READ A BOOK NIGGA!

Me dio mucha risa esta cosa que encontré :P y sobre todo la reacción de los medios jajajajaja.
Vaya maneras de tratar de cambiar al mundo... a p&%azos ¿Eh?

La Persona de Bergman

Chickin out: Esta que obra "voló mi mente".
Ayer fuimos al teatro unos enapos y yo a ver "Persona" en el teatro "El Milagro" de Gimenez Cacho (el general de Arráncame la vida)... Digamos que sigo sintiendo una shizzle en la mente; nos movió el líquido cefalorraquídeo de manera mala-buena-copa.
Es una adaptación de la película de Ingmar Bergman bajo el mismo nombre (duh!)... vayan a verla, cuesta $50 y es los fines d semana a las 6pm en la Roma (todo Insurgentes -->Nte. hasta Reforma y por Gral. Prim en la calle Milano #42) :)
¿Quieren sentir? Igual y esto les ayuda un poco jejeje.

http://www.ingmarbergman.se/page.asp?guid=FAAFBDA0-48FC-4871-8603-1795C358F900&LanCD=EN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(film)

Links a prueba de error.

Aquí los links de los videos de abajo por si no pifan los que postee. 

1.- http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paola_antonelli_previews_design_and_the_elastic_mind.html

2.-http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_collects_stories.html

3.-http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html

4.-http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_nachtwey_s_searing_pictures_of_war.html

5.-http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/frans_lanting_s_lyrical_nature_photos.html

6.-http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pilobolus_perform_symbiosis.html

7.-http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html

El 4to está fuerte pero por favor no se lo pierdan. 

TED talks, ideas worth spreading

Bueno, después de brillar por mi ausencia en este blog y en el depa y en las semanas de muchos de ustedes (por lo cual me disculpo humilde y sinceramente) les comento sobre TED. Las siglas de TED representan Technology, Entretainment and Design, básicamente algo similar a lo que MeMöBiUs busca unir. Lo que hacen ellos es una conferencia anual en Monterey, California que reune a filósofos del mundo moderno, activistas por X o Y casua, empresarios humanitarios, artistas ecológicos, fotógrafos cuentacuentos, psicólogos pacifistas etc. 

El punto es que todos son unos chingones en lo que hacen y además se ofrecen o los invitan a dar, lo que llaman en TED "talks" que es a grandes rasgos, eso, monólogos en los que la audiencia participa involucrándose en el tema.

Mi idea es que no sólo le echemos un ojo a estos vids, sino que también tomemos ideas para poner nosotros en práctica, son muy entusiastas sobre difundir sus videos e ideas y sobre reunir gente del globo que busque un bien común.

Aquí les dejo algunos que me parecieron interesantes.

1.- Trata sobre tu intención Xall, que comentaste con Lele y yo, crear con bases en ciencia, arte y diseño.

2.- How we feel, National Happiness.

3.- Cultura occidental representada por sus deshechos.

4.- TED Prize wish: Share a vital story with the World (war photographer)

5.- Fotografía poética (el wey habla horrible pero denle chance)

6.- Nomas por placer, Pilobolus

7.- Lele y yo encontramos este video muy interesante, Last but not least: ¿Cómo es que nos hacemos monstruos o héroes?

La verdad es que todos están muy interesantes, no dejen de ir de link en link, hay muchas más, todas aportan algo, no sólo a MeMöBiUs sino también a la calidad de nuestra propia cultura general. Saludos a todos.

Andemo

Sobre la Crisis Económica (Info de Tal, proporcionada por el TEC)

September 5, 2008

Main Bank of China Is in Need of Capital

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — China’s central bank is in a bind.

It has been on a buying binge in the United States over the last seven years, snapping up roughly $1 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Those investments have been declining sharply in value when converted from dollars into the strong yuan, casting a spotlight on the central bank’s tiny capital base. The bank’s capital, just $3.2 billion, has not grown during the buying spree, despite private warnings from the International Monetary Fund.

Now the central bank needs an infusion of capital. Central banks can, of course, print more money, but that would stoke inflation. Instead, the People’s Bank of China has begun discussions with the finance ministry on ways to shore up its capital, said three people familiar with the discussions who insisted on anonymity because the subject is delicate in China.

The central bank’s predicament has several repercussions. For one, it makes it less likely that China will allow the yuan to continue rising against the dollar, say central banking experts. This could heighten trade tensions with the United States. The Bush administration and many Democrats in Congress have sought a stronger yuan to reduce the competitiveness of Chinese exports and trim the American trade deficit.

