight-of-hand magic, and generally try to lighten the mood since the main part of their jobs included treatments like bone-sawing, bloodletting, applying leeches, and dispensing various substances that were either placebos, deadly poisons, or both. <br />The history of medicine is like a checkerboard where every era would discredit the treatments of the previous era. What was once a deadly poison became a cure, and vice versa. I have a medical book from 1800s written by a famous wild-west gunfighter of that era (yes, I know) that recommends a tincture consisting of sulphuric acid and pure alcohol to be used as eye drops. Just think about that for a second. Back when it was OK to execute people for stealing bread because they were starving, and slavery was legal, it was also OK to prescribe eyedrops that would render their victim partially or completely blind, besides being extremely painful. <br />Extrapolating that into the future, we will look back on today's treatments the same way, as coming out of a primitive era where an official representing a prestigious medical school would claim that under certain circumstances, men can give birth to a child through their urethras. It wasn't so long ago that Thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant women, and it wasn't so long ago that doctors and various fitness experts were recommending that their middle-aged patients take up jogging, knowing full well that the repetitive impacts on the skeletal system would destroy the cartilage in their hips and knees, necessitating expensive medical interventions like hip and knee replacements. <br />In the USA, the main medical regulatory body is the FDA, and it's run by, and fully subsidised by the industry it's supposed to regulate, in addition to the fact that pharmaceutical companies in the USA have legal immunity from prosecutions and litigation. This same FDA sets the standards for acceptable food ingredients, which is why nearly all the food in the USA contains high-fructose corn syrup meaning that no matter what you eat, you're getting enough poison to cause medical issues down the line. EXPENSIVE medical issues. <br />Speaking of clowns, and food, I should point out that the mascot for McDonald's Corporation is a clown named Ronald McDonald. It wouldn't surprise me to find out in a few years that this \"Ronald McDonald\" was NOT a man in a costume, but a genetically modified lab-grown humanoid of the genus McDonaldopithecus Ronaldiensis, or something to that effect, possibly a by-product of their attempt to create lab-grown meat. Since he probably is a lab-grown organism, he lacks genitalia, as evidenced by the fact that nobody has ever seen Ronald McDonald's genitalia.<br />The question inevitably arises: how do we deal with the clown in our midst? The short answer is to simply ignore them as much as possible. The other method would be the \"Hanna-Barbera method\" since it is both handy and barbaric: clobber them on the head with an oversized wooden mallet, then put them into a box with \"Africa\" scrawled on it, apply a huge amount of stamps, and stuff them into the nearest mailbox. ",
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"content": "Clowns In Our Midst, (part 2,297)\n\nThey live among us. Scarcely a day goes by without their pernicious influence. In medieval Europe, doctors would wear characteristic garb that included brightly-coloured clothing, a conspicuous hat, and even makeup. Presumably this was done to give them credibility, since any clothing other than modified burlap sacks was considered upper-class. Today, we would instantly recognise this costume as a CLOWN. \nJust like modern circus clowns, these doctors would play tricks, do some rudimentary sleight-of-hand magic, and generally try to lighten the mood since the main part of their jobs included treatments like bone-sawing, bloodletting, applying leeches, and dispensing various substances that were either placebos, deadly poisons, or both. \nThe history of medicine is like a checkerboard where every era would discredit the treatments of the previous era. What was once a deadly poison became a cure, and vice versa. I have a medical book from 1800s written by a famous wild-west gunfighter of that era (yes, I know) that recommends a tincture consisting of sulphuric acid and pure alcohol to be used as eye drops. Just think about that for a second. Back when it was OK to execute people for stealing bread because they were starving, and slavery was legal, it was also OK to prescribe eyedrops that would render their victim partially or completely blind, besides being extremely painful. \nExtrapolating that into the future, we will look back on today's treatments the same way, as coming out of a primitive era where an official representing a prestigious medical school would claim that under certain circumstances, men can give birth to a child through their urethras. It wasn't so long ago that Thalidomide was prescribed to pregnant women, and it wasn't so long ago that doctors and various fitness experts were recommending that their middle-aged patients take up jogging, knowing full well that the repetitive impacts on the skeletal system would destroy the cartilage in their hips and knees, necessitating expensive medical interventions like hip and knee replacements. \nIn the USA, the main medical regulatory body is the FDA, and it's run by, and fully subsidised by the industry it's supposed to regulate, in addition to the fact that pharmaceutical companies in the USA have legal immunity from prosecutions and litigation. This same FDA sets the standards for acceptable food ingredients, which is why nearly all the food in the USA contains high-fructose corn syrup meaning that no matter what you eat, you're getting enough poison to cause medical issues down the line. EXPENSIVE medical issues. \nSpeaking of clowns, and food, I should point out that the mascot for McDonald's Corporation is a clown named Ronald McDonald. It wouldn't surprise me to find out in a few years that this \"Ronald McDonald\" was NOT a man in a costume, but a genetically modified lab-grown humanoid of the genus McDonaldopithecus Ronaldiensis, or something to that effect, possibly a by-product of their attempt to create lab-grown meat. Since he probably is a lab-grown organism, he lacks genitalia, as evidenced by the fact that nobody has ever seen Ronald McDonald's genitalia.\nThe question inevitably arises: how do we deal with the clown in our midst? The short answer is to simply ignore them as much as possible. The other method would be the \"Hanna-Barbera method\" since it is both handy and barbaric: clobber them on the head with an oversized wooden mallet, then put them into a box with \"Africa\" scrawled on it, apply a huge amount of stamps, and stuff them into the nearest mailbox. ",
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"content": "The only way to make sure they can't steal your money is to keep as little money in your account as possible. Just enough to cover your expenses. This is the lesson that the Cyprus banking crisis has taught us. In today's era of low deposit interest rates it makes no sense to keep anything in the bank above what is necessary. Excess cash should be put into a brokerage account and used to purchase blue chip stocks that pay decent dividends, like utilities. Silver is always a good investment as well. ",
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"content": "The only way to make sure they can't steal your money is to keep as little money in your account as possible. Just enough to cover your expenses. This is the lesson that the Cyprus banking crisis has taught us. In today's era of low deposit interest rates it makes no sense to keep anything in the bank above what is necessary. Excess cash should be put into a brokerage account and used to purchase blue chip stocks that pay decent dividends, like utilities. Silver is always a good investment as well. ",
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"content": "On How To Think About Doing Nothing Without Actually Doing Something, For Fun And Profit, In Theory And Practice.<br /><br />You could say that my life has been filled with books from the very beginning. Not the VERY beginning, in that my parents didn't pick out my name from the book \"What to Name your Baby.\" My father has the same first name, and my middle name comes from my mother's godmother. Why her, and not my uncle? Let's just say that he had some really bad luck his whole life and died a tragic death. You could say it worked, because I've had almost nothing but very good luck. That, and the occasional absolutely unbelievably BIZARRE luck that's neither good nor bad.<br />In my youth we even had a library in our bathroom. It's how I learned to read both Czech and English from an early age well before kindergarten. My brother is 4 years younger and when I was 7, I taught him to read Czech, which is actually stupid-easy compared to English. <br />Although you could say that I read a lot of the usual childhood and young adult conveyor-belt fiction out there like Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, my real interest was in USEFUL books. Interestingly enough I actually did meet Nancy Drew many years later when her creator, a very pleasant old lady, had her moving sale in northern Bergen County.<br />As soon as I started dividing all books into the \"useful\" and \"not useful\" dichotomy, I started applying that same dichotomy to movies and TV shows as well. By that same metric, you could categorise most of what I've written as \"not useful\" the vast majority of said works having been ghost-written for other people despite meeting the requirements for being classified as Non-Fiction. More like a whole new category needs to be created called Useless Non-Fiction or UNF, or UNFiction. Kind of like when Science Fiction became Sci-Fi became SF so as not to turn all the women away, then re-branded as SF meaning Speculative Fiction. This, despite the fact that most women LOVE Sci-Fi. <br />Our family subscribed to all these book clearance newsletters and catalogues back in the early 80s and the first instance of UNF I came across was a book on how to defecate in the woods. I mean, even at that tender age I shook my head and thought \"only in America.\" I'm pretty sure that whole book can be summarised in one sentence: \"just don't wipe your ass with stinging nettle or poision ivy (or poison oak, or poison sumac) and every edition of the standard-issue Boy Scout Manual covers this. <br />Being the book-obsessed type, becoming a used-book dealer was an almost logical and expected thing when The Internet came along. What better way to discover the books I wanted to read myself than by handling tens of thousands of them for other people? Estate sales, book sales, library sales, and garage sales anywhere in my area were always a harrowing experience that sometimes ended with me asking the owner \"so, how much for ALL of them?\" and sometimes just walking away without an explanation if I felt the price was too high. <br />I managed to make a decent middle-class income doing just books and various venues like eBay popped up and helped even more. Then came 911 and a week later, my sales collapsed to about one-tenth of their previous glory. Not only did I see the fakery of 911 with my own eyes, but I saw through the hypocrisy of eBay, which forbade the sale of any flight manuals in the week following 911. I had 3 flight manuals for small aircraft like the Jepperson Airplane and the Piper Cub that got taken down. Why? No evidence that ANY part of the official fairy tale was true. These were useful books.Something about flying an airplane that's anti-American or anti-eBay? Or is somehow eBay-ness next to American-ness which in turn is next to cleanliness and by extension Godliness? They also forbade other things which made me think that PROFIT was not eBay's only raison d'etre. Maybe it IS in league with the government. <br />The most recent instance of a book-that-has-no-business-existing that I came across was on a garbage-picking treasure-hunt in Leuchtenberg. One of the books in one of several boxes was still in its original plastic shrink-wrap. This intrigued me. Greatly. Being the curious type, I looked it up. Loosely translated from German, the title reads: \"What to do over the weekend, or during summer vacations.\" The book was from 1976 and for the last FORTY years, nobody has bothered to open it. Ever! And in all my nearly FIFTY years of dealing with books I've never come across one like that that would be wrapped in transparent polyethylene shrink-wrap. Does any of this \"What to do over the weekend...\" include any hot and wild monkey sex? Granted, this was a Bokk Club Edition and maybe that's how German book clubs mailed books out. I just might never find out. Like, whatever would POSSESS someone to write a book like that in the first place, right? Maybe the author was attempting to target that specific demographic of people (i.e. men) who, rather than actually doing whatever they feel like on their days off from their boring and meaningless office \"jobs\" will instead react to that prospect of unregulated time with an outbreak of cold sweat and shaking hands, and the thought \"maybe I ought to read a BOOK about this situation first.\" \"So I don't make a mistake, you know?\" That demographic that represents maybe ONE, possibly up to 1.5 guys in all of Germany. <br />I have to add that Germany is the only place on Earth where I've come across instances of Robotism, for want of a better word for it. This guy would walk past my school every single day at the same exact time while I'd be having my 10:15 am recess cigarette. Always looked forward, eyes never deviating from a precise alignment straight ahead, absolutely no discernible facial expression, each step in precise cadence accurate to a millisecond. \"Who is this guy?\" I thought, and pointed him out to my fellow students.They didn't seem to care much but I just wondered. I was SURE that if this guy's owner/boss/girlfriend ordered him to go on vacation, the pictures would all show him standing like a tin soldier looking straight ahead, arms at his sides and standing perfectly straight. He'd probably even wear the same clothes. You could easily photoshop him over and over in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, or whatever and he'd look just as unnatural and out of place as on that sidewalk in downtown Germany. Yes indeed. Robots in our midst! <br />So, in retrospect I think that this book was probably given to someone as a gift, and probably purchased at a bookstore's \"99% off\" bin by the register. A \"gift\" in every sense of the word where by now I'm sure you know that the word \"Gift\" means \"poison\" in German. I'm also pretty sure there's languages out there where \"gift\" means \"firewood,\" or \"kindling,\" a reference to the ONLY 15 Minutes of Fame that book will ever experiences when it finally burns up in some old man's woodburning stove to raise the temperature in his tiny abode by 0.5 degrees Celsius. ",
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"content": "On How To Think About Doing Nothing Without Actually Doing Something, For Fun And Profit, In Theory And Practice.\n\nYou could say that my life has been filled with books from the very beginning. Not the VERY beginning, in that my parents didn't pick out my name from the book \"What to Name your Baby.\" My father has the same first name, and my middle name comes from my mother's godmother. Why her, and not my uncle? Let's just say that he had some really bad luck his whole life and died a tragic death. You could say it worked, because I've had almost nothing but very good luck. That, and the occasional absolutely unbelievably BIZARRE luck that's neither good nor bad.\nIn my youth we even had a library in our bathroom. It's how I learned to read both Czech and English from an early age well before kindergarten. My brother is 4 years younger and when I was 7, I taught him to read Czech, which is actually stupid-easy compared to English. \nAlthough you could say that I read a lot of the usual childhood and young adult conveyor-belt fiction out there like Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, my real interest was in USEFUL books. Interestingly enough I actually did meet Nancy Drew many years later when her creator, a very pleasant old lady, had her moving sale in northern Bergen County.\nAs soon as I started dividing all books into the \"useful\" and \"not useful\" dichotomy, I started applying that same dichotomy to movies and TV shows as well. By that same metric, you could categorise most of what I've written as \"not useful\" the vast majority of said works having been ghost-written for other people despite meeting the requirements for being classified as Non-Fiction. More like a whole new category needs to be created called Useless Non-Fiction or UNF, or UNFiction. Kind of like when Science Fiction became Sci-Fi became SF so as not to turn all the women away, then re-branded as SF meaning Speculative Fiction. This, despite the fact that most women LOVE Sci-Fi. \nOur family subscribed to all these book clearance newsletters and catalogues back in the early 80s and the first instance of UNF I came across was a book on how to defecate in the woods. I mean, even at that tender age I shook my head and thought \"only in America.\" I'm pretty sure that whole book can be summarised in one sentence: \"just don't wipe your ass with stinging nettle or poision ivy (or poison oak, or poison sumac) and every edition of the standard-issue Boy Scout Manual covers this. \nBeing the book-obsessed type, becoming a used-book dealer was an almost logical and expected thing when The Internet came along. What better way to discover the books I wanted to read myself than by handling tens of thousands of them for other people? Estate sales, book sales, library sales, and garage sales anywhere in my area were always a harrowing experience that sometimes ended with me asking the owner \"so, how much for ALL of them?\" and sometimes just walking away without an explanation if I felt the price was too high. \nI managed to make a decent middle-class income doing just books and various venues like eBay popped up and helped even more. Then came 911 and a week later, my sales collapsed to about one-tenth of their previous glory. Not only did I see the fakery of 911 with my own eyes, but I saw through the hypocrisy of eBay, which forbade the sale of any flight manuals in the week following 911. I had 3 flight manuals for small aircraft like the Jepperson Airplane and the Piper Cub that got taken down. Why? No evidence that ANY part of the official fairy tale was true. These were useful books.Something about flying an airplane that's anti-American or anti-eBay? Or is somehow eBay-ness next to American-ness which in turn is next to cleanliness and by extension Godliness? They also forbade other things which made me think that PROFIT was not eBay's only raison d'etre. Maybe it IS in league with the government. \nThe most recent instance of a book-that-has-no-business-existing that I came across was on a garbage-picking treasure-hunt in Leuchtenberg. One of the books in one of several boxes was still in its original plastic shrink-wrap. This intrigued me. Greatly. Being the curious type, I looked it up. Loosely translated from German, the title reads: \"What to do over the weekend, or during summer vacations.\" The book was from 1976 and for the last FORTY years, nobody has bothered to open it. Ever! And in all my nearly FIFTY years of dealing with books I've never come across one like that that would be wrapped in transparent polyethylene shrink-wrap. Does any of this \"What to do over the weekend...\" include any hot and wild monkey sex? Granted, this was a Bokk Club Edition and maybe that's how German book clubs mailed books out. I just might never find out. Like, whatever would POSSESS someone to write a book like that in the first place, right? Maybe the author was attempting to target that specific demographic of people (i.e. men) who, rather than actually doing whatever they feel like on their days off from their boring and meaningless office \"jobs\" will instead react to that prospect of unregulated time with an outbreak of cold sweat and shaking hands, and the thought \"maybe I ought to read a BOOK about this situation first.\" \"So I don't make a mistake, you know?\" That demographic that represents maybe ONE, possibly up to 1.5 guys in all of Germany. \nI have to add that Germany is the only place on Earth where I've come across instances of Robotism, for want of a better word for it. This guy would walk past my school every single day at the same exact time while I'd be having my 10:15 am recess cigarette. Always looked forward, eyes never deviating from a precise alignment straight ahead, absolutely no discernible facial expression, each step in precise cadence accurate to a millisecond. \"Who is this guy?\" I thought, and pointed him out to my fellow students.They didn't seem to care much but I just wondered. I was SURE that if this guy's owner/boss/girlfriend ordered him to go on vacation, the pictures would all show him standing like a tin soldier looking straight ahead, arms at his sides and standing perfectly straight. He'd probably even wear the same clothes. You could easily photoshop him over and over in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, or whatever and he'd look just as unnatural and out of place as on that sidewalk in downtown Germany. Yes indeed. Robots in our midst! \nSo, in retrospect I think that this book was probably given to someone as a gift, and probably purchased at a bookstore's \"99% off\" bin by the register. A \"gift\" in every sense of the word where by now I'm sure you know that the word \"Gift\" means \"poison\" in German. I'm also pretty sure there's languages out there where \"gift\" means \"firewood,\" or \"kindling,\" a reference to the ONLY 15 Minutes of Fame that book will ever experiences when it finally burns up in some old man's woodburning stove to raise the temperature in his tiny abode by 0.5 degrees Celsius. ",
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"content": "For some reason, this video got 648 views! I guess the planets were in the right configuration. \n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEwOsM_cCp8",
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"content": "An interesting 2 hour discussion between G-Sharp, myself, and John from Max Vision Remote Viewing. <br /><br /><a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdZy670KmDg\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdZy670KmDg</a>",
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"content": "An interesting 2 hour discussion between G-Sharp, myself, and John from Max Vision Remote Viewing. \n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdZy670KmDg",
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"content": "None of our past predictions for the present day has ever come to fruition as expected, and they also say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That being the case, where do all the mediocre predictions get you? They get you RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW. Maybe if we change our expectations, a better outcome can be achieved. An interesting discussion with Trina on Milky Way: <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2h7bGtiTdA\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2h7bGtiTdA</a>",
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"content": "None of our past predictions for the present day has ever come to fruition as expected, and they also say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That being the case, where do all the mediocre predictions get you? They get you RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW. Maybe if we change our expectations, a better outcome can be achieved. An interesting discussion with Trina on Milky Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2h7bGtiTdA",
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"content": "Digging Deeper, Episode 1<br /><br />THIS VIDEO WAS TAKEN DOWN BY YOUTUBE WITHIN 2 HOURS OF UPLOAD. <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1512170975959977993\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1512170975959977993</a>",
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"content": "The CampyLand Diaries<br /><br />Slowly I drove to the end of the parking lot, toward the edge of a wooded area. Pretty sure I hadn’t been observed coming in. Here I was, still in my black 3-piece business suit, my black briefcase on the seat next to me crammed with Budweiser cans and an axe to the point of nearly popping open. I parked, shut the lights off and waited in the darkness apprehensively. After about a minute I thought “it’s now or never,” exited my car and headed into the blackness of the wooded night. <br /><br />A minute later I breathed a sigh of relief. I was free, for now. Another 15 minutes of walking, and I could already see a fire in the distance. Made a left at the Evil Tree and a right at the Free Cunt Tree. Someone was already there. I gave out my usual monkey call and made my way towards the fire. Stoner, Squeegee, Joe and Scott the Lesser were already there because I heard their voices greeting me. I was home. CampyLand had another denizen. <br /><br />As I spread out my Barron’s on a fallen log so I could sit down, I was informed that Scott the Greater would be there any minute. Opened my briefcase and handed the axe to Squeegee, who proceeded into the darkness to search for more wood, an ongoing preoccupation at Campy. Popped open my first beer and proceeded to converse fluently on matters of finance, reaganomics, and esoteric topics like deregulation. Here I was, so seemingly out of place, but at the same time right at home. This was CampyLand, or at least one of them. <br /><br />CampyLand was a VAST network of 6 improvised structures located in various parts of the tri-state (NY, NJ, CT) area in the late 1980s. Always secluded but never too far from civilization in those small, undeveloped and densely wooded areas of (mostly) northern New Jersey that had sometimes been labeled “toxic waste dumps,” superfund sites, a purported UFO landing area, that sort of thing. Interesting places behind various factories, swampy areas where cops feared to tread. <br /><br />Originally it started out as just one CampyLand and was conceived by my friend as a residence. He was a Russian-Ukrainian immigrant and quite resourceful. Since he didn’t live anywhere, he was also the first person I knew who had a cell phone, because he needed it for his job. How ironic. He probably made more money than I did working at the HQ of one of New Jersey’s largest banks, but he still had no real place to live except The Structure at CampyLand. The Structure was always the same basic design. A group of 6 to 8 decent sized trees in a circle, the center of which would be clear (or cleared), and various salvaged pieces of wood nailed onto the outer trees, with their branches tied together to form a roof with a circular hole in it consisting of tarps draped over the branches. In the center was always a 55-gallon toxic waste drum with holes made in the bottom where wood could be burned. <br /><br />Amenities, and sizes of the Structures varied greatly. The first such Structure was the most sumptuous, having “wall” to “wall” carpeting, a sofa, “seats,” and a king sized bed. All garbage-picked and slightly used, but still useful. When the fire was started you could literally lounge in there in the middle of February in just a T-shirt, and sometimes such attire was mandatory given how hot it could get in there. Sometimes there would be up to 25 people showing up. <br /><br />Since the Campies were only ever used at night, and only once did the Wayne, NJ Police attempt to enter the woods at night, we quickly discovered that the cops would do their dirty deeds during the daytime when nobody was there. That was the real reason there were 6 of them, each one constructed not far away and using as much of the materials as were practical to salvage. We were therefor constantly scouting new areas for potential Campies, and almost set one up on Garrett Mountain. We had discovered some sort of weather station that had an electrified fence around it which when touched felt a lot like the 110 Volts needed to power a nice TV set. The theory was to run a concealed wire made of linked extension cords from there to the location we called \"Whippet Rock,\" a big glacial boulder in the middle of the woods not accessible via any trail. <br /><br />Since most of these locations were inside swampy and thorny areas, one of my friends had decided to grow some weed in the middle of a thorn thicket he had cleared by himself with a machete. It was only years later that he admittend to having done this. With the hindsight of the Internet I also found out that after I had left the USA, all the Campies basically died out. Although I hadn't started this \"movement\" I certainly was its main proponent for 4 years. In a sense, it really was like a secret society since you could only find the place if someone took you there more than once. Remember, there were no GPS units back then, and since the locations we would utilise would change, we also had a system of secret codes we could use over the phone to indicate which CampyLand would be visited any given evening. Back in the pre-internet days that meant each of us getting in touch by phone, then grabbing more people either at the WIllowbrook Mall or Johnny's house. Then hitting the \"special\" liquour stores that would serve us without ID and then making our way there in as few cars as possible. <br /><br />Although their original purpose was to provide my friend with temporary housing, for the rest of us its purpose existed solely for victimless crimes like the clandestine consumption of alcoholic beverages by underaged adults. I know, two oxymorons, but that’s life in the USA. Mainly it served as a gathering place for a motley crue as diverse as the castaways on Gilligan’s Island and the characters in Bloom County where my unique role would be a fusion between The Professor, Mr. Howell, Steve Harris, and (sometimes) Bill the Cat. <br />The ritual was always the same. <br /> <br />1. Arrive at structure.<br />2. Decide who has to get the wood.<br />3. Get wood.<br />4. Light fire.<br />5. Get wasted.<br /> <br />Strangely reminiscent of some Greek Dionysian Mystery-School ritual, I know. What's ironic (and iconic) is the fact that I would usually do all this while wearing a 3-piece pinstripe suit while gainfully employed, as were all the other future (potentially future) Captains of Industry, potential Philanthropists, and possible Philosophers. Iconic, I say, because how many other 3-piece suit wearing capitalists have an axe in their briefcase and chop wood with it on a regular basis, then rant and rave about the evils of capitalism while wasted on beer, the Campyland equivalent of the Dionysian intoxicant known as Kykeon. <br /><br />Sometimes this “Kykeon” would consist of wine I would brew myself. By the tender age of 11 I had mastered this arcane art form and had used it for personal amusement on a regular basis. In the days of CampyLand, most of this wine would actually come from my own office at the bank. When my boss was fired, I simply took over his office for use as storage space which I “needed” for all the mortgage files I was “working” on. In reality, there were anywhere from 20-40 gallons brewing there at any one time, and the occasional smell was always attributed to some rotting fruit I maintained on his desk. Even so, I was mentally prepared for my little operation being discovered and my argument was simple. Nowhere in the Employee Handbook did it state that \"employees are not allowed to brew wine in their office cubicles.\"<br /><br />Explaining why I constantly smelled like some lumberjack with the smell of wood smoke on my clothing was surprisingly not that easy. Most of my colleagues didn’t believe I actually did this Campy thing on a semi-regular basis. <br /><br />Since I did this all in 2 litre bottles I could easily conceal in my briefcase and had access to a bathroom almost nobody used, the operation was very efficient. I never found out if anybody knew what I was doing in there and honestly, I didn’t care. I knew that the worst that could happen was I’d get fired, only to find an even better job at an even better bank. Besides, I was looking to get out of the USA, knowing full well that no matter what happened, my life would definitely turn out more interesting than those lives and potential lives I would leave behind. But yeah, I would decant and filter batches of wine every day, or set up new ones as required. It was ridiculous because there was no \"real\" work to be done anyway because interest rates were quite high, at around 11%. Another \"hobby\" I was able to cultivate at that job was SLEEPING, or more accurately stated, catching up on lost sleep since I was working full-time, attending college part-time, and hanging out with lots of cool people. The technique I developed was really simple and I'd just spread out some report on my desk, complete with a ruler and a calculator and a pen in my hand, and rest my head while covering my eyes, as if deep in thought. I also quickly discovered that if I moved around the office while conspicuously holding a pen, nobody would ever ask me to do anything. <br /><br />None of the CampyLands had been conceived as permanent structures in any sense of the word, and at no time was this more obvious than when the cops raided the first one behind the Drake’s Cakes factory in Little Falls, NJ. Nobody got caught or arrested because we knew those woods like the back of our hands. Generally the cops would NOT really want to enter the woods at night, any woods. Usually they’d announce their presence using a megaphone. During that particular incident they said “come out with your hands up!” and Fergusson had the presence of mind to scream back “NO, YOU come HERE and get us!” which after about a 5 minute deliberation they attempted to do. You could see exactly where they were by their flashlights, so avoiding them was like playing some really easy video game. We scattered. In their “righteous indignation” the cops destroyed and burned down The Structure. <br />Of course we went back some days later to assess the damage, however, since we had almost foreseen this happening, a NEW and IMPROVED CampyLand was in the process of being constructed just around the corner! Actually, about ½ kilometre away but in the same woods. <br /><br />In reality, that 5-step ritual was more complex, and involved different people coming in and working on Structural improvements, like bringing in plywood, pallets, or carrying out repairs. It was like some Underground Railroad operation. Everybody contributed something, whether that was work, bringing in newspapers for seating and/or kindling, bringing various random foodstuffs, or dragging in some dead wood. <br /><br />The rules for entry were simple: (1) you had to be “cool” (2) you never entered with a flashlight since only cops used them, and besides, we all knew those woods much better than they did. You COULD use a flashlight going out, though; and (3) you also had to either state your name, or make monkey noises to indicate your CampyLand affiliation or “citizenship” as it were. <br /><br />Although temporary in nature, the CampyLands were quite logical in purpose. Some of these people lived with their parents, some (actually ONE) had no place to live, and some didn’t want to risk their own places getting destroyed by these hypothetically future “business leaders,” “captains of industry,” “artists,” and their ilk trashing their place while drunk. <br /><br />When I moved to Czechoslovakia in 1991 I landed another cushy job, and the only vestige of Campy tradition I carried on was the whole brewing-huge-quantities-of-wine-in-my-office thing, using upwards of 85% of my time there for my own personal business and also for purposes of personal amusement. Oh, and getting away with it. I mean, working a job that paid 90 Dollars a month simply HAD to pay off somehow, and I made DAMN sure that was the case. <br /><br />I also didn’t have a whole lot of free time to spend with friends because I had no friends outside of my job when I first moved there. There was no internet and speaking to anybody over your own land line with someone in the US cost an arm and a leg. There was also no point in setting up a Czechoslovakian CampyLand because I could now freely go to bars and get wasted there. Or better yet, after hours at work, while having unlimited access to a phone. <br /><br />Besides, everywhere I looked, I saw evidence that my new world was in fact one HUGE CampyLand, and very much temporary in the greater scheme of things, but just as purposeful and methodical. Half-assed and rinky-dink, but stunning in beauty and meaning nevertheless. You could say that every single person’s living situation in some ways resembles CampyLand.<br /><br />And there’s no place like CampyLand.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=CAMPY\" title=\"#CAMPY\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#CAMPY</a>",
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"content": "The CampyLand Diaries\n\nSlowly I drove to the end of the parking lot, toward the edge of a wooded area. Pretty sure I hadn’t been observed coming in. Here I was, still in my black 3-piece business suit, my black briefcase on the seat next to me crammed with Budweiser cans and an axe to the point of nearly popping open. I parked, shut the lights off and waited in the darkness apprehensively. After about a minute I thought “it’s now or never,” exited my car and headed into the blackness of the wooded night. \n\nA minute later I breathed a sigh of relief. I was free, for now. Another 15 minutes of walking, and I could already see a fire in the distance. Made a left at the Evil Tree and a right at the Free Cunt Tree. Someone was already there. I gave out my usual monkey call and made my way towards the fire. Stoner, Squeegee, Joe and Scott the Lesser were already there because I heard their voices greeting me. I was home. CampyLand had another denizen. \n\nAs I spread out my Barron’s on a fallen log so I could sit down, I was informed that Scott the Greater would be there any minute. Opened my briefcase and handed the axe to Squeegee, who proceeded into the darkness to search for more wood, an ongoing preoccupation at Campy. Popped open my first beer and proceeded to converse fluently on matters of finance, reaganomics, and esoteric topics like deregulation. Here I was, so seemingly out of place, but at the same time right at home. This was CampyLand, or at least one of them. \n\nCampyLand was a VAST network of 6 improvised structures located in various parts of the tri-state (NY, NJ, CT) area in the late 1980s. Always secluded but never too far from civilization in those small, undeveloped and densely wooded areas of (mostly) northern New Jersey that had sometimes been labeled “toxic waste dumps,” superfund sites, a purported UFO landing area, that sort of thing. Interesting places behind various factories, swampy areas where cops feared to tread. \n\nOriginally it started out as just one CampyLand and was conceived by my friend as a residence. He was a Russian-Ukrainian immigrant and quite resourceful. Since he didn’t live anywhere, he was also the first person I knew who had a cell phone, because he needed it for his job. How ironic. He probably made more money than I did working at the HQ of one of New Jersey’s largest banks, but he still had no real place to live except The Structure at CampyLand. The Structure was always the same basic design. A group of 6 to 8 decent sized trees in a circle, the center of which would be clear (or cleared), and various salvaged pieces of wood nailed onto the outer trees, with their branches tied together to form a roof with a circular hole in it consisting of tarps draped over the branches. In the center was always a 55-gallon toxic waste drum with holes made in the bottom where wood could be burned. \n\nAmenities, and sizes of the Structures varied greatly. The first such Structure was the most sumptuous, having “wall” to “wall” carpeting, a sofa, “seats,” and a king sized bed. All garbage-picked and slightly used, but still useful. When the fire was started you could literally lounge in there in the middle of February in just a T-shirt, and sometimes such attire was mandatory given how hot it could get in there. Sometimes there would be up to 25 people showing up. \n\nSince the Campies were only ever used at night, and only once did the Wayne, NJ Police attempt to enter the woods at night, we quickly discovered that the cops would do their dirty deeds during the daytime when nobody was there. That was the real reason there were 6 of them, each one constructed not far away and using as much of the materials as were practical to salvage. We were therefor constantly scouting new areas for potential Campies, and almost set one up on Garrett Mountain. We had discovered some sort of weather station that had an electrified fence around it which when touched felt a lot like the 110 Volts needed to power a nice TV set. The theory was to run a concealed wire made of linked extension cords from there to the location we called \"Whippet Rock,\" a big glacial boulder in the middle of the woods not accessible via any trail. \n\nSince most of these locations were inside swampy and thorny areas, one of my friends had decided to grow some weed in the middle of a thorn thicket he had cleared by himself with a machete. It was only years later that he admittend to having done this. With the hindsight of the Internet I also found out that after I had left the USA, all the Campies basically died out. Although I hadn't started this \"movement\" I certainly was its main proponent for 4 years. In a sense, it really was like a secret society since you could only find the place if someone took you there more than once. Remember, there were no GPS units back then, and since the locations we would utilise would change, we also had a system of secret codes we could use over the phone to indicate which CampyLand would be visited any given evening. Back in the pre-internet days that meant each of us getting in touch by phone, then grabbing more people either at the WIllowbrook Mall or Johnny's house. Then hitting the \"special\" liquour stores that would serve us without ID and then making our way there in as few cars as possible. \n\nAlthough their original purpose was to provide my friend with temporary housing, for the rest of us its purpose existed solely for victimless crimes like the clandestine consumption of alcoholic beverages by underaged adults. I know, two oxymorons, but that’s life in the USA. Mainly it served as a gathering place for a motley crue as diverse as the castaways on Gilligan’s Island and the characters in Bloom County where my unique role would be a fusion between The Professor, Mr. Howell, Steve Harris, and (sometimes) Bill the Cat. \nThe ritual was always the same. \n \n1. Arrive at structure.\n2. Decide who has to get the wood.\n3. Get wood.\n4. Light fire.\n5. Get wasted.\n \nStrangely reminiscent of some Greek Dionysian Mystery-School ritual, I know. What's ironic (and iconic) is the fact that I would usually do all this while wearing a 3-piece pinstripe suit while gainfully employed, as were all the other future (potentially future) Captains of Industry, potential Philanthropists, and possible Philosophers. Iconic, I say, because how many other 3-piece suit wearing capitalists have an axe in their briefcase and chop wood with it on a regular basis, then rant and rave about the evils of capitalism while wasted on beer, the Campyland equivalent of the Dionysian intoxicant known as Kykeon. \n\nSometimes this “Kykeon” would consist of wine I would brew myself. By the tender age of 11 I had mastered this arcane art form and had used it for personal amusement on a regular basis. In the days of CampyLand, most of this wine would actually come from my own office at the bank. When my boss was fired, I simply took over his office for use as storage space which I “needed” for all the mortgage files I was “working” on. In reality, there were anywhere from 20-40 gallons brewing there at any one time, and the occasional smell was always attributed to some rotting fruit I maintained on his desk. Even so, I was mentally prepared for my little operation being discovered and my argument was simple. Nowhere in the Employee Handbook did it state that \"employees are not allowed to brew wine in their office cubicles.\"\n\nExplaining why I constantly smelled like some lumberjack with the smell of wood smoke on my clothing was surprisingly not that easy. Most of my colleagues didn’t believe I actually did this Campy thing on a semi-regular basis. \n\nSince I did this all in 2 litre bottles I could easily conceal in my briefcase and had access to a bathroom almost nobody used, the operation was very efficient. I never found out if anybody knew what I was doing in there and honestly, I didn’t care. I knew that the worst that could happen was I’d get fired, only to find an even better job at an even better bank. Besides, I was looking to get out of the USA, knowing full well that no matter what happened, my life would definitely turn out more interesting than those lives and potential lives I would leave behind. But yeah, I would decant and filter batches of wine every day, or set up new ones as required. It was ridiculous because there was no \"real\" work to be done anyway because interest rates were quite high, at around 11%. Another \"hobby\" I was able to cultivate at that job was SLEEPING, or more accurately stated, catching up on lost sleep since I was working full-time, attending college part-time, and hanging out with lots of cool people. The technique I developed was really simple and I'd just spread out some report on my desk, complete with a ruler and a calculator and a pen in my hand, and rest my head while covering my eyes, as if deep in thought. I also quickly discovered that if I moved around the office while conspicuously holding a pen, nobody would ever ask me to do anything. \n\nNone of the CampyLands had been conceived as permanent structures in any sense of the word, and at no time was this more obvious than when the cops raided the first one behind the Drake’s Cakes factory in Little Falls, NJ. Nobody got caught or arrested because we knew those woods like the back of our hands. Generally the cops would NOT really want to enter the woods at night, any woods. Usually they’d announce their presence using a megaphone. During that particular incident they said “come out with your hands up!” and Fergusson had the presence of mind to scream back “NO, YOU come HERE and get us!” which after about a 5 minute deliberation they attempted to do. You could see exactly where they were by their flashlights, so avoiding them was like playing some really easy video game. We scattered. In their “righteous indignation” the cops destroyed and burned down The Structure. \nOf course we went back some days later to assess the damage, however, since we had almost foreseen this happening, a NEW and IMPROVED CampyLand was in the process of being constructed just around the corner! Actually, about ½ kilometre away but in the same woods. \n\nIn reality, that 5-step ritual was more complex, and involved different people coming in and working on Structural improvements, like bringing in plywood, pallets, or carrying out repairs. It was like some Underground Railroad operation. Everybody contributed something, whether that was work, bringing in newspapers for seating and/or kindling, bringing various random foodstuffs, or dragging in some dead wood. \n\nThe rules for entry were simple: (1) you had to be “cool” (2) you never entered with a flashlight since only cops used them, and besides, we all knew those woods much better than they did. You COULD use a flashlight going out, though; and (3) you also had to either state your name, or make monkey noises to indicate your CampyLand affiliation or “citizenship” as it were. \n\nAlthough temporary in nature, the CampyLands were quite logical in purpose. Some of these people lived with their parents, some (actually ONE) had no place to live, and some didn’t want to risk their own places getting destroyed by these hypothetically future “business leaders,” “captains of industry,” “artists,” and their ilk trashing their place while drunk. \n\nWhen I moved to Czechoslovakia in 1991 I landed another cushy job, and the only vestige of Campy tradition I carried on was the whole brewing-huge-quantities-of-wine-in-my-office thing, using upwards of 85% of my time there for my own personal business and also for purposes of personal amusement. Oh, and getting away with it. I mean, working a job that paid 90 Dollars a month simply HAD to pay off somehow, and I made DAMN sure that was the case. \n\nI also didn’t have a whole lot of free time to spend with friends because I had no friends outside of my job when I first moved there. There was no internet and speaking to anybody over your own land line with someone in the US cost an arm and a leg. There was also no point in setting up a Czechoslovakian CampyLand because I could now freely go to bars and get wasted there. Or better yet, after hours at work, while having unlimited access to a phone. \n\nBesides, everywhere I looked, I saw evidence that my new world was in fact one HUGE CampyLand, and very much temporary in the greater scheme of things, but just as purposeful and methodical. Half-assed and rinky-dink, but stunning in beauty and meaning nevertheless. You could say that every single person’s living situation in some ways resembles CampyLand.\n\nAnd there’s no place like CampyLand.\n\n \n\n#CAMPY",
