read,see

Send in the Clouds

TRAVEL

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By ANTHONY DOERR

| NOVEMBER 18, 2011, 8:08 AM

Photographs by Vava RibeiroCanopy opener The Mashpi nature reserve, rich with birds and bugs, sits on nearly 3,000 acres in the Western Andes.

Like pretty much everyone in Ecuador, Roque Sevilla drives fast. I hurtle with him from the capital of Quito down two and a half hours of gut-stirring switchbacks, losing elevation with every turn. The sugar-cane and cattle farmsteads tumbling past on either side dwindle steadily, while the surrounding forests gain in age and power.

Sevilla talks the whole way. Slender, mustached and hugely energetic, he recites the names of tree species, describes different hummingbirds and tells stories about the foundations of Ecuador’s conservation movement. “I have been in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America,” he says, “but Ecuador — and I don’t say this only because it is my home — is truly special.”

Sevilla should know. He is a former mayor of Quito and a member of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund. He also runs the country’s largest tourism company

At a fork in the road, signs present us with a typically Ecuadorean choice: Paraiso (Paradise) on the left and La Delicia (the Delight) on the right. Sevilla goes right. The air thickens; the road turns to clay and gets wet. Unbroken walls of trees scroll past. Finally we come over a last rib of the cordillera and drop into the white.

White, white, white — at first that’s all I can see, not the jungly hills I’ve imagined, or the bright flashes of equatorial birds — nothing more than streaming curtains of cloud creeping up valleys, folding over ridges, veiling the world.

Only in shreds and glimpses do I begin to see trees. They pass us in ghostly walls, so close together and so diverse in species that the eye hardly knows how to parse them into individuals. Dozens of plants hang from, cling to or wrap every one of them — vines, mosses, ferns, bromeliads, orchids as tiny as my fingernail and orchids as big as my forearm.

This is Mashpi Rainforest Biodiversity Reserve, a recently formed private concession on the western slopes of the Andes, a last piece of Ecuadorean cloud forest at the southern end of what ecologists call the Chocó-Darién biogeographic region. In May, the Municipality of Quito declared 45,500 acres of this forest a “natural protected area”; that reserve envelops the heart of Mashpi, 2,891 acres that belong to Roque Sevilla.

ο απόλυτος μ.......

watch

THE LAST OBSESSION from Luca Finotti on Vimeo.

χαιρετίσματα από τη Στοκχόλμη

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

κι η Γη γυρίζει

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

από το doctv

• 

  Α' ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟ | 16.11.2011

  Στο σύμπαν του Γκέμπελς

....

δες

bye bye eurozone

Let The Economist have the last word. This is from an article by Ryan Avent in the current issue titled “Finito?”:

“I have been examining and re-examining the situation, trying to find the potential happy ending. It isn’t there. The euro zone is in a death spiral. Markets are abandoning the periphery, including Italy, which is the world’s eighth largest economy and third largest bond market. This is triggering margin calls and leading banks to pull credit from the European market. This, in turn, is damaging the European economy, which is already being squeezed by the austerity programmes adopted in every large euro-zone economy. A weakening economy will damage revenues, undermining efforts at fiscal consolidation, further driving away investors and potentially triggering more austerity. The cycle will continue until something breaks. Eventually, one economy or another will face a true bank run and severe capital flight and will be forced to adopt capital controls. At that point, it will effectively be out of the euro area. What happens next isn’t clear, but it’s unlikely to be pretty.” (“Finito?, The Economist)

ω οι ευτυχισμένες μέρες

...

Bunga Banka

November 10, 2011

Legends of the Fail

By PAUL KRUGMAN

This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all.

But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking.

First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe. And it was questioned by American liberals, who worried — rightly, I’d say (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) — about what would happen if countries couldn’t use monetary and fiscal policy to fight recessions.

So now that the euro project is on the rocks, what lessons should we draw?

I’ve been hearing two claims, both false: that Europe’s woes reflect the failure of welfare states in general, and that Europe’s crisis makes the case for immediate fiscal austerity in the United States.

Krugman: Eurodebacle

una fatsa una crisi

The Crisis Worsens

Economic Mismanagement in Europe

by MARK WEISBROT

Some of us have been warning for months about the crisis scenario that is accelerating today in Europe. In particular I have noted that the European authorities were pushing Italy down a dangerous path, similarly to what they did to Greece. The formula is deadly: force budget tightening on an economy that is already shrinking or on the edge of recession. This shrinks the economy further, causing government revenue to fall and making further tightening necessary to meet the target budget deficit. The government’s borrowing costs rise because markets see where this is going. This makes it even more difficult to meet the targets, and the whole mess can spiral out of control.

Today financial markets reacted violently to this process in Italy, with yields on both 10-year and 2-year Italian government bonds soaring past 7 percent. Let’s do the math.