The central bank has been the main advocate within China for a stronger yuan. But it now finds itself increasingly beholden to the finance ministry, which has tended to oppose a stronger yuan. As the yuan slips in value, China’s exports gain an edge over the goods of other countries.

The two bureaucracies have been ferocious rivals. Accepting an injection of capital from the finance ministry could reduce the independence of the central bank, said Eswar S. Prasad, the former division chief for China at the International Monetary Fund.

“Central banks hate doing that because it puts them more under the thumb of the finance ministry,” he said.

Mr. Prasad said that during his trips to Beijing on behalf of the I.M.F., he had repeatedly cautioned China over the enormous scale of its holdings of American bonds, emphasizing that it left China vulnerable to losses from either a strengthening of the yuan or from a rise in American interest rates. When interest rates rise, the prices of bonds fall.

Officials at the central bank declined to comment, while finance ministry officials did not respond to calls or questions via fax seeking comment. Data in a study by the Bank of International Settlements based in Basel, Switzerland, sometimes called the central bank for central banks, shows that many central banks had small China’s Central Bank Is Short of Capital bases relative to foreign reserves at the end of 2002, though few were as low as the People’s Bank of China.

Given the poor performance of foreign bonds, the Chinese government could decide to shift some of its foreign exchange reserves into global stock markets.
The central bank started making modest purchases of foreign stocks last winter, but has kept almost all of its reserves in bonds, like other central banks.
The finance ministry, however, has pushed for investments in overseas stocks. Last year, it wrested control of the $200 billion China Investment Corporation, which had been bankrolled by the central bank. That corporation’s most publicized move, a $3 billion investment in the Blackstone Group in May of last year, has lost more than 43 percent of its value.

The central bank’s difficulties do not, by themselves, pose a threat to the economy, economists agree. The government has ample resources and is running a budget surplus. Most likely, the finance ministry would simply transfer bonds of other Chinese government agencies to the bank to increase its capital. But even in a country that strongly discourages criticism of its economic policies, hints of dissatisfaction are appearing over China’s foreign investments.

For instance, a Chinese blogger complained last month, “It is as if China has made a gift to the United States Navy of 200 brand new aircraft carriers.”

Bankers estimate that $1 trillion of China’s total foreign exchange reserves of $1.8 trillion are in American securities. With aircraft carriers costing up to $5 billion apiece, $1 trillion would, in theory, buy 200 of them.
By buying United States bonds, the Chinese government has been investing a large chunk of the country’s savings in assets earning just 3 percent annually in dollars. And those low returns turn into real declines of about 10 percent a year after factoring in inflation and the yuan’s appreciation against the dollar.

The yuan has risen 21 percent against the dollar since China stopped pegging its currency to the dollar in July 2005. The actual declines in value of the central bank’s various investments are a carefully guarded state secret. Still China finds itself hemmed in. If it were to curtail its purchases of dollar-denominated securities drastically, the dollar would likely fall and American interest rates could soar.
China spent more than one-eighth of its entire economic output last year on foreign bonds, and then picked up the pace during the first half of this year. Chinese officials have suggested in recent comments that they are increasingly interested in stopping the yuan’s rise, and thus are willing to continue buying foreign securities to support the dollar. In fact, the yuan weakened slightly against the dollar last month after 26 consecutive months of gains.

Along with Treasuries, China has invested heavily in mortgage-backed bonds from Fannie Mae and Freddie China’s Central Bank Is Short of Capital Mac, the struggling mortgage finance giants that are sponsored by the United States government. Standard & Poor’s estimates China’s holdings at $340 billion.
Some bond traders suspect that the central bank has scaled back its purchases of these securities, as have China’s commercial banks. But the central bank trades this debt through many third parties in many countries, making its activity opaque to outside analysts.

The central bank has gone to great lengths to maintain its foreign purchases. The money to buy foreign bonds has come from the reserves required that commercial banks must deposit with the central bank. In effect, China’s commercial banks have been lending the central bank more than $1 trillion at an interest rate of less than 2 percent.

To keep the banks strong when they were getting such little interest on their reserves, the central bank has kept deposit rates low. The gap between what banks are paying on deposits and the rates they are charging ordinary customers to borrow is several percentage points. This amounts to a transfer of wealth from ordinary Chinese savers to the central bank and on to Americans who are selling their debt to the Chinese.