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"content": "Hey, How Come Your Lips Aren't Moving?<br /><br />Years ago, I wrote a short story about a hypothetical situation in which VENTRILOQUISM takes over a small town. It started out as a fad in a local high school where kids would play jokes on each other using ventriloquism. That year, a couple of ventriloquist acts were featured in the school's talent show, and the school's administrators thought nothing of it. The next year it became an obsession, and the kids were all doing it, and later, even some teachers were sharing in the fun. Things got serious when students started experiencing involuntary ventriloquism where their lips would stop moving mid-sentence, even as they continued to speak normally. A significant portion of the student body was afflicted, and the principal put out a memo to teachers to keep an eye out for this behaviour. Ventriloquism and ventriloquistic speech became sanctionable offenses and students would be given detention for it. However, this phenomenon was no longer confined to just one school. In short order, the whole county became afflicted and later, the whole state. The FBI was notified and they formed their own Ventriloquism Task Force to get to the bottom of it. Medical experts discovered severe abnormalities in the most severely afflicted victims, like lockjaw and facial muscular hyperplasia. Some victims even died due to an inability to ingest food. A press conference was called and the governor spoke to news reporters to explain what was happening, however, towards the end of his appearance, his lips had stopped moving and his face took on a dummy-head expression, even as he continued to answer questions normally. Even a TV newscaster would suffer the same fate while delivering her live report on the situation. More and more people were caught in a typical spiral of violence, drugs, alcohol, and ventriloquism. The WHO started looking into this as a possible global pandemic and came to the conclusion that mass psychiatry was the only solution. Armies of counselors were recruited and deployed, even so far as being dropped off by helicopters in remote regions. The ramifications to daily life were immense. Ventriloquism-related questions were added to anything from medical questionnaires to job applications. Some jurisdictions even made it a misdemeanour, but the problem, now global, was barely being contained. Saudi Arabia instituted death by hanging, where the dummy would also be hanged beside the victim. Clearly a breakthrough was needed, and that was exactly what happened when a psychiatric researcher stationed in Antarctica noted that ventriloquism was wholly absent on the continent, since ventriloquist dummies had been banned early on in the pandemic. A study was commissioned and subsequent testing confirmed everybody's suspicions: the dummies had caused the pandemic! Apparently, certain medieval-reptilian circuits in the brain are triggered while watching any mechanical contraption resembling a human with an articulated mouth. The solution was simple: make it so that all ventriloquist dummies would have their mouths glued shut, thereby inducing a phenomenon known as \"reverse ventriloquism\" where the human victim starts compensating for the dummy's lack of mouth movements by making his own mouth move. In other words, the dummies would make people dummies, or as they say: fight fire with fire (or in this case, fight ventriloquism with ventriloquism). Within a few months, the whole ventriloquism pandemic was conquered. No longer would dummies ruin our lives.<br /><br />If you, or someone you know is suffering from involuntary ventriloquistic speech, contact the Ventriloquism Support Hotline at 1-800-5477-6683 (1-800-LIPS-MOVE).<br />",
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"content": "Hey, How Come Your Lips Aren't Moving?\n\nYears ago, I wrote a short story about a hypothetical situation in which VENTRILOQUISM takes over a small town. It started out as a fad in a local high school where kids would play jokes on each other using ventriloquism. That year, a couple of ventriloquist acts were featured in the school's talent show, and the school's administrators thought nothing of it. The next year it became an obsession, and the kids were all doing it, and later, even some teachers were sharing in the fun. Things got serious when students started experiencing involuntary ventriloquism where their lips would stop moving mid-sentence, even as they continued to speak normally. A significant portion of the student body was afflicted, and the principal put out a memo to teachers to keep an eye out for this behaviour. Ventriloquism and ventriloquistic speech became sanctionable offenses and students would be given detention for it. However, this phenomenon was no longer confined to just one school. In short order, the whole county became afflicted and later, the whole state. The FBI was notified and they formed their own Ventriloquism Task Force to get to the bottom of it. Medical experts discovered severe abnormalities in the most severely afflicted victims, like lockjaw and facial muscular hyperplasia. Some victims even died due to an inability to ingest food. A press conference was called and the governor spoke to news reporters to explain what was happening, however, towards the end of his appearance, his lips had stopped moving and his face took on a dummy-head expression, even as he continued to answer questions normally. Even a TV newscaster would suffer the same fate while delivering her live report on the situation. More and more people were caught in a typical spiral of violence, drugs, alcohol, and ventriloquism. The WHO started looking into this as a possible global pandemic and came to the conclusion that mass psychiatry was the only solution. Armies of counselors were recruited and deployed, even so far as being dropped off by helicopters in remote regions. The ramifications to daily life were immense. Ventriloquism-related questions were added to anything from medical questionnaires to job applications. Some jurisdictions even made it a misdemeanour, but the problem, now global, was barely being contained. Saudi Arabia instituted death by hanging, where the dummy would also be hanged beside the victim. Clearly a breakthrough was needed, and that was exactly what happened when a psychiatric researcher stationed in Antarctica noted that ventriloquism was wholly absent on the continent, since ventriloquist dummies had been banned early on in the pandemic. A study was commissioned and subsequent testing confirmed everybody's suspicions: the dummies had caused the pandemic! Apparently, certain medieval-reptilian circuits in the brain are triggered while watching any mechanical contraption resembling a human with an articulated mouth. The solution was simple: make it so that all ventriloquist dummies would have their mouths glued shut, thereby inducing a phenomenon known as \"reverse ventriloquism\" where the human victim starts compensating for the dummy's lack of mouth movements by making his own mouth move. In other words, the dummies would make people dummies, or as they say: fight fire with fire (or in this case, fight ventriloquism with ventriloquism). Within a few months, the whole ventriloquism pandemic was conquered. No longer would dummies ruin our lives.\n\nIf you, or someone you know is suffering from involuntary ventriloquistic speech, contact the Ventriloquism Support Hotline at 1-800-5477-6683 (1-800-LIPS-MOVE).\n",
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"content": " <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=PARANORMAL\" title=\"#PARANORMAL\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#PARANORMAL</a><br />My Ghostly Experience - December 1991 to the Present Day<br /><br />The first home I ever bought was apartment # 1 in an apartment building in Brno, Czechoslovakia. It had been inhabited by an old doctor lady and the sheer amount of junk there was enormous. The first peculiarities I noticed were what appeared to be cat brains stored and labeled individually in mason jars containing alcohol. I knew what they were because I had seen a cat's brain in my freshman year biology class in just such a jar. The large amount of benzene she kept in that same pantry was also strange. <br />I also noticed that the wear on the carpet in the living room had an unusual wear pattern to it, where the wear was most intense in the center of the room, directly under the chandelier, and was less intense going outward from that central point. It almost seemed like the good doctoress had been doing a dervish dance there, or something. The other strange things were all the animal claw marks on all the walls and doors, as were the numerous bullet holes in 2 of the doors, and holes and ricochet marks on the walls. <br />Since I was actively employed at that time, I worked on throwing out all the junk every day, as well as dismantling and throwing out all the disgusting furniture. In one such pile I discovered a cheap-looking jewelry box, and inside I found some jewelry and a fist sized stack of various currency. I was elated because although most was recluded, some of it, like the US Dollars and Deutschmarks were still valid. I was elated, but not for long. One of the light bulbs illuminating the room had popped. Went to the circuit breaker and reset the fuse. Got back inside, and again. And again. By the time this happened for the 10th and final time, I was freaking out. As I stood there outside in the cold, wearing just a t-shirt I was filled with both anger and fear. I thought about the situation logically and reasoned that no ghost can ever harm a living person. Mentally rehearsed exactly what I was going to do, and did it. Went inside, grabbed my cigarette lighter and found 2 spare bulbs I had. Screwed them in, and the 2 lights stayed on. <br />That night I slept very badly and did so with the light on. Next day I bought 20 new bulbs just in case this happened again. It wasn't logical. There was no reason for one bulb after the other to pop like that, each one about 30 seconds after the fuse was reset. It wasn't something on the main line because that would have affected everybody's apartments as well, but I was the only one going to the fuse box in the hallway. And since that incident in 1991, on no other occasion did I have exactly 10 bulbs pop like that sequentially.<br />As time went on, I got to know my neighbours, and one told me that Dr. D. was a very strange woman. She was an emergency doctor but she never talked to anyone in the building and avoided eye contact. The only exception to this was Christmas. She would bake enormous quantities of Christmas pastries, and every year, she gave large amounts of it to each of the 14 apartments in that building. She also had many cats.<br />I had a very bizarre nightmare one time where I woke up in a cold sweat, literally. In it, a naked and very old woman was crawling all over me in bed and desiring sex. Her full body weight was upon me and I couldn't breathe, and I distinctly remembered her face. <br />I also got to know some of my colleagues, and one of them asked me where I lived, so I told him. He seemed to have already known what I was talking about when I described the bullet holes. His brother was a Police officer, and he was one of the cops who had to break into the apartment after Dr. D. had been missing for some time. When they broke in, the cats had gone completely crazy and were attacking the cops, and had to be shot. They also found Dr. D., or more like what was left of her, since the cats had eaten most of her body. All they could figure out was that she had died in her bed, and had been alone in the apartment when it happened. <br />Great. Now I knew that there was a possibility my place was haunted, and I felt violated. The seller, her son, had never told me about this fact. I know, he didn't have to and the place was cheap, even though I remember feeling really depressed there, this despite my previously rented apartment being right next to the city crematorium. I was also quite mad at my neighbours for not having told me about any of this, even though it seemed like it was common knowledge. One neighbour said he would show me a picture of her, and although it was a group photo, I instantly picked her out. That was her, the perverted old lady in my dream. <br />As my ongoing renovations progressed, I rearranged some furniture, and in the bedroom where she had died, one of the walls had some imperfections which I decided to correct using plaster. I was not an expert and had done it wrong, causing a 50 cm x 1.50 m section of the interior stucco to come off, exposing the concrete substrate. Nothing really special, except if you looked closely, you could see a face. HER face. I tried covering the hole (and the face) up using even more plaster, but that made another 50 x 50 cm section fall out. This one showed the distinct and unmistakable impression of a black human hand, about the size of my own. I showed this to my girlfriend at the time and she freaked out, and urged me to sell the apartment as soon as possible. A colleague at work suggested I try using cement to cover up the hole, and it worked. <br />As time went on I actually moved my bed into the bedroom. Many times, right before falling asleep I would distinctly hear the toilet seat being raised and then dropped down, as well as what sounded like an attempt to flush it. One time that I head the toilet seat lid drop, I also clearly heard a woman's voice say \"someone's been smoking in here, again!\" <br />Fast forward to 1995, and my friend from NYC came and visited me for 2 weeks after Christmas. We spent New Year's Eve at a bar not far away, the Lonely Hearts Club (Klub Osamelych Srdci). We sat at a table and I noticed there was a guy sitting at the bar holding a bayonet to his throat the whole time. Each time I passed him on the way to and from the bathroom I'd overhear snippets of conversation like \"it's not worth it,\" or \"don't do this.\" Around 3 am he DID do it, right as I was in the bathroom. As exited the bathroom, I could see the entire floor of the bar area was covered in blood. The guy was dead and he was being loaded onto a stretcher. Shell shocked, I looked up and saw a cop looking at me with like a whimsical smile who said, \"well, it's over.\" I got to the table just as the waiter was asking everybody to leave and pay up. We did, and went back to my place, my friend from the US, and a Czech friend of mine. I get to the main entrance and turned the key. The key broke inside the lock. Not wanting to disturb anyone else, I asked my friend, who had gloves on to climb the lightning rod to my bacony, break the lower door window, and retrieve my spare keys. He did so. Put the key in the lock from the other side, and it snapped effortlessly inside the lock just like mine did. We all wound up climbing the lightning rod to get to my place using my friend's gloves. Next morning we were awakened to the sound of many angry people unable to get in or out, AND a knock on my door because somehow the building maintenance guy KNEW that I had caused this problem. <br />Not sure if that lock incident had anything to do with Dr. D. but I sure felt it did at the time. <br />A couple of years later, I was living about 300 km from Brno and I was in a bar. One of the guys I was sitting with at the table was from Slovakia, and he had also lived in Brno for just 2 weeks, in the late 80s not far from where my apartment had been. I told him my exact address, and without any hesitation he said, \"hey, that's the place where that doctor lady was eaten by her own cats, ain't that something.\" I then confirmed that that had, in fact, been my apartment. <br />20 years later I was writing about what had happened up to that point to a famous (now deceased) ghost researcher. I hit the \"send\" button, and in that INSTANT I heard a commotion in my bathroom. When I went there to investigate I saw that a hair brush had fallen into the sink from the sink's ledge. This was impossible since the ledge was big enough, and I'd never leave the brush hanging over the edge. But this was no ordinary brush. It came from THAT apartment, and had belonged to Dr. D. and I had kept it only because it had been new and sealed in plastic when I got it. <br />As if that's not strange enough. The very next day, I'm relating all this stuff that had happened to my (now) former girlfriend. No sooner did I finish my story did we hear a very loud thud downstairs. My grandmother, who lives in the apartment downstairs, had accidentally tipped over an endtable. It was an endtable that had come from THAT apartment and had belonged to Dr. D. <br />My only conclusion is that this is somehow, and on some level, an ongoing experience. Subjectively I feel that Dr. D. has taken a liking to me. Maybe she even looks out for me, who knows, and in return for that, I try not to smoke in the bathroom, and I still take good care of all her possessions I have kept.",
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"content": " #PARANORMAL\nMy Ghostly Experience - December 1991 to the Present Day\n\nThe first home I ever bought was apartment # 1 in an apartment building in Brno, Czechoslovakia. It had been inhabited by an old doctor lady and the sheer amount of junk there was enormous. The first peculiarities I noticed were what appeared to be cat brains stored and labeled individually in mason jars containing alcohol. I knew what they were because I had seen a cat's brain in my freshman year biology class in just such a jar. The large amount of benzene she kept in that same pantry was also strange. \nI also noticed that the wear on the carpet in the living room had an unusual wear pattern to it, where the wear was most intense in the center of the room, directly under the chandelier, and was less intense going outward from that central point. It almost seemed like the good doctoress had been doing a dervish dance there, or something. The other strange things were all the animal claw marks on all the walls and doors, as were the numerous bullet holes in 2 of the doors, and holes and ricochet marks on the walls. \nSince I was actively employed at that time, I worked on throwing out all the junk every day, as well as dismantling and throwing out all the disgusting furniture. In one such pile I discovered a cheap-looking jewelry box, and inside I found some jewelry and a fist sized stack of various currency. I was elated because although most was recluded, some of it, like the US Dollars and Deutschmarks were still valid. I was elated, but not for long. One of the light bulbs illuminating the room had popped. Went to the circuit breaker and reset the fuse. Got back inside, and again. And again. By the time this happened for the 10th and final time, I was freaking out. As I stood there outside in the cold, wearing just a t-shirt I was filled with both anger and fear. I thought about the situation logically and reasoned that no ghost can ever harm a living person. Mentally rehearsed exactly what I was going to do, and did it. Went inside, grabbed my cigarette lighter and found 2 spare bulbs I had. Screwed them in, and the 2 lights stayed on. \nThat night I slept very badly and did so with the light on. Next day I bought 20 new bulbs just in case this happened again. It wasn't logical. There was no reason for one bulb after the other to pop like that, each one about 30 seconds after the fuse was reset. It wasn't something on the main line because that would have affected everybody's apartments as well, but I was the only one going to the fuse box in the hallway. And since that incident in 1991, on no other occasion did I have exactly 10 bulbs pop like that sequentially.\nAs time went on, I got to know my neighbours, and one told me that Dr. D. was a very strange woman. She was an emergency doctor but she never talked to anyone in the building and avoided eye contact. The only exception to this was Christmas. She would bake enormous quantities of Christmas pastries, and every year, she gave large amounts of it to each of the 14 apartments in that building. She also had many cats.\nI had a very bizarre nightmare one time where I woke up in a cold sweat, literally. In it, a naked and very old woman was crawling all over me in bed and desiring sex. Her full body weight was upon me and I couldn't breathe, and I distinctly remembered her face. \nI also got to know some of my colleagues, and one of them asked me where I lived, so I told him. He seemed to have already known what I was talking about when I described the bullet holes. His brother was a Police officer, and he was one of the cops who had to break into the apartment after Dr. D. had been missing for some time. When they broke in, the cats had gone completely crazy and were attacking the cops, and had to be shot. They also found Dr. D., or more like what was left of her, since the cats had eaten most of her body. All they could figure out was that she had died in her bed, and had been alone in the apartment when it happened. \nGreat. Now I knew that there was a possibility my place was haunted, and I felt violated. The seller, her son, had never told me about this fact. I know, he didn't have to and the place was cheap, even though I remember feeling really depressed there, this despite my previously rented apartment being right next to the city crematorium. I was also quite mad at my neighbours for not having told me about any of this, even though it seemed like it was common knowledge. One neighbour said he would show me a picture of her, and although it was a group photo, I instantly picked her out. That was her, the perverted old lady in my dream. \nAs my ongoing renovations progressed, I rearranged some furniture, and in the bedroom where she had died, one of the walls had some imperfections which I decided to correct using plaster. I was not an expert and had done it wrong, causing a 50 cm x 1.50 m section of the interior stucco to come off, exposing the concrete substrate. Nothing really special, except if you looked closely, you could see a face. HER face. I tried covering the hole (and the face) up using even more plaster, but that made another 50 x 50 cm section fall out. This one showed the distinct and unmistakable impression of a black human hand, about the size of my own. I showed this to my girlfriend at the time and she freaked out, and urged me to sell the apartment as soon as possible. A colleague at work suggested I try using cement to cover up the hole, and it worked. \nAs time went on I actually moved my bed into the bedroom. Many times, right before falling asleep I would distinctly hear the toilet seat being raised and then dropped down, as well as what sounded like an attempt to flush it. One time that I head the toilet seat lid drop, I also clearly heard a woman's voice say \"someone's been smoking in here, again!\" \nFast forward to 1995, and my friend from NYC came and visited me for 2 weeks after Christmas. We spent New Year's Eve at a bar not far away, the Lonely Hearts Club (Klub Osamelych Srdci). We sat at a table and I noticed there was a guy sitting at the bar holding a bayonet to his throat the whole time. Each time I passed him on the way to and from the bathroom I'd overhear snippets of conversation like \"it's not worth it,\" or \"don't do this.\" Around 3 am he DID do it, right as I was in the bathroom. As exited the bathroom, I could see the entire floor of the bar area was covered in blood. The guy was dead and he was being loaded onto a stretcher. Shell shocked, I looked up and saw a cop looking at me with like a whimsical smile who said, \"well, it's over.\" I got to the table just as the waiter was asking everybody to leave and pay up. We did, and went back to my place, my friend from the US, and a Czech friend of mine. I get to the main entrance and turned the key. The key broke inside the lock. Not wanting to disturb anyone else, I asked my friend, who had gloves on to climb the lightning rod to my bacony, break the lower door window, and retrieve my spare keys. He did so. Put the key in the lock from the other side, and it snapped effortlessly inside the lock just like mine did. We all wound up climbing the lightning rod to get to my place using my friend's gloves. Next morning we were awakened to the sound of many angry people unable to get in or out, AND a knock on my door because somehow the building maintenance guy KNEW that I had caused this problem. \nNot sure if that lock incident had anything to do with Dr. D. but I sure felt it did at the time. \nA couple of years later, I was living about 300 km from Brno and I was in a bar. One of the guys I was sitting with at the table was from Slovakia, and he had also lived in Brno for just 2 weeks, in the late 80s not far from where my apartment had been. I told him my exact address, and without any hesitation he said, \"hey, that's the place where that doctor lady was eaten by her own cats, ain't that something.\" I then confirmed that that had, in fact, been my apartment. \n20 years later I was writing about what had happened up to that point to a famous (now deceased) ghost researcher. I hit the \"send\" button, and in that INSTANT I heard a commotion in my bathroom. When I went there to investigate I saw that a hair brush had fallen into the sink from the sink's ledge. This was impossible since the ledge was big enough, and I'd never leave the brush hanging over the edge. But this was no ordinary brush. It came from THAT apartment, and had belonged to Dr. D. and I had kept it only because it had been new and sealed in plastic when I got it. \nAs if that's not strange enough. The very next day, I'm relating all this stuff that had happened to my (now) former girlfriend. No sooner did I finish my story did we hear a very loud thud downstairs. My grandmother, who lives in the apartment downstairs, had accidentally tipped over an endtable. It was an endtable that had come from THAT apartment and had belonged to Dr. D. \nMy only conclusion is that this is somehow, and on some level, an ongoing experience. Subjectively I feel that Dr. D. has taken a liking to me. Maybe she even looks out for me, who knows, and in return for that, I try not to smoke in the bathroom, and I still take good care of all her possessions I have kept.",
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"content": "Psychic Connections With Animal Friends<br /><br />Kookyshek was the Love of my Life, and although he only lived for 5 short years, his life brought me immense joy and fulfillment. He was as true a friend anyone can have in one’s life. His soul was pure, honest, and full of beauty and truth.<br /><br />When he first came into my life, I had decided to call him Tapik. The date was 3 April 2005, and I was with 2 of my friends at the weekend market at Redhost, Czech Republic. It’s an unusual market because it’s a moderately-sized village that turns into a giant open-air market every weekend where you have vendors selling everything from livestock to antiques to new goods. My 2 friends wanted to go there and get vegetable seedlings, and I was invited to tag along. Going there was always an interesting experience, and the food there is inexpensive while being pretty good. <br /><br />A skinny young man in overalls was selling a box full of 8 baby rabbits and I just HAD to check them out. They were beautiful! One of them kept jumping in my hand, and I told the young man I wanted him, but that we had just arrived and if he could put him aside so I could pick him up when we were leaving. He said no, because they will all be sold within an hour, since a lot of people were interested in them. So I paid him the 80 Crowns he wanted and he gave me a shoe box to keep him in, since I had no other way of carrying him around. Jitka, one of the 2 friends I was there with, bought a big laundry bag, and I was able to put him in it, with the lid off. We passed a vegetable stand, and I bought him a carrot, and when I put it next to him, it was nearly twice as long as he, but he was scared, and didn’t touch it. With all those huge crows of people and music and commotion, plus being jostled around in a laundry bag must’ve been a frightening experience for him, especially since he had just been separated from his family. <br /><br />When I finally got him home after a whole day walking around like that, I put him in an open rabbit cage I had lined with wood shavings, some vegetables, and some toys, and he just sat there for about 3 days completely stunned and not very active. Afterwards he learned he could jump out of the cage, originally intended for guinea pigs where the pet shop owner ASSURED me that no dwarf rabbit would EVER jump out (yeah, right!). <br /><br />I kept him in my main room where I lived most of the day, as well as slept. He became much more open and friendly, and on many occasions, he’d wake me up because he’d jump into bed with me and sleep right next to me. It’s not that I didn’t LOVE that but I was afraid of accidentally smothering him if I turned over because he was so tiny, and every time that happened I had to put him back in his area, but I always told him why. On some level I could feel that he missed his mother, and one day I saw a stuffed toy rabbit at the gas station, and bought it for him to sleep next to, which he did. He’d not only sleep next to it every night but he’d also groom it every once in a while. <br />Gradually he started doing some unbelievable acrobatics while I was on my computer. One time he jumped in such a way off my bed where he rebounded off one wall onto another wall, did a triple somersault in midair, and landed on all fours facing me, and gave me a look that conveyed “that was something wasn’t it?”<br /><br />Gradually, the room got too big for him and he started doing other things like chewing on my cables. I always managed to re-solder these but it was annoying. One day I got home and nothing in my room worked, the reason being that he had chewed through the main extension cord to my power strip, all while it had 240 volts in it! I knew I couldn’t keep him there, so I moved his little area to the downstairs floor, which I made sure had no exposed wires he could chew on and hurt himself. He also had a grand view of my garden and the back patio, and he’d always watch all the birds, cats, and porcupines that would show up. <br /><br />He was also quite curious about everything. I showed him some picture books of rabbits, where some clearly didn’t interest him, and some DID. He quickly understood how books work, and would attempt to turn the page with his teeth whenever the pictures didn’t interest him. I later found out that animals like to view pictures of high-ranking animals of their own species, so I assumed that was the case for all the rabbits he was interested in. He also LOVED dogs, for some reason. I kept the TV on for him all day with the sound low enough that it was just background, but anytime a dog would appear, he’d perk up and really pay attention. <br /><br />Then came The Dream. <br /><br />I had gone to bed around 1 am that night and had a hyper-realistic dream in which I had locked him in the downstairs hallway where he had no access to the rooms on the floor itself, where his little area was located (and his food and water). I always did lock these 3 downstairs doors at night but always made sure he wasn’t in the hallway. In the dream, he WAS, and I approached him to apologise and let him out. He addressed me by my name and said “Hello Dalibor! My name isn’t Tapik, my name is Kookyshek! Kookyshek!” He had a small and thin voice, like that of a small child, and continued to repeat his name, as I petted his fur, then opened the door for him to exit the hallway. Right then, I awoke, sweating and confused. It was 2am and I was doubting my senses, and decided to go downstairs and make sure I really HADN’T accidentally locked him out. <br /><br />I hadn’t, and Kookyshek was fully awake, tensed up like I’d never seen him before, and sitting in the direct centre of the big sofa I had there, almost trembling. I knelt on the floor in front of him and petted his back. I said to him, out loud “so, did you just have the same dream that I had just now, Kookyshek?” As soon as I said his name, he completely relaxed, and was friendly as usual. I knew right there that the dream I had was no ordinary dream. That was really his name, and although highly unusual, it seemed to fit him. <br /><br />Every day I would make numerous trips downstairs, and when appropriate, I would let him outside so he could check out the garden and dig holes all over the place. Sometimes he would indicate this by pawing the glass patio door. Many times I didn’t feel like going out with him, but he’d always come over and pull on my sweatpants or run circles around me in a figure of 8 between my legs. <br /><br />Whenever we’d be outside, he had no problem approaching him and petting him, but as soon as I had the intention of taking him back inside, he wouldn’t let me get near him. It was always a chase, and ended only after he was completely exhausted and cornered. He also knew when I REALLY had to go, in which case he’d simply run inside and sit on the sofa. <br /><br />When I was studying for my brokerage exam, I had set up an old carpet on the grass, and lay there in my bathing suit. Every once in a while, he’d jump on over to see why I was staring at that book so intensely. I could see he was looking at the charts or graphs in it, not able to comprehend what was captivating my attention so much. Then he’d go off somewhere and play, and AGAIN, come back, and look at the book with me! Maybe he was expecting it to be the book with the rabbits in it? <br /><br />My neighbours little kids loved him, and anytime he was out, they’d always come and pet him through the fence. He liked them too, and would always come to the fence when he saw them. They later got a rabbit themselves, a dwarf female they named Alenka. When Alenka was old enough, the neighbours asked if Kookyshek could father her children, and Alenka had 7 beautiful baby rabbits of her own. <br /><br />Kookyshek was an EXCELLENT judge of character, and all the people he loved turned out to be great friends of mine. Some people not so much, and these people turned out to NOT be very good people. Over the years, we had many adventures together. I’d take him to visit my girlfriend at the time, who lived in Prague, about ½ an hour away. I bought a cat transport box and propped it up on my front seat under some books with the seat belt attached so he could see out the windows. He didn’t mind being driven around at all. I drive like an old man anyway, so it was OK. <br /><br />In 2009, my parents moved in with me from the USA and that meant having to keep Kookyshek outside all the time because of their strict and fastidious adherence to hygiene. I wasn’t too happy about that at all, but what could I do. They wound up loving him as well, and the relationship was mutual. I had bought 2 outdoor rabbit runs, basically a low fence, and attached all of it to his existing little habitat, so that he could be (sort of) outside and hop inside his habitat, which had a roof and was winterized and waterproofed. The whole thing was covered with chicken wire, but one day I found disturbing evidence that the local hawk was trying to rip open the chicken wire. <br /><br />This hawk was huge, with a 2-metre wingspan. Every morning he would sit on top of the 2nd tree from the gas station, and would observe me as I drove past him, and out of Smecno to my job. I always waved to him! At various times, I’d see him hanging around at the edges of the fields that surrounded Smecno. At night, you could hear at least 2 owls hooting in the night. Although I love all animals, this wasn’t too good for Kookyshek, so I covered the chicken wire top of the enclosures with sheets of eternite, so as to prevent the hawks or owls from getting to him. A couple of times I’d go to visit him, and the porcupine was checking him out, and vice versa. Many cats would show up as well, and various birds would gather around his enclosure to sing to him! <br /><br />One day I noticed that he was acting strangely. I would let him outside 2x a day on weekdays and anywhere up to 5x a day on weekends. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself and just sat there staring into space. I also noticed he had a big lump underneath his rib. He had gotten all his shots, but I took him to the vet and they did an x-ray and found he had a large tumour on his lung. <br /><br />For years prior to that, one of my neighbours had been manufacturing some kind of illegal drugs, and every night around 3-4 am there would be a very strong chemical odour in the air. Every day the odour would change. Some days it was like acetone, some days it was like alcohol, and some days it smelled like almonds. I suspected that THIS is what ultimately killed my little friend Kookyshek. Being low to the ground where all the vapours would accumulate, and being outside while all the humans were inside was another thing. <br /><br />Kookyshek died on 23.10.2010 and I buried him in a cardboard shoe box wrapped in a white t-shirt of mine, along with a CD of all the images and movies we had made together, so that if some archaeologist discovers his little grave 30,000 years from know, he will know that he had been my friend, and that he was LOVED by all who knew him. I also placed a large cement slab over his grave so as to prevent scavengers from digging up his poor little body. The next week was All Souls Day and despite the wind, I managed to light a candle on top of where he was buried. <br /><br />Rest in peace my little friend. You remain my friend for all eternity.<br /><br />On 23.10.2015 I had a very strange dream. In it, I had been looking at some houses, and at the end of the dream, Kookyshek appeared to me and spoke to me in the same thin and childlike voice he had spoken in that previous dream. He told me that he would be reincarnated as a baby hippopotamus. “A baby hippopotamus, a baby hippopotamus!” he kept repeating. He showed me in what looked exactly like Google Maps, the place he would be born in, in the direct centre of South Sudan. He told me that when he had been a rabbit, that he had missed having a mother to take care of him, and that when I got him the stuffed rabbit toy he appreciated it very much. I also remembered (still in the dream) how he loved taking a bath and sitting in the rain for hours and he sensed my thought and responded with an affirmation. He also told me he loved me very much and that he would never forget me, even though I had been a busy man and that many of his days had been filled with boredom. I asked him if we would ever meet, and he said YES, but in different bodies in a different time and place, and that he had to go. <br /><br />For many years before that dream, I had been hoping to meet him in a different reincarnation and would visit a local store that sold rabbits hoping to see him there but never did. Now I knew why. He had been in some kind of limbo for exactly 5 years, and was now reincarnating in a different body. Maybe his next incarnation would be an elephant, and then later on a human, I wondered. The thing I didn’t know at the time of the dream was that hippopotamuses are vegetarians just like rabbits are. <br /><br />In 2011 I had moved from Czech republic to Germany. My illustrious career as bank manager and manager of the stock exchange was over following a stroke in that same year. In 2017 I was cruising my local Sperrmull, a bulk garbage day and looking for things to sell. Since I think of Kookyshek every once in a while it’s impossible to say if I did or didn’t think of him right before I found a brand-new leather jacket. Thought nothing of it, as I placed it in my car.<br /><br />At home, I found out that it was my exact size. Inside the left pocket, I found a nice 50 Euro banknote, and rejoiced! Inside the other pocket was a used train ticket. I still have it. It’s dated 23.10.2010, the day that Kookyshek died. It’s from Weiden to Regensburg via Schwandorf, abbreviated as SAD, and it’s a ticket for one adult and one child.<br /><br />I knew it was his way of showing me some favour in such a way that I would know when it happened that it was from him. I thanked him for the 50 Euros and the jacket, which I started wearing the very next day. It’s perfect because it has so many pockets for all my stuff. I also thanked him for having let me know that he was OK. <br /><br />I know we will meet again. <br /><br />",