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από το DOCTV

• 

  Α' ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟ | 10.11.2011

  Όχι άλλο Ευρώπη

Mercozy suck

Wall Street Journal Lays It Down: "Merkel And Sarkozy Have Lost Credibility"

The United States fought a bloody civil war in the nineteenth century to stop states seceding from the union. Yet the German and French leaders have decided the euro zone will be a voluntary union, not because of an attachment to the principle of national self-determination but to protect the principle that euro-zone countries should not become liable for each other's debts. The significance of Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy's Cannes declaration is immense. At a stroke, they have introduced foreign-exchange risk into a sovereign-debt market still grappling with the realization that euro-zone government bonds contain unexpected credit risk. Worse, throughout the crisis, the two leaders said they will do whatever it takes to save the euro. Yet the assurances they've given haven't been worth the paper they were written on: First, there were to be no sovereign defaults; then the first Greek haircut was a "unique situation;" the second Greek haircut followed 12 weeks later; now euro-zone exits are possible. No wonder the markets won't lend and China won't invest in Europe's bailout funds. Nothing these leaders say any longer carries any credibility.

δες

PHOTO BOOTH

From punks to models.

winter is coming

No one knows why they do it. Yet each fall, thousands of starlings dance in the twilight above Gretna, Scotland. The birds gather in magical shape-shifting flocks called murmurations, having migrated in the millions from Russia and Scandinavia to escape winter’s bite. Scientists aren’t sure how they do it, either. Even complex algorithmic models haven’t yet explained the starlings’ acrobatics, which rely on the tiny bird’s quicksilver reaction time of under 100 milliseconds to avoid aerial collisions—and predators—in the giant flock. Despite their show of force in the dusky sky, starlings have declined significantly in the UK in recent years, perhaps because of a drop in nesting sites. The birds still roost in several of Britain’s rural pastures, however, settling down to sleep (and chatter) after the evening’s ballet.

...

το 4ο Ράιχ αντιμετωπίζει πρόβλημα

Not With A Bang, But A 28% Annualized Decline: Charting The End Of The German Manufacturing Miracle

Slowly, but surely, the global economic growth dynamo is growing ever dimmer and dimmer. Two days ago we reported that that relentless driver of global growth - exports - finally succumbed to reality, as slowly but surely the paradigm of everyone exporting to someone else with magically nobody importing, logically collapsed. This is now followed by German manufacturing, that traditional and only source of strength in Europe, which half an hour ago was reported to drop 4.3%, compared to an expectation of a 0.1% gain. In other words, as the chart below shows German factory orders have just suffered their worst three, post-Reunification months outside of the late crash itself, falling at a 28% annualized rate, to take the total back to where it first stood over five years ago. Reaction is swift: Italian and Spanish bonds immediately drop, with the yield returning to 6.23% and 5.52%, forcing the ECB's monetization actions to have to fight not only "speculators" but also reality.

ξυπνήσανε στην Ιταλία

δεν έχω ακόμα αποφασίσει

Αν ο στόχος του είναι να σώσει την Ελλάδα έχει αποτύχει παταγωδώς. Αντίθετα όλες οι αποφάσεις, όλες οι κινήσεις που έχει κάνει μέχρι στιγμής είχαν σαν αποτέλεσμα να βυθίσουν ακόμα περισσότερο στην κρίση την έρημη ετούτη χώρα.

Αν ο στόχος του είναι να διαλύσει την ΕΕ τα καταφέρνει περίφημα. Και ταυτόχρονα εξηγεί όλες τις μέχρι τώρα αποφάσεις του και κινήσεις του. Είναι ο άνθρωπος που έφερε το ΔΝΤ στην Ευρώπη και που διαπραγματευόταν μαζί του πριν καν πάρει την εξουσία, ενώ μας γέμιζε με φούμαρα για λεφτά που υπάρχουν. Είναι ο άνθρωπος που κάνει τα πάντα για να συντηρήσει και να επιτείνει την αβεβαιότητα βυθίζοντας τα χρηματιστήρια σε ολόκληρο τον κόσμο.

Δεν μπορώ να καταλήξω αν είναι επικίνδυνα βλάκας ή επικίνδυνα ικανός.

a good idea

November 01, 2011

An Ideal Target

Occupy the European Central Bank

by DEAN BAKER

In the last month, people from around the country and around the world have picked up on the Occupy Wall Street theme of retaking the country from the wealthy. Insofar as this sentiment gathers force in Europe, there is probably no place better for people to plant themselves than on the steps of the European Central Bank (ECB).

More than any other institution the ECB is responsible for the economic wreckage that has overtaken the European economy. In the years when housing bubbles were building across the much of the eurozone and the United States, the ECB looked the other way. Its position at the time was that these bubbles and the huge imbalances they created were not its concern. Its concern was keeping the inflation rate at 2.0 percent.

This single-minded obsession with the inflation rate at a time when the economies of the eurozone and the world were on the edge of disaster is akin to Kodak insisting that its business line was photographic film at a time when digital photography was exploding. Competent business people adjust their business plans when the world changes. In the same vein, competent central bankers reorder their priorities when the economic situation requires changes.

But the ECB ignored the housing bubbles and the economy came crashing down around them. This may have been due to incompetence or it may have something to do with the fact that many of their friends in the banking industry were making lots of money financing the bubbles. Either way the consequences for the European people are the same.

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