The central bank is now under considerable pressure to reduce the commercial banks’ reserve requirements to encourage growth as the Chinese economy shows signs of slowing.
Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese central banking at Northwestern University, said that when he visited the People’s Bank of China for a series of meetings this summer, he was surprised by how many officials resented the institution’s losses.

He said the officials blamed the United States and believed the controversial assertions set forth in the book “Currency War,” a Chinese best seller published a year ago. The book suggests that the United States deliberately lured China into buying its securities knowing that they would later plunge in value.

“A lot of policy makers in China, at least midlevel policy makers, believe this,” Mr. Shih said.

October 13, 2008

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Gordon Does Good

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

O.K., the question is premature — we still don’t know the exact shape of the planned financial rescues in Europe or for that matter the United States, let alone whether they’ll really work. What we do know, however, is that Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.

This is an unexpected turn of events. The British government is, after all, very much a junior partner when it comes to world economic affairs. It’s true that London is one of the world’s great financial centers, but the

British economy is far smaller than the U.S. economy, and the Bank of England doesn’t have anything like the influence either of the Federal Reserve or of the European Central Bank. So you don’t expect to see Britain playing a leadership role.

But the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own.

What is the nature of the crisis? The details can be insanely complex, but the basics are fairly simple. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to large losses for anyone who bought assets backed by mortgage payments; these losses have left many financial institutions with too much debt and too little capital to provide the credit the economy needs; troubled financial institutions have tried to meet their debts and increase their capital by selling assets, but this has driven asset prices down, reducing their capital even further.

What can be done to stem the crisis? Aid to homeowners, though desirable, can’t prevent large losses on bad loans, and in any case will take effect too slowly to help in the current panic. The natural thing to do, then — and the solution adopted in many previous financial crises — is to deal with the problem of inadequate financial capital by having governments provide financial institutions with more capital in return for a share of ownership.

This sort of temporary part-nationalization, which is often referred to as an “equity injection,” is the crisis solution advocated by many economists — and sources told The Times that it was also the solution privately favored by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman.

But when Henry Paulson, the U.S. Treasury secretary, announced his plan for a $700 billion financial bailout, he rejected this obvious path, saying, “That’s what you do when you have failure.” Instead, he called for government purchases of toxic mortgage-backed securities, based on the theory that ... actually, it never was clear what his theory was.

Meanwhile, the British government went straight to the heart of the problem — and moved to address it with stunning speed. On Wednesday, Mr. Brown’s officials announced a plan for major equity injections into British banks, backed up by guarantees on bank debt that should get lending among banks, a crucial part of the financial mechanism, running again. And the first major commitment of funds will come on Monday — five days after the plan’s announcement.

At a special European summit meeting on Sunday, the major economies of continental Europe in effect declared themselves ready to follow Britain’s lead, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into banks while guaranteeing their debts. And whaddya know, Mr. Paulson — after arguably wasting several precious weeks — has also reversed course, and now plans to buy equity stakes rather than bad mortgage securities (although he still seems to be moving with painful slowness).

As I said, we still don’t know whether these moves will work. But policy is, finally, being driven by a clear view of what needs to be done. Which raises the question, why did that clear view have to come from London rather than Washington?

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Paulson’s initial response was distorted by ideology. Remember, he works for an administration whose philosophy of government can be summed up as “private good, public bad,” which must have made it hard to face up to the need for partial government ownership of the financial sector.

I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to Mr. Paulson’s fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.

Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis.

BIENVENIDA-INTRODUCTORIA- Life, What is it but a Dream...

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. 'I don't much care where----' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. '----so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation. 'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk enough.'
(Alice in Wonderland, copiado de un poster del cuarto de mon petit ami)

Hola a todos!

Les agradezco enormemente el que hayan hecho caso al hiperlink del mail, ahora el paso #2 consiste en leer lo que a continuación escribí para sus ojos...
CHAN CHAN CHAAAAN.

Desde hace tiempo llevo guardando en mi MEMOria varios pasajes de los múltiples debrayes etilicos en sobriedad que he tenido con gente de todo tipo a quien que escucho con mis orejas de zurda. Ergo-concordantly-vis.a.vis acordé con mis gurús-roomies en darle solución activa (duh!) a nuestra posmodernidad-sedentarismo-EMOtividad.negativa-weba.mental convertida en indiferencia-inepta-de.impotencia e inutilidad como seres humanos ante nuestra propia situación "no tan favorable" (para ahorrarme adjetivos mala copas) en este país... y como parte de este mundo.