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"content": "Psychic Connections With Animal Friends\n\nKookyshek was the Love of my Life, and although he only lived for 5 short years, his life brought me immense joy and fulfillment. He was as true a friend anyone can have in one’s life. His soul was pure, honest, and full of beauty and truth.\n\nWhen he first came into my life, I had decided to call him Tapik. The date was 3 April 2005, and I was with 2 of my friends at the weekend market at Redhost, Czech Republic. It’s an unusual market because it’s a moderately-sized village that turns into a giant open-air market every weekend where you have vendors selling everything from livestock to antiques to new goods. My 2 friends wanted to go there and get vegetable seedlings, and I was invited to tag along. Going there was always an interesting experience, and the food there is inexpensive while being pretty good. \n\nA skinny young man in overalls was selling a box full of 8 baby rabbits and I just HAD to check them out. They were beautiful! One of them kept jumping in my hand, and I told the young man I wanted him, but that we had just arrived and if he could put him aside so I could pick him up when we were leaving. He said no, because they will all be sold within an hour, since a lot of people were interested in them. So I paid him the 80 Crowns he wanted and he gave me a shoe box to keep him in, since I had no other way of carrying him around. Jitka, one of the 2 friends I was there with, bought a big laundry bag, and I was able to put him in it, with the lid off. We passed a vegetable stand, and I bought him a carrot, and when I put it next to him, it was nearly twice as long as he, but he was scared, and didn’t touch it. With all those huge crows of people and music and commotion, plus being jostled around in a laundry bag must’ve been a frightening experience for him, especially since he had just been separated from his family. \n\nWhen I finally got him home after a whole day walking around like that, I put him in an open rabbit cage I had lined with wood shavings, some vegetables, and some toys, and he just sat there for about 3 days completely stunned and not very active. Afterwards he learned he could jump out of the cage, originally intended for guinea pigs where the pet shop owner ASSURED me that no dwarf rabbit would EVER jump out (yeah, right!). \n\nI kept him in my main room where I lived most of the day, as well as slept. He became much more open and friendly, and on many occasions, he’d wake me up because he’d jump into bed with me and sleep right next to me. It’s not that I didn’t LOVE that but I was afraid of accidentally smothering him if I turned over because he was so tiny, and every time that happened I had to put him back in his area, but I always told him why. On some level I could feel that he missed his mother, and one day I saw a stuffed toy rabbit at the gas station, and bought it for him to sleep next to, which he did. He’d not only sleep next to it every night but he’d also groom it every once in a while. \nGradually he started doing some unbelievable acrobatics while I was on my computer. One time he jumped in such a way off my bed where he rebounded off one wall onto another wall, did a triple somersault in midair, and landed on all fours facing me, and gave me a look that conveyed “that was something wasn’t it?”\n\nGradually, the room got too big for him and he started doing other things like chewing on my cables. I always managed to re-solder these but it was annoying. One day I got home and nothing in my room worked, the reason being that he had chewed through the main extension cord to my power strip, all while it had 240 volts in it! I knew I couldn’t keep him there, so I moved his little area to the downstairs floor, which I made sure had no exposed wires he could chew on and hurt himself. He also had a grand view of my garden and the back patio, and he’d always watch all the birds, cats, and porcupines that would show up. \n\nHe was also quite curious about everything. I showed him some picture books of rabbits, where some clearly didn’t interest him, and some DID. He quickly understood how books work, and would attempt to turn the page with his teeth whenever the pictures didn’t interest him. I later found out that animals like to view pictures of high-ranking animals of their own species, so I assumed that was the case for all the rabbits he was interested in. He also LOVED dogs, for some reason. I kept the TV on for him all day with the sound low enough that it was just background, but anytime a dog would appear, he’d perk up and really pay attention. \n\nThen came The Dream. \n\nI had gone to bed around 1 am that night and had a hyper-realistic dream in which I had locked him in the downstairs hallway where he had no access to the rooms on the floor itself, where his little area was located (and his food and water). I always did lock these 3 downstairs doors at night but always made sure he wasn’t in the hallway. In the dream, he WAS, and I approached him to apologise and let him out. He addressed me by my name and said “Hello Dalibor! My name isn’t Tapik, my name is Kookyshek! Kookyshek!” He had a small and thin voice, like that of a small child, and continued to repeat his name, as I petted his fur, then opened the door for him to exit the hallway. Right then, I awoke, sweating and confused. It was 2am and I was doubting my senses, and decided to go downstairs and make sure I really HADN’T accidentally locked him out. \n\nI hadn’t, and Kookyshek was fully awake, tensed up like I’d never seen him before, and sitting in the direct centre of the big sofa I had there, almost trembling. I knelt on the floor in front of him and petted his back. I said to him, out loud “so, did you just have the same dream that I had just now, Kookyshek?” As soon as I said his name, he completely relaxed, and was friendly as usual. I knew right there that the dream I had was no ordinary dream. That was really his name, and although highly unusual, it seemed to fit him. \n\nEvery day I would make numerous trips downstairs, and when appropriate, I would let him outside so he could check out the garden and dig holes all over the place. Sometimes he would indicate this by pawing the glass patio door. Many times I didn’t feel like going out with him, but he’d always come over and pull on my sweatpants or run circles around me in a figure of 8 between my legs. \n\nWhenever we’d be outside, he had no problem approaching him and petting him, but as soon as I had the intention of taking him back inside, he wouldn’t let me get near him. It was always a chase, and ended only after he was completely exhausted and cornered. He also knew when I REALLY had to go, in which case he’d simply run inside and sit on the sofa. \n\nWhen I was studying for my brokerage exam, I had set up an old carpet on the grass, and lay there in my bathing suit. Every once in a while, he’d jump on over to see why I was staring at that book so intensely. I could see he was looking at the charts or graphs in it, not able to comprehend what was captivating my attention so much. Then he’d go off somewhere and play, and AGAIN, come back, and look at the book with me! Maybe he was expecting it to be the book with the rabbits in it? \n\nMy neighbours little kids loved him, and anytime he was out, they’d always come and pet him through the fence. He liked them too, and would always come to the fence when he saw them. They later got a rabbit themselves, a dwarf female they named Alenka. When Alenka was old enough, the neighbours asked if Kookyshek could father her children, and Alenka had 7 beautiful baby rabbits of her own. \n\nKookyshek was an EXCELLENT judge of character, and all the people he loved turned out to be great friends of mine. Some people not so much, and these people turned out to NOT be very good people. Over the years, we had many adventures together. I’d take him to visit my girlfriend at the time, who lived in Prague, about ½ an hour away. I bought a cat transport box and propped it up on my front seat under some books with the seat belt attached so he could see out the windows. He didn’t mind being driven around at all. I drive like an old man anyway, so it was OK. \n\nIn 2009, my parents moved in with me from the USA and that meant having to keep Kookyshek outside all the time because of their strict and fastidious adherence to hygiene. I wasn’t too happy about that at all, but what could I do. They wound up loving him as well, and the relationship was mutual. I had bought 2 outdoor rabbit runs, basically a low fence, and attached all of it to his existing little habitat, so that he could be (sort of) outside and hop inside his habitat, which had a roof and was winterized and waterproofed. The whole thing was covered with chicken wire, but one day I found disturbing evidence that the local hawk was trying to rip open the chicken wire. \n\nThis hawk was huge, with a 2-metre wingspan. Every morning he would sit on top of the 2nd tree from the gas station, and would observe me as I drove past him, and out of Smecno to my job. I always waved to him! At various times, I’d see him hanging around at the edges of the fields that surrounded Smecno. At night, you could hear at least 2 owls hooting in the night. Although I love all animals, this wasn’t too good for Kookyshek, so I covered the chicken wire top of the enclosures with sheets of eternite, so as to prevent the hawks or owls from getting to him. A couple of times I’d go to visit him, and the porcupine was checking him out, and vice versa. Many cats would show up as well, and various birds would gather around his enclosure to sing to him! \n\nOne day I noticed that he was acting strangely. I would let him outside 2x a day on weekdays and anywhere up to 5x a day on weekends. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself and just sat there staring into space. I also noticed he had a big lump underneath his rib. He had gotten all his shots, but I took him to the vet and they did an x-ray and found he had a large tumour on his lung. \n\nFor years prior to that, one of my neighbours had been manufacturing some kind of illegal drugs, and every night around 3-4 am there would be a very strong chemical odour in the air. Every day the odour would change. Some days it was like acetone, some days it was like alcohol, and some days it smelled like almonds. I suspected that THIS is what ultimately killed my little friend Kookyshek. Being low to the ground where all the vapours would accumulate, and being outside while all the humans were inside was another thing. \n\nKookyshek died on 23.10.2010 and I buried him in a cardboard shoe box wrapped in a white t-shirt of mine, along with a CD of all the images and movies we had made together, so that if some archaeologist discovers his little grave 30,000 years from know, he will know that he had been my friend, and that he was LOVED by all who knew him. I also placed a large cement slab over his grave so as to prevent scavengers from digging up his poor little body. The next week was All Souls Day and despite the wind, I managed to light a candle on top of where he was buried. \n\nRest in peace my little friend. You remain my friend for all eternity.\n\nOn 23.10.2015 I had a very strange dream. In it, I had been looking at some houses, and at the end of the dream, Kookyshek appeared to me and spoke to me in the same thin and childlike voice he had spoken in that previous dream. He told me that he would be reincarnated as a baby hippopotamus. “A baby hippopotamus, a baby hippopotamus!” he kept repeating. He showed me in what looked exactly like Google Maps, the place he would be born in, in the direct centre of South Sudan. He told me that when he had been a rabbit, that he had missed having a mother to take care of him, and that when I got him the stuffed rabbit toy he appreciated it very much. I also remembered (still in the dream) how he loved taking a bath and sitting in the rain for hours and he sensed my thought and responded with an affirmation. He also told me he loved me very much and that he would never forget me, even though I had been a busy man and that many of his days had been filled with boredom. I asked him if we would ever meet, and he said YES, but in different bodies in a different time and place, and that he had to go. \n\nFor many years before that dream, I had been hoping to meet him in a different reincarnation and would visit a local store that sold rabbits hoping to see him there but never did. Now I knew why. He had been in some kind of limbo for exactly 5 years, and was now reincarnating in a different body. Maybe his next incarnation would be an elephant, and then later on a human, I wondered. The thing I didn’t know at the time of the dream was that hippopotamuses are vegetarians just like rabbits are. \n\nIn 2011 I had moved from Czech republic to Germany. My illustrious career as bank manager and manager of the stock exchange was over following a stroke in that same year. In 2017 I was cruising my local Sperrmull, a bulk garbage day and looking for things to sell. Since I think of Kookyshek every once in a while it’s impossible to say if I did or didn’t think of him right before I found a brand-new leather jacket. Thought nothing of it, as I placed it in my car.\n\nAt home, I found out that it was my exact size. Inside the left pocket, I found a nice 50 Euro banknote, and rejoiced! Inside the other pocket was a used train ticket. I still have it. It’s dated 23.10.2010, the day that Kookyshek died. It’s from Weiden to Regensburg via Schwandorf, abbreviated as SAD, and it’s a ticket for one adult and one child.\n\nI knew it was his way of showing me some favour in such a way that I would know when it happened that it was from him. I thanked him for the 50 Euros and the jacket, which I started wearing the very next day. It’s perfect because it has so many pockets for all my stuff. I also thanked him for having let me know that he was OK. \n\nI know we will meet again. \n\n",
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"content": "The REAL Reason the US Dollar and the Euro Will Collapse<br /><br />Follow the Mud Brick Road<br /><br />Times change, and currencies change as well. There was a time when Gold and Silver were reserve currencies. Then came a time when the Greek Drachma served that purpose, then later the Roman Denarius, the Spanish Real, the British Pound, and finally the US Dollar. In each and every case, the currency was backed by a metal, i.e. Gold, Silver, bronze, or copper. For example, the reason why the British currency is called a Pound Sterling is because it had the same value as one pound of sterling (0.925) Silver, meaning that had its value not been decoupled from Silver, a British Pound should be worth $230 as of this writing, and not a mere $1.276.<br /><br />Greece, Rome, Spain, Britain, and the US. East to West. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? By extrapolation, it’s not diffucult to see China and the Yuan take centre stage in the global economy. At around 30% of its annual GDP, the public debt of China is nowhere nearly as bad as that of the US, but that still isn’t good. If you go down the list, practically every single country on earth with a functioning economy is indebted to someone else! This is illegal under common law. It’s exactly the same as if I decided to buy a high-rise building in downtown Europe City, got a loan from an American bank while putting up just 5% of the money, where the rest of that money gets paid back by all the residents of that city. <br /><br />My argument is: how do you get away with indebting a third party without their consent, or in many cases an ability to repay that debt? Or even being of the legal age of consent! The US is the most indebted nation to have ever existed, and the debt is actually higher than 90% of all the rest of the world combined, but I won’t quote a figure on this because it really depends on whom you ask, and how the question is formulated. <br /><br />I like the analogy that Ann Barnhardt uses where she sees everything in terms of man-hours. When looking at it from her perspective, it would take all 7 billion people working a 20 USD/hour and being taxed at 100% about 120 years to re-pay the national debt of the US alone, never mind all the other countries, and that doesn’t include the interest that will have accrued between now and 2135. So not only is the global financial system with the US in the lead indebting newborn children and old people, they’re indebting children not even born yet, 5 generations down the line! <br />Did YOU vote for this? I’m sure you didn’t do it consciously, but rather involuntarily by voting for anyone in the first place.<br /><br />What becomes obvious is the fact that these huge debts of all these countries, especially that of the US will not be repaid, because they cannot be repaid. The global financial elites all know this very well but are delaying any inevitable collapse of the US Dollar until such time as it becomes convenient, and that goes for (and is related to) the suppression of the prices of Gold, Silver, platinum, and palladium. <br /><br />Flash back for a second here. In Weimar Germany, the hyperinflation of 1922-1923 had driven down the value of the Deutschmark tremendously. By the beginning of 1923, a viable plan had been conceived to replace the Deutschmark with the Rentenmark which was backed by Gold, mortgages, and other assets. But they held off on implementing it for a few weeks and waited till the exchange rate plummeted to exactly one trillion Marks to one. Why? To make the math easier! Just wipe off 12 zeros. Don’t forget they didn’t even have pocket calculators back then. However, in the case of the Dollar, as well as Gold, the reason is equally as simple. Most of the countries worldwide who had stored their Gold with the Federal Reserve now want to repatriate this Gold. The US is fighting tooth and nail to delay this and/or to slow it down because it doesn’t have any of it, and instead they have to buy it from primary producers. When they ship the Gold out, they’re actually losing real money, but to alleviate any stress on the asset side, the price of Gold is artificially kept low using naked shorting and falsification of data regarding the real status of the Gold markets. Why do you think that Comex recently issued a statement saying that basically they can’t attest to the veracity of their figures? Why do you think that back in 2008 they stopped fulfilling futures contracts in physical metal, and instead would issue just a warehouse receipt? That also happened to coincide with the investigation that was done back then where they found that these warehouses simply didn’t have the amounts of physical that they were claiming and also, the whole scandal where it was revealed that al lot of these 400 oz. bars were just Gold plated tungsten. It also coincided with the first time that Gold went from contango to backwardation on the futures markets vis-à-vis spot. In other words, physical Gold was not available anywhere at any price (except maybe eBay, for small amounts, but try buying a 400 oz. bar on eBay- good luck). <br /><br />Gold and Silver Prices are “For Entertainment Purposes Only”<br /><br />I know I keep repeating myself here but back in 2010 I did a study for my bank using regression analysis, inflation-adjusted modeling, and arithmetic progression correlating Gold and Silver supplies to demand, as well as a simple inflation adjusted linear technical analysis and came up with an average figure of 10,500 USD/troz. for Gold and 550 USD/troz. for Silver. What shocked me most was not so much the figures themselves but that the Ag/Au ratio was very much in line with historical data (about 20:1), and not like what it is right now (something like 75:1), meaning that Silver is DEEPLY undervalued, much more so than Gold. Of course everyone at the bank got my memo, but nothing was done about it and it never hit the website. Couple of months later I was at a party with all these other bankers and I found out that yes, everybody did know about this, but they were keeping it under the table so they could continue buying Silver for as long as possible because this also coincided with a historical low for the Dollar/Euro exchange rate. And yes, they were ALL buying Silver. They just didn’t want this publicly known because if the public caught on, that would drive both the Dollar price, and the Silver price up. <br /><br />Interestingly enough, a few weeks later I was reading an article by Edgar J. Steele and he came to very similar ballpark figures using his own methods. That was right before they framed him for a murder that never happened. Oh yeah, and they “confiscated” (i.e. stole) all his Silver too.<br />And then they wonder why I gave up on the US and just moved out.<br /><br />At the same time I was doing these calculations, one of my analysts took the initiative and he did a really nice presentation correlating certain LEIs with sunspot activity, and according to his conclusions, the global economy should start recovering around 2019. But the thing is, no matter how educated you are, no matter how good your information is, none of the predictions made by anybody, including myself should be taken without a really big grain of salt. One time I made the joke at a meeting that new clients for the brokerage division should be given crystal balls with the bank’s logo on them because that’s about as reliable as any of our predictions. For example, nobody foresaw the flash crash of 2010, but that itself had a major ripple effect because it triggered all the stop-losses people had on their positions. Then there was the bandwagon effect, which is the #1 way people lose money. Like all the people buying Gold and Silver in 1979. <br /><br />The point I’m making is that since about 1999 there has been a disconnect between commodities prices and the value of the US Dollar. Both are artificially manipulated. The prices of commodities are easier to manipulate than any currency because artificially lowering the price of say Gold or Silver using naked shorts and other tricks basically decreases the value of currency indirectly. To influence currency rates directly is not doable for any group because of the sheer volume. The USD/EUR interbank cash market trades more in a single day than all the equity markets do in 2.5 months. <br /><br />Dismantling the New World’s Order BRIC by BRIC<br /><br />The US Dollar, being a fiat currency has had phenomenal performance considering the fact that it’s lasted for as long as it has. The average lifespan of a fiat currency is less than 40 years and they usually die of hyperinflation, independence, reunification, or wars. But the US has not had a currency reclusion since 1792. The fact that the US Dollar is backed up only by war and oil is not necessarily the problem. The real problem is American arrogance, and their use of the currency as a weapon. Whenever a country starts behaving in a manner even remotely against the interests of the US, the first thing they do are to institute sanctions. Sanctions mean that if you happen to be a citizen or resident of that country and you’re trading in US Dollars because you own let’s say an import/export company. Sooner or later you have to either covert into or convert out of the US Dollar vis-à-vis your local currency, which means that sooner or later it either goes through, or gets parked at an American bank, or the branch or subsidiary of an American bank, at which point that money gets “frozen” (i.e. stolen). Notwithstanding any profits you might have, if that’s your operating capital, your business is basically screwed. <br /><br />Since the US has done this so many times at the drop of a hat, some of the wealthier countries in the Non-Aligned movement have figured out that the way to prevent this is by having a reserve currency that’s not subject to the whims and wishes of the United States. And it really doesn’t matter what it’s backed up by because even Gold is a fiat currency when you think about it. <br />This is why Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and a couple of other countries got together to form a BRICS bank, the New Development Bank to serve as a more decentralised alternative to the US dominated World Bank, IMF, and the Fed. Definitely more balanced because the likelihood of any of these countries going to war with each other is highly unlikely (except maybe Russia and China). But Russia and China have already reached an agreement to make the Ruble and theYuan mutually exchangeable without the need to go through a USD intermediary bank. <br /><br />Since then, the New Development Bank has already opened its first offices in Singapore, with many more to follow, the demand for Dollars is logically going to increase because their currency will provide more stability and security for the common user and no longer subject to confiscation by the United States. Because of the outsourcing, offshoring, and globalisation that began in the 80s, it’s come to the point where the whole rest of the world is producing actual commodities and goods, while the US is only producing Dollars, weapons, and wars. Since American hegemony is intrinsically tied to this relationship, any collapse of the Dollar will result in the collapse of the US as a viable world power. Same way as the Roman Empire collapsed, and same way as the British Empire collapsed. That’s why any threat to the US Dollar hegemony is viewed by the US as a threat to its political power, like Quadaffi, Chavez, Hussein, or Ahmadinejad were. The fact that a country like Libya and Quadaffi’s proposed Gold Dinar posed an actual threat to the US shows just how fragile the whole system is. <br /><br />Bringing Back the Good Gold Days<br /><br />Several countries have already requested the repatriation of their Gold reserves from the US Federal Reserve system, notably Germany. Germany is the bellwether inside the Euro(zone) and any actions it takes will eventually be emulated by others. The fact that the Euro is backed by Gold to the tune of 10% of its nominal is one of the reasons why you won’t see the Euro going away because of hyperinflation, but for other reasons entirely. The problem is that the US doesn’t have Germany’s (or anybody else’s) Gold but they have to buy it incrementally and ship it to them over the course of the next few years (but they won’t admit this). This again will put negative pressure on the US Dollar because when you’re selling that many Dollars to buy that much Gold to ship out of that country, plus the competition of any new reserve currency that the BRICS create, and plus the fact that the US will lose political and military power as a result would make any rational businessperson or trader very bearish on the USD long term. <br /><br />On the other side once Europe does get back all its Gold from the US, it will have a lot of essentially dead assets doing nothing in various underground vaults. This isn’t the 1930s any more, and people are a lot more likely to trust an online currency like Bitcoin, Linden Dollars, Loom, Ven, Litecoin, or whatever simply because they fall outside of US jurisdiction. Even the “official” Euro rates are not reflective of its real value. Just look at how much Euro currency in cash sells for on eBay.com and compare it to the going rate. Clearly there are Americans looking for a safer alternative to the Dollar, because in the US you can’t just walk into a bank and ask to open up an Euro account, or a Sterling account. Forget it. In this regard, there is very little financial freedom in the US. <br /><br />However, there are cracks starting to appear in the Eurozone, notably the whole Grexit situation which I wrote about in a previous article. <br />But Greece is NOT the reason the Euro can collapse. The real canary in the Gold mine here was Cyprus. After seeing what happened there, al lot of international businesses who had incorporated there got wary. After all losing 40% of anything above 100k is absolutely criminal, and it is theft. The problem here is that most Eurozone countries only guarantee deposits up to 100,000 Euros, which for any business having a current account like a DDA or checking account is pretty much peanuts. Only a handful of countries guarantee deposits for the full amount, Ireland being a good example. The reason why the Cyprus incident is so frightening is because Cyprus had very favourable incorporation laws, and a very favourable tax regime which is why a lot of companies were based there, notably Russian companies and this despite the fact that Russia has a flat tax of 15% last time I checked. If you’re an investor and a high roller, you’d go for bonds, which despite their low yields are guaranteed by the state. But if you’re a corporation which needs its operating capital as liquid and as fungible as possible you can’t exactly do that. But even if you DO own bonds guaranteed by a state, what do you do when that state starts cracking up? That’s the first disadvantage of the Euro. The second one is the fact that several countries, notably Italy have instituted taxes on all deposits coming in from outside the Eurozone, and/or have instituted restrictions on amounts that can be transferred out of the country. Now in light of the fact that a new BRICS currency promises to solve both the problems associated with holding Euros AND Dollars, not just financially but politically, the pressure on these currencies will be enormous. <br /><br />Lets look at the Gold situation now. All the Gold has been repatriated to Venezuela, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, India, Mexico, Bangladesh and others and the US and England have none. What happens then? The demand for Gold and Silver by the tech sector and the jewelry industry is inelastic, and it will continue with a steady stream of demand regardless of price. When the financial sector realizes that we’re in a worse situation than 2008 with Gold in backwardation, that price is going to skyrocket way beyond its fiscal value. It’s going to be a huge bubble way bigger than the 10,500 USD/troz. I had extrapolated. And what happens to every single bubble there ever was? It pops, except that this will be the pop heard round the world because the ripple effect will destabilize ALL financial markets worldwide. <br />So barring any unforeseen turmoil such as a large-scale war or natural disasters, I think the timeline for all this will begin as soon as all the foreign Gold is repatriated out of the United States.<br /><br />In all likelihood, it HAS all been repatriated. Why else is Fort Knox off-limits to journalists and why has the Fed never been audited? At this point, that looks to me like a de facto admission that they have no Gold. <br /><br /> <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=FINANCE\" title=\"#FINANCE\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#FINANCE</a>",
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"content": "The REAL Reason the US Dollar and the Euro Will Collapse\n\nFollow the Mud Brick Road\n\nTimes change, and currencies change as well. There was a time when Gold and Silver were reserve currencies. Then came a time when the Greek Drachma served that purpose, then later the Roman Denarius, the Spanish Real, the British Pound, and finally the US Dollar. In each and every case, the currency was backed by a metal, i.e. Gold, Silver, bronze, or copper. For example, the reason why the British currency is called a Pound Sterling is because it had the same value as one pound of sterling (0.925) Silver, meaning that had its value not been decoupled from Silver, a British Pound should be worth $230 as of this writing, and not a mere $1.276.\n\nGreece, Rome, Spain, Britain, and the US. East to West. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? By extrapolation, it’s not diffucult to see China and the Yuan take centre stage in the global economy. At around 30% of its annual GDP, the public debt of China is nowhere nearly as bad as that of the US, but that still isn’t good. If you go down the list, practically every single country on earth with a functioning economy is indebted to someone else! This is illegal under common law. It’s exactly the same as if I decided to buy a high-rise building in downtown Europe City, got a loan from an American bank while putting up just 5% of the money, where the rest of that money gets paid back by all the residents of that city. \n\nMy argument is: how do you get away with indebting a third party without their consent, or in many cases an ability to repay that debt? Or even being of the legal age of consent! The US is the most indebted nation to have ever existed, and the debt is actually higher than 90% of all the rest of the world combined, but I won’t quote a figure on this because it really depends on whom you ask, and how the question is formulated. \n\nI like the analogy that Ann Barnhardt uses where she sees everything in terms of man-hours. When looking at it from her perspective, it would take all 7 billion people working a 20 USD/hour and being taxed at 100% about 120 years to re-pay the national debt of the US alone, never mind all the other countries, and that doesn’t include the interest that will have accrued between now and 2135. So not only is the global financial system with the US in the lead indebting newborn children and old people, they’re indebting children not even born yet, 5 generations down the line! \nDid YOU vote for this? I’m sure you didn’t do it consciously, but rather involuntarily by voting for anyone in the first place.\n\nWhat becomes obvious is the fact that these huge debts of all these countries, especially that of the US will not be repaid, because they cannot be repaid. The global financial elites all know this very well but are delaying any inevitable collapse of the US Dollar until such time as it becomes convenient, and that goes for (and is related to) the suppression of the prices of Gold, Silver, platinum, and palladium. \n\nFlash back for a second here. In Weimar Germany, the hyperinflation of 1922-1923 had driven down the value of the Deutschmark tremendously. By the beginning of 1923, a viable plan had been conceived to replace the Deutschmark with the Rentenmark which was backed by Gold, mortgages, and other assets. But they held off on implementing it for a few weeks and waited till the exchange rate plummeted to exactly one trillion Marks to one. Why? To make the math easier! Just wipe off 12 zeros. Don’t forget they didn’t even have pocket calculators back then. However, in the case of the Dollar, as well as Gold, the reason is equally as simple. Most of the countries worldwide who had stored their Gold with the Federal Reserve now want to repatriate this Gold. The US is fighting tooth and nail to delay this and/or to slow it down because it doesn’t have any of it, and instead they have to buy it from primary producers. When they ship the Gold out, they’re actually losing real money, but to alleviate any stress on the asset side, the price of Gold is artificially kept low using naked shorting and falsification of data regarding the real status of the Gold markets. Why do you think that Comex recently issued a statement saying that basically they can’t attest to the veracity of their figures? Why do you think that back in 2008 they stopped fulfilling futures contracts in physical metal, and instead would issue just a warehouse receipt? That also happened to coincide with the investigation that was done back then where they found that these warehouses simply didn’t have the amounts of physical that they were claiming and also, the whole scandal where it was revealed that al lot of these 400 oz. bars were just Gold plated tungsten. It also coincided with the first time that Gold went from contango to backwardation on the futures markets vis-à-vis spot. In other words, physical Gold was not available anywhere at any price (except maybe eBay, for small amounts, but try buying a 400 oz. bar on eBay- good luck). \n\nGold and Silver Prices are “For Entertainment Purposes Only”\n\nI know I keep repeating myself here but back in 2010 I did a study for my bank using regression analysis, inflation-adjusted modeling, and arithmetic progression correlating Gold and Silver supplies to demand, as well as a simple inflation adjusted linear technical analysis and came up with an average figure of 10,500 USD/troz. for Gold and 550 USD/troz. for Silver. What shocked me most was not so much the figures themselves but that the Ag/Au ratio was very much in line with historical data (about 20:1), and not like what it is right now (something like 75:1), meaning that Silver is DEEPLY undervalued, much more so than Gold. Of course everyone at the bank got my memo, but nothing was done about it and it never hit the website. Couple of months later I was at a party with all these other bankers and I found out that yes, everybody did know about this, but they were keeping it under the table so they could continue buying Silver for as long as possible because this also coincided with a historical low for the Dollar/Euro exchange rate. And yes, they were ALL buying Silver. They just didn’t want this publicly known because if the public caught on, that would drive both the Dollar price, and the Silver price up. \n\nInterestingly enough, a few weeks later I was reading an article by Edgar J. Steele and he came to very similar ballpark figures using his own methods. That was right before they framed him for a murder that never happened. Oh yeah, and they “confiscated” (i.e. stole) all his Silver too.\nAnd then they wonder why I gave up on the US and just moved out.\n\nAt the same time I was doing these calculations, one of my analysts took the initiative and he did a really nice presentation correlating certain LEIs with sunspot activity, and according to his conclusions, the global economy should start recovering around 2019. But the thing is, no matter how educated you are, no matter how good your information is, none of the predictions made by anybody, including myself should be taken without a really big grain of salt. One time I made the joke at a meeting that new clients for the brokerage division should be given crystal balls with the bank’s logo on them because that’s about as reliable as any of our predictions. For example, nobody foresaw the flash crash of 2010, but that itself had a major ripple effect because it triggered all the stop-losses people had on their positions. Then there was the bandwagon effect, which is the #1 way people lose money. Like all the people buying Gold and Silver in 1979. \n\nThe point I’m making is that since about 1999 there has been a disconnect between commodities prices and the value of the US Dollar. Both are artificially manipulated. The prices of commodities are easier to manipulate than any currency because artificially lowering the price of say Gold or Silver using naked shorts and other tricks basically decreases the value of currency indirectly. To influence currency rates directly is not doable for any group because of the sheer volume. The USD/EUR interbank cash market trades more in a single day than all the equity markets do in 2.5 months. \n\nDismantling the New World’s Order BRIC by BRIC\n\nThe US Dollar, being a fiat currency has had phenomenal performance considering the fact that it’s lasted for as long as it has. The average lifespan of a fiat currency is less than 40 years and they usually die of hyperinflation, independence, reunification, or wars. But the US has not had a currency reclusion since 1792. The fact that the US Dollar is backed up only by war and oil is not necessarily the problem. The real problem is American arrogance, and their use of the currency as a weapon. Whenever a country starts behaving in a manner even remotely against the interests of the US, the first thing they do are to institute sanctions. Sanctions mean that if you happen to be a citizen or resident of that country and you’re trading in US Dollars because you own let’s say an import/export company. Sooner or later you have to either covert into or convert out of the US Dollar vis-à-vis your local currency, which means that sooner or later it either goes through, or gets parked at an American bank, or the branch or subsidiary of an American bank, at which point that money gets “frozen” (i.e. stolen). Notwithstanding any profits you might have, if that’s your operating capital, your business is basically screwed. \n\nSince the US has done this so many times at the drop of a hat, some of the wealthier countries in the Non-Aligned movement have figured out that the way to prevent this is by having a reserve currency that’s not subject to the whims and wishes of the United States. And it really doesn’t matter what it’s backed up by because even Gold is a fiat currency when you think about it. \nThis is why Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and a couple of other countries got together to form a BRICS bank, the New Development Bank to serve as a more decentralised alternative to the US dominated World Bank, IMF, and the Fed. Definitely more balanced because the likelihood of any of these countries going to war with each other is highly unlikely (except maybe Russia and China). But Russia and China have already reached an agreement to make the Ruble and theYuan mutually exchangeable without the need to go through a USD intermediary bank. \n\nSince then, the New Development Bank has already opened its first offices in Singapore, with many more to follow, the demand for Dollars is logically going to increase because their currency will provide more stability and security for the common user and no longer subject to confiscation by the United States. Because of the outsourcing, offshoring, and globalisation that began in the 80s, it’s come to the point where the whole rest of the world is producing actual commodities and goods, while the US is only producing Dollars, weapons, and wars. Since American hegemony is intrinsically tied to this relationship, any collapse of the Dollar will result in the collapse of the US as a viable world power. Same way as the Roman Empire collapsed, and same way as the British Empire collapsed. That’s why any threat to the US Dollar hegemony is viewed by the US as a threat to its political power, like Quadaffi, Chavez, Hussein, or Ahmadinejad were. The fact that a country like Libya and Quadaffi’s proposed Gold Dinar posed an actual threat to the US shows just how fragile the whole system is. \n\nBringing Back the Good Gold Days\n\nSeveral countries have already requested the repatriation of their Gold reserves from the US Federal Reserve system, notably Germany. Germany is the bellwether inside the Euro(zone) and any actions it takes will eventually be emulated by others. The fact that the Euro is backed by Gold to the tune of 10% of its nominal is one of the reasons why you won’t see the Euro going away because of hyperinflation, but for other reasons entirely. The problem is that the US doesn’t have Germany’s (or anybody else’s) Gold but they have to buy it incrementally and ship it to them over the course of the next few years (but they won’t admit this). This again will put negative pressure on the US Dollar because when you’re selling that many Dollars to buy that much Gold to ship out of that country, plus the competition of any new reserve currency that the BRICS create, and plus the fact that the US will lose political and military power as a result would make any rational businessperson or trader very bearish on the USD long term. \n\nOn the other side once Europe does get back all its Gold from the US, it will have a lot of essentially dead assets doing nothing in various underground vaults. This isn’t the 1930s any more, and people are a lot more likely to trust an online currency like Bitcoin, Linden Dollars, Loom, Ven, Litecoin, or whatever simply because they fall outside of US jurisdiction. Even the “official” Euro rates are not reflective of its real value. Just look at how much Euro currency in cash sells for on eBay.com and compare it to the going rate. Clearly there are Americans looking for a safer alternative to the Dollar, because in the US you can’t just walk into a bank and ask to open up an Euro account, or a Sterling account. Forget it. In this regard, there is very little financial freedom in the US. \n\nHowever, there are cracks starting to appear in the Eurozone, notably the whole Grexit situation which I wrote about in a previous article. \nBut Greece is NOT the reason the Euro can collapse. The real canary in the Gold mine here was Cyprus. After seeing what happened there, al lot of international businesses who had incorporated there got wary. After all losing 40% of anything above 100k is absolutely criminal, and it is theft. The problem here is that most Eurozone countries only guarantee deposits up to 100,000 Euros, which for any business having a current account like a DDA or checking account is pretty much peanuts. Only a handful of countries guarantee deposits for the full amount, Ireland being a good example. The reason why the Cyprus incident is so frightening is because Cyprus had very favourable incorporation laws, and a very favourable tax regime which is why a lot of companies were based there, notably Russian companies and this despite the fact that Russia has a flat tax of 15% last time I checked. If you’re an investor and a high roller, you’d go for bonds, which despite their low yields are guaranteed by the state. But if you’re a corporation which needs its operating capital as liquid and as fungible as possible you can’t exactly do that. But even if you DO own bonds guaranteed by a state, what do you do when that state starts cracking up? That’s the first disadvantage of the Euro. The second one is the fact that several countries, notably Italy have instituted taxes on all deposits coming in from outside the Eurozone, and/or have instituted restrictions on amounts that can be transferred out of the country. Now in light of the fact that a new BRICS currency promises to solve both the problems associated with holding Euros AND Dollars, not just financially but politically, the pressure on these currencies will be enormous. \n\nLets look at the Gold situation now. All the Gold has been repatriated to Venezuela, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, India, Mexico, Bangladesh and others and the US and England have none. What happens then? The demand for Gold and Silver by the tech sector and the jewelry industry is inelastic, and it will continue with a steady stream of demand regardless of price. When the financial sector realizes that we’re in a worse situation than 2008 with Gold in backwardation, that price is going to skyrocket way beyond its fiscal value. It’s going to be a huge bubble way bigger than the 10,500 USD/troz. I had extrapolated. And what happens to every single bubble there ever was? It pops, except that this will be the pop heard round the world because the ripple effect will destabilize ALL financial markets worldwide. \nSo barring any unforeseen turmoil such as a large-scale war or natural disasters, I think the timeline for all this will begin as soon as all the foreign Gold is repatriated out of the United States.\n\nIn all likelihood, it HAS all been repatriated. Why else is Fort Knox off-limits to journalists and why has the Fed never been audited? At this point, that looks to me like a de facto admission that they have no Gold. \n\n #FINANCE",
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"content": "Analysis of a Precognitive Dream: 10 Years Later<br /><br />Here’s the dream I had in January 2009 (uncut!) with explanatory notes added today in brackets.<br /><br />In my dream I was at my office at work [at the Kladno branch of the Czech stock exchange] and my colleague Zdenek had come by from Prague to help me out, as he sometimes does [did]. My friend and next-door neighbour, nicknamed \"The Bear\" because he's so big, had come by to visit, and all three of us were chatting away and drinking coffee. [exactly like a talk show. It was like this most of the time] Then Zdenek gets a call and tells me we have to go pick up some documents at the SCP and that because his car isn't very reliable, that I have to do it. The SCP is [was] the Czech Republic's securities registrar. When my friend The Bear heard this he said \"you're going all the way over there in that tiny car of yours? In this weather (it was snowing heavily)? \"Here,\" he said, as he handed me his keys, \"take my car.\" \"I just bought it. It's a white Subaru minivan and it's parked behind the Finance College.\" The SCP has [had] offices in 4 major cities in CZ, however, in the dream, they had a \"secret\" branch in a tiny village near where I live [lived] named Stochov. There really is a village by that name, and its name means \"One Hundred Husbandries.\" So I go to the parking lot, find the car, and start it, only to find out that it had no steering wheel, but was instead operated just like a military tank, namely with a left and a right clutch. Notwithstanding, I somehow managed to get used to this arrangement and drove to Stochov. This \"secret\" SCP branch turned out to be adapted out of a large villa, to which there had been (somewhat awkwardly) added a modern section. Upon entering the building and meeting all the people there, I remembered that I had already been there once before and that I really liked all the people there. I immediately started talking to one of the managers and she started telling me all these things about Chakras, meditation, psychic powers, etc. After about an hour, I went over to another office and took care of the business at hand and they took my ID for processing, this time getting into a long discussion about the current financial catastrophe with two of the guys there. As I'm walking down the hall to leave, I pass a table that had all these finance books on it with a sign saying \"Free\" so I checked them out and decided to take a large textbook on finance that was in English. As I'm leaving, I realise that they had forgotten to return me my Czech Republic ID card and so I asked a secretary if she could find it. She tapped something into her computer and with an unblinking stare told me that my ID had been lost. Lost? How so? \"That's just the way it is,\" she said. “Lost.” \"BUT,\" she said, \"very few people know this, but the SCP, being a state institution, has the legal authority to create you a new one.\" This of course is false, but it was true in the dream. OK! So she sent me to an office on one of the upper floors, where I somehow realised that the people working there also lived there. One of the managers asks me to stand in front of a bright red velvet drape and snaps my picture with a digital camera. A few minutes later he comes back with my new ID, which I proceeded to check. The picture was mine, the address was correct, my date of birth and my personal ID number too, but the name wasn't mine! It was Enoch (something), at which point I started complaining that the name was wrong, whereupon he dryly stated that \"that's just the name that the system generated,\" and that there was nothing else he could do for me. I'll just have to get used to my new name. I was thinking: \"how the hell am I going to explain this to my friends, coworkers, etc.? Will they print me up a new batch of business cards? Will they change my login name? Angrily, I left the building and proceeded to look for my friend's car, only to realise that it had been stolen! Immediately I called the Police and they said \"good news!\" \"We've already located the car.\" So they picked me up and drove me to it, and I thanked them. I get in and try to start it, only to find out that there's no gas. So I called one of the guys at the SCP office I had just left and he asked me where I was at. He told me that I was actually just 3 houses away from a friend of his who's an amateur auto mechanic and that he might have some gas. So I knock on the door and a friendly but somewhat brutish guy answers. I tell him my story, and he says to come in, and that he has 6 cars in his backyard and that he's sure we might be able to siphon some gas out, but that I have to help him. So I help him do it, and being somewhat clumsy I slipped on oil or snow and got my brand-new suit completely soiled and soaked in oil. The end result was that all we were able to glean from the six cars amounted to only about half a cup of gasoline. Carefully we poured it into the car, at which point I realised that there's no way I can make it back to my office in Kladno, so instead I decided to drive back to Stochov. It was the day before payday and I had no cash, and nothing on my card left. Back at the SCP office they made me a coffee and since they had a washer/dryer there they offered to clean it, but said that the machine only operates when it’s fully loaded, which meant I had to put ALL my clothes in it. Surprisingly, neither I nor anybody else thought it was weird for me to hang out there for the next 90 minutes completely naked and talking about everything under the sun, mainly financial matters. When my clothes were ready and I finally put them on, I noticed 3 of the buttons on my vest were missing. One of the ladies told me she found them on the floor and had put them in the vest's pocket. After another 2 hours, my colleague Zdenek showed up with a canister of gas. He was completely out of it since this had been his first time driving in a snowstorm this bad (he's a young guy). Anyway, somehow we both made it safely back to Kladno, and that's where the dream ended.<br /><br />Couple points here. Since Zdenek had come to rescue me from my predicament, who was in charge back at my office? My friend The Bear? Unlikely. The man’s a stone mason and a home builder but he IS very smart. <br /><br />The dream begins and ends in the same location: the Kladno branch of the stock exchange. Just like the dream essentially went nowhere, the same exact thing can be said for my job there. I started and finished at exactly the same salary after 3 years, and my career had the same stupid plot twists as the dream. The red background I had my ID photo taken in front of? All that means is that I’m someone that the authorities have red-flagged and this was true then, as it is now. <br /><br />But just like back then, they couldn’t find anything on me. Nothing at all, but they tried as they could to find something. An incident comes to mind. I had a guy there that I was training and one day he says to me “[the head lawyer] wants you to call him ASAP. Says it’s about an illegal relationship you have with a certain securities issuer.” Really? Well, as a stockbroker, having any direct relationship with an issuer of securities traded on the exchange would have been illegal, but I couldn’t think of anything. I told him I would call him up after I had a cigarette and thought about it, which I did, out front. I walk back in and he starts saying shit about things I should have disclosed before I was hired, etc. He says “Come on, Dalibor, what are are you really hiding? Might as well just spill the beans because they know everything anyway.” Being the type of person who keeps a lot of secrets, I said nothing. Look up the lawyer guy’s extension, and lift up the phone, at which point he says it was just a joke. Well, SOME JOKE there buddy. I’m thinking “who put this guy up to this? Did he concoct this all by his lonesome?” “What’s the real deal?” <br /><br />The fact that my friend’s car was operated just like an older type of tank would be indicative of exactly the way the stock exchange is run. Exactly like the military and just as inefficient. Same hierarchy, same everything, except for one thing: DISCIPLINE. <br /><br />The name Enoch means “dedicated” in Hebrew. The people who worked for the SCP (the securities registrar at that time) also lived there. The stock exchange itself was LIKE an older institution (or house, like in the dream) from the 1800s to which a modern addition had been appended. The core remains the same, only the façade changed. <br /><br />The knowledge I had acquired at that job was free for the taking, as evidenced by the table with the books, but I only selected a small subset of it that I could use. My suit’s vest had 7 buttons and 3 had come off. The fact that the first thing I had talked about was Chakras, which are 7 in number meant that 3 of my Chakras were now permanently open. I just don’t remember which ones. <br /><br />Didn’t matter anyway since everyone knew everything about me, as evidenced by my nakedness and nobody considering it anything unusual. If traced out on a map, my path in the dream would have taken me 25 km northeast, then 5km southwest, then 5km northeast, then 25 km southwest, kind of like a graph of the movement of the PX at that time. Had 2 rebounds, or a reverse head-and-shoulders pattern (sort of). <br /><br />The fact that the SCP had a “secret” branch in Stochov meant that dreams can reveal secrets that are hidden in plain sight. They’re only secret because we don’t realise what we’re looking at even IF we know all the facts, as evidenced by the fact that I remembered (in the dream) that I had been there before and that I knew all the people there from other contexts. <br /><br />The friendly nature of all the people in this dream, together with the intransigence of some dictatorial “computer” or “system” is EXACTLY what the Czech Republic is really like. The people will help you in any way they can, but they’re still beholden to “the system” just like the people who worked for (and lived at) the SCP.<br /><br />Also, the fact that every day at that job felt, for the most part like I was hosting a talkshow on finance led me to consider doing just that. I drafted a whole proposal and pitched it to (I forget) MSNBC or some outfits of their ilk and got nowhere. Pitched it to my employer and they said (surprisingly enough) YES. Also arranged for me to meet the head of a Czech financial news channel, Z-1, to talk about it, and I mulled it over for about a month before that particular organization went unexpectedly bankrupt. In other words, it was a great idea and I was the perfect guy for the job, BUT like a lot of good ideas it went nowhere. Know where? Or nowhere? <br />",
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"content": "Analysis of a Precognitive Dream: 10 Years Later\n\nHere’s the dream I had in January 2009 (uncut!) with explanatory notes added today in brackets.\n\nIn my dream I was at my office at work [at the Kladno branch of the Czech stock exchange] and my colleague Zdenek had come by from Prague to help me out, as he sometimes does [did]. My friend and next-door neighbour, nicknamed \"The Bear\" because he's so big, had come by to visit, and all three of us were chatting away and drinking coffee. [exactly like a talk show. It was like this most of the time] Then Zdenek gets a call and tells me we have to go pick up some documents at the SCP and that because his car isn't very reliable, that I have to do it. The SCP is [was] the Czech Republic's securities registrar. When my friend The Bear heard this he said \"you're going all the way over there in that tiny car of yours? In this weather (it was snowing heavily)? \"Here,\" he said, as he handed me his keys, \"take my car.\" \"I just bought it. It's a white Subaru minivan and it's parked behind the Finance College.\" The SCP has [had] offices in 4 major cities in CZ, however, in the dream, they had a \"secret\" branch in a tiny village near where I live [lived] named Stochov. There really is a village by that name, and its name means \"One Hundred Husbandries.\" So I go to the parking lot, find the car, and start it, only to find out that it had no steering wheel, but was instead operated just like a military tank, namely with a left and a right clutch. Notwithstanding, I somehow managed to get used to this arrangement and drove to Stochov. This \"secret\" SCP branch turned out to be adapted out of a large villa, to which there had been (somewhat awkwardly) added a modern section. Upon entering the building and meeting all the people there, I remembered that I had already been there once before and that I really liked all the people there. I immediately started talking to one of the managers and she started telling me all these things about Chakras, meditation, psychic powers, etc. After about an hour, I went over to another office and took care of the business at hand and they took my ID for processing, this time getting into a long discussion about the current financial catastrophe with two of the guys there. As I'm walking down the hall to leave, I pass a table that had all these finance books on it with a sign saying \"Free\" so I checked them out and decided to take a large textbook on finance that was in English. As I'm leaving, I realise that they had forgotten to return me my Czech Republic ID card and so I asked a secretary if she could find it. She tapped something into her computer and with an unblinking stare told me that my ID had been lost. Lost? How so? \"That's just the way it is,\" she said. “Lost.” \"BUT,\" she said, \"very few people know this, but the SCP, being a state institution, has the legal authority to create you a new one.\" This of course is false, but it was true in the dream. OK! So she sent me to an office on one of the upper floors, where I somehow realised that the people working there also lived there. One of the managers asks me to stand in front of a bright red velvet drape and snaps my picture with a digital camera. A few minutes later he comes back with my new ID, which I proceeded to check. The picture was mine, the address was correct, my date of birth and my personal ID number too, but the name wasn't mine! It was Enoch (something), at which point I started complaining that the name was wrong, whereupon he dryly stated that \"that's just the name that the system generated,\" and that there was nothing else he could do for me. I'll just have to get used to my new name. I was thinking: \"how the hell am I going to explain this to my friends, coworkers, etc.? Will they print me up a new batch of business cards? Will they change my login name? Angrily, I left the building and proceeded to look for my friend's car, only to realise that it had been stolen! Immediately I called the Police and they said \"good news!\" \"We've already located the car.\" So they picked me up and drove me to it, and I thanked them. I get in and try to start it, only to find out that there's no gas. So I called one of the guys at the SCP office I had just left and he asked me where I was at. He told me that I was actually just 3 houses away from a friend of his who's an amateur auto mechanic and that he might have some gas. So I knock on the door and a friendly but somewhat brutish guy answers. I tell him my story, and he says to come in, and that he has 6 cars in his backyard and that he's sure we might be able to siphon some gas out, but that I have to help him. So I help him do it, and being somewhat clumsy I slipped on oil or snow and got my brand-new suit completely soiled and soaked in oil. The end result was that all we were able to glean from the six cars amounted to only about half a cup of gasoline. Carefully we poured it into the car, at which point I realised that there's no way I can make it back to my office in Kladno, so instead I decided to drive back to Stochov. It was the day before payday and I had no cash, and nothing on my card left. Back at the SCP office they made me a coffee and since they had a washer/dryer there they offered to clean it, but said that the machine only operates when it’s fully loaded, which meant I had to put ALL my clothes in it. Surprisingly, neither I nor anybody else thought it was weird for me to hang out there for the next 90 minutes completely naked and talking about everything under the sun, mainly financial matters. When my clothes were ready and I finally put them on, I noticed 3 of the buttons on my vest were missing. One of the ladies told me she found them on the floor and had put them in the vest's pocket. After another 2 hours, my colleague Zdenek showed up with a canister of gas. He was completely out of it since this had been his first time driving in a snowstorm this bad (he's a young guy). Anyway, somehow we both made it safely back to Kladno, and that's where the dream ended.\n\nCouple points here. Since Zdenek had come to rescue me from my predicament, who was in charge back at my office? My friend The Bear? Unlikely. The man’s a stone mason and a home builder but he IS very smart. \n\nThe dream begins and ends in the same location: the Kladno branch of the stock exchange. Just like the dream essentially went nowhere, the same exact thing can be said for my job there. I started and finished at exactly the same salary after 3 years, and my career had the same stupid plot twists as the dream. The red background I had my ID photo taken in front of? All that means is that I’m someone that the authorities have red-flagged and this was true then, as it is now. \n\nBut just like back then, they couldn’t find anything on me. Nothing at all, but they tried as they could to find something. An incident comes to mind. I had a guy there that I was training and one day he says to me “[the head lawyer] wants you to call him ASAP. Says it’s about an illegal relationship you have with a certain securities issuer.” Really? Well, as a stockbroker, having any direct relationship with an issuer of securities traded on the exchange would have been illegal, but I couldn’t think of anything. I told him I would call him up after I had a cigarette and thought about it, which I did, out front. I walk back in and he starts saying shit about things I should have disclosed before I was hired, etc. He says “Come on, Dalibor, what are are you really hiding? Might as well just spill the beans because they know everything anyway.” Being the type of person who keeps a lot of secrets, I said nothing. Look up the lawyer guy’s extension, and lift up the phone, at which point he says it was just a joke. Well, SOME JOKE there buddy. I’m thinking “who put this guy up to this? Did he concoct this all by his lonesome?” “What’s the real deal?” \n\nThe fact that my friend’s car was operated just like an older type of tank would be indicative of exactly the way the stock exchange is run. Exactly like the military and just as inefficient. Same hierarchy, same everything, except for one thing: DISCIPLINE. \n\nThe name Enoch means “dedicated” in Hebrew. The people who worked for the SCP (the securities registrar at that time) also lived there. The stock exchange itself was LIKE an older institution (or house, like in the dream) from the 1800s to which a modern addition had been appended. The core remains the same, only the façade changed. \n\nThe knowledge I had acquired at that job was free for the taking, as evidenced by the table with the books, but I only selected a small subset of it that I could use. My suit’s vest had 7 buttons and 3 had come off. The fact that the first thing I had talked about was Chakras, which are 7 in number meant that 3 of my Chakras were now permanently open. I just don’t remember which ones. \n\nDidn’t matter anyway since everyone knew everything about me, as evidenced by my nakedness and nobody considering it anything unusual. If traced out on a map, my path in the dream would have taken me 25 km northeast, then 5km southwest, then 5km northeast, then 25 km southwest, kind of like a graph of the movement of the PX at that time. Had 2 rebounds, or a reverse head-and-shoulders pattern (sort of). \n\nThe fact that the SCP had a “secret” branch in Stochov meant that dreams can reveal secrets that are hidden in plain sight. They’re only secret because we don’t realise what we’re looking at even IF we know all the facts, as evidenced by the fact that I remembered (in the dream) that I had been there before and that I knew all the people there from other contexts. \n\nThe friendly nature of all the people in this dream, together with the intransigence of some dictatorial “computer” or “system” is EXACTLY what the Czech Republic is really like. The people will help you in any way they can, but they’re still beholden to “the system” just like the people who worked for (and lived at) the SCP.\n\nAlso, the fact that every day at that job felt, for the most part like I was hosting a talkshow on finance led me to consider doing just that. I drafted a whole proposal and pitched it to (I forget) MSNBC or some outfits of their ilk and got nowhere. Pitched it to my employer and they said (surprisingly enough) YES. Also arranged for me to meet the head of a Czech financial news channel, Z-1, to talk about it, and I mulled it over for about a month before that particular organization went unexpectedly bankrupt. In other words, it was a great idea and I was the perfect guy for the job, BUT like a lot of good ideas it went nowhere. Know where? Or nowhere? \n",
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"content": "Einigkeit und Recht und SPERRMULL<br /><br />Actually, it's supposed to be \"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit\" meaning \"Unity, Justice, and Freedom\" which is the National Phrase of The People's Republic of Germany, where I'm still living in a self-imposed exile of lascivious greed. And YES, it really IS officially called the \"people's republic\" (Bundesrepublik) of Germany notwithstanding the fact that that designation is almost always reserved for communistic totalitarian (toiletarian) regimes and regimelets. And it shows, really it does. <br /><br />So what's a Sperrmull? It's a German ritual where all the \"other\" garbage gets sacrificially placed on the sidewalk so that people from eastern Europe can come and take it away, and then whatever's left over gets hauled off to a landfill. People from eastern Europe like ME. A saner mind might wonder as to what spiritual deformity might beset a relatively well-off guy like me to do this. The \"other\" garbage I'm referring to is anything that's not household waste (like banana peels, or nut shells), not recyclable (like plastic bottles or glass), or garden waste (like dead birds, or grass clippings). <br /><br />In my county, they issue a whole 54 page booklet about what gets thrown out and where and why and includes an index where you can find entries for things as obscure as used typerwiter correction ribbons, MUNITIONS, hydrogen peroxide, and alarm clocks. Surprisingly it doesn't include any entry for cursed objects, Gold jewelry, or sharks, that last being an actual item appearing in the German Customs Code with its own tarriff rates and conditions. <br /><br />Unlike Christmas, the Sperrmull happens twice a year, and each city has its own dates for it where in my 20 km area that comes out to about one Christmas per week, just that they're bunched together around the Spring Equinox, and the Fall Equinox. I always wondered why they never have them right after Christmas, so people can get rid of all the obligatory junk they get.<br /><br />You could say that I have a love AND trepidation relationship to Sperrmull because although I'm joyfully anticipating all the valuable finds, I'm also dreading all the work that it inevitably involves, especially hauling it upstairs to my apartment. The beauty of Sperrmull is in finding things you never even knew existed. It's also a way to do modern urban archaeology and analyse what people have in their homes by the stuff they throw out. Some of these towns I do are very wealthy but you'd be shocked at some of the crap they throw out. As a rule, rich people never thow out anything truly worthwile. No, they keep it all for themselves, just like I do. Sperrmull is also a social phenomenon where (former) West Germans who pretend to be rich throw out stuff that nominally \"poor\" people from eastern Europe are taking back to their own countries. I know what the real deal is because not only have I spoken with some of my competitors from Poland and Czech Republic, I also know very well what MY OWN situation is like, as well as all the people who have accompanied me on a Sperrmull run. Every single person that I ever garbage picked with was a multi-millionaire, and that's NOT an exaggeration. <br /><br />It's the POOR people who would never be caught dead doing something like garbage picking. It's POOR people who throw out new clothes after they've washed them four times. Same people who might buy a house and throw out all the \"junk,\" who also have no appreciation for things like art or books. The same people who prefer to live in apartments because the government's Hartz IV program will pay your rent if you're on ALG 2 (long-term unemployment or welfare) but won't pay you anything if you own your own home, like I do. Matter of fact, if you own rental property, you can't even collect unemployment in Germany, regardless of how long you've paid into the system. It's the same system that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich, all reinforced by social mores reinforced by TV shows or \"programming\" that tells people they \"need\" things like fashion and \"luxuries.\" <br /><br />In Sperrmull terms, this translates into what I call a Potlach Effect (Potlach is a Chinook word for a gift-giving party where the higher your status, the more expensive gifts you have to give) best noticed in areas where all the houses are visible from each other, like a dead-end street, or a square. One person throws out a 60 cm TV. Neighbour sees that, so he throws out a 100 cm TV. Next neighbour sees that and trumps that with an even bigger one, and so on. It perfectly explains why you have clustering of various types of high-visibility items, be they furniture, TVs, or even aquariums. Sometimes there are hidden clusters of very unusual items that are usually not displayed openly, such as The Chi Machine, which is basically a foot shaker / quack medical device. It has an upholstered bar that you place your feet on where it shakes them back and forth and is supposed to increase your Chi. Not to be used for longer than 15 minutes as per the directions, otherwise it might cause too much Chi. I have one in my stacks that's in perfect condition which I hope to sell at some point in the future as a quack medical device. Another functioning model has been repurposed to fit the handle of a hacksaw so I can cut large metal pieces with no effort and very little noise. <br /><br />Even things like computer keyboards have strange fluctuations where some days or some towns you'll find about 50 of them in 2 hours, and sometimes you won't find a single one. Baffling. I take them all because they all contain between 0.5 and 5.0 grams of pure Silver and they take about 2 minutes to take apart. The case is also made from ABS, and that's worth an additional 2 Euros. Even if you just keep the 2 Mylar films that contain all the Silver and never extract it, those films are a fungible commodity by themselves. <br /><br />So basicallly if someone asks me what it is I go for when I do my Spermull runs, the truthful answer is Silver, Gold, art, antiques, and cash. Some things I keep as my own little trade secrets, but I've found actual Gold bars. Pretty sure why that got thrown out. People thought it was a fake from China, but I had it tested and it's quite real. Cash? Almost all handbags contain change between the liner and the outer shell, and sometimes that change can be VERY old. In one instance I found 235 Deutschmarks because the people wrongly assumed it to be worthless not that we have the Euro. Wrong, because you can exchange them 2:1 for Euros in perpetuity, and their collectible value is double that in Euros. And sometimes, these handbags contain stuff even more entertaining than cash, like PILLS. LOL! Plus, some of the handbags themselve have sold for hundreds of Euros. One of my most perplexing finds was an organised coin collection in 2 albums consisting of American, Swiss, and British Silver coins. Both albums were laid on top of the piles of garbage and opened with the coins showing, and the house that threw them out was quite possibly the most desolate and dilapidated one in all of Luhe-Wildenau. Either they were thrown out because the people thought they were worthless, or it was some sort of charity offering designed to be taken by someone like me. All I can say is THANKS. <br /><br />People who know that I've lived in the USA and Czech Republic might be interested in compaing and contrasting my garbage-picking experiences in these different countries. Basically, nobody in Czech Republic throws out anything useful, ever. The Czech mentality is based on perpetual lack, and people are very handy at repairing all kinds of things. I had a public dumpster right under my window for 7 years and searched it every night. That was the 1990s before the internet and was looking for day-old newspapers and magazines. I also would save stamps from letters people would trow out. In those 7 years, the only other thing I found was an old scale, and a small hobby loom (more like a toy loom). I did make one friend doing this, a guy who did the same thing. One day he noticed I was taking all the stamps off letters and said he had a whole trunk full of stamps. He was looking for a nice big ashtray and I had one. We made a trade, and sure enough, it was a full trunk (included) and soaking it took up the whole bathtub. <br /><br />In the USA, the dumpster situation was different. The ones that were the most profitable and would put out steady streams of income were commercial dumpsters behind strip malls. Bigger stores in the USA tend to have compactors, just like all the stores do here in Europe. Although I never found anything as stupendous like that 2.4 kg collection of Silver coins, or that Gold bar, I did find middle-of-the-road electronics, office supplies, computers, and other items I could easily repair or clean up. Most of these were either returns or display units. The only place I could find the same quality of stuff in the USA were all the little garage and estate sales. Here in Europe, I have never heard of anybody having a garage sale. That kind of stuff is usually to be found in flea markets, but I hate those because they're few and far between, so that they're overcrowded, and it's always cold and/or raining, and you have to get there by 6am and they end at 14:00 which is typically when I wake up.<br /><br />Some of the stuff I've found isn't very valuable but it's valuable to ME. I was about to leave Neustadt after about 2 hours because my minivan was filled to the roof. It was cold and raining but as I'm about to leave, I spot a \"set\" (a pile of laid-out garbage, in my own parlance), and atop that set sat a big Snoopy toy. I had to urinate anyway and so I did that by a nearby tree, and Snoopy just gave me this look of pure unadulterated JOY, and I knew I had to take him home with me. Once at the house, I put him in the washing machine, and nowadays he brightens my living room with his innocent and carefree goodness. I could sense that he had been loved by a little girl at one time. Who knows, maybe years from now that little girl will be a woman, and she'll remember that stuffed Snoopy toy and think fondly of her childhood, never realising that he's still making someone else happy with his big huge smile. ",
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"content": "Einigkeit und Recht und SPERRMULL\n\nActually, it's supposed to be \"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit\" meaning \"Unity, Justice, and Freedom\" which is the National Phrase of The People's Republic of Germany, where I'm still living in a self-imposed exile of lascivious greed. And YES, it really IS officially called the \"people's republic\" (Bundesrepublik) of Germany notwithstanding the fact that that designation is almost always reserved for communistic totalitarian (toiletarian) regimes and regimelets. And it shows, really it does. \n\nSo what's a Sperrmull? It's a German ritual where all the \"other\" garbage gets sacrificially placed on the sidewalk so that people from eastern Europe can come and take it away, and then whatever's left over gets hauled off to a landfill. People from eastern Europe like ME. A saner mind might wonder as to what spiritual deformity might beset a relatively well-off guy like me to do this. The \"other\" garbage I'm referring to is anything that's not household waste (like banana peels, or nut shells), not recyclable (like plastic bottles or glass), or garden waste (like dead birds, or grass clippings). \n\nIn my county, they issue a whole 54 page booklet about what gets thrown out and where and why and includes an index where you can find entries for things as obscure as used typerwiter correction ribbons, MUNITIONS, hydrogen peroxide, and alarm clocks. Surprisingly it doesn't include any entry for cursed objects, Gold jewelry, or sharks, that last being an actual item appearing in the German Customs Code with its own tarriff rates and conditions. \n\nUnlike Christmas, the Sperrmull happens twice a year, and each city has its own dates for it where in my 20 km area that comes out to about one Christmas per week, just that they're bunched together around the Spring Equinox, and the Fall Equinox. I always wondered why they never have them right after Christmas, so people can get rid of all the obligatory junk they get.\n\nYou could say that I have a love AND trepidation relationship to Sperrmull because although I'm joyfully anticipating all the valuable finds, I'm also dreading all the work that it inevitably involves, especially hauling it upstairs to my apartment. The beauty of Sperrmull is in finding things you never even knew existed. It's also a way to do modern urban archaeology and analyse what people have in their homes by the stuff they throw out. Some of these towns I do are very wealthy but you'd be shocked at some of the crap they throw out. As a rule, rich people never thow out anything truly worthwile. No, they keep it all for themselves, just like I do. Sperrmull is also a social phenomenon where (former) West Germans who pretend to be rich throw out stuff that nominally \"poor\" people from eastern Europe are taking back to their own countries. I know what the real deal is because not only have I spoken with some of my competitors from Poland and Czech Republic, I also know very well what MY OWN situation is like, as well as all the people who have accompanied me on a Sperrmull run. Every single person that I ever garbage picked with was a multi-millionaire, and that's NOT an exaggeration. \n\nIt's the POOR people who would never be caught dead doing something like garbage picking. It's POOR people who throw out new clothes after they've washed them four times. Same people who might buy a house and throw out all the \"junk,\" who also have no appreciation for things like art or books. The same people who prefer to live in apartments because the government's Hartz IV program will pay your rent if you're on ALG 2 (long-term unemployment or welfare) but won't pay you anything if you own your own home, like I do. Matter of fact, if you own rental property, you can't even collect unemployment in Germany, regardless of how long you've paid into the system. It's the same system that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich, all reinforced by social mores reinforced by TV shows or \"programming\" that tells people they \"need\" things like fashion and \"luxuries.\" \n\nIn Sperrmull terms, this translates into what I call a Potlach Effect (Potlach is a Chinook word for a gift-giving party where the higher your status, the more expensive gifts you have to give) best noticed in areas where all the houses are visible from each other, like a dead-end street, or a square. One person throws out a 60 cm TV. Neighbour sees that, so he throws out a 100 cm TV. Next neighbour sees that and trumps that with an even bigger one, and so on. It perfectly explains why you have clustering of various types of high-visibility items, be they furniture, TVs, or even aquariums. Sometimes there are hidden clusters of very unusual items that are usually not displayed openly, such as The Chi Machine, which is basically a foot shaker / quack medical device. It has an upholstered bar that you place your feet on where it shakes them back and forth and is supposed to increase your Chi. Not to be used for longer than 15 minutes as per the directions, otherwise it might cause too much Chi. I have one in my stacks that's in perfect condition which I hope to sell at some point in the future as a quack medical device. Another functioning model has been repurposed to fit the handle of a hacksaw so I can cut large metal pieces with no effort and very little noise. \n\nEven things like computer keyboards have strange fluctuations where some days or some towns you'll find about 50 of them in 2 hours, and sometimes you won't find a single one. Baffling. I take them all because they all contain between 0.5 and 5.0 grams of pure Silver and they take about 2 minutes to take apart. The case is also made from ABS, and that's worth an additional 2 Euros. Even if you just keep the 2 Mylar films that contain all the Silver and never extract it, those films are a fungible commodity by themselves. \n\nSo basicallly if someone asks me what it is I go for when I do my Spermull runs, the truthful answer is Silver, Gold, art, antiques, and cash. Some things I keep as my own little trade secrets, but I've found actual Gold bars. Pretty sure why that got thrown out. People thought it was a fake from China, but I had it tested and it's quite real. Cash? Almost all handbags contain change between the liner and the outer shell, and sometimes that change can be VERY old. In one instance I found 235 Deutschmarks because the people wrongly assumed it to be worthless not that we have the Euro. Wrong, because you can exchange them 2:1 for Euros in perpetuity, and their collectible value is double that in Euros. And sometimes, these handbags contain stuff even more entertaining than cash, like PILLS. LOL! Plus, some of the handbags themselve have sold for hundreds of Euros. One of my most perplexing finds was an organised coin collection in 2 albums consisting of American, Swiss, and British Silver coins. Both albums were laid on top of the piles of garbage and opened with the coins showing, and the house that threw them out was quite possibly the most desolate and dilapidated one in all of Luhe-Wildenau. Either they were thrown out because the people thought they were worthless, or it was some sort of charity offering designed to be taken by someone like me. All I can say is THANKS. \n\nPeople who know that I've lived in the USA and Czech Republic might be interested in compaing and contrasting my garbage-picking experiences in these different countries. Basically, nobody in Czech Republic throws out anything useful, ever. The Czech mentality is based on perpetual lack, and people are very handy at repairing all kinds of things. I had a public dumpster right under my window for 7 years and searched it every night. That was the 1990s before the internet and was looking for day-old newspapers and magazines. I also would save stamps from letters people would trow out. In those 7 years, the only other thing I found was an old scale, and a small hobby loom (more like a toy loom). I did make one friend doing this, a guy who did the same thing. One day he noticed I was taking all the stamps off letters and said he had a whole trunk full of stamps. He was looking for a nice big ashtray and I had one. We made a trade, and sure enough, it was a full trunk (included) and soaking it took up the whole bathtub. \n\nIn the USA, the dumpster situation was different. The ones that were the most profitable and would put out steady streams of income were commercial dumpsters behind strip malls. Bigger stores in the USA tend to have compactors, just like all the stores do here in Europe. Although I never found anything as stupendous like that 2.4 kg collection of Silver coins, or that Gold bar, I did find middle-of-the-road electronics, office supplies, computers, and other items I could easily repair or clean up. Most of these were either returns or display units. The only place I could find the same quality of stuff in the USA were all the little garage and estate sales. Here in Europe, I have never heard of anybody having a garage sale. That kind of stuff is usually to be found in flea markets, but I hate those because they're few and far between, so that they're overcrowded, and it's always cold and/or raining, and you have to get there by 6am and they end at 14:00 which is typically when I wake up.\n\nSome of the stuff I've found isn't very valuable but it's valuable to ME. I was about to leave Neustadt after about 2 hours because my minivan was filled to the roof. It was cold and raining but as I'm about to leave, I spot a \"set\" (a pile of laid-out garbage, in my own parlance), and atop that set sat a big Snoopy toy. I had to urinate anyway and so I did that by a nearby tree, and Snoopy just gave me this look of pure unadulterated JOY, and I knew I had to take him home with me. Once at the house, I put him in the washing machine, and nowadays he brightens my living room with his innocent and carefree goodness. I could sense that he had been loved by a little girl at one time. Who knows, maybe years from now that little girl will be a woman, and she'll remember that stuffed Snoopy toy and think fondly of her childhood, never realising that he's still making someone else happy with his big huge smile. ",