Marcha del 68, crisis económica (ya casi, y@MERO jaja), se derriten los polos y los ositos blancos se ahogan... petróleo, Obama faw yo momma... Atropellan al de la CANACA. No, bueno ya en serio: hay una piedrita en el tenis de mi cabeza que había optado por ignorar todos estos años para evitar la frustración, y es la pregunta:

"¿Y QUÉ ESTOY HACIENDO AL RESPECTO?". El mundo oscila en su perpetuidad momentánea y algunos nos sentimos vegetales caducos. No trascendemos más allá de lo efímero, de nuestras frágiles palabras echadas al aire en vísperas de la digestión de una torta de tamal matutina mientras se discute acerca de la política mundial y los transgénicos de la carne. Hacemos excelentes críticas, quejas y demás, pero no pasa de eso.

Pues yo, la verdad ya me cansé de tomar té mientras no hago nada en mi doble negación, por lo que con mucho optimismo les digo:
"Y ahora con ustedes: El proyecto "Memoebius""

¿Qué carajos es esta shizzle? Es muy secillo (y NOT). El nombre es un híbrido juajiro de dos términos interesantes: Meme y Moebius. Wikipedia les hará el paro, lo demás lo dejo a sus vastas imaginaciones (si, suena como "me muevo" y es a propósito) :)

Consiste en: Dar ideas en un brainstorm masivo y maniaco dadá sobre cualquier tipo de solución gráfica, de video, de conferencia o teatro guiñol (lo que se les ocurra) para los problemas de la actualidad.
Planeamos participar en todo tipo de convocatorias para hacer posters, playeras, escritos, dibujos, performances/happenings (como lo de Wally), pláticas o guateberness (sic) con finalidad de involucrarnos más con los hazares del Flying Spaghetti Monster y por lo tanto lograr toda clase de mejoras paulatinas y sencillas en la vida no sólo nuestra sino de los demás compañeros. Viva el efecto mariposa en ese sentido :)

Este es mi granito de Xalli (de arena, eso significa mi nombre en Náhuatl) y realmente creo que podemos usar nuestro poder creativo comunal para divertirnos cambiando al mundo con IDEAS ATERRIZADAS de jóvenes yet-2-b-corrupted-by-adulthood jeje.

Si se enteran de cualquier convocatoria o tienen información de proyectos ajenos y demás, les imploro que me lo hagan saber para ponerlo en este blog y empezar a darle al MEMÖBIUS :)
Mientras les ofrezco todo lo que tengo para darle cuerda a esta monkey.

Agradezco plenamente a Lele, Pana y a Daniel, quienes me dieron la patadita final del Thrust que necesitaba para empezar a redactar nuevamente. Suerte amigos, ¡Los quiero!
La imagen se sacó de http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/tenniel/alice/6.4.jpg

Convocatoria- Los Leones No Son Como Los Pintan 2008

ANIMAL CARE!!!
Esta ya está a punto de terminar... pero valdría la pena. Especialmente dedicada a Andemo que me traumó todo este mes con causas pro-animales anti-circos y zoológicos mala copa jajaja.
http://www.losleonesnosoncomolospintan.com/

Un agradecimiento a Nat, que me pasó la voz de este link :)

i'm going on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENE1eWtW7e8

I’ve seen it with my own eyes
How we’re gettin’ otherwise
Without the luxury of leavin’
The touch and feeling of free is
Untangible technically
Something you’ve got to believe in
Connect the cause and effect
One foot in front of the next
This is the start of a journey.
And my mind is already gone
And though there are other unknowns
Somehow this doesn’t concern me.

And you can stand right there if you want
But I’m going on
And I’m prepared to go it alone
I’m going on
To a place in the sun that’s nice and warm
I’m going on

And I’m sure they’ll have a place for you too

____
preemtive. to be ahead and not necessarily on top.
to believe in better ways and swings to sway.
ready for a 360* tumbleturn.

N'importe quoi!!

Arenita Aporta:

Esta es una peli/documental de Agnes Varda (una directora de cine de origen francés) que me latió mucho. No les voy a decir de qué se trata :P pero abarca el tema del desperdicio sobre todo, en Europa y cómo alguna gente actúa al respecto (para bien o para mal). Está interesantona, aparte es buena práctica para aquellos que estudian franchute.
En especial se me hizo un detalle "soberbio" como la narración parte del cuadro
de Millet "La Espigadoras"... nice-in-the-deed.
http://filmsdefrance.com/FDF_Les_Glaneurs_et_les_glaneuse_rev.html