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"content": "The Denigration of Immigration<br /><br />I'm an immigrant. Always have been one, always will be one, and will never stop being one no matter where I relocate to on this Earth. I can't even go back to the country I was born in because it's not there anymore. As someone who has moved internationally (emigrated) EIGHT times, I'm well-versed in all that immigration entails, such as the culture-shock aspect; and one would think that after 50 years of doing this I'd be somewhat inured to its effects, but that is not the case. Nothing can ever fully prepare you for what awaits you when you cross that (border) line. In that sense, countries can almost be regarded as individual people where you constantly discover new things about them, until you come to a relatively important one like \"oh I get it, you're just STUPID.\"<br />Right now I'm kind of stuck in the former Nazi Germany, the former Weimar Repiblic, or whatever you want to call it for reasons that are as complex as they are STUPID. I came here in 2011 looking for a decent life. Major reasons included a higher standard of living, better security, a desire to experience the left half of Europe and not just the right half, and, most importantly, a better price-to-rental ratio on real estate. I had done all the math, and having lived off investment income in the past (2004-2008) using the riskiest vehicle on the market, namely bank-managed funds, I decided that living off rental income would be more secure, in addition to providing me more income. I never expected to be living off just the rental income, but that is what it's come down to. <br />My rationale was quite primitive. I figured I'd move here, buy a few apartment-houses, and get a job. ANY job, and learn German to a degree commensurate with eventually getting the type of job I had been accustomed to in CZ, like that of bank manager. <br />I followed all the advice I was given. I was told that the only way I could get a job was through the Arbeitsamt (Employment Office) so I registered with them. They promised to pay for a German language course which I successfully completed. They did not. I didn't know this at the time, but if you own any \"excess\" real estate in Germany, you can never collect ALG 1 or ALG 2 benefits under the Hartz IV system (unemployment or welfare) and that was the excuse the Arbeitsamt used to not pay me a cent. <br />During my brief but tumultuous relationship with said Arbeitsamt I got sent on many job interviews. These always seemed promising at first and I always enjoyed job interviews because in the past, I had a near-100% success rate. I came to dread these later on because Germany is the only country I've been told to \"go to hell\" or asked \"what language did you speak as a child growing up?\" during a job interview conducted in English. I was asked that strange question 3x and my response was truthful each time. As a child, I grew up speaking Czech in the home and never saw any reason to conceal this fact until I moved to Germany and found out the we the Czechs are the most hated minority here, which perfectly explains why there's only 15,000 of us where most of those happen to be healthcare professionals and also explains why the state of healthcare is so dismal in CZ. Also had strange things happen to me like having to show my passport before the interview even began, being asked where I was born, or if I was single, married, or had a girlfriend. Keep in mind that unlike the US, questions like these are allowed at job interviews. One time I went to a private job agency and when the interviewer found out I had been born in Czechoslovakia, told me that \"we don't deal with any people from that country\" and made a sweeping hand motion indicating \"begone!\" Keep in mind that I have no criminal record, I have all the necessary documents, a college degree, good work experience, and already pay lots of taxes ipso facto by owning some significant real estate here. <br />Apparently I'm not in some protected class. Apparently they only want to hire gay immigrants who speak no German whatsoever and who may harbour terroristic intentions. Maybe next time I could pretend like I'm poly-gayic (or whatever the proper term is) by wearing an ascot or something. Funny that I was always initially suspected of being gay when I lived in the US but here in Germany it seems like I'm not gay enough. Pendulums swing and windmills turn but always re-turn to the same place, where Germans have gone from Nazi to diversity-Nazis where that diversity only applies to a very strictly-defined narrow set of parameters. Whatever the case may be, it doesn't apply to me. <br />In 2011 I wasn't the only person who thought that moving to Germany might be a good idea, where apparently 2.7 MILLION people had that same idea between 2011-2016. The number of unemployed or welfare-receiving people was 2.6 million yet somehow, magically the unemployment rate stayed the same despite that influx where rather than paying taxes, those 2.7 million people are costing Germany 49 billion Euros per year in added welfare expenditures which perfectly explains why Merkel asked for all that German Gold worth 75 billion to be repatriated. Adding further insult to injury, 3.0 million people moved OUT of Germany in that same 2011-2016 period, most being retirees. Keep in mind that Germany has a population of about 82 million, and this added influx of non-integrating invaders commits about 6,000 felonies per day and in some areas with the highest concentrations, crime has gone up by TENFOLD. <br />I've had a bird-eye view of this slow-motion collapse of what had once been a decent place to live, right from my windows here in Weiden. I used to see people walking at all hours of the day and night because I live on a busy street, but nowadays it's quite desolate after 9pm. All I see are either large gangs of these immigrants or large gangs of drunk Germans, both being reasons why I stopped taking my regular nightly walks. <br />I also had my own terrifying experience right in my own driveway. It was 2am and I had just gotten home. A group of 4 of these very loud invaders were walking past my house, so I just stood in the doorway to see what was going on. When they spotted me, they stopped and started making gestures and angrily yelling at me in a language I don't understand, then started running toward me up the driveway. I slammed the door about 2 metres in front of them and ran upstairs and locked the door. Why were they yelling at me in a foreign language? Were they expecting me to understand? Do I look like the type of guy who speaks one of their languages? I don't get it. <br />Over the years, I've had a strain of unusually bad \"luck\" here. Like the utilities. I've had my water meter changed for a unit that charged me 3x what it was supposed to and was able to measure this and prove it. I've also had that same water turned off 3x for \"non-payment\" where each time it was deemed to be an \"administrative error.\" Same thing happened to me with my gas heat 2x, and my electricity once. The last time they came to shut my water off, I already had my shit together in terms of amounts paid etc. and it still took the 2 guys 45 minutes on the phone to figure out that they had the wrong house (or whatever). In that interim, one of them asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a former banker, to which he mockingly replied it was obvious as he looked at some of my basement junk-piles. <br />The annual 300 Euro gas and chimney inspection is another pretext to violate someone's civil right to privacy because they \"check\" every room to make sure it doesn't have a chimney or a gas stove or water-heater, and yes, they DO ask about my national origin and my choice of profession sometimes. <br />Property taxes used to be a non-issue in that I had them directly deducted from my account, that is, until I bought the house next door. They deducted the first quarter's taxes for both buildings and then a year later I get a threatening letter stating that I hadn't paid them. When I went there to sort that out personally, I was told that my account number had \"popped out of their system\" and that they no longer had enough information to debit my account for the property taxes due. Four years later, that is still the case, and each quarter I get the same letter from the collection agency and just pay that, because any attempt I make at resolving the situation results in my account number \"popping out of the system.\" <br />You'd think that something as prosaic as grocery shopping would be easy, especially since I live across from a supermarket. Not the case. Initially I suspected they were short-changing me, and so I started paying attention to the change, and sure enough, they'd almost always short-change me by one banknote or one 1 Euro or 2 Euro coin, and every time I counted it in front of them and told them it was wrong, they'd quickly say \"sorry\" and add the right amount. In other words, they knew exactly what they were doing, but they were also expecting to get away with it. I stopped going there, not just because of the employees' conduct but the fact that this place has hordes of unwashed immigrant customers who constantly stare at me, and also have a propensity to touch all the food items with their (possibly) infected hands.<br />We had our own infectious disease scare here in Weiden when they discovered LEPROSY in the public swimming pool after they analysed the water because some immigrant had openly ejaculated into the water. This was after we had TWO mass-sexual-molestation incidents of young girls happen there. Didn't even make the front page of the local newspaper which instead had a big expose about a drunken German woman who drove her bicycle into a public flower-bed and damaged some of the flowers. Those flowers will grow back next year, but the SOULS of those 4 young women are damaged for life. <br />And on and on it goes. I've come to the conclusion that there exists a secret cabal here in Germany whose ad-hoc purpose is to drive out all the foreigners. This is not some conspiracy \"theory\" because if I was a German, that's exactly what I would do myself. Only problem is that they're short-sighted and cowardly because they seem to have no problem in picking on a European guy who came here bringing in some added tax revenue, but are too afraid of picking on some muslims and facing the very real prospect of having their heads chopped off using a rusty bread-knife. <br />I once had a guy confrontationally ask me what I'm doing in Germany after he saw me get out of my car, which has Czech license plates. Would he do the same thing to a muslim? I used to constantly get harassed at the local recycling yard for having Czech plates with people falsely claiming that I can't use THEIR recycling place. Had a lady threaten to call the Police on me, had one instance of a guy writing down my license plate number, and another instance of a woman filming me. Would you do THAT to a muslim? I solved that problem by no longer recycling anything anymore and just putting everything into the black Restmull-tonne. Fuck you, and fuck your little recycling. <br />So yeah, I'm still stuck here and it's dependent on a whole litany of things. Like I always say: Germany: you come for ze pain, but stay for ze TORCHAAAA!",
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"content": "The Denigration of Immigration\n\nI'm an immigrant. Always have been one, always will be one, and will never stop being one no matter where I relocate to on this Earth. I can't even go back to the country I was born in because it's not there anymore. As someone who has moved internationally (emigrated) EIGHT times, I'm well-versed in all that immigration entails, such as the culture-shock aspect; and one would think that after 50 years of doing this I'd be somewhat inured to its effects, but that is not the case. Nothing can ever fully prepare you for what awaits you when you cross that (border) line. In that sense, countries can almost be regarded as individual people where you constantly discover new things about them, until you come to a relatively important one like \"oh I get it, you're just STUPID.\"\nRight now I'm kind of stuck in the former Nazi Germany, the former Weimar Repiblic, or whatever you want to call it for reasons that are as complex as they are STUPID. I came here in 2011 looking for a decent life. Major reasons included a higher standard of living, better security, a desire to experience the left half of Europe and not just the right half, and, most importantly, a better price-to-rental ratio on real estate. I had done all the math, and having lived off investment income in the past (2004-2008) using the riskiest vehicle on the market, namely bank-managed funds, I decided that living off rental income would be more secure, in addition to providing me more income. I never expected to be living off just the rental income, but that is what it's come down to. \nMy rationale was quite primitive. I figured I'd move here, buy a few apartment-houses, and get a job. ANY job, and learn German to a degree commensurate with eventually getting the type of job I had been accustomed to in CZ, like that of bank manager. \nI followed all the advice I was given. I was told that the only way I could get a job was through the Arbeitsamt (Employment Office) so I registered with them. They promised to pay for a German language course which I successfully completed. They did not. I didn't know this at the time, but if you own any \"excess\" real estate in Germany, you can never collect ALG 1 or ALG 2 benefits under the Hartz IV system (unemployment or welfare) and that was the excuse the Arbeitsamt used to not pay me a cent. \nDuring my brief but tumultuous relationship with said Arbeitsamt I got sent on many job interviews. These always seemed promising at first and I always enjoyed job interviews because in the past, I had a near-100% success rate. I came to dread these later on because Germany is the only country I've been told to \"go to hell\" or asked \"what language did you speak as a child growing up?\" during a job interview conducted in English. I was asked that strange question 3x and my response was truthful each time. As a child, I grew up speaking Czech in the home and never saw any reason to conceal this fact until I moved to Germany and found out the we the Czechs are the most hated minority here, which perfectly explains why there's only 15,000 of us where most of those happen to be healthcare professionals and also explains why the state of healthcare is so dismal in CZ. Also had strange things happen to me like having to show my passport before the interview even began, being asked where I was born, or if I was single, married, or had a girlfriend. Keep in mind that unlike the US, questions like these are allowed at job interviews. One time I went to a private job agency and when the interviewer found out I had been born in Czechoslovakia, told me that \"we don't deal with any people from that country\" and made a sweeping hand motion indicating \"begone!\" Keep in mind that I have no criminal record, I have all the necessary documents, a college degree, good work experience, and already pay lots of taxes ipso facto by owning some significant real estate here. \nApparently I'm not in some protected class. Apparently they only want to hire gay immigrants who speak no German whatsoever and who may harbour terroristic intentions. Maybe next time I could pretend like I'm poly-gayic (or whatever the proper term is) by wearing an ascot or something. Funny that I was always initially suspected of being gay when I lived in the US but here in Germany it seems like I'm not gay enough. Pendulums swing and windmills turn but always re-turn to the same place, where Germans have gone from Nazi to diversity-Nazis where that diversity only applies to a very strictly-defined narrow set of parameters. Whatever the case may be, it doesn't apply to me. \nIn 2011 I wasn't the only person who thought that moving to Germany might be a good idea, where apparently 2.7 MILLION people had that same idea between 2011-2016. The number of unemployed or welfare-receiving people was 2.6 million yet somehow, magically the unemployment rate stayed the same despite that influx where rather than paying taxes, those 2.7 million people are costing Germany 49 billion Euros per year in added welfare expenditures which perfectly explains why Merkel asked for all that German Gold worth 75 billion to be repatriated. Adding further insult to injury, 3.0 million people moved OUT of Germany in that same 2011-2016 period, most being retirees. Keep in mind that Germany has a population of about 82 million, and this added influx of non-integrating invaders commits about 6,000 felonies per day and in some areas with the highest concentrations, crime has gone up by TENFOLD. \nI've had a bird-eye view of this slow-motion collapse of what had once been a decent place to live, right from my windows here in Weiden. I used to see people walking at all hours of the day and night because I live on a busy street, but nowadays it's quite desolate after 9pm. All I see are either large gangs of these immigrants or large gangs of drunk Germans, both being reasons why I stopped taking my regular nightly walks. \nI also had my own terrifying experience right in my own driveway. It was 2am and I had just gotten home. A group of 4 of these very loud invaders were walking past my house, so I just stood in the doorway to see what was going on. When they spotted me, they stopped and started making gestures and angrily yelling at me in a language I don't understand, then started running toward me up the driveway. I slammed the door about 2 metres in front of them and ran upstairs and locked the door. Why were they yelling at me in a foreign language? Were they expecting me to understand? Do I look like the type of guy who speaks one of their languages? I don't get it. \nOver the years, I've had a strain of unusually bad \"luck\" here. Like the utilities. I've had my water meter changed for a unit that charged me 3x what it was supposed to and was able to measure this and prove it. I've also had that same water turned off 3x for \"non-payment\" where each time it was deemed to be an \"administrative error.\" Same thing happened to me with my gas heat 2x, and my electricity once. The last time they came to shut my water off, I already had my shit together in terms of amounts paid etc. and it still took the 2 guys 45 minutes on the phone to figure out that they had the wrong house (or whatever). In that interim, one of them asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a former banker, to which he mockingly replied it was obvious as he looked at some of my basement junk-piles. \nThe annual 300 Euro gas and chimney inspection is another pretext to violate someone's civil right to privacy because they \"check\" every room to make sure it doesn't have a chimney or a gas stove or water-heater, and yes, they DO ask about my national origin and my choice of profession sometimes. \nProperty taxes used to be a non-issue in that I had them directly deducted from my account, that is, until I bought the house next door. They deducted the first quarter's taxes for both buildings and then a year later I get a threatening letter stating that I hadn't paid them. When I went there to sort that out personally, I was told that my account number had \"popped out of their system\" and that they no longer had enough information to debit my account for the property taxes due. Four years later, that is still the case, and each quarter I get the same letter from the collection agency and just pay that, because any attempt I make at resolving the situation results in my account number \"popping out of the system.\" \nYou'd think that something as prosaic as grocery shopping would be easy, especially since I live across from a supermarket. Not the case. Initially I suspected they were short-changing me, and so I started paying attention to the change, and sure enough, they'd almost always short-change me by one banknote or one 1 Euro or 2 Euro coin, and every time I counted it in front of them and told them it was wrong, they'd quickly say \"sorry\" and add the right amount. In other words, they knew exactly what they were doing, but they were also expecting to get away with it. I stopped going there, not just because of the employees' conduct but the fact that this place has hordes of unwashed immigrant customers who constantly stare at me, and also have a propensity to touch all the food items with their (possibly) infected hands.\nWe had our own infectious disease scare here in Weiden when they discovered LEPROSY in the public swimming pool after they analysed the water because some immigrant had openly ejaculated into the water. This was after we had TWO mass-sexual-molestation incidents of young girls happen there. Didn't even make the front page of the local newspaper which instead had a big expose about a drunken German woman who drove her bicycle into a public flower-bed and damaged some of the flowers. Those flowers will grow back next year, but the SOULS of those 4 young women are damaged for life. \nAnd on and on it goes. I've come to the conclusion that there exists a secret cabal here in Germany whose ad-hoc purpose is to drive out all the foreigners. This is not some conspiracy \"theory\" because if I was a German, that's exactly what I would do myself. Only problem is that they're short-sighted and cowardly because they seem to have no problem in picking on a European guy who came here bringing in some added tax revenue, but are too afraid of picking on some muslims and facing the very real prospect of having their heads chopped off using a rusty bread-knife. \nI once had a guy confrontationally ask me what I'm doing in Germany after he saw me get out of my car, which has Czech license plates. Would he do the same thing to a muslim? I used to constantly get harassed at the local recycling yard for having Czech plates with people falsely claiming that I can't use THEIR recycling place. Had a lady threaten to call the Police on me, had one instance of a guy writing down my license plate number, and another instance of a woman filming me. Would you do THAT to a muslim? I solved that problem by no longer recycling anything anymore and just putting everything into the black Restmull-tonne. Fuck you, and fuck your little recycling. \nSo yeah, I'm still stuck here and it's dependent on a whole litany of things. Like I always say: Germany: you come for ze pain, but stay for ze TORCHAAAA!",
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"content": "A short report I compiled in 2014, but if you add +5% to the projected numbers, the figures add up.<br /><br />THE MARKET OUTLOOK FOR PHOTOVOLTAICS IN EUROPE 2014-2017<br />By Dalibor M. Suchy<br /><br />INTRODUCTION<br /><br />The year 2013 was another historic one for solar photovoltaic (PV) technology, which has experienced remarkable growth over the past decade and is on the way to becoming a mature and mainstream source of electricity. The world's cumulative PV capacity surpassed the impressive 100-gigawatt(GW) installed electrical power mark, achieving just over 102 GW. This capacity is capable of<br />producing as much annual electrical energy as 16 coal power plants or nuclear reactors of 1 GW each.<br /><br />Each year these PV installations save more than 53 million tons of CO2. Remarkably, even during a time of economic crisis, an estimated 31 GW of new PV capacity was commissioned around the world in 2013 - roughly the same as in the record-setting year of 2011. But even if the headline numbers remain stable, the story behind them is changing dramatically. The results of 2012 signal a turning point in the global PV market that will have profound implications in the coming<br />years. For the first time in more than a decade, the European market for PV declined compared to the previous year. More vigorous growth in markets outside of Europe helped keep the global development of PV on an upward trajectory. <br /><br />Other factors - the approaching competitiveness of PV compared to other electricity sources, the changing nature of electricity markets, trade conflicts and the turmoil facing the PV industry due to consolidation - are also already affecting the market outlook for the near future.<br /><br />This report assesses the European and global markets for PV in 2013, and makes forecasts for the next five years. It is based on an internal analysis of data from industry members, national associations, government agencies and electric utilities. <br /><br />Major findings for 2013 include:<br /><br />• Around the world 31.1 GW of PV systems were installed in 2013, up from 30.4 GW in 2012; PV remains, after hydro and wind power, the third most important renewable energy source in terms of globally installed capacity<br /><br />• 17.2 GW of PV capacity were connected to the grid in Europe in 2013, compared to 22.4 GW in 2012; Europe still accounts for the predominant share of the global PV market, with 55% of all new capacity in 2013<br /><br />• Germany was the top market for the year, with 7.6 GW of newly connected systems; followed by China with an estimated 5 GW; Italy with 3.4 GW; the USA with 3.3 GW; and Japan with an estimated 2 GW<br /><br />• For the third year in a row, PV was the number-one new source of electricity generation installed in Europe<br /><br />• Under a pessimistic Business-as-Usual scenario, the global annual market could reach 48 GW in 2018; under a Policy-Driven scenario, it could be as high as 84 GW in 2018<br /><br />This report bases its analysis on PV systems that have been connected to the grid; the implications of this choice for how market growth is assessed and the differences between installations and connections are discussed in the Methodology section.<br /><br />GLOBAL MARKET OUTLOOK FOR PHOTOVOLTAICS 2014-2018 <br /><br />A new world order<br /><br />It is clear from the results of 2013 and the forecast for the coming years that Europe's leading role in the PV market is coming to an end. In 2012, Europe accounted for 74% of the world's new PV installations; in 2013 this number was around 55%. In 2014 it is almost certain that the majority of new PV capacity in the world will be installed outside of Europe. Part of the reason for the decline in Europe's numbers is a natural cooling down period after very strong growth in the previous two years. To be sure, there are still markets in Europe that have strong and still-untapped potential and room for significant PV growth.<br /><br />But this will occur at a more stable - and sustainable - rate than it has in the last few years. Going forward, the driving forces will be in countries like China, the USA, Japan and India. The PV market is becoming truly global.<br /><br />Increasing competitiveness<br /><br />PV markets in Europe and around the world continued making rapid progress in 2012 toward competitiveness in the electricity sector. The strong price decreases of PV technology, and increased electricity prices in general, have helped drive momentum toward what is often called \"grid parity\".<br /><br />The moment is near when the savings in electricity cost and/or the revenues generated by selling PV electricity on the market could be equal to or higher than the long-term cost of installing and financing a PV system. This so-called \"dynamic grid parity\" appears within range in several EU countries, and has been reached already in some segments of some countries. In most countries, PV market deployment still depends on the political framework in place. Various national schemes - whether they are being introduced, modified, or phased out - have a significant influence on forecasts and scenarios as they have serious consequences on national PV markets and industries. As shown by the substantial regulatory changes introduced by policymakers in several countries in 2013, dedicated financial support as the main driver for PV development is progressively vanishing. In the coming years, deployment strategies will depend much more on the capacity of PV power to actively participate in the electricity system.<br /><br />PV in the electricity mix<br /><br />For the second year in a row and the second time in history, PV in 2013 was the number-one electricity source in the European Union (EU) in terms of newly installed capacity. PV now covers 2.6% of the electricity demand and 5.2% of the peak electricity demand in Europe. As a result, it is already starting to have an effect on the structure and on the management of the electricity system. Grid and market integration challenges will therefore shape, much more than in the past, the capability to develop PV markets in the coming years.<br /><br />The factors lined up against the continued strong growth of PV in Europe and around the world are formidable: a continuing economic and financial crisis; industry consolidation; a global market rebalancing; political and regulatory instability as governments reconsider their commitment to renewable energy sources and climate-change mitigation. But even in the face of all of this, the following report shows how, under the right conditions, the prospects going forward for solar PV - a clean, safe and infinitely renewable power source - remain solid.<br /><br />The main questions are how and where continued PV growth will occur, and how committed policymakers are to making it happen.<br /><br />METHODOLOGY AND SCENARIOS<br /><br />The dynamics of PV development are well known in a market driven by incentives. But in a post-incentive era, when the market potential of PV depends on electricity savings and/or potential sales on the wholesale electricity market, forecasting market evolution becomes more complex than it was even a year ago. While most of the latest analyses indicate that in 2014, a large part of the European market will still be driven by specific support measures, several key markets are already entering the transition phase from an investor-driven market to an energy savings-driven market in the building segments (residential, commercial and industrial). In addition, the economic uncertainty in several European markets has in some cases pushed policymakers to make decisions that have a negative effect on the market, such as imposing retroactive measures. Such decisions severely erode investor confidence even as PV technology and competitiveness improve - slowing market development in a way that is not easily predictable. Moreover, these measures harm these countries' credibility not just for PV but for their whole financing sector.<br /><br />Two scenarios for the future development of PV markets can therefore be derived:<br /><br />• The Business-as-Usual scenario assumes rather pessimistic market behaviour with no major reinforcement or adequate replacement of existing support mechanisms, or a strong decrease/limitation of existing schemes. In this scenario, it is assumed that in countries close to transition, markets are significantly slowing down when Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) are phased out<br /><br />• The Policy-Driven scenario assumes the continuation, adjustment or introduction of adequate support mechanisms, accompanied by a strong political will to consider PV as a major power source in the coming years. Achieving this will also require removing unnecessary administrative barriers and streamlining grid connection procedures. Although market booms caused by inadequate support mechanisms are less likely to happen because of the growing exchange of best practices when designing support policies, they can still be observed in some cases, similarly to the Business-as-Usual scenario<br /><br />Under these two scenarios, this report analyses the historical development of the PV market and its potential for the future. Based on a bottom-up approach at country level, it presents aggregated figures and scenarios.<br /><br />In this bottom-up approach, consolidated forecasts should be understood as a range of possible PV market developments, with a high probability between the Business-as-Usual scenario as the lower boundary and the Policy-Driven one as the higher one. Lower or higher forecasts are of course possible as the history of PV market development has shown, but with a lower probability.<br /><br /><br />Installations and connections<br /><br />The methodology used in this report includes only systems connected to the grid and not those that have been installed but not yet connected. Therefore, the cumulative installed capacity refers to installations that can make a real contribution to meeting the energy demand. This also reflects both the energy system point of view and the regulatory point of view, as PV electricity tariffs are paid only to systems that are connected and producing electricity. The difference between installations and systems connected to the grid can be quite significant in some cases.<br /><br />The role of off-grid installations<br /><br />Long before PV became a reliable source of power connected to the grid, it was largely used to provide electricity in remote areas that lay out of the reach of electricity grids. While off-grid systems in Europe account for less than 1% of the installed PV capacity, they represent a significant power source in other parts of the world. For this reason, off-grid systems are also taken into account in the total installed capacity. In the USA, off-grid systems represented 10% of the overall market in 2009 and declined since then. In Australia and Korea, dozens of megawatts of off-grid capacity are installed every year and are accordingly taken into account in the total installed capacity in those countries. In countries such as India, the development of PV in the coming years could originate at least partially from hybrid systems and micro-grid applications. In that respect the notion of on-grid or off-grid installations could be more difficult to assess outside Europe.<br /><br />AC-DC numbers: counting comparable numbers<br /><br />PV panels generate direct-current (DC) electricity; electricity systems are based on alternating-current (AC) electricity. Most countries refer to installed PV systems by counting DC power, but some report AC power. The major difference lies in the small percentage of energy lost during the DC-AC conversion in the inverters, which could deliver non-comparable data. This report presents data as they are produced by national authorities to ensure the compatibility of historical data, whatever the conventions used.<br /><br />However, in the case of countries reporting AC power, this report also calculates DC power numbers. All forecasts and consolidated data are presented in DC power, while electricity production data must consider AC power. In such cases, a realistic loss during conversion is assumed. In Europe, Spain falls in this category.<br /><br /><br />MARKET EVOLUTION<br /><br />HISTORICAL PV MARKET DEVELOPMENT<br /><br />PV technology has grown over the past decade at a remarkable rate - even during difficult economic times - and is on the way to becoming a major source of power generation for the world. After record growth in 2012, the global PV market stabilised, with capacity additions in 2013 slightly above those achieved in 2012. At the end of 2009, the world's cumulative installed PV capacity was approaching 24 GW. One year later it was 40.7 GW and at the end of 2011 it was 71.1 GW. In 2012, more than 100 GW of PV are installed globally - an amount capable of producing at least 110 TWh of electricity every year. This energy volume is sufficient to cover the annual power supply needs of over 30 million European households.<br /><br />Europe remains the world's leading region in terms of cumulative installed capacity, with more than 70 GW as of 2013. This represents about 70% of the world's cumulative PV capacity (compared to about 75% of the world's capacity in 2011). Next in the ranking are China (8.3 GW) and the USA (7.8 GW), followed by Japan (6.9 GW). Many of the markets outside EU - in particular China, the USA and Japan, but also Australia (2.4 GW) and India (1.2 GW) - have addressed only a very small part of their enormous potential; several countries from large Sunbelt regions like Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America are on the brink of starting their development. Even so, the cumulative installed capacity outside Europe reached 30 GW as of 2013, demonstrating the ongoing rebalancing between Europe and the rest of the world and reflecting more closely the patterns in electricity consumption.<br /><br />Europe's market has progressed rapidly over the past decade: from an annual market of less than 1 GW in 2003 to a market of over 13.6 GW in 2010 and 22.4 GW in 2011 - even in the face of difficult economic circumstances and varying levels of opposition to PV in some countries. But the record performance of 2011, driven by the fast expansion of PV in Italy and again a high level of installations in Germany, was not repeatable in 2013 and the market went down to 17.2 GW. For the first time in the last 12 years, the PV market in Europe decreased in terms of new connected capacity. Even so, in 2013 the PV market in Europe again exceeded all expectations. However, due to variable delays in connecting PV systems to the grid depending on the country, some installations from 2011 were not connected until 2012 and this repeated again in 2013. This has an impact on market perception.<br /><br />For the seventh time in the last 13 years, Germany was the world's top PV market, with 7.6 GW of newly connected systems; China was second with an assumed 5 GW, followed closely by Italy (3.4 GW), the USA (3.3 GW) and Japan with an estimated 2 GW. Together, Germany, China, Italy, the USA and Japan accounted for nearly 21.3 GW, or two-thirds of the global market during last year. These five markets were followed by France (1.1 GW), Australia and India (close to 1 GW each) and the United Kingdom (925 MW). The performance of France, India and the United Kingdom (UK) was surprisingly moderate compared to expectations. Many other markets have started to show significant development.<br /><br />Regionally, Europe is followed by the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, which in addition to Japan and China includes Korea, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand. The third leading region is North America, with Canada developing steadily alongside the USA. Elsewhere, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region represents untapped potential for the medium term. PV also shows great potential in South America and Africa, where electricity demands will grow significantly in the coming years and where numerous projects have popped-up and will lead to installations in 2013 and after.<br /><br />Europe's market development is the result of a few countries that have taken the lead year after year, with Germany showing a constant commitment from policymakers to support the development of PV.<br /><br />After the Spanish boom in 2008, Germany was the only leading market in 2009, and consequently European growth as a whole was limited. This can be seen in retrospect as a consequence of the first phase of the financial crisis but also a year of stabilisation after the boom PV experienced in 2008. Major growth returned in 2010, with Germany scoring unprecedented installation numbers, and Italy and the Czech Republic adding together close to 3.8 GW of PV systems. As in Spain and the Czech Republic, overheated market development can produce a boom in one year and a bust in the next, as a result of pressure from conventional energy producers and policymakers concerned about the rapid growth of the market. In 2011, the combined boom of Italy's connections and Germany's installations led again to huge growth. France's growth in 2011 was at least partly due to its connection of projects installed in 2010 and consequently in 2012, the French market went down as expected. In 2012, the record year of Germany allowed the European market to keep a reasonable level of 17.2 GW, with 11 GW coming from this country and Italy alone. Behind these two, the UK, Greece, Bulgaria and Belgium provided a large part of the market development.<br /><br />The cumulative evolution shows a similar story, with countries stabilising their installed capacity after major growth events as Germany continues to expand its PV base.<br /><br />The geographical split of the PV market in Europe is linked to the speed at which the technology developed in recent years. Germany saw steady growth for nearly a decade and represents clearly the most developed PV market. But some countries that got a later start - the Czech Republic, Italy, Greece and Belgium - quickly reached high levels. Next to these leaders, Spain now appears quite low since its market has been constrained; the French and British results continue to reveal an untapped potential in both countries.<br /><br />From a PV perspective, Europe's development is unrivalled. The USA and Japan, once PV pioneers, are now years behind Europe in terms of PV penetration and China has caught up to their level in just a few years of fast development. Apart from Australia, the rest of the world scores quite low in terms of PV markets, though in many countries there remains great untapped potential.<br /><br />For the most part, the development of PV has until now corresponded with economic development:<br /><br />After taking root in OECD countries (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia), it started to reach emerging countries. Though as a bloc, BRIC scores low, China and India will show the way to Brazil and possibly to Russia. Africa scores last on the development list, though there is some short-term potential in South Africa.<br /><br />THE MARKET IN EUROPE IN 2013 AND THE FORECAST UNTIL 2018<br /><br />With more than 17 GW of new PV capacity in 2013 (compared to 22.4 GW in 2012), Europe has increased its cumulative capacity base to 70 GW. This impressive performance was driven mainly by two markets: Germany and Italy. France also performed below the level achieved in 2012 (which was inflated by a number of past installations that remained to be connected). UK improved its market situation with 925 MW of systems installed and connected in 2013. Greece (912 MW) and Bulgaria (at least 767 MW) boomed in 2013. There was also a strong showing in Belgium (599 MW), where the Wallonia region contributed much more than in past years with 269 MW. Next to these markets, Denmark (378 MW) is the major surprise of 2013 thanks to a net-metering system, fol owed by Spain (276 MW), Austria (230 MW) and Switzerland (200 MW).<br /><br />\"Installed\" vs. \"commissioned capacity\" figures<br /><br />While most market reports present installation figures, this report reports newly grid-connected capacities (\"commissioned systems\"). This is because there is no reliable methodology for counting installations and most official bodies report systems connected to the grid. Installation figures are interesting for the PV industry (they describe the demand for PV systems), but grid-connection data are more relevant when considering the increasing share of PV in the electricity mix (and the expenditures in FiTs).<br /><br />In the past, the fact that there was a notable gap between installations and connections is not new, that discrepancies have been noted in France, Belgium and Italy in recent years. Had those numbers been confirmed, the European demand for PV systems would have shifted up by as much as 5 GW in 2011. Instead of some 13 GW connected in 2011 in Europe, we would have had then some 18 GW of instal ations (reflecting the demand for PV systems).<br /><br />In 2012, we would have seen only 16.9 GW instead of 22.4 GW - completely changing the interpretation of market evolution during those two years.<br /><br />In 2012, at least three markets experienced possibly huge discrepancies between installations and commissioning. In Germany, the concept of \"commercial commissioning\" of PV systems - which can allow reporting systems that are not yet installed or connected - allows the argument that part of the 3 GW reported in December 2012 in Germany was not really connected, lowering the 2012 connections but increasing 2013 ones. The huge activity in Germany in the first quarter of 2013 did not materialise in installations numbers because of the 3 GW already counted in 2012. Depending on how they are considered, these discrepancies affect the way we perceive the market over the last three years.<br /><br />Relevant European markets in 2013<br /><br />The decline overall in Europe's PV market in 2013 hides various realities at national level; the market evolution was very different from one country to another. Even in Germany, the apparent market stability is the result of a chaotic evolution, due to regulatory changes and hectic responses from investors. Germany has seen three consecutive years with a roughly stable 7.4-7.6 GW of connections, leading to a total installed capacity in the country of a record 32.4 GW. This was accompanied by a progressive evolution in market dynamics, with 2013 showing PV gradually becoming self-sustainable. With PV's Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) now lower than the price of retail electricity, at least in the residential and commercial segments in Germany, PV development can be at least partially driven by self-consumption rather than only FiTs. Also, it should be remembered that the 7.5 GW connected in 2013 included 3 GW that had already been reported as installed in December 2012, but that were only physically connected in the first part of 2013; in other words, there is not really a constant level of 7.5 GW. A more realistic view of Germany's market in the last months shows a relative stabilisation at around 5-6 GW a year, quite far from the government expectations.<br /><br />In Italy, 3.4 GW of PV were connected to the grid in 2013. This is a significant decrease from the major boom seen in 2012, with 9.45 GW. But as was the case with Germany in 2012, many systems connected to the grid in Italy that year had actually been installed at the end of 2011. The numbers are different when analysing the market from an installation point of view; in this case, the Italian market was closer to 4-5 GW in 2011, 6-7 GW in 2012 and around 3.5 GW in 2013. After the rush of 2012, the Italian market has returned to a level that nevertheless remains high. Having reached a financial cap for FiTs, the Italian market will experience the transition to the post-FiT era faster than many expected.<br /><br />European PV market breakdown in 2013 (MW; %)<br /><br />Rest of Europe (751; 4%)<br />Switzerland (200; 1%)<br />Austria (230; 1%)<br />Spain (276; 2%)<br />Denmark (378; 2%)<br />Belgium (599; 4%)<br />Bulgaria (767; 5%)<br />Greece (912; 5%)<br />Germany (7,604; 44%)<br />United Kingdom (925; 6%)<br />France (1,079; 6%)<br />Italy (3,438; 20%)<br /><br />France scored third place among European countries in 2013, thanks again to previously installed projects finally being connected in 2013 along with a limited contribution from new installations. With 1.08 GW of PV in 2013, the country is still performing well below its theoretical potential and below 2012 when it scored 1.76 GW. While the government pushed recently for an additional 1 GW of capacity, the constraints on market development remain significant.<br /><br />In the UK, which installed 925 MW in 2013, the long-term prospects remain quite positive even if the speed at which the market develops is not so impressive. Greece installed almost 1 GW (912 MW), a record level for this country hit by an extremely hard recession, and 2014 could be a good year as well despite more restrictive conditions. Bulgaria experienced a boom in 2013, with 767 MW installed before the government reacted with harsh retroactive measures to slow the market growth; in 2014 the country's market will most probably slow down significantly. Belgium installed again a quite high level with 599 MW (with Wallonia's impressive 269 MW in the residential segment only), in a context of strong political concern over the cost of support schemes. This could lead to a relatively low market in 2014. Denmark was one of the surprises of the year with 378 MW, but the boom could be stopped in 2014. Austria installed 230 MW and Switzerland 200 MW. They have contributed marginally to market development, even if the numbers they have reached are the result of a major market growth.<br /><br />Some countries, notably Poland, failed to fulfil expectations in 2013 and the prospects for 2014 remain weak. In Spain, the government imposed an unexpected moratorium on FiTs, destroying what remained of the PV market; only 276 MW were connected to the grid in 2013 in this country, which should be among the European leaders. The long-expected net-metering scheme was never introduced and there are doubts as to whether it ever will be, given the government's fear of creating another boom.<br /><br />Ukraine experienced impressive growth in 2012 with almost 190 MW connected, thanks solely to the development of two very large power plants realised by one company. In 2013, 182 MW were installed again and the potential remains interesting. The Czech Republic finally installed 113 MW, a more important achievement than expected but very far from the booming levels of 2009 and 2010. Slovakia, which experienced a relative boom at the end of 2012 and the first semester of 2013, went down to only a few megawatts while the market in Slovenia grew once again, this time to 117 MW. Romania also has a certain untapped potential and the market in 2013 brought only 26 MW to the counter but many expect this market could grow in 2014.<br /><br />Russia remains quite low with only a few megawatts installed and little perspective on the short term. Sweden sees each year some megawatts being installed but without significant policies and prospects.<br /><br />Segmentation<br /><br />The European PV market remains quite heterogeneous, with diverse segmentation from one country to another. The market segmentation has been split to distinguish among ground-mounted systems, commercial and industrial rooftop applications and residential applications. The segmentation is not classified according to standard sizes, since the size of system largely depends on the respective structure of support schemes, country by country. In general, the commercial segment should be distinguished from the residential segment not only according to the system size but also the nature of the investor (private or public person) and the regime of retail electricity prices he is submitted to. The same classification can be applied to distinguish between commercial and industrial segments, according to the electricity price contracts.<br /><br />European PV market segmentation in 2012 (%)<br /><br />Ground mounted (28%)<br />Residential (21%)<br />Industrial (19%)<br />Commercial (32%)<br /><br />Market segmentation in Europe remained roughly stable in 2013 compared to 2012. But given the recent changes in regulatory frameworks, the ground-mounted segment will probably decline considerably in Europe in 2014. Overall a large share of the market in Europe is concentrated in the commercial and industrial rooftop segments; this trend will continue, based on the foreseen evolution of the legal framework. The residential segment has developed rapidly in some countries, such as Belgium, Greece and the UK.<br /><br />The top-five countries per segment show the continued domination of the largest markets (Germany, Italy, France, UK).<br /><br />Top 5 European residential PV markets in 2013 (%)<br /><br />Rest of Europe (22%)<br />Italy (22%)<br />Denmark (11%)<br />Germany (19%)<br />United Kingdom (12%)<br />Belgium (14%)<br /><br /><br />Top 5 European commercial PV markets in 2013 (%)<br /><br />Rest of Europe (15%)<br />Austria (3%)<br />Greece (6%)<br />Germany (49%)<br />France (9%)<br />Italy (18%)<br /><br /><br />Top 5 European industrial PV markets in 2013 (%)<br /><br />Rest of Europe (9%)<br />United Kingdom (2%)<br />France (4%)<br />Greece (9%)<br />Italy (44%)<br />Germany (32%)<br /><br /><br />Top 5 European ground mounted PV markets in 2013 (%)<br /><br />Rest of Europe (10%)<br />Spain (3%)<br />United Kingdom (7%)<br />France (7%)<br />Germany (65%)<br />Italy (8%)<br /><br /><br />Forecasts of PV in Europe until 2018<br /><br />Considering newly connected systems, 2013 showed the first PV market decline in Europe since 2000, mainly due to the end of the boom in the Italian market (which was the world's largest in 2011) while the rest of the European market stabilised. Had Italy experienced a more reasonable market level in 2011, the PV market would have stabilised from 2010 to 2013 or experienced slight growth. Overall, the future of the European market is uncertain for the coming years. The drastic decrease of some FiT programmes will push some markets down in 2013, even though a few emerging markets in Europe could of set any major decline. Given these new conditions, the short-term prospects for the European markets are stable in the best case or declining. In a Business-as-Usual scenario, without support from policymakers to PV, the transition could be quite painful over the next two or three years. In a Policy-Driven scenario, the market could stabilise in 2014 and grow again from 2015 onwards, driven by the approaching competitiveness of PV and emerging markets in Europe.<br /><br />2020 potential and targets in the EU<br /><br />Potential vs. market reality for PV deployment in the EU<br /><br />The EPIA report \"Connecting the Sun: Solar photovoltaics on the road to large-scale grid integration\", published in 2012, identifies three possible PV deployment scenarios to 2020 and 2030 that represent the technology's real potential:<br /><br />• The Baseline scenario envisages 4% of the electricity demand in Europe provided by PV in 2020. This represents about 130 GW of cumulative capacity by 2020. In 2030, PV could represent up to 10% of the electricity demand.<br /><br />• The Accelerated scenario, with PV meeting 8% of the demand, is based on the maximum PV growth in Europe that is possible with the current market trends. This represents about 200 GW of cumulative capacity by 2020. In 2030, PV could target up to 15% of the electricity demand.<br /><br />• A third case, which assumes that all regulatory, perceptual and technical barriers are lifted to allow the PV market to grow in most countries at a very fast speed, is called the Paradigm Shift scenario. This foresees PV supplying up to 12% of EU electricity demand by 2020. This represents about 390 GW of cumulative capacity by 2020.<br /><br />Table 1 shows the potential per country by 2020. In each case one of the three scenarios has been chosen, depending on how the market has developed until now and how it can continue to grow in the coming decade if appropriate policy measures are in place and barriers are removed. A corresponding linear annual market potential from now until 2020 is then derived and compared to last year's market size. <br /><br />Overall the EU market was at an appropriate level, but the results are not sustainably balanced.<br /><br /><br />PV potential in the EU 27 until 2020 vs. 2013 reality (MW)<br /><br />Country Potential Type Potential Actual <br /> Cumulative Of Annual Newly<br /> Installed Scenario Market Connected <br /> Capacity Until Capacity<br /> In 2020 2020 In 2013<br /><br />Austria 4,000 Accelerated 448 230<br /><br />Belgium 7,000 Accelerated 544 599<br /><br />Bulgaria 3,000 Accelerated 262 767<br /><br />Czech Republic 4,000 Accelerated 241 113<br /><br />Denmark 1,000 Accelerated 76 378<br /><br />France 30,000 Accelerated 3,250 1,079<br /><br />Germany 80,000 Paradigm Shift 5,949 7,604<br /><br />Greece 8,000 Accelerated 808 912<br /><br />Hungary 2,000 Accelerated 249 n/a<br /><br />Italy 42,000 Accelerated 3,205 3,438<br /><br />Netherlands 8,000 Paradigm Shift 967 125<br /><br />Poland 5,000 Accelerated 624 4<br /><br />Portugal 3,000 Accelerated 344 49<br /><br />Romania 5,000 Accelerated 621 26<br /><br />Slovakia 3,000 Accelerated 310 15<br /><br />Slovenia 1,500 Accelerated 163 117<br /><br />Spain 18,000 Accelerated 1,604 276<br /><br />Sweden 1,000 Accelerated 123 8<br /><br />United Kingdom 22,000 Paradigm Shift 2,521 925<br /><br />Rest of EU 27* 1,850 226 20<br /><br />Total EU 27 249,350 22,534 16,672<br /><br />* Rest of EU 27 includes Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Malta.<br /><br /><br />National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs) vs. the reality of PV markets<br /><br />The next table compares the cumulative installed capacity at the end of 2013 in most EU markets, the official National Renewable Energy Action Plan target for PV by 2020 and the necessary yearly market to reach this 2020 target (linear projection).<br /><br />NREAPs vs. reality of PV markets in the EU 27 (MW)<br /><br />Country Cumulative NREAPs Necessary Target Market Market<br /> Installed 2020 Yearly Reached In In<br /> Capacity Target Market In 2012 2013<br /> In 2013 For PV Till 2020<br /><br />Austria 418 322 n/a 2012 92 230<br /><br />Belgium 2,650 1,340 n/a 2011 996 599<br /><br />Bulgaria 908 303 n/a 2012 105 767<br /><br />Czech Rep. 2,072 1,695 n/a 2010 6 113<br /><br />Denmark 394 6 n/a 2010 10 378<br /><br />France 4,003 4,860 107.1 2014 1,756 1,079<br /><br />Germany 32,411 51,753 2417.8 2016-20 7,485 7,604<br /><br />Greece 1,536 2,200 83 2014 426 912<br /><br />Hungary 4 63 7.4 2014-15 2.5 n/a<br /><br />Italy 16,361 8,000 n/a 2011 9,454 3,438<br /><br />Netherlands 266 722 57 2014-16 58 125<br /><br />Poland 7 3 n/a 2012 1 4<br /><br />Portugal 244 1,000 94.4 2016-20 47 49<br /><br />Romania 30 260 28.7 2014-16 1.6 26<br /><br />Slovakia 523 300 n/a 2011 321 15<br /><br />Slovenia 198 139 n/a 2012 46 117<br /><br />Spain 5,166 8,367 400.2 2016-20 472 276<br /><br />Sweden 19 8 n/a 2011 4 8<br /><br />United Kingdom 1,829 2,680 106.4 2014 813 925<br /><br />Rest of EU 27* 62 360 37.3 2016-20 22 7<br /><br />Total EU 27 69,100 84,381 1910.12 2014 22,117 16,672<br /><br />* Rest of EU 27 includes Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Malta.<br /><br /><br />Potential, national targets and the reality<br /><br />The Business-as-Usual scenario for PV until 2018 that used to be aligned with the 4% target appears now to be slightly higher. This represents an improvement from previous forecasts, which estimated that growth would not quite reach the 4% target by 2020. Thus, it looks reasonable to expect that 4-5% penetration for PV could be reached even in the low growth case.<br /><br />The Policy-Driven scenario for PV until 2018 appears almost in line with the Accelerated scenario presented in the EPIA report \"Connecting the Sun\". It targets to cover about 8% of the electricity demand by 2020. While this scenario of reaching 8% by 2020 looks coherent and in line with optimistic market expectations, reaching 12% would require a real Paradigm Shift in the way PV is supported and incentivised, even after competitiveness is reached in many countries and market segments. It is clear today that this 12% scenario is no longer a realistic option and would require tremendous market developments, unsupported by public policies in Europe for the time being.<br /><br />The NREAPs as devised in 2009 are far from the reality of today's PV market. Apart from in Germany and Greece, market evolution in most countries could easily overtake the action plans. Future expectations largely reflect the current balance of installations, with Germany and Italy dominating the market. In the EU forecasts, the NREAPs targets with the intermediary value for 2015 have been taken into account. The extent to which they have underestimated the market developments in 2011, 2012 and even further in 2013 is obvious.<br /><br />Put simply, the potential for 2020 is at least twice as high as the levels foreseen in the NREAPs, pushing towards 200 GW capacity or even more in Europe by 2020. Possible revisions of the action plans will have to take into account the fast increases in installations over the last year.<br /><br />Support schemes in Europe and prospects for PV<br /><br />European PV support schemes assessment by country (early 2014 status)<br /><br />Austria - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Existing reasonable cap still limiting market growth.<br /><br />Belgium - Changing environment due to increased grid costs and the end of attractive past support. Reduced support to PV for all segments. Streamlined administrative processes. Reduced political support. Support levels in Flanders also reduced in some segments to maintain a market. In Wallonia, very high levels until 2012, leading to a complete review of the scheme.<br /><br />Bulgaria - Very unstable environment with repeated FiT decreases in 2012 combined to retroactive grid fees that have now been revoked by the Supreme Court. Investment environment very insecure.<br /><br />Czech Republic - FiT limited to very small applications (< 30 kWp), triggering a small market. Clear evolution of FiTs. Still a very strong adverse lobbying from conventional stakeholders, including grid operators. Retroactive law passed in 2010, another one expected in 2014. Grid operator blocking new licencing.<br /><br />Denmark - Net-metering under revision since November 2012. No market expected until new scheme is approved by the EC. Lower support due to a move from yearly to hourly net-metering; but should be open to larger segments.<br /><br />France - Clear FiT evolution in 2013 for systems up to 100 kWp. Improved transparecy on tendering schemes for larger systems. Doubling of yearly objective at the beginning of 2013, but actual support potentially not sufficient to reach objective. Adverse lobbying from conventional stakeholders. Willingness to limit development to control cost. Slow administrative processes still in place.<br /><br />Germany - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Restrictions on utility-scale installations to reduce market. Federal elections year making Germany the future of support beyond 2013 unsure with a willingness to reduce cost of FiTs, including retroactively. Simple and lean administrative process. Risk coming from grid operators to finance the grid and overall cost of the support to RES.<br /><br />Greece - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Past committed projects to develop market. Adverse financial environment limiting development of new projects. Residential PV favoured over large-scale PV plants. Licensing of new large projects frozen since August 2012, retroactive taxation adopted in Q4 2012, huge delays for producers' payments.<br /><br />Italy - New FiT scheme since August 2012 with short lifetime due to cap on overall support system cost. No visibility after financial cap reached (probably mid-2013). Wil ingness to limit development to control costs with the introduction of a register. Improving administrative processes. No direct support after financial cap is reached, leading to a market contraction.<br /><br />Netherlands - Net-metering and high electricity prices allowing for a residential market to develop rapidly together with an investment grant. Adequate support for a market close to grid parity in the residential segment.<br /><br />Poland - New FiT and Green Certificate scheme under discussion for over a year; long decision process still ahead, probably until 2014. Possible lack of investor confidence due to lack of formal government decision.<br /><br />Portugal - Clear FiT evolution for small to medium-size market segments. Financial crisis limiting market growth. Administrative process simplified for smaller segments. No visibility for larger segments. Competitiveness in the residential segment in sight, so market could develop soon without support schemes anyway.<br /><br />Romania - Favourable conditions for large-scale systems, support expected to be reduced in the future. Improved legal environment in 2012. FiT for small-scale systems pending approval. Could lead to an overheated market if support not adapted timely.<br /><br />Slovakia - Very low FiT and heavy administrative barriers. No profitability expected from any investment. Ongoing review of support for small-scale system which could be adopted by the end of 2013.<br /><br />Spain - Support to PV frozen at the beginning of 2012 and not reintroduced. Overal Spanish electricity tariff cumulative deficit (multi-billion-euro debt) blocking any new development. Net-metering scheme long awaited. Few projects starting independently from support schemes (self-consumption for commercial system with high self-consumption rate, large scale plants to sell on the electricity market), within an unclear regulatory framework. Heavy and slow administrative processes. Many attempts to revitalise the utility-scale segment without incentives, but no significant development so far.<br /><br />Switzerland - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Expected increased cap to be adopted this year. Long waiting list progressively being cleared. Market to remain stable this year or even increase.<br /><br />Turkey - Net-metering scheme for systems up to 500 kW. Large-scale project expected to be approved in 2013. Administrative process unclear. Market should take off in 2013 or 2014.<br /><br />United Kingdom - Drastic reduction of FiT in 2012. Support scheme regularly adapted now. Green Certificate (GC) scheme for larger systems expected to be reviewed to align itself with FiT levels for smaller-scale installations. Clear and lean administrative processes. Road to competitiveness still long.<br /><br />THE GLOBAL MARKET IN 2013 AND FORECAST UNTIL 2018<br /><br />Europe has dominated the global PV market for years but the rest of the world clearly has the biggest potential for growth. This was highlighted by market developments that saw Europe's share of the global market being reduced from 74% in 2012 to 55% in 2013.<br /><br />Driven by local and global energy demand, the fastest PV growth is expected to continue in China and India, followed by Southeast Asia, Latin America and the MENA countries. The PV potential of the Sunbelt countries - where PV can already compete with diesel generators for peak power generation without financial support - could range from 60 to 250 GW by 2020, and from 260 to 1,100 GW in 2030. And with the faster than expected price decrease that the industry experienced in 2012 and 2013, even more countries will see PV becoming competitive before the end of this decade.<br /><br />New installations of PV systems in the rest of the world accounted for 13.9 GW in 2013, compared to 8 GW in 2012 and 3 GW in 2011. China took first place among these countries with most probably 5 GW2, followed by the USA with 3.3 GW and Japan with a maximum of 2 GW. All are expected to continue growing in 2013, with China as one of the two top markets in 2013. Australia expanded rapidly in 2013 with around 1 GW of new installations. India installed 980 MW, finally realising a part of its huge potential. In Korea, 252 MW were installed, a sign that the market has restarted but it remains at a low level compared to Europe, constrained by a quota system. Taiwan reached for the first time the 100-MW mark with 104 MW while Thailand, with a huge pipeline of projects, commissioned 210 MW. Malaysia, where several manufacturers are producing, appears on the map with 22 MW. In the Americas, Canada has expanded slower than some have expected with 268 MW and Mexico and Peru installed several megawatts. Brazil and Chile, with their huge potential, haven't commissioned many systems yet. In the Middle East region, Israel remains the only country with a significant market, while Saudi Arabia showed in 2012 some interest for PV development. The Turkish market remains quite low for the time being despite its potential.<br /><br />PV market share outside Europe in 2013 (MW; %)<br /><br />Rest of the World (1,090; 8%)<br />Korea (252; 2%)<br />Canada (268; 2%)<br />India (980; 7%)<br />Australia (1,000; 7%)<br />China (5,000; 36%)<br />Japan (2,000; 14%)<br />USA (3,346; 24%)<br /><br /><br />MARKET EVOLUTION<br /><br />An examination of the total installed capacity reveals greater contrasts. Outside Europe, the market is well-balanced; three countries with a huge potential lead the pace, followed by an emerging secondary market. Except for the Australian boom in 2012 and 2013, the market remains under control in most countries. With that potential progressively unleashed, the share of PV installations outside Europe can only increase, rebalancing in such a way Europe will represent less than half of the global PV market in 2013.<br /><br />Global PV cumulative installed capacity share in 2013 (MW; %)<br /><br />Rest of the World (12,554; 12%)<br />India (1,205; 1%)<br />Greece (1,536; 1%)<br />United Kingdom (1,829; 2%)<br />Czech Republic (2,072; 2%)<br />Australia (2,412; 2%)<br />Belgium (2,650; 2%)<br />Germany (32,411; 31%)<br />France (4,003; 4%)<br />Spain (5,166; 5%)<br />Japan (6,914; 7%)<br />Italy (16,361; 16%)<br />USA (7,777; 7%)<br />China (8,300; 8%)<br /><br />It is important to note that China climbed to third place in terms of total installed capacity in 2013, ahead of the USA and Japan, two of the pioneers of PV development.<br /><br />Forecasts until 2018<br /><br />In the Business-as-Usual scenario, the expected growth of markets outside Europe is not likely to compensate fast enough for the slowdown of the market in Europe in the next two years. This assumes a negative perspective in most markets in the near future, especially in Europe. But even in this scenario, the global market could be as high as 48 GW in 2017.<br /><br />In 2013, the rapid decline of PV system prices in al markets triggered installations that compensated for the decline of the Italian market. But given the current uncertainty in the manufacturing segment of the PV industry, the stability of module prices remains an open question in the coming years - with implications for system price decreases and the opening of new markets for PV. The link between price decrease and the unlocking of new markets is the key to market development. But the inability of existing markets to absorb more gigawatts pushed prices even lower in 2012, due to overcapacity in the PV industry - itself a result of the time gap between the price decrease and the reaction of policymakers in some countries. This vividly illustrates how PV remains a policy-driven business, where political decisions influence considerably the potential market off-take.<br /><br />Market evolution over the next five years will depend mainly on developments in Europe and the ability of policymakers to maintain market conditions at an acceptable level. In the Policy-Driven scenario, the European market would stabilise first around 16-17 GW in 2014 before growing slowly again to around 25-28 GW five years from now. In that case, the global market could top more than 84 GW in 2018, with two-thirds of this coming from new markets outside Europe. The new markets could help ensure major growth even in 2013, and robust market development in the fol owing years. It is expected that the APAC region (without China) to represent between 10 and 20 GW each year until 2017. China alone could add 10 GW of PV installations each year, as announced by the Chinese authorities.<br /><br />The surpassing of the 100-GW mark in terms of cumulative global PV capacity in 2012 represents a major achievement of the PV industry in just a few years. Depending on the conditions of the Business-as-Usual scenario, the 200 GW mark could be reached in between 2015 and 2016, while in the Policy-Driven scenario, more than 420 GW of PV systems could be connected to the grid over the next five years.<br /><br />Forecasts per segment<br /><br />In 2012 rooftop segments represented around 22 GW of the total installations, while utility-scale applications reached more than 9 GW. But this segmentation will shift in the coming years. With the development of PV in the Sunbelt markets, EPIA expects utility-scale plants to grow much faster than rooftop applications. The rooftop market could in the Policy-Driven scenario double from<br />2014 to 2017 while the utility-scale market could in the same scenario quadruple from 9 to 37 GW. This can be explained by the nature of the investors in the most promising markets and the reduced opposition to ground-mounted PV systems compared to Europe. In the Business-as-Usual scenario, the rooftop market could decline in 2014 and 2015 and stagnate around the levels of 2012 until 2017 while the global utility-scale market would more than double in the next five years.<br /><br />At the regional level, the utility-scale segment is expected to at best stagnate in Europe even as it booms in the Americas and Asia including China. In both scenarios, the APAC region including China should see the largest share of new utility-scale applications, ahead of the Americas.<br /><br />In the rooftop segment, Europe could still account for 30 to 40% of the global market, with the APAC region including China taking first place with 40-42% in the coming five years.<br /><br />Future prospects for market development<br /><br />The development of PV was estimated according to two sets of drivers: the attractiveness of PV for the country and the attractiveness of the country for investors. While the country attractiveness for investors can change rapidly, the accuracy of the figure below remains quite important. Since 2010, the following markets have indeed experienced some PV market development: China, Australia, India, Israel. Several others are expected to grow fast in 2014 and 2015: Mexico, South Africa, Chile.<br /><br />PHOTOVOLTAICS IN THE ENERGY SECTOR<br /><br />PV: THE FIRST NEW GENERATION CAPACITY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION IN 2012<br /><br />For the second year in a row and the second time in history, PV in 2012 was the number-one electricity source in the EU in terms of newly added installed capacity. With 16.7 GW connected to the grid, PV outscored gas and wind. The remarkable progress made by PV over the last four years (it placed third among electricity sources for added capacity in 2009, and second in 2010) should be compared with the stability of wind penetration and the fluctuating development of gas power plant commissioning in Europe. Gas reached a peak in 2010, with more than 20 GW newly connected to the grid, before falling to slightly less than 10 GW in 2011 and above 10 GW of new installations in 2012.<br /><br />Including decommissioning (which remains marginal in the PV sector so far), power generation capacities from gas rose by just 5 GW in 2013. All other production sources, renewables and conventional, are far behind. Traditional electricity sources such as nuclear, coal and fuel oil have been decommissioned more than newly installed. Fuel oil lost the most in 2013, followed by coal and nuclear. The only sources of electricity that saw capacity grow in 2013 were renewables and gas.<br /><br />Rooftop PV takes first place while large PV installations (utility-scale PV) take the fourth place. Onshore wind, which remains an important source of new electricity installations, stayed in second place while the fast growing offshore wind positions itself at the level of biomass, with a bit more than 1 GW installed and commissioned.<br /><br />PV CONTRIBUTES ALMOST 30% OF NEW GENERATION IN 2013<br /><br />In terms of the electricity production coming from new generators connected in 2013, PV comes second, ahead of wind, after having scored first place in 2011. Due to the reduced operating hours of PV compared to wind and gas, PV additions will provide around 19 TWh of new electricity during a complete operation year, compared to 29 TWh from the new wind installations and 15 TWh from gas power plants running in average 3,000 hours a year.<br /><br />It could be argued that gas power plants running only 3,000 hours a year are being operated at less than their theoretical production level; this reflects the reality of the electricity market in Europe in 2012 and 2013. More interesting, the energy that will be produced by new PV and wind installations in 2013 based on 2012 additions represents enough electricity to compensate for the decommissioning of nuclear, fuel oil and coal power plants in 2013. PV continues to prove its ability to compete in the energy sector as mainstream power generation source.<br /><br />Based on the capacity installed and connected to the grid at the end of 2013, PV can currently provide roughly 2.6% of the electricity demand in Europe, up from 1.15% at the end of 2011 and 2% at the end of 2012. In Italy, more than 6.7% of the electricity will come from PV systems connected until 2013. In Germany, this figure is more than 5.6%, while Greece reached more than 4%. Belgium, Bulgaria and other countries are progressing rapidly as well.<br /><br />In most EU countries today, PV can be considered as peak power generation. Indeed, it produces during the day, at the time of the mid-day peak, competing directly with other peak generators. If we assume that peak power generation represents roughly 50% of the electricity demand in Europe, we should look at these percentages in another way: PV can produce today 5.2% of the peak electricity demand in the EU 27 and more than 13.5% in Italy, more than 11% in Germany, and so on. This achievement came in just a few years and shows again how the development of PV electricity in Europe is occurring at a faster rate than almost anyone had expected.<br /><br />Looking at the trends since 2000, PV is positioning itself in Europe as a major player, gaining on gas and wind. With more than 70 GW installed, the PV development is only at its beginning and more remains to be added in the coming years. Over the long term, PV market development forecasts show that PV will most probably stay in the top three technologies in Europe. Indeed, no other technology has reached or will reach in the five coming years enough maturity to challenge PV, wind or gas.<br /><br />Global PV electricity production<br /><br />Globally, PV represented at the end of 2012 roughly 110 TWh of electricity or 0.6% of electricity demand and 1.2% of the peak power demand. Given the speed at which markets outside Europe can develop, PV could in the coming years score the same percentage as in the best European countries.<br /><br />INDUSTRY EVOLUTION<br /><br />In 2013, the PV industry went again through a challenging period, with political, market and industry factors affecting business along the whole value chain. Important manufacturers disappeared, were acquired or had to adapt their business plan, decrease the utilisation rate and consequently reduce significantly their production. The tough market environment in Europe has forced many important players out of the PV business.<br /><br />The PV global market capacity has evolved mainly in a context of production overcapacity. Many players entered the business ramping up very quickly their production capacity to increase their share of what in most cases was wrongly forecast, volatile and policy-driven PV demand. Despite some cases of specific material/component shortage that have been seen in the last three years, module production capacity was in between 150-230% higher than annual global installations.<br /><br />Besides the supply and demand mismatch at a global level, the growing regional imbalance between the demand and the supply of PV modules that was observed until 2012 raised concerns. In 2013 however there were signs, still meagre, towards balancing PV market with regional supply mainly driven by the Chinese market growth.<br /><br />Since 2004, Europe became a net importer of PV modules mainly from Asian countries. Today, similarly to 2013, European industry represents only around<br />13% of the global market in terms of actual module production and around 24% of its own market. The rest is imported mainly from China and APAC countries which supply around 70% of the global PV demand. China is the only country that can cover its own growing market, with 320% more production than its need. That figure is expected to go down due to local absorption of PV production.<br /><br />PRODUCTION CAPACITY VS. ACTUAL PRODUCTION<br /><br />Regional distribution of production capacity and actual production of the upstream value chain components<br /><br />Apart from the module supply/demand regional imbalance, there has been an attempt to map the supply of the main upstream value chain parts of PV and identify the regional distribution for 2013.<br /><br />The distribution of production capacities remained in general terms similar to the one of 2012 in the different value chain parts. However, the differences among the regions remained significant depending on the type of product and its position in the value chain. In all cases though, the PV industry remained strong in Asia. Especially in wafers, c-Si cells, and c-Si modules China played and will continue playing a leading role. European production capacity remained competitive in the polysilicon business with annual capacity share reaching 17% and actual production share reaching 20% due to higher utilisation rates. The USA kept high shares in the polysilicon business, coming first in actual production.<br /><br />With respect to TF production capacities, Europe played an important role in 2013 by keeping above 20% shares in actual production. Germany with mainly CIGS and some CdTe technology shares contributed significantly to this share. The USA followed with a 12% share, while China kept a low profile in this sector with low production capacities and utilisation rates. The APAC region however with Japan and Malaysia as top producers covered more than 60% of the actual production of 2013.<br /><br />GLOBAL PV PRODUCTION CAPACITY OUTLOOK UNTIL 2018<br /><br />Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) across the PV value chain<br /><br />The data on overcapacity allow for a correlation between demand and production capacity in the main parts of the value chain. This is based on IHS Solar data and should be considered as one possible indication of the current production capacities. In general, production capacities refer to announced production capacities, which are typically higher than the actual capacity (due to industrial factors, obsolete or non-competitive production lines or production incidents resulting in downtime). Finally, contract manufacturing complicates the risk of double counting production capacities. Published numbers vary widely depending on the source, with production capacities sometimes reaching between 5-35 GW more than what IHS is reporting. In the worst case, overcapacity could last longer than many expect and continue to put pressure on prices.<br /><br />With all due caution, despite the consolidation phase that the PV industry is facing today, the yearly production capacity could continue growing along the whole main value chain. This growth will happen only in case of some further market growth globally. Given the necessary time to ramp-up production capacities, capacity evolutions after 2015 should be considered as an indication of optimistic market developments in 2014. This should then be considered as indicative, especially given the potential gap between both market development scenarios.<br /><br />The arrival on the market of new and improved products will also create dynamics that can influence the market and industry development patterns. However, it is evident that the future capacity growth rates will become steadier and more sustainable than in recent years, going away from the boom-and-bust cycle and disturbing mismatches between demand and production, linked to the history of market development until now.<br /><br />This is also the reason for overcapacity in the polysilicon sector and explains better the rationale behind the rapid price decline polysilicon experienced in 2013. While this price decline cannot be disconnected from the module price decline, it is even more acute in a sector where the European share continues to be slightly higher than in other segments of the value chain.<br /><br />For the next five years no major changes should be expected as far as the main technologies, crystalline silicon (c-Si) and TF, are concerned. A slightly higher growth rate is expected for c-Si mainly due to the uncertainty of amorphous silicon (a-Si) technologies, for which the growth rate might be reduced by around 3% until 2017. The reason for this negative CAGR is the lower module efficiency of a-Si in comparison with the rapid evolution of Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) and Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS), limiting the market for TF modules with efficiencies below 10% on module level.<br /><br />Also, it is anticipated that Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV) will start to represent a sustainable market niche in the coming years, with many projects coming in the Sunbelt region and the USA, which will finally allow the CPV industry to develop. Other emerging technologies such as Organic Photovoltaics (OPV) will gain a respective share in the market achieving high growth rates since the current production capacity is very small. Some see as a scenario around 300 MW of produced OPV and close to 1 GW of yearly production capacity globally until 2018. But due to the low efficiency and the characteristics of this technology, it could take years to transform OPV into a viable competitor of existing technologies.<br /><br />PV CAGR until 2018 (%)<br /><br />CPV (HCPV+LCPV) 41.09%<br />Modules (c-Si+High-efficiency PV+TF+OPV) 6.02%<br />High-efficiency PV 7.46%<br />OPV 153.65%<br />CIGS 8.70%<br />CdTe 5.95%<br />A-Si -2.98%<br />TF modules (inorganic) 3.17%<br />C-Si modules 6.34%<br />C-Si cells 9.00%<br />Wafers 9.22%<br />Silicon 6.71%<br /><br /><br /><br />TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT<br /><br />According to IHS Solar, the level of production capacity in 2013 reached 56.5 GW including all major technologies. Those capacities are likely to grow continuously, reaching a growth rate of around 6% until 2018: in the case of a fast-growing market, the production capacity could grow up to 75 GW in 2018.<br /><br />The predominant c-Si technology is expected to maintain its market share at levels of around 80% principally because of the maturity of the technology and also because of the existing and growing capacity in China and APAC countries, which favour wafer-based technologies. The low production costs of c-Si technologies will allow it to remain the top PV technology in the coming years. Cost reductions and record efficiencies on cell and module level keep the LCOE values low and the attention of the existing and new industry players high, making c-Si appear to be a less risky investment under healthy market conditions.<br /><br />After the huge growth expectations of TF technologies some years ago, the competing market price of c-Si has slowed the development of TF. The latter are expected to grow anyway at a lower rate, and therefore will stabilise their market share over the next five years. Among emerging technologies, OPV technologies and especially CPV technologies (both Low CPV (LCPV) and High CPV<br />(HCPV)) are expected to enjoy around 1% of the market share by 2018.<br /><br />As far as high-efficiency (above 20%) modules are concerned, due to lower competition within the respective players a 3% share could easily be reached. In addition the overall efficiency of PV modules should increase thanks to the generalisation of 20%-efficiency cells, in between the traditional c-Si and the high efficiency mentioned here.<br /><br />CPV, mainly HCPV, is considered by some as a sleeping giant. CPV is expected to reach around 1 GW of production capacity by 2018 meeting mostly HCPV installation demand. Emerging markets with high irradiation levels will provide market momentum to the technology, which has become very interesting to investors by achieving LCOE numbers similar to mainstream technologies.<br /><br />OPV and other emerging technologies are expected to create their own niche markets in the coming years, at a very low level compared to the global PV market. Such technologies should make a stronger presence but not before 2015 at soonest, assuming that current R&D will push down the costs (around 10 times higher today than conventional PV), and adapt them better to new customer needs to be served, possibly BIPV or total y new uses such as the automotive industry. The expectations are based on the assumption that after 2015 the PV industry will have emerged from today's consolidation period and there will be a healthier arena for such investments.<br /><br />CONCLUSION<br /><br />After many years of unfettered growth and innovation, the PV industry is now going through a challenging period, with shifting market dynamics and changing political support creating a climate of uncertainty. Still, even in 2013, in the midst of an economic crisis, the market for PV in Europe and around the world was strong - with more than 31 GW of new capacity.<br /><br />Going forward, key questions will play a role in determining how market evolution takes place:<br /><br />• Policy: The PV market remains in most places a policy-driven one, linked to changing political environments and commitments from government in a rather limited set of countries; with the right decisions to create smart and sustainable support schemes for PV, markets can continue to grow<br /><br />• Competitiveness: PV is rapidly becoming competitive, in terms of LCOE, with other power sources - and in some countries in some segments, it already is; grid and especially market integration challenges will however increasingly hamper future PV deployment<br /><br />• Industry consolidation: The current world overcapacity in PV modules is having a severe effect on companies all along the solar value chain; how this plays out will have an effect on market development<br /><br />• Trade: trade disputes in parts of the PV value chain are creating uncertainty that may affect markets forecasts in the next few years<br /><br />Amid all these questions, what remains unchanged is the enormous potential and undeniable benefits solar PV is already bringing to the power system - where it is becoming a mainstream player - and the promise it holds for helping achieve vital energy, environmental and economic goals.<br /><br />The results of 2013 bear this out. But they also reveal that a shift is taking place in PV markets - from one driven mostly by Europe to one that also depends on countries around the world with varying degrees of solar potential and the political will to exploit it.<br /><br />How much more the global market can grow in 2013 remains a question: The economic situation in Europe makes the moderate scenario more likely for the short term. A 15 GW showing in Europe could bring the world market easily above 35 GW, depending on the reaction of emerging markets. But a low market in Europe will most likely prolong the imbalance between supply and demand of PV components, making 2013 a difficult year for PV companies. Renewed political resolve is needed to restore investor confidence, remove bottlenecks and maintain a reliable but dynamic framework for the remuneration of PV.<br /><br />But under even the most pessimistic scenario, PV will continue to increase its share of the energy mix in Europe and around the world, becoming a reliable source of clean, safe and infinitely renewable energy for all.<br /><br /><br />GLOSSARY<br /><br />Alternating Current (AC): Electric current that periodically reverses its direction of flows - 50 times per second (Hz) for Europe, China, East Japan among others and 60 times per second for the USA, West Japan, Brazil. Solar PV power must be converted from DC (see below) to AC using a power inverter.<br /><br />Connected capacity: Refers to generating systems (e.g. PV generators) that have been installed and allowed to inject electricity into the grid.<br /><br />Direct Current (DC): Electric current that flows only in one direction. Solar PV power starts as DC and is normally converted to AC using a power inverter.<br /><br />Dynamic grid parity: Refers to the moment at which, in a particular market segment in a specific country, the present value of the long-term net earnings (considering revenues, savings, cost and depreciation) of the electricity supply from a PV installation is equal to the long-term cost of receiving traditionally produced and supplied power over the grid.<br /><br />Feed-in Tariff (FiT): Policy mechanism created and regulated by government to promote investment in RES (e.g. PV technology). Under FiT schemes renewable electricity producers are offered long-term contracts under which a guaranteed fixed amount of money is paid to them, usually by the utility provider (national or local), for the energy fed into the grid. The FiT rate is typically set above market rates, offsetting inherent risks in renewable energy production.<br /><br />Green Certificate (GC): Tradable certificate that represents the environmental or social benefits of (green) electricity generated from RES such as PV. Green certificates can be purchased both from electricity producers and consumers as a proof of producing or consuming renewable electricity.<br /><br />Installed capacity: Refers to systems put in place but awaiting the approval of the grid operator to inject electricity into the grid. It should not be confused with connected capacity (see above).<br /><br />Net metering: Compensation scheme that allows electricity consumers to reduce their electricity bills by giving them credit for the electricity produced by their PV system over a certain period of time (usually one year).<br /><br />Self-consumption: Possibility for any kind of electricity producer to directly use/consume part or all of the electricity produced at the same location (on-site consumption), instantaneously.<br /><br />",
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"content": "A short report I compiled in 2014, but if you add +5% to the projected numbers, the figures add up.\n\nTHE MARKET OUTLOOK FOR PHOTOVOLTAICS IN EUROPE 2014-2017\nBy Dalibor M. Suchy\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nThe year 2013 was another historic one for solar photovoltaic (PV) technology, which has experienced remarkable growth over the past decade and is on the way to becoming a mature and mainstream source of electricity. The world's cumulative PV capacity surpassed the impressive 100-gigawatt(GW) installed electrical power mark, achieving just over 102 GW. This capacity is capable of\nproducing as much annual electrical energy as 16 coal power plants or nuclear reactors of 1 GW each.\n\nEach year these PV installations save more than 53 million tons of CO2. Remarkably, even during a time of economic crisis, an estimated 31 GW of new PV capacity was commissioned around the world in 2013 - roughly the same as in the record-setting year of 2011. But even if the headline numbers remain stable, the story behind them is changing dramatically. The results of 2012 signal a turning point in the global PV market that will have profound implications in the coming\nyears. For the first time in more than a decade, the European market for PV declined compared to the previous year. More vigorous growth in markets outside of Europe helped keep the global development of PV on an upward trajectory. \n\nOther factors - the approaching competitiveness of PV compared to other electricity sources, the changing nature of electricity markets, trade conflicts and the turmoil facing the PV industry due to consolidation - are also already affecting the market outlook for the near future.\n\nThis report assesses the European and global markets for PV in 2013, and makes forecasts for the next five years. It is based on an internal analysis of data from industry members, national associations, government agencies and electric utilities. \n\nMajor findings for 2013 include:\n\n• Around the world 31.1 GW of PV systems were installed in 2013, up from 30.4 GW in 2012; PV remains, after hydro and wind power, the third most important renewable energy source in terms of globally installed capacity\n\n• 17.2 GW of PV capacity were connected to the grid in Europe in 2013, compared to 22.4 GW in 2012; Europe still accounts for the predominant share of the global PV market, with 55% of all new capacity in 2013\n\n• Germany was the top market for the year, with 7.6 GW of newly connected systems; followed by China with an estimated 5 GW; Italy with 3.4 GW; the USA with 3.3 GW; and Japan with an estimated 2 GW\n\n• For the third year in a row, PV was the number-one new source of electricity generation installed in Europe\n\n• Under a pessimistic Business-as-Usual scenario, the global annual market could reach 48 GW in 2018; under a Policy-Driven scenario, it could be as high as 84 GW in 2018\n\nThis report bases its analysis on PV systems that have been connected to the grid; the implications of this choice for how market growth is assessed and the differences between installations and connections are discussed in the Methodology section.\n\nGLOBAL MARKET OUTLOOK FOR PHOTOVOLTAICS 2014-2018 \n\nA new world order\n\nIt is clear from the results of 2013 and the forecast for the coming years that Europe's leading role in the PV market is coming to an end. In 2012, Europe accounted for 74% of the world's new PV installations; in 2013 this number was around 55%. In 2014 it is almost certain that the majority of new PV capacity in the world will be installed outside of Europe. Part of the reason for the decline in Europe's numbers is a natural cooling down period after very strong growth in the previous two years. To be sure, there are still markets in Europe that have strong and still-untapped potential and room for significant PV growth.\n\nBut this will occur at a more stable - and sustainable - rate than it has in the last few years. Going forward, the driving forces will be in countries like China, the USA, Japan and India. The PV market is becoming truly global.\n\nIncreasing competitiveness\n\nPV markets in Europe and around the world continued making rapid progress in 2012 toward competitiveness in the electricity sector. The strong price decreases of PV technology, and increased electricity prices in general, have helped drive momentum toward what is often called \"grid parity\".\n\nThe moment is near when the savings in electricity cost and/or the revenues generated by selling PV electricity on the market could be equal to or higher than the long-term cost of installing and financing a PV system. This so-called \"dynamic grid parity\" appears within range in several EU countries, and has been reached already in some segments of some countries. In most countries, PV market deployment still depends on the political framework in place. Various national schemes - whether they are being introduced, modified, or phased out - have a significant influence on forecasts and scenarios as they have serious consequences on national PV markets and industries. As shown by the substantial regulatory changes introduced by policymakers in several countries in 2013, dedicated financial support as the main driver for PV development is progressively vanishing. In the coming years, deployment strategies will depend much more on the capacity of PV power to actively participate in the electricity system.\n\nPV in the electricity mix\n\nFor the second year in a row and the second time in history, PV in 2013 was the number-one electricity source in the European Union (EU) in terms of newly installed capacity. PV now covers 2.6% of the electricity demand and 5.2% of the peak electricity demand in Europe. As a result, it is already starting to have an effect on the structure and on the management of the electricity system. Grid and market integration challenges will therefore shape, much more than in the past, the capability to develop PV markets in the coming years.\n\nThe factors lined up against the continued strong growth of PV in Europe and around the world are formidable: a continuing economic and financial crisis; industry consolidation; a global market rebalancing; political and regulatory instability as governments reconsider their commitment to renewable energy sources and climate-change mitigation. But even in the face of all of this, the following report shows how, under the right conditions, the prospects going forward for solar PV - a clean, safe and infinitely renewable power source - remain solid.\n\nThe main questions are how and where continued PV growth will occur, and how committed policymakers are to making it happen.\n\nMETHODOLOGY AND SCENARIOS\n\nThe dynamics of PV development are well known in a market driven by incentives. But in a post-incentive era, when the market potential of PV depends on electricity savings and/or potential sales on the wholesale electricity market, forecasting market evolution becomes more complex than it was even a year ago. While most of the latest analyses indicate that in 2014, a large part of the European market will still be driven by specific support measures, several key markets are already entering the transition phase from an investor-driven market to an energy savings-driven market in the building segments (residential, commercial and industrial). In addition, the economic uncertainty in several European markets has in some cases pushed policymakers to make decisions that have a negative effect on the market, such as imposing retroactive measures. Such decisions severely erode investor confidence even as PV technology and competitiveness improve - slowing market development in a way that is not easily predictable. Moreover, these measures harm these countries' credibility not just for PV but for their whole financing sector.\n\nTwo scenarios for the future development of PV markets can therefore be derived:\n\n• The Business-as-Usual scenario assumes rather pessimistic market behaviour with no major reinforcement or adequate replacement of existing support mechanisms, or a strong decrease/limitation of existing schemes. In this scenario, it is assumed that in countries close to transition, markets are significantly slowing down when Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) are phased out\n\n• The Policy-Driven scenario assumes the continuation, adjustment or introduction of adequate support mechanisms, accompanied by a strong political will to consider PV as a major power source in the coming years. Achieving this will also require removing unnecessary administrative barriers and streamlining grid connection procedures. Although market booms caused by inadequate support mechanisms are less likely to happen because of the growing exchange of best practices when designing support policies, they can still be observed in some cases, similarly to the Business-as-Usual scenario\n\nUnder these two scenarios, this report analyses the historical development of the PV market and its potential for the future. Based on a bottom-up approach at country level, it presents aggregated figures and scenarios.\n\nIn this bottom-up approach, consolidated forecasts should be understood as a range of possible PV market developments, with a high probability between the Business-as-Usual scenario as the lower boundary and the Policy-Driven one as the higher one. Lower or higher forecasts are of course possible as the history of PV market development has shown, but with a lower probability.\n\n\nInstallations and connections\n\nThe methodology used in this report includes only systems connected to the grid and not those that have been installed but not yet connected. Therefore, the cumulative installed capacity refers to installations that can make a real contribution to meeting the energy demand. This also reflects both the energy system point of view and the regulatory point of view, as PV electricity tariffs are paid only to systems that are connected and producing electricity. The difference between installations and systems connected to the grid can be quite significant in some cases.\n\nThe role of off-grid installations\n\nLong before PV became a reliable source of power connected to the grid, it was largely used to provide electricity in remote areas that lay out of the reach of electricity grids. While off-grid systems in Europe account for less than 1% of the installed PV capacity, they represent a significant power source in other parts of the world. For this reason, off-grid systems are also taken into account in the total installed capacity. In the USA, off-grid systems represented 10% of the overall market in 2009 and declined since then. In Australia and Korea, dozens of megawatts of off-grid capacity are installed every year and are accordingly taken into account in the total installed capacity in those countries. In countries such as India, the development of PV in the coming years could originate at least partially from hybrid systems and micro-grid applications. In that respect the notion of on-grid or off-grid installations could be more difficult to assess outside Europe.\n\nAC-DC numbers: counting comparable numbers\n\nPV panels generate direct-current (DC) electricity; electricity systems are based on alternating-current (AC) electricity. Most countries refer to installed PV systems by counting DC power, but some report AC power. The major difference lies in the small percentage of energy lost during the DC-AC conversion in the inverters, which could deliver non-comparable data. This report presents data as they are produced by national authorities to ensure the compatibility of historical data, whatever the conventions used.\n\nHowever, in the case of countries reporting AC power, this report also calculates DC power numbers. All forecasts and consolidated data are presented in DC power, while electricity production data must consider AC power. In such cases, a realistic loss during conversion is assumed. In Europe, Spain falls in this category.\n\n\nMARKET EVOLUTION\n\nHISTORICAL PV MARKET DEVELOPMENT\n\nPV technology has grown over the past decade at a remarkable rate - even during difficult economic times - and is on the way to becoming a major source of power generation for the world. After record growth in 2012, the global PV market stabilised, with capacity additions in 2013 slightly above those achieved in 2012. At the end of 2009, the world's cumulative installed PV capacity was approaching 24 GW. One year later it was 40.7 GW and at the end of 2011 it was 71.1 GW. In 2012, more than 100 GW of PV are installed globally - an amount capable of producing at least 110 TWh of electricity every year. This energy volume is sufficient to cover the annual power supply needs of over 30 million European households.\n\nEurope remains the world's leading region in terms of cumulative installed capacity, with more than 70 GW as of 2013. This represents about 70% of the world's cumulative PV capacity (compared to about 75% of the world's capacity in 2011). Next in the ranking are China (8.3 GW) and the USA (7.8 GW), followed by Japan (6.9 GW). Many of the markets outside EU - in particular China, the USA and Japan, but also Australia (2.4 GW) and India (1.2 GW) - have addressed only a very small part of their enormous potential; several countries from large Sunbelt regions like Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America are on the brink of starting their development. Even so, the cumulative installed capacity outside Europe reached 30 GW as of 2013, demonstrating the ongoing rebalancing between Europe and the rest of the world and reflecting more closely the patterns in electricity consumption.\n\nEurope's market has progressed rapidly over the past decade: from an annual market of less than 1 GW in 2003 to a market of over 13.6 GW in 2010 and 22.4 GW in 2011 - even in the face of difficult economic circumstances and varying levels of opposition to PV in some countries. But the record performance of 2011, driven by the fast expansion of PV in Italy and again a high level of installations in Germany, was not repeatable in 2013 and the market went down to 17.2 GW. For the first time in the last 12 years, the PV market in Europe decreased in terms of new connected capacity. Even so, in 2013 the PV market in Europe again exceeded all expectations. However, due to variable delays in connecting PV systems to the grid depending on the country, some installations from 2011 were not connected until 2012 and this repeated again in 2013. This has an impact on market perception.\n\nFor the seventh time in the last 13 years, Germany was the world's top PV market, with 7.6 GW of newly connected systems; China was second with an assumed 5 GW, followed closely by Italy (3.4 GW), the USA (3.3 GW) and Japan with an estimated 2 GW. Together, Germany, China, Italy, the USA and Japan accounted for nearly 21.3 GW, or two-thirds of the global market during last year. These five markets were followed by France (1.1 GW), Australia and India (close to 1 GW each) and the United Kingdom (925 MW). The performance of France, India and the United Kingdom (UK) was surprisingly moderate compared to expectations. Many other markets have started to show significant development.\n\nRegionally, Europe is followed by the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, which in addition to Japan and China includes Korea, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand. The third leading region is North America, with Canada developing steadily alongside the USA. Elsewhere, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region represents untapped potential for the medium term. PV also shows great potential in South America and Africa, where electricity demands will grow significantly in the coming years and where numerous projects have popped-up and will lead to installations in 2013 and after.\n\nEurope's market development is the result of a few countries that have taken the lead year after year, with Germany showing a constant commitment from policymakers to support the development of PV.\n\nAfter the Spanish boom in 2008, Germany was the only leading market in 2009, and consequently European growth as a whole was limited. This can be seen in retrospect as a consequence of the first phase of the financial crisis but also a year of stabilisation after the boom PV experienced in 2008. Major growth returned in 2010, with Germany scoring unprecedented installation numbers, and Italy and the Czech Republic adding together close to 3.8 GW of PV systems. As in Spain and the Czech Republic, overheated market development can produce a boom in one year and a bust in the next, as a result of pressure from conventional energy producers and policymakers concerned about the rapid growth of the market. In 2011, the combined boom of Italy's connections and Germany's installations led again to huge growth. France's growth in 2011 was at least partly due to its connection of projects installed in 2010 and consequently in 2012, the French market went down as expected. In 2012, the record year of Germany allowed the European market to keep a reasonable level of 17.2 GW, with 11 GW coming from this country and Italy alone. Behind these two, the UK, Greece, Bulgaria and Belgium provided a large part of the market development.\n\nThe cumulative evolution shows a similar story, with countries stabilising their installed capacity after major growth events as Germany continues to expand its PV base.\n\nThe geographical split of the PV market in Europe is linked to the speed at which the technology developed in recent years. Germany saw steady growth for nearly a decade and represents clearly the most developed PV market. But some countries that got a later start - the Czech Republic, Italy, Greece and Belgium - quickly reached high levels. Next to these leaders, Spain now appears quite low since its market has been constrained; the French and British results continue to reveal an untapped potential in both countries.\n\nFrom a PV perspective, Europe's development is unrivalled. The USA and Japan, once PV pioneers, are now years behind Europe in terms of PV penetration and China has caught up to their level in just a few years of fast development. Apart from Australia, the rest of the world scores quite low in terms of PV markets, though in many countries there remains great untapped potential.\n\nFor the most part, the development of PV has until now corresponded with economic development:\n\nAfter taking root in OECD countries (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia), it started to reach emerging countries. Though as a bloc, BRIC scores low, China and India will show the way to Brazil and possibly to Russia. Africa scores last on the development list, though there is some short-term potential in South Africa.\n\nTHE MARKET IN EUROPE IN 2013 AND THE FORECAST UNTIL 2018\n\nWith more than 17 GW of new PV capacity in 2013 (compared to 22.4 GW in 2012), Europe has increased its cumulative capacity base to 70 GW. This impressive performance was driven mainly by two markets: Germany and Italy. France also performed below the level achieved in 2012 (which was inflated by a number of past installations that remained to be connected). UK improved its market situation with 925 MW of systems installed and connected in 2013. Greece (912 MW) and Bulgaria (at least 767 MW) boomed in 2013. There was also a strong showing in Belgium (599 MW), where the Wallonia region contributed much more than in past years with 269 MW. Next to these markets, Denmark (378 MW) is the major surprise of 2013 thanks to a net-metering system, fol owed by Spain (276 MW), Austria (230 MW) and Switzerland (200 MW).\n\n\"Installed\" vs. \"commissioned capacity\" figures\n\nWhile most market reports present installation figures, this report reports newly grid-connected capacities (\"commissioned systems\"). This is because there is no reliable methodology for counting installations and most official bodies report systems connected to the grid. Installation figures are interesting for the PV industry (they describe the demand for PV systems), but grid-connection data are more relevant when considering the increasing share of PV in the electricity mix (and the expenditures in FiTs).\n\nIn the past, the fact that there was a notable gap between installations and connections is not new, that discrepancies have been noted in France, Belgium and Italy in recent years. Had those numbers been confirmed, the European demand for PV systems would have shifted up by as much as 5 GW in 2011. Instead of some 13 GW connected in 2011 in Europe, we would have had then some 18 GW of instal ations (reflecting the demand for PV systems).\n\nIn 2012, we would have seen only 16.9 GW instead of 22.4 GW - completely changing the interpretation of market evolution during those two years.\n\nIn 2012, at least three markets experienced possibly huge discrepancies between installations and commissioning. In Germany, the concept of \"commercial commissioning\" of PV systems - which can allow reporting systems that are not yet installed or connected - allows the argument that part of the 3 GW reported in December 2012 in Germany was not really connected, lowering the 2012 connections but increasing 2013 ones. The huge activity in Germany in the first quarter of 2013 did not materialise in installations numbers because of the 3 GW already counted in 2012. Depending on how they are considered, these discrepancies affect the way we perceive the market over the last three years.\n\nRelevant European markets in 2013\n\nThe decline overall in Europe's PV market in 2013 hides various realities at national level; the market evolution was very different from one country to another. Even in Germany, the apparent market stability is the result of a chaotic evolution, due to regulatory changes and hectic responses from investors. Germany has seen three consecutive years with a roughly stable 7.4-7.6 GW of connections, leading to a total installed capacity in the country of a record 32.4 GW. This was accompanied by a progressive evolution in market dynamics, with 2013 showing PV gradually becoming self-sustainable. With PV's Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) now lower than the price of retail electricity, at least in the residential and commercial segments in Germany, PV development can be at least partially driven by self-consumption rather than only FiTs. Also, it should be remembered that the 7.5 GW connected in 2013 included 3 GW that had already been reported as installed in December 2012, but that were only physically connected in the first part of 2013; in other words, there is not really a constant level of 7.5 GW. A more realistic view of Germany's market in the last months shows a relative stabilisation at around 5-6 GW a year, quite far from the government expectations.\n\nIn Italy, 3.4 GW of PV were connected to the grid in 2013. This is a significant decrease from the major boom seen in 2012, with 9.45 GW. But as was the case with Germany in 2012, many systems connected to the grid in Italy that year had actually been installed at the end of 2011. The numbers are different when analysing the market from an installation point of view; in this case, the Italian market was closer to 4-5 GW in 2011, 6-7 GW in 2012 and around 3.5 GW in 2013. After the rush of 2012, the Italian market has returned to a level that nevertheless remains high. Having reached a financial cap for FiTs, the Italian market will experience the transition to the post-FiT era faster than many expected.\n\nEuropean PV market breakdown in 2013 (MW; %)\n\nRest of Europe (751; 4%)\nSwitzerland (200; 1%)\nAustria (230; 1%)\nSpain (276; 2%)\nDenmark (378; 2%)\nBelgium (599; 4%)\nBulgaria (767; 5%)\nGreece (912; 5%)\nGermany (7,604; 44%)\nUnited Kingdom (925; 6%)\nFrance (1,079; 6%)\nItaly (3,438; 20%)\n\nFrance scored third place among European countries in 2013, thanks again to previously installed projects finally being connected in 2013 along with a limited contribution from new installations. With 1.08 GW of PV in 2013, the country is still performing well below its theoretical potential and below 2012 when it scored 1.76 GW. While the government pushed recently for an additional 1 GW of capacity, the constraints on market development remain significant.\n\nIn the UK, which installed 925 MW in 2013, the long-term prospects remain quite positive even if the speed at which the market develops is not so impressive. Greece installed almost 1 GW (912 MW), a record level for this country hit by an extremely hard recession, and 2014 could be a good year as well despite more restrictive conditions. Bulgaria experienced a boom in 2013, with 767 MW installed before the government reacted with harsh retroactive measures to slow the market growth; in 2014 the country's market will most probably slow down significantly. Belgium installed again a quite high level with 599 MW (with Wallonia's impressive 269 MW in the residential segment only), in a context of strong political concern over the cost of support schemes. This could lead to a relatively low market in 2014. Denmark was one of the surprises of the year with 378 MW, but the boom could be stopped in 2014. Austria installed 230 MW and Switzerland 200 MW. They have contributed marginally to market development, even if the numbers they have reached are the result of a major market growth.\n\nSome countries, notably Poland, failed to fulfil expectations in 2013 and the prospects for 2014 remain weak. In Spain, the government imposed an unexpected moratorium on FiTs, destroying what remained of the PV market; only 276 MW were connected to the grid in 2013 in this country, which should be among the European leaders. The long-expected net-metering scheme was never introduced and there are doubts as to whether it ever will be, given the government's fear of creating another boom.\n\nUkraine experienced impressive growth in 2012 with almost 190 MW connected, thanks solely to the development of two very large power plants realised by one company. In 2013, 182 MW were installed again and the potential remains interesting. The Czech Republic finally installed 113 MW, a more important achievement than expected but very far from the booming levels of 2009 and 2010. Slovakia, which experienced a relative boom at the end of 2012 and the first semester of 2013, went down to only a few megawatts while the market in Slovenia grew once again, this time to 117 MW. Romania also has a certain untapped potential and the market in 2013 brought only 26 MW to the counter but many expect this market could grow in 2014.\n\nRussia remains quite low with only a few megawatts installed and little perspective on the short term. Sweden sees each year some megawatts being installed but without significant policies and prospects.\n\nSegmentation\n\nThe European PV market remains quite heterogeneous, with diverse segmentation from one country to another. The market segmentation has been split to distinguish among ground-mounted systems, commercial and industrial rooftop applications and residential applications. The segmentation is not classified according to standard sizes, since the size of system largely depends on the respective structure of support schemes, country by country. In general, the commercial segment should be distinguished from the residential segment not only according to the system size but also the nature of the investor (private or public person) and the regime of retail electricity prices he is submitted to. The same classification can be applied to distinguish between commercial and industrial segments, according to the electricity price contracts.\n\nEuropean PV market segmentation in 2012 (%)\n\nGround mounted (28%)\nResidential (21%)\nIndustrial (19%)\nCommercial (32%)\n\nMarket segmentation in Europe remained roughly stable in 2013 compared to 2012. But given the recent changes in regulatory frameworks, the ground-mounted segment will probably decline considerably in Europe in 2014. Overall a large share of the market in Europe is concentrated in the commercial and industrial rooftop segments; this trend will continue, based on the foreseen evolution of the legal framework. The residential segment has developed rapidly in some countries, such as Belgium, Greece and the UK.\n\nThe top-five countries per segment show the continued domination of the largest markets (Germany, Italy, France, UK).\n\nTop 5 European residential PV markets in 2013 (%)\n\nRest of Europe (22%)\nItaly (22%)\nDenmark (11%)\nGermany (19%)\nUnited Kingdom (12%)\nBelgium (14%)\n\n\nTop 5 European commercial PV markets in 2013 (%)\n\nRest of Europe (15%)\nAustria (3%)\nGreece (6%)\nGermany (49%)\nFrance (9%)\nItaly (18%)\n\n\nTop 5 European industrial PV markets in 2013 (%)\n\nRest of Europe (9%)\nUnited Kingdom (2%)\nFrance (4%)\nGreece (9%)\nItaly (44%)\nGermany (32%)\n\n\nTop 5 European ground mounted PV markets in 2013 (%)\n\nRest of Europe (10%)\nSpain (3%)\nUnited Kingdom (7%)\nFrance (7%)\nGermany (65%)\nItaly (8%)\n\n\nForecasts of PV in Europe until 2018\n\nConsidering newly connected systems, 2013 showed the first PV market decline in Europe since 2000, mainly due to the end of the boom in the Italian market (which was the world's largest in 2011) while the rest of the European market stabilised. Had Italy experienced a more reasonable market level in 2011, the PV market would have stabilised from 2010 to 2013 or experienced slight growth. Overall, the future of the European market is uncertain for the coming years. The drastic decrease of some FiT programmes will push some markets down in 2013, even though a few emerging markets in Europe could of set any major decline. Given these new conditions, the short-term prospects for the European markets are stable in the best case or declining. In a Business-as-Usual scenario, without support from policymakers to PV, the transition could be quite painful over the next two or three years. In a Policy-Driven scenario, the market could stabilise in 2014 and grow again from 2015 onwards, driven by the approaching competitiveness of PV and emerging markets in Europe.\n\n2020 potential and targets in the EU\n\nPotential vs. market reality for PV deployment in the EU\n\nThe EPIA report \"Connecting the Sun: Solar photovoltaics on the road to large-scale grid integration\", published in 2012, identifies three possible PV deployment scenarios to 2020 and 2030 that represent the technology's real potential:\n\n• The Baseline scenario envisages 4% of the electricity demand in Europe provided by PV in 2020. This represents about 130 GW of cumulative capacity by 2020. In 2030, PV could represent up to 10% of the electricity demand.\n\n• The Accelerated scenario, with PV meeting 8% of the demand, is based on the maximum PV growth in Europe that is possible with the current market trends. This represents about 200 GW of cumulative capacity by 2020. In 2030, PV could target up to 15% of the electricity demand.\n\n• A third case, which assumes that all regulatory, perceptual and technical barriers are lifted to allow the PV market to grow in most countries at a very fast speed, is called the Paradigm Shift scenario. This foresees PV supplying up to 12% of EU electricity demand by 2020. This represents about 390 GW of cumulative capacity by 2020.\n\nTable 1 shows the potential per country by 2020. In each case one of the three scenarios has been chosen, depending on how the market has developed until now and how it can continue to grow in the coming decade if appropriate policy measures are in place and barriers are removed. A corresponding linear annual market potential from now until 2020 is then derived and compared to last year's market size. \n\nOverall the EU market was at an appropriate level, but the results are not sustainably balanced.\n\n\nPV potential in the EU 27 until 2020 vs. 2013 reality (MW)\n\nCountry Potential Type Potential Actual \n Cumulative Of Annual Newly\n Installed Scenario Market Connected \n Capacity Until Capacity\n In 2020 2020 In 2013\n\nAustria 4,000 Accelerated 448 230\n\nBelgium 7,000 Accelerated 544 599\n\nBulgaria 3,000 Accelerated 262 767\n\nCzech Republic 4,000 Accelerated 241 113\n\nDenmark 1,000 Accelerated 76 378\n\nFrance 30,000 Accelerated 3,250 1,079\n\nGermany 80,000 Paradigm Shift 5,949 7,604\n\nGreece 8,000 Accelerated 808 912\n\nHungary 2,000 Accelerated 249 n/a\n\nItaly 42,000 Accelerated 3,205 3,438\n\nNetherlands 8,000 Paradigm Shift 967 125\n\nPoland 5,000 Accelerated 624 4\n\nPortugal 3,000 Accelerated 344 49\n\nRomania 5,000 Accelerated 621 26\n\nSlovakia 3,000 Accelerated 310 15\n\nSlovenia 1,500 Accelerated 163 117\n\nSpain 18,000 Accelerated 1,604 276\n\nSweden 1,000 Accelerated 123 8\n\nUnited Kingdom 22,000 Paradigm Shift 2,521 925\n\nRest of EU 27* 1,850 226 20\n\nTotal EU 27 249,350 22,534 16,672\n\n* Rest of EU 27 includes Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Malta.\n\n\nNational Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs) vs. the reality of PV markets\n\nThe next table compares the cumulative installed capacity at the end of 2013 in most EU markets, the official National Renewable Energy Action Plan target for PV by 2020 and the necessary yearly market to reach this 2020 target (linear projection).\n\nNREAPs vs. reality of PV markets in the EU 27 (MW)\n\nCountry Cumulative NREAPs Necessary Target Market Market\n Installed 2020 Yearly Reached In In\n Capacity Target Market In 2012 2013\n In 2013 For PV Till 2020\n\nAustria 418 322 n/a 2012 92 230\n\nBelgium 2,650 1,340 n/a 2011 996 599\n\nBulgaria 908 303 n/a 2012 105 767\n\nCzech Rep. 2,072 1,695 n/a 2010 6 113\n\nDenmark 394 6 n/a 2010 10 378\n\nFrance 4,003 4,860 107.1 2014 1,756 1,079\n\nGermany 32,411 51,753 2417.8 2016-20 7,485 7,604\n\nGreece 1,536 2,200 83 2014 426 912\n\nHungary 4 63 7.4 2014-15 2.5 n/a\n\nItaly 16,361 8,000 n/a 2011 9,454 3,438\n\nNetherlands 266 722 57 2014-16 58 125\n\nPoland 7 3 n/a 2012 1 4\n\nPortugal 244 1,000 94.4 2016-20 47 49\n\nRomania 30 260 28.7 2014-16 1.6 26\n\nSlovakia 523 300 n/a 2011 321 15\n\nSlovenia 198 139 n/a 2012 46 117\n\nSpain 5,166 8,367 400.2 2016-20 472 276\n\nSweden 19 8 n/a 2011 4 8\n\nUnited Kingdom 1,829 2,680 106.4 2014 813 925\n\nRest of EU 27* 62 360 37.3 2016-20 22 7\n\nTotal EU 27 69,100 84,381 1910.12 2014 22,117 16,672\n\n* Rest of EU 27 includes Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Malta.\n\n\nPotential, national targets and the reality\n\nThe Business-as-Usual scenario for PV until 2018 that used to be aligned with the 4% target appears now to be slightly higher. This represents an improvement from previous forecasts, which estimated that growth would not quite reach the 4% target by 2020. Thus, it looks reasonable to expect that 4-5% penetration for PV could be reached even in the low growth case.\n\nThe Policy-Driven scenario for PV until 2018 appears almost in line with the Accelerated scenario presented in the EPIA report \"Connecting the Sun\". It targets to cover about 8% of the electricity demand by 2020. While this scenario of reaching 8% by 2020 looks coherent and in line with optimistic market expectations, reaching 12% would require a real Paradigm Shift in the way PV is supported and incentivised, even after competitiveness is reached in many countries and market segments. It is clear today that this 12% scenario is no longer a realistic option and would require tremendous market developments, unsupported by public policies in Europe for the time being.\n\nThe NREAPs as devised in 2009 are far from the reality of today's PV market. Apart from in Germany and Greece, market evolution in most countries could easily overtake the action plans. Future expectations largely reflect the current balance of installations, with Germany and Italy dominating the market. In the EU forecasts, the NREAPs targets with the intermediary value for 2015 have been taken into account. The extent to which they have underestimated the market developments in 2011, 2012 and even further in 2013 is obvious.\n\nPut simply, the potential for 2020 is at least twice as high as the levels foreseen in the NREAPs, pushing towards 200 GW capacity or even more in Europe by 2020. Possible revisions of the action plans will have to take into account the fast increases in installations over the last year.\n\nSupport schemes in Europe and prospects for PV\n\nEuropean PV support schemes assessment by country (early 2014 status)\n\nAustria - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Existing reasonable cap still limiting market growth.\n\nBelgium - Changing environment due to increased grid costs and the end of attractive past support. Reduced support to PV for all segments. Streamlined administrative processes. Reduced political support. Support levels in Flanders also reduced in some segments to maintain a market. In Wallonia, very high levels until 2012, leading to a complete review of the scheme.\n\nBulgaria - Very unstable environment with repeated FiT decreases in 2012 combined to retroactive grid fees that have now been revoked by the Supreme Court. Investment environment very insecure.\n\nCzech Republic - FiT limited to very small applications (< 30 kWp), triggering a small market. Clear evolution of FiTs. Still a very strong adverse lobbying from conventional stakeholders, including grid operators. Retroactive law passed in 2010, another one expected in 2014. Grid operator blocking new licencing.\n\nDenmark - Net-metering under revision since November 2012. No market expected until new scheme is approved by the EC. Lower support due to a move from yearly to hourly net-metering; but should be open to larger segments.\n\nFrance - Clear FiT evolution in 2013 for systems up to 100 kWp. Improved transparecy on tendering schemes for larger systems. Doubling of yearly objective at the beginning of 2013, but actual support potentially not sufficient to reach objective. Adverse lobbying from conventional stakeholders. Willingness to limit development to control cost. Slow administrative processes still in place.\n\nGermany - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Restrictions on utility-scale installations to reduce market. Federal elections year making Germany the future of support beyond 2013 unsure with a willingness to reduce cost of FiTs, including retroactively. Simple and lean administrative process. Risk coming from grid operators to finance the grid and overall cost of the support to RES.\n\nGreece - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Past committed projects to develop market. Adverse financial environment limiting development of new projects. Residential PV favoured over large-scale PV plants. Licensing of new large projects frozen since August 2012, retroactive taxation adopted in Q4 2012, huge delays for producers' payments.\n\nItaly - New FiT scheme since August 2012 with short lifetime due to cap on overall support system cost. No visibility after financial cap reached (probably mid-2013). Wil ingness to limit development to control costs with the introduction of a register. Improving administrative processes. No direct support after financial cap is reached, leading to a market contraction.\n\nNetherlands - Net-metering and high electricity prices allowing for a residential market to develop rapidly together with an investment grant. Adequate support for a market close to grid parity in the residential segment.\n\nPoland - New FiT and Green Certificate scheme under discussion for over a year; long decision process still ahead, probably until 2014. Possible lack of investor confidence due to lack of formal government decision.\n\nPortugal - Clear FiT evolution for small to medium-size market segments. Financial crisis limiting market growth. Administrative process simplified for smaller segments. No visibility for larger segments. Competitiveness in the residential segment in sight, so market could develop soon without support schemes anyway.\n\nRomania - Favourable conditions for large-scale systems, support expected to be reduced in the future. Improved legal environment in 2012. FiT for small-scale systems pending approval. Could lead to an overheated market if support not adapted timely.\n\nSlovakia - Very low FiT and heavy administrative barriers. No profitability expected from any investment. Ongoing review of support for small-scale system which could be adopted by the end of 2013.\n\nSpain - Support to PV frozen at the beginning of 2012 and not reintroduced. Overal Spanish electricity tariff cumulative deficit (multi-billion-euro debt) blocking any new development. Net-metering scheme long awaited. Few projects starting independently from support schemes (self-consumption for commercial system with high self-consumption rate, large scale plants to sell on the electricity market), within an unclear regulatory framework. Heavy and slow administrative processes. Many attempts to revitalise the utility-scale segment without incentives, but no significant development so far.\n\nSwitzerland - Clear FiT evolution in 2013. Expected increased cap to be adopted this year. Long waiting list progressively being cleared. Market to remain stable this year or even increase.\n\nTurkey - Net-metering scheme for systems up to 500 kW. Large-scale project expected to be approved in 2013. Administrative process unclear. Market should take off in 2013 or 2014.\n\nUnited Kingdom - Drastic reduction of FiT in 2012. Support scheme regularly adapted now. Green Certificate (GC) scheme for larger systems expected to be reviewed to align itself with FiT levels for smaller-scale installations. Clear and lean administrative processes. Road to competitiveness still long.\n\nTHE GLOBAL MARKET IN 2013 AND FORECAST UNTIL 2018\n\nEurope has dominated the global PV market for years but the rest of the world clearly has the biggest potential for growth. This was highlighted by market developments that saw Europe's share of the global market being reduced from 74% in 2012 to 55% in 2013.\n\nDriven by local and global energy demand, the fastest PV growth is expected to continue in China and India, followed by Southeast Asia, Latin America and the MENA countries. The PV potential of the Sunbelt countries - where PV can already compete with diesel generators for peak power generation without financial support - could range from 60 to 250 GW by 2020, and from 260 to 1,100 GW in 2030. And with the faster than expected price decrease that the industry experienced in 2012 and 2013, even more countries will see PV becoming competitive before the end of this decade.\n\nNew installations of PV systems in the rest of the world accounted for 13.9 GW in 2013, compared to 8 GW in 2012 and 3 GW in 2011. China took first place among these countries with most probably 5 GW2, followed by the USA with 3.3 GW and Japan with a maximum of 2 GW. All are expected to continue growing in 2013, with China as one of the two top markets in 2013. Australia expanded rapidly in 2013 with around 1 GW of new installations. India installed 980 MW, finally realising a part of its huge potential. In Korea, 252 MW were installed, a sign that the market has restarted but it remains at a low level compared to Europe, constrained by a quota system. Taiwan reached for the first time the 100-MW mark with 104 MW while Thailand, with a huge pipeline of projects, commissioned 210 MW. Malaysia, where several manufacturers are producing, appears on the map with 22 MW. In the Americas, Canada has expanded slower than some have expected with 268 MW and Mexico and Peru installed several megawatts. Brazil and Chile, with their huge potential, haven't commissioned many systems yet. In the Middle East region, Israel remains the only country with a significant market, while Saudi Arabia showed in 2012 some interest for PV development. The Turkish market remains quite low for the time being despite its potential.\n\nPV market share outside Europe in 2013 (MW; %)\n\nRest of the World (1,090; 8%)\nKorea (252; 2%)\nCanada (268; 2%)\nIndia (980; 7%)\nAustralia (1,000; 7%)\nChina (5,000; 36%)\nJapan (2,000; 14%)\nUSA (3,346; 24%)\n\n\nMARKET EVOLUTION\n\nAn examination of the total installed capacity reveals greater contrasts. Outside Europe, the market is well-balanced; three countries with a huge potential lead the pace, followed by an emerging secondary market. Except for the Australian boom in 2012 and 2013, the market remains under control in most countries. With that potential progressively unleashed, the share of PV installations outside Europe can only increase, rebalancing in such a way Europe will represent less than half of the global PV market in 2013.\n\nGlobal PV cumulative installed capacity share in 2013 (MW; %)\n\nRest of the World (12,554; 12%)\nIndia (1,205; 1%)\nGreece (1,536; 1%)\nUnited Kingdom (1,829; 2%)\nCzech Republic (2,072; 2%)\nAustralia (2,412; 2%)\nBelgium (2,650; 2%)\nGermany (32,411; 31%)\nFrance (4,003; 4%)\nSpain (5,166; 5%)\nJapan (6,914; 7%)\nItaly (16,361; 16%)\nUSA (7,777; 7%)\nChina (8,300; 8%)\n\nIt is important to note that China climbed to third place in terms of total installed capacity in 2013, ahead of the USA and Japan, two of the pioneers of PV development.\n\nForecasts until 2018\n\nIn the Business-as-Usual scenario, the expected growth of markets outside Europe is not likely to compensate fast enough for the slowdown of the market in Europe in the next two years. This assumes a negative perspective in most markets in the near future, especially in Europe. But even in this scenario, the global market could be as high as 48 GW in 2017.\n\nIn 2013, the rapid decline of PV system prices in al markets triggered installations that compensated for the decline of the Italian market. But given the current uncertainty in the manufacturing segment of the PV industry, the stability of module prices remains an open question in the coming years - with implications for system price decreases and the opening of new markets for PV. The link between price decrease and the unlocking of new markets is the key to market development. But the inability of existing markets to absorb more gigawatts pushed prices even lower in 2012, due to overcapacity in the PV industry - itself a result of the time gap between the price decrease and the reaction of policymakers in some countries. This vividly illustrates how PV remains a policy-driven business, where political decisions influence considerably the potential market off-take.\n\nMarket evolution over the next five years will depend mainly on developments in Europe and the ability of policymakers to maintain market conditions at an acceptable level. In the Policy-Driven scenario, the European market would stabilise first around 16-17 GW in 2014 before growing slowly again to around 25-28 GW five years from now. In that case, the global market could top more than 84 GW in 2018, with two-thirds of this coming from new markets outside Europe. The new markets could help ensure major growth even in 2013, and robust market development in the fol owing years. It is expected that the APAC region (without China) to represent between 10 and 20 GW each year until 2017. China alone could add 10 GW of PV installations each year, as announced by the Chinese authorities.\n\nThe surpassing of the 100-GW mark in terms of cumulative global PV capacity in 2012 represents a major achievement of the PV industry in just a few years. Depending on the conditions of the Business-as-Usual scenario, the 200 GW mark could be reached in between 2015 and 2016, while in the Policy-Driven scenario, more than 420 GW of PV systems could be connected to the grid over the next five years.\n\nForecasts per segment\n\nIn 2012 rooftop segments represented around 22 GW of the total installations, while utility-scale applications reached more than 9 GW. But this segmentation will shift in the coming years. With the development of PV in the Sunbelt markets, EPIA expects utility-scale plants to grow much faster than rooftop applications. The rooftop market could in the Policy-Driven scenario double from\n2014 to 2017 while the utility-scale market could in the same scenario quadruple from 9 to 37 GW. This can be explained by the nature of the investors in the most promising markets and the reduced opposition to ground-mounted PV systems compared to Europe. In the Business-as-Usual scenario, the rooftop market could decline in 2014 and 2015 and stagnate around the levels of 2012 until 2017 while the global utility-scale market would more than double in the next five years.\n\nAt the regional level, the utility-scale segment is expected to at best stagnate in Europe even as it booms in the Americas and Asia including China. In both scenarios, the APAC region including China should see the largest share of new utility-scale applications, ahead of the Americas.\n\nIn the rooftop segment, Europe could still account for 30 to 40% of the global market, with the APAC region including China taking first place with 40-42% in the coming five years.\n\nFuture prospects for market development\n\nThe development of PV was estimated according to two sets of drivers: the attractiveness of PV for the country and the attractiveness of the country for investors. While the country attractiveness for investors can change rapidly, the accuracy of the figure below remains quite important. Since 2010, the following markets have indeed experienced some PV market development: China, Australia, India, Israel. Several others are expected to grow fast in 2014 and 2015: Mexico, South Africa, Chile.\n\nPHOTOVOLTAICS IN THE ENERGY SECTOR\n\nPV: THE FIRST NEW GENERATION CAPACITY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION IN 2012\n\nFor the second year in a row and the second time in history, PV in 2012 was the number-one electricity source in the EU in terms of newly added installed capacity. With 16.7 GW connected to the grid, PV outscored gas and wind. The remarkable progress made by PV over the last four years (it placed third among electricity sources for added capacity in 2009, and second in 2010) should be compared with the stability of wind penetration and the fluctuating development of gas power plant commissioning in Europe. Gas reached a peak in 2010, with more than 20 GW newly connected to the grid, before falling to slightly less than 10 GW in 2011 and above 10 GW of new installations in 2012.\n\nIncluding decommissioning (which remains marginal in the PV sector so far), power generation capacities from gas rose by just 5 GW in 2013. All other production sources, renewables and conventional, are far behind. Traditional electricity sources such as nuclear, coal and fuel oil have been decommissioned more than newly installed. Fuel oil lost the most in 2013, followed by coal and nuclear. The only sources of electricity that saw capacity grow in 2013 were renewables and gas.\n\nRooftop PV takes first place while large PV installations (utility-scale PV) take the fourth place. Onshore wind, which remains an important source of new electricity installations, stayed in second place while the fast growing offshore wind positions itself at the level of biomass, with a bit more than 1 GW installed and commissioned.\n\nPV CONTRIBUTES ALMOST 30% OF NEW GENERATION IN 2013\n\nIn terms of the electricity production coming from new generators connected in 2013, PV comes second, ahead of wind, after having scored first place in 2011. Due to the reduced operating hours of PV compared to wind and gas, PV additions will provide around 19 TWh of new electricity during a complete operation year, compared to 29 TWh from the new wind installations and 15 TWh from gas power plants running in average 3,000 hours a year.\n\nIt could be argued that gas power plants running only 3,000 hours a year are being operated at less than their theoretical production level; this reflects the reality of the electricity market in Europe in 2012 and 2013. More interesting, the energy that will be produced by new PV and wind installations in 2013 based on 2012 additions represents enough electricity to compensate for the decommissioning of nuclear, fuel oil and coal power plants in 2013. PV continues to prove its ability to compete in the energy sector as mainstream power generation source.\n\nBased on the capacity installed and connected to the grid at the end of 2013, PV can currently provide roughly 2.6% of the electricity demand in Europe, up from 1.15% at the end of 2011 and 2% at the end of 2012. In Italy, more than 6.7% of the electricity will come from PV systems connected until 2013. In Germany, this figure is more than 5.6%, while Greece reached more than 4%. Belgium, Bulgaria and other countries are progressing rapidly as well.\n\nIn most EU countries today, PV can be considered as peak power generation. Indeed, it produces during the day, at the time of the mid-day peak, competing directly with other peak generators. If we assume that peak power generation represents roughly 50% of the electricity demand in Europe, we should look at these percentages in another way: PV can produce today 5.2% of the peak electricity demand in the EU 27 and more than 13.5% in Italy, more than 11% in Germany, and so on. This achievement came in just a few years and shows again how the development of PV electricity in Europe is occurring at a faster rate than almost anyone had expected.\n\nLooking at the trends since 2000, PV is positioning itself in Europe as a major player, gaining on gas and wind. With more than 70 GW installed, the PV development is only at its beginning and more remains to be added in the coming years. Over the long term, PV market development forecasts show that PV will most probably stay in the top three technologies in Europe. Indeed, no other technology has reached or will reach in the five coming years enough maturity to challenge PV, wind or gas.\n\nGlobal PV electricity production\n\nGlobally, PV represented at the end of 2012 roughly 110 TWh of electricity or 0.6% of electricity demand and 1.2% of the peak power demand. Given the speed at which markets outside Europe can develop, PV could in the coming years score the same percentage as in the best European countries.\n\nINDUSTRY EVOLUTION\n\nIn 2013, the PV industry went again through a challenging period, with political, market and industry factors affecting business along the whole value chain. Important manufacturers disappeared, were acquired or had to adapt their business plan, decrease the utilisation rate and consequently reduce significantly their production. The tough market environment in Europe has forced many important players out of the PV business.\n\nThe PV global market capacity has evolved mainly in a context of production overcapacity. Many players entered the business ramping up very quickly their production capacity to increase their share of what in most cases was wrongly forecast, volatile and policy-driven PV demand. Despite some cases of specific material/component shortage that have been seen in the last three years, module production capacity was in between 150-230% higher than annual global installations.\n\nBesides the supply and demand mismatch at a global level, the growing regional imbalance between the demand and the supply of PV modules that was observed until 2012 raised concerns. In 2013 however there were signs, still meagre, towards balancing PV market with regional supply mainly driven by the Chinese market growth.\n\nSince 2004, Europe became a net importer of PV modules mainly from Asian countries. Today, similarly to 2013, European industry represents only around\n13% of the global market in terms of actual module production and around 24% of its own market. The rest is imported mainly from China and APAC countries which supply around 70% of the global PV demand. China is the only country that can cover its own growing market, with 320% more production than its need. That figure is expected to go down due to local absorption of PV production.\n\nPRODUCTION CAPACITY VS. ACTUAL PRODUCTION\n\nRegional distribution of production capacity and actual production of the upstream value chain components\n\nApart from the module supply/demand regional imbalance, there has been an attempt to map the supply of the main upstream value chain parts of PV and identify the regional distribution for 2013.\n\nThe distribution of production capacities remained in general terms similar to the one of 2012 in the different value chain parts. However, the differences among the regions remained significant depending on the type of product and its position in the value chain. In all cases though, the PV industry remained strong in Asia. Especially in wafers, c-Si cells, and c-Si modules China played and will continue playing a leading role. European production capacity remained competitive in the polysilicon business with annual capacity share reaching 17% and actual production share reaching 20% due to higher utilisation rates. The USA kept high shares in the polysilicon business, coming first in actual production.\n\nWith respect to TF production capacities, Europe played an important role in 2013 by keeping above 20% shares in actual production. Germany with mainly CIGS and some CdTe technology shares contributed significantly to this share. The USA followed with a 12% share, while China kept a low profile in this sector with low production capacities and utilisation rates. The APAC region however with Japan and Malaysia as top producers covered more than 60% of the actual production of 2013.\n\nGLOBAL PV PRODUCTION CAPACITY OUTLOOK UNTIL 2018\n\nCompound annual growth rate (CAGR) across the PV value chain\n\nThe data on overcapacity allow for a correlation between demand and production capacity in the main parts of the value chain. This is based on IHS Solar data and should be considered as one possible indication of the current production capacities. In general, production capacities refer to announced production capacities, which are typically higher than the actual capacity (due to industrial factors, obsolete or non-competitive production lines or production incidents resulting in downtime). Finally, contract manufacturing complicates the risk of double counting production capacities. Published numbers vary widely depending on the source, with production capacities sometimes reaching between 5-35 GW more than what IHS is reporting. In the worst case, overcapacity could last longer than many expect and continue to put pressure on prices.\n\nWith all due caution, despite the consolidation phase that the PV industry is facing today, the yearly production capacity could continue growing along the whole main value chain. This growth will happen only in case of some further market growth globally. Given the necessary time to ramp-up production capacities, capacity evolutions after 2015 should be considered as an indication of optimistic market developments in 2014. This should then be considered as indicative, especially given the potential gap between both market development scenarios.\n\nThe arrival on the market of new and improved products will also create dynamics that can influence the market and industry development patterns. However, it is evident that the future capacity growth rates will become steadier and more sustainable than in recent years, going away from the boom-and-bust cycle and disturbing mismatches between demand and production, linked to the history of market development until now.\n\nThis is also the reason for overcapacity in the polysilicon sector and explains better the rationale behind the rapid price decline polysilicon experienced in 2013. While this price decline cannot be disconnected from the module price decline, it is even more acute in a sector where the European share continues to be slightly higher than in other segments of the value chain.\n\nFor the next five years no major changes should be expected as far as the main technologies, crystalline silicon (c-Si) and TF, are concerned. A slightly higher growth rate is expected for c-Si mainly due to the uncertainty of amorphous silicon (a-Si) technologies, for which the growth rate might be reduced by around 3% until 2017. The reason for this negative CAGR is the lower module efficiency of a-Si in comparison with the rapid evolution of Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) and Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS), limiting the market for TF modules with efficiencies below 10% on module level.\n\nAlso, it is anticipated that Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV) will start to represent a sustainable market niche in the coming years, with many projects coming in the Sunbelt region and the USA, which will finally allow the CPV industry to develop. Other emerging technologies such as Organic Photovoltaics (OPV) will gain a respective share in the market achieving high growth rates since the current production capacity is very small. Some see as a scenario around 300 MW of produced OPV and close to 1 GW of yearly production capacity globally until 2018. But due to the low efficiency and the characteristics of this technology, it could take years to transform OPV into a viable competitor of existing technologies.\n\nPV CAGR until 2018 (%)\n\nCPV (HCPV+LCPV) 41.09%\nModules (c-Si+High-efficiency PV+TF+OPV) 6.02%\nHigh-efficiency PV 7.46%\nOPV 153.65%\nCIGS 8.70%\nCdTe 5.95%\nA-Si -2.98%\nTF modules (inorganic) 3.17%\nC-Si modules 6.34%\nC-Si cells 9.00%\nWafers 9.22%\nSilicon 6.71%\n\n\n\nTECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT\n\nAccording to IHS Solar, the level of production capacity in 2013 reached 56.5 GW including all major technologies. Those capacities are likely to grow continuously, reaching a growth rate of around 6% until 2018: in the case of a fast-growing market, the production capacity could grow up to 75 GW in 2018.\n\nThe predominant c-Si technology is expected to maintain its market share at levels of around 80% principally because of the maturity of the technology and also because of the existing and growing capacity in China and APAC countries, which favour wafer-based technologies. The low production costs of c-Si technologies will allow it to remain the top PV technology in the coming years. Cost reductions and record efficiencies on cell and module level keep the LCOE values low and the attention of the existing and new industry players high, making c-Si appear to be a less risky investment under healthy market conditions.\n\nAfter the huge growth expectations of TF technologies some years ago, the competing market price of c-Si has slowed the development of TF. The latter are expected to grow anyway at a lower rate, and therefore will stabilise their market share over the next five years. Among emerging technologies, OPV technologies and especially CPV technologies (both Low CPV (LCPV) and High CPV\n(HCPV)) are expected to enjoy around 1% of the market share by 2018.\n\nAs far as high-efficiency (above 20%) modules are concerned, due to lower competition within the respective players a 3% share could easily be reached. In addition the overall efficiency of PV modules should increase thanks to the generalisation of 20%-efficiency cells, in between the traditional c-Si and the high efficiency mentioned here.\n\nCPV, mainly HCPV, is considered by some as a sleeping giant. CPV is expected to reach around 1 GW of production capacity by 2018 meeting mostly HCPV installation demand. Emerging markets with high irradiation levels will provide market momentum to the technology, which has become very interesting to investors by achieving LCOE numbers similar to mainstream technologies.\n\nOPV and other emerging technologies are expected to create their own niche markets in the coming years, at a very low level compared to the global PV market. Such technologies should make a stronger presence but not before 2015 at soonest, assuming that current R&D will push down the costs (around 10 times higher today than conventional PV), and adapt them better to new customer needs to be served, possibly BIPV or total y new uses such as the automotive industry. The expectations are based on the assumption that after 2015 the PV industry will have emerged from today's consolidation period and there will be a healthier arena for such investments.\n\nCONCLUSION\n\nAfter many years of unfettered growth and innovation, the PV industry is now going through a challenging period, with shifting market dynamics and changing political support creating a climate of uncertainty. Still, even in 2013, in the midst of an economic crisis, the market for PV in Europe and around the world was strong - with more than 31 GW of new capacity.\n\nGoing forward, key questions will play a role in determining how market evolution takes place:\n\n• Policy: The PV market remains in most places a policy-driven one, linked to changing political environments and commitments from government in a rather limited set of countries; with the right decisions to create smart and sustainable support schemes for PV, markets can continue to grow\n\n• Competitiveness: PV is rapidly becoming competitive, in terms of LCOE, with other power sources - and in some countries in some segments, it already is; grid and especially market integration challenges will however increasingly hamper future PV deployment\n\n• Industry consolidation: The current world overcapacity in PV modules is having a severe effect on companies all along the solar value chain; how this plays out will have an effect on market development\n\n• Trade: trade disputes in parts of the PV value chain are creating uncertainty that may affect markets forecasts in the next few years\n\nAmid all these questions, what remains unchanged is the enormous potential and undeniable benefits solar PV is already bringing to the power system - where it is becoming a mainstream player - and the promise it holds for helping achieve vital energy, environmental and economic goals.\n\nThe results of 2013 bear this out. But they also reveal that a shift is taking place in PV markets - from one driven mostly by Europe to one that also depends on countries around the world with varying degrees of solar potential and the political will to exploit it.\n\nHow much more the global market can grow in 2013 remains a question: The economic situation in Europe makes the moderate scenario more likely for the short term. A 15 GW showing in Europe could bring the world market easily above 35 GW, depending on the reaction of emerging markets. But a low market in Europe will most likely prolong the imbalance between supply and demand of PV components, making 2013 a difficult year for PV companies. Renewed political resolve is needed to restore investor confidence, remove bottlenecks and maintain a reliable but dynamic framework for the remuneration of PV.\n\nBut under even the most pessimistic scenario, PV will continue to increase its share of the energy mix in Europe and around the world, becoming a reliable source of clean, safe and infinitely renewable energy for all.\n\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nAlternating Current (AC): Electric current that periodically reverses its direction of flows - 50 times per second (Hz) for Europe, China, East Japan among others and 60 times per second for the USA, West Japan, Brazil. Solar PV power must be converted from DC (see below) to AC using a power inverter.\n\nConnected capacity: Refers to generating systems (e.g. PV generators) that have been installed and allowed to inject electricity into the grid.\n\nDirect Current (DC): Electric current that flows only in one direction. Solar PV power starts as DC and is normally converted to AC using a power inverter.\n\nDynamic grid parity: Refers to the moment at which, in a particular market segment in a specific country, the present value of the long-term net earnings (considering revenues, savings, cost and depreciation) of the electricity supply from a PV installation is equal to the long-term cost of receiving traditionally produced and supplied power over the grid.\n\nFeed-in Tariff (FiT): Policy mechanism created and regulated by government to promote investment in RES (e.g. PV technology). Under FiT schemes renewable electricity producers are offered long-term contracts under which a guaranteed fixed amount of money is paid to them, usually by the utility provider (national or local), for the energy fed into the grid. The FiT rate is typically set above market rates, offsetting inherent risks in renewable energy production.\n\nGreen Certificate (GC): Tradable certificate that represents the environmental or social benefits of (green) electricity generated from RES such as PV. Green certificates can be purchased both from electricity producers and consumers as a proof of producing or consuming renewable electricity.\n\nInstalled capacity: Refers to systems put in place but awaiting the approval of the grid operator to inject electricity into the grid. It should not be confused with connected capacity (see above).\n\nNet metering: Compensation scheme that allows electricity consumers to reduce their electricity bills by giving them credit for the electricity produced by their PV system over a certain period of time (usually one year).\n\nSelf-consumption: Possibility for any kind of electricity producer to directly use/consume part or all of the electricity produced at the same location (on-site consumption), instantaneously.\n\n",
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"content": "Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!<br /><br />Oh boy, did I see one hell of a fearsome science demonstration the other day. A whole bunch of scientists in white lab coats with stethoscopes draped over their necks were chanting in unison: \"centripetal acceleration and conservation of angular momentum NOW!\" while swinging golf balls on strings in an apparent attempt at demonstrating (for or against, couldn't say) simple harmonic motion of an object traveling in a circular path at a constant velocity. The amount of norepinephrine it generated in the bystanders was evidenced by their clammy skin, increased heartbeat, and pallour. However, the scientists were not careful enough as they were swinging their balls around and every once in a while, you'd hear an audible <boink!> as a random ball would strike the head of one of the scientist-demonstrators. As their chanting grew to a feverished crescendo, their ball-spinning grew more erratic, and the <boinks> began increasing in both frequency and intensity.<br /><br />\"Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\" <boink!><br />\"Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\" <boink!> <boink!> <boink!><br /><br />These boinks continued to increase in direct proportion to half the elapsed time squared, where approximately one-third of every such <boink!> would result in unconsciousness. As this progressed, the probability distribution emerged as a chain reaction where the chanting and the boinking started dying out at a rate inversely proportional to the time squared, leaving just one scientist going \"Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\" in a weak and raspy voice. <br /><br />In conclusion, most science demonstrations fail due to the propensity of the demonstration's negative outcome reaching equilibrium state in any closed system.<br />",
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"content": "Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\n\nOh boy, did I see one hell of a fearsome science demonstration the other day. A whole bunch of scientists in white lab coats with stethoscopes draped over their necks were chanting in unison: \"centripetal acceleration and conservation of angular momentum NOW!\" while swinging golf balls on strings in an apparent attempt at demonstrating (for or against, couldn't say) simple harmonic motion of an object traveling in a circular path at a constant velocity. The amount of norepinephrine it generated in the bystanders was evidenced by their clammy skin, increased heartbeat, and pallour. However, the scientists were not careful enough as they were swinging their balls around and every once in a while, you'd hear an audible <boink!> as a random ball would strike the head of one of the scientist-demonstrators. As their chanting grew to a feverished crescendo, their ball-spinning grew more erratic, and the <boinks> began increasing in both frequency and intensity.\n\n\"Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\" <boink!>\n\"Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\" <boink!> <boink!> <boink!>\n\nThese boinks continued to increase in direct proportion to half the elapsed time squared, where approximately one-third of every such <boink!> would result in unconsciousness. As this progressed, the probability distribution emerged as a chain reaction where the chanting and the boinking started dying out at a rate inversely proportional to the time squared, leaving just one scientist going \"Centripetal Acceleration and Conservation of Angular Momentum NOW!\" in a weak and raspy voice. \n\nIn conclusion, most science demonstrations fail due to the propensity of the demonstration's negative outcome reaching equilibrium state in any closed system.\n",
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"content": "Movie Review - Willy Dynamite, 1974<br /><br />Willie Dynamite is a story of personal Alchemical Transformation with deep meaning on many different levels. The 7 prostitutes symbolise the 7 continents (or the 7 planets) while the 7 pimps symbolise the 7 deadly sins, with Willie symbolising greed on one level or the Magician card of the Tarot on another. Cora, who had herself undergone a personal transformation serves as the Philosopher's Stone that transforms Willy Dynamite by transforming herself again by going from his enemy to realising his humanity and connecting with that aspect of him. On the one hand- the good vs. evil divide seem clear-cut but as the storyline progresses the viewer sees that each side has elements of both, just like the Yin/Yang. Ultimately, it's not the people themselves that turn out to be reprehensible but the larger systems each of them espouse (crime, and the criminal justice system) that ultimately recognise only their own interests and ignore any collateral human damage (Passion, and Willy's mom). Willy's perspective is that he knows his way of life is untenable, and is only \"worth it\" if he attains to the dominant position. He proves that he in fact CAN be number one by defeating Belle, and does so TWICE, but never goes all the way. Cora seems to feel the same way by realisisng she's part of the other half of the problem and comes to see Willy not as an enemy but as a fellow human being. Willy realises the futility of leading a double life, and gives it up in the final scene where his car (symbolising his physical body) is towed away and he remarks that it \"used to be his.\" He also \"loses\" his extravagant clothing and for the first time is seen interacting with ordinary people as an equal when he throws back the football. Ultimately it's a movie about the 7 Alchemical principles in action, where the Mental principle dominates. The Gender principle is exploited via Cause and Effect in a systematised, almost industrial scale and setting (principle of Rhythm). This attracts the opposite Polarity to annihilate it via Correspondence because there are Black and White \"actors\" on both sides, where the principle of Vibration ultimately leads to resolution of opposites. Point creates counterpoint and YOU the viewer are left with a choice: are you Willy before of AFTER his transformation? Are you Cora before or AFTER her transformation?",
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"content": "Movie Review - Willy Dynamite, 1974\n\nWillie Dynamite is a story of personal Alchemical Transformation with deep meaning on many different levels. The 7 prostitutes symbolise the 7 continents (or the 7 planets) while the 7 pimps symbolise the 7 deadly sins, with Willie symbolising greed on one level or the Magician card of the Tarot on another. Cora, who had herself undergone a personal transformation serves as the Philosopher's Stone that transforms Willy Dynamite by transforming herself again by going from his enemy to realising his humanity and connecting with that aspect of him. On the one hand- the good vs. evil divide seem clear-cut but as the storyline progresses the viewer sees that each side has elements of both, just like the Yin/Yang. Ultimately, it's not the people themselves that turn out to be reprehensible but the larger systems each of them espouse (crime, and the criminal justice system) that ultimately recognise only their own interests and ignore any collateral human damage (Passion, and Willy's mom). Willy's perspective is that he knows his way of life is untenable, and is only \"worth it\" if he attains to the dominant position. He proves that he in fact CAN be number one by defeating Belle, and does so TWICE, but never goes all the way. Cora seems to feel the same way by realisisng she's part of the other half of the problem and comes to see Willy not as an enemy but as a fellow human being. Willy realises the futility of leading a double life, and gives it up in the final scene where his car (symbolising his physical body) is towed away and he remarks that it \"used to be his.\" He also \"loses\" his extravagant clothing and for the first time is seen interacting with ordinary people as an equal when he throws back the football. Ultimately it's a movie about the 7 Alchemical principles in action, where the Mental principle dominates. The Gender principle is exploited via Cause and Effect in a systematised, almost industrial scale and setting (principle of Rhythm). This attracts the opposite Polarity to annihilate it via Correspondence because there are Black and White \"actors\" on both sides, where the principle of Vibration ultimately leads to resolution of opposites. Point creates counterpoint and YOU the viewer are left with a choice: are you Willy before of AFTER his transformation? Are you Cora before or AFTER her transformation?",
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"content": "\"More of the same!\"<br />\"More of the same!\"<br />\"We want more!\" \"More of the same!\"<br />Ever heard any group of demonstrators chanting that? Of course not, but that's exactly my point. Trump is no different than Obama, who was no different than Bush 2, who was no different than Clinton, who was no different than Bush 1, who was no different than Reagan, who was no different than Carter, who was no different than Nixon. <br />The laws in the USA are going steadily in one direction ONLY and that is LESS rights for the citizens and more rights for the government. The unrepayable national debt also keeps going in one direction ONLY. The number of wars inflicted by the USA and the countries it has destroyed also keeps going in only one direction, and that's UP. <br />One day, the US government will regulate how chickens peck at their feed, as we say in my country.<br />Every war in the last century has been fomented by, or instigated by the USA, including WW2 because American bankers financed Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Marcos, Allende, Hussein, etc. etc. (and not in any particular order). <br />The latest situation with Iran (again!) has nothing to do with the USA. The Iranian takeover of 2 British ships is rtaliation for the unprovoked British takeover of one of their own tankers, as well as the 3rd-party bombing (most likely Saudi) of 2 tankers belonging to nations buying oil from Iran. Why would Iran bomb their own customers? As for the various tit-for-tat drone shootdowns, those are provocations (again!) by the USA operating aircraft near or in another country's airspace. Would any Americans have a big problem with Iranian vessels patrolling international waters right off the US eastern seaboard? Probably, in which case you can't blame Iran for feeling intimidated by the USA doing the same thing to Iran. Same thing when the US promised the USSR not to expand NATO, but did so anyway after the USSR broke up, where nowadays the USA and its EU stooges are doing a mocking-dance (going \"nah, nah nah, nah, nah!\") literally 5km from Russia's borders. <br />If anybody provably does NOT want peace on Earth, it is the USA and no other country. <br />So that while there most likely WILL be changes to the world order, they will be the kind that most people do NOT want. They will involve another unwinnable war, except this time the international community knows what'll happen: capital theft (account seizures or \"freezes\") on assets held by citizens of \"enemy\" countries, only difference being that the world has wised up to that and Russia and China are dumping US debt and buying Gold. The subsequent financial destruction of the USA will not benefit anybody, and a new power will rise up to take its place, namely China. After a couple more US treasury bond auctions with zero buyers, the news cycle will have to be diverted from finances, the only news that really matters, to something like the asassination of Jeffrey Epstein in prison, or the US military financing transgendered operations for all servicemen at 90k a pop. China will take that as a cue and INVADE AUSTRALIA because they CAN, and they need the goodies like aluminium, Gold, molybdenum, and copper that Australia has. Once the US gets defeated in its fight for Australia, the powerlessness of the empire will be evident for all to see, and Mexico and the central and south American republics will form an alliance to take over the USA itself. And no, this does not end well for anybody on Earth.<br />",
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"published": "2019-07-21T21:43:23+00:00",
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"content": "\"More of the same!\"\n\"More of the same!\"\n\"We want more!\" \"More of the same!\"\nEver heard any group of demonstrators chanting that? Of course not, but that's exactly my point. Trump is no different than Obama, who was no different than Bush 2, who was no different than Clinton, who was no different than Bush 1, who was no different than Reagan, who was no different than Carter, who was no different than Nixon. \nThe laws in the USA are going steadily in one direction ONLY and that is LESS rights for the citizens and more rights for the government. The unrepayable national debt also keeps going in one direction ONLY. The number of wars inflicted by the USA and the countries it has destroyed also keeps going in only one direction, and that's UP. \nOne day, the US government will regulate how chickens peck at their feed, as we say in my country.\nEvery war in the last century has been fomented by, or instigated by the USA, including WW2 because American bankers financed Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Marcos, Allende, Hussein, etc. etc. (and not in any particular order). \nThe latest situation with Iran (again!) has nothing to do with the USA. The Iranian takeover of 2 British ships is rtaliation for the unprovoked British takeover of one of their own tankers, as well as the 3rd-party bombing (most likely Saudi) of 2 tankers belonging to nations buying oil from Iran. Why would Iran bomb their own customers? As for the various tit-for-tat drone shootdowns, those are provocations (again!) by the USA operating aircraft near or in another country's airspace. Would any Americans have a big problem with Iranian vessels patrolling international waters right off the US eastern seaboard? Probably, in which case you can't blame Iran for feeling intimidated by the USA doing the same thing to Iran. Same thing when the US promised the USSR not to expand NATO, but did so anyway after the USSR broke up, where nowadays the USA and its EU stooges are doing a mocking-dance (going \"nah, nah nah, nah, nah!\") literally 5km from Russia's borders. \nIf anybody provably does NOT want peace on Earth, it is the USA and no other country. \nSo that while there most likely WILL be changes to the world order, they will be the kind that most people do NOT want. They will involve another unwinnable war, except this time the international community knows what'll happen: capital theft (account seizures or \"freezes\") on assets held by citizens of \"enemy\" countries, only difference being that the world has wised up to that and Russia and China are dumping US debt and buying Gold. The subsequent financial destruction of the USA will not benefit anybody, and a new power will rise up to take its place, namely China. After a couple more US treasury bond auctions with zero buyers, the news cycle will have to be diverted from finances, the only news that really matters, to something like the asassination of Jeffrey Epstein in prison, or the US military financing transgendered operations for all servicemen at 90k a pop. China will take that as a cue and INVADE AUSTRALIA because they CAN, and they need the goodies like aluminium, Gold, molybdenum, and copper that Australia has. Once the US gets defeated in its fight for Australia, the powerlessness of the empire will be evident for all to see, and Mexico and the central and south American republics will form an alliance to take over the USA itself. And no, this does not end well for anybody on Earth.\n",
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