Maria Curie

 

 

Fue la primera mujer que recibió el premio Nobel, y lo recibió dos veces.

Fue la primera mujer catedrática de la Sorbona, y durante muchos años la única.

Y después, cuando ya no podía celebrarlo, fue la primera mujer aceptada en el Panteón, el portentoso mausoleo reservado a 'los grandes hombres de Francia', aunque no era hombre y había nacido y crecido en Polonia.

A fines del siglo diecinueve, Marie Sklodowska y su marido, Pierre Curie, descubrieron una sustancia que emitía cuatrocientas veces más radiación que el uranio. La llamaron polonio, en homenaje al país de Marie. Poco después, inventaron la palabra radiactividad y comenzaron sus experimentos con el radio, tres mil veces más poderoso que el uranio. Y juntos recibieron el premio Nobel.

Pierre ya tenía sus dudas: ¿eran ellos portadores de una ofrenda del cielo o del infierno? En su conferencia de Estocolmo, advirtió que el caso del propio Alfred Nobel, inventor de la dinamita, había sido ejemplar:

—Los poderosos explosivos han permitido a la humanidad llevar a cabo trabajos admirables. Pero también son un medio temible de destrucción en manos de los grandes criminales que arrastran a los pueblos a la guerra.
Muy poco después, Pierre murió atropellado por un carro que cargaba cuatro toneladas de material militar.

Marie lo sobrevivió, y su cuerpo pagó el precio de sus éxitos. Las radiaciones le provocaron quemaduras, llagas y fuertes dolores, hasta que por fin murió de anemia perniciosa.

A la hija, Irene, que también fue premio Nobel por sus conquistas en el nuevo reino de la radiactividad, la mató la leucemia.

Immanuel Kant

Jorge Luis Borges

Alexandre Dumas

E.E Cummings

Emma Goldman

Henrik Ibsen

Charles Baudelaire

Donde sea fuera del mundo


La vida es un hospital donde cada enfermo está poseído por el deseo de cambiar de cama. Éste quisiera sufrir frente al calefactor, y aquél cree que mejoraría junto a la ventana.

Me parece que siempre estaría mejor allá, donde no estoy, y este problema de mudanza lo discuto sin cesar con mi alma.

"Dime, alma mía, pobre alma fría, ¿qué te parecería vivir en Lisboa? Allá debe hacer calor y te echarías al sol como una lagartija. Esta ciudad está a la orilla del agua; dicen que está hecha de mármol, y que la gente tiene tal odio por lo vege­tal que arranca los árboles. He aquí un paisaje a tu gusto: un paisaje con la luz y el mi­neral, ¡y el líquido para reflejarlos!"

Mi alma no responde.

"Ya que te gusta tanto el reposo, con el es­pectáculo del movimiento, ¿te gustaría vivir en Holanda, esa tierra prodigiosa? Tal vez te divertirías en esa región cuya imagen has admirado a menudo en los museos. ¿Qué te parecería Rotterdam, a ti que te gustan los paisajes con mástiles y las barcas atracadas al pie de las casas?"

Mi alma permanece muda.

"¿Quizá Batavia te complacería más? Ade­más allí encontraríamos el espíritu de Eu­ro­pa confundido con la belleza tropical."

Ni una palabra. —¿Habrá muerto mi alma?

"¿Habrás llegado a ese punto de parálisis en que no disfrutas sino tu malestar? Si es así, vayamos hacia los países que son la analogía de la Muerte. —¡Ya resolví el problema, pobre alma! Haremos nuestras maletas para Tornio. Vayamos aun más le­jos, al último rincón del Báltico; incluso más lejos de la vida, de ser po­si­­ble; ins­talé­monos en el polo. Allá el sol apenas roza la tierra obli­cuamen­te y las lentas sucesiones de la luz y la noche suprimen la variedad y aumentan la monotonía, esa mitad de la nada. Allá po­dremos tomar largos baños de tinieblas, mientras que, para di­vertir­nos, las auroras boreales nos enviarán de vez en cuando sus botones rosas, ¡como reflejos de fuegos artificiales del Infierno!"

Al fin estalla mi alma, y sabia­men­te me grita: "¡Donde sea!, ¡don­de sea!, ¡con tal que sea fuera de este mundo!"

John Donne

Upton Sinclair

Mark Wellman

Mark Twain

Joe Luis

Show presenter Melissa Bachman slammed after posting photo of lion she killed in South Africa

Bachman posted a smiling picture of herself with a dead lion in front of her, gushing about her 'incredible hunting day.' Her enthusiasm was not shared by thousands of others, who signed a petition to ban Bachman from South Africa.

Comments (364)

BY DAVID HARDING / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2013, 5:14 AM

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

TV presenter and hunter Melissa Bachman posted this photo of herself with a lion she killed in South Africa, tweeting, 'What a hunt!'

South Africans have begun a petition to ban hardcore huntress Melissa Bachman from their country after she posted a picture of a male lion she killed on Twitter and Facebook.

The picture shows the smiling Minnesota native and hunting show presenter holding a gun next to the dead beast, with its paws spread and eyes closed.

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

Bachman's websites feature smiling photos of her next to slain animals.

RELATED: ‘STEVE MARTIN’ DEER RETURNS HEALED AND HAPPY

"An incredible day hunting in South Africa!' she tweeted. "… what a hunt!"

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

Bachman shared this photo on her Facebook page of a zebra she killed in South Africa.

But her delight was not shared by thousands of others, reported the Daily Telegraph.

RELATED: HUNTER'S ARROW KILLS PUPPY IN PA.

CHANGE.ORG

Cape Town resident Elan Burman launched a Change.org petition to get the 'avid hunter' banned from ever returning to her country.

Cape Town resident Elan Burman immediately launched a Change.org petition to get the "avid hunter" banned from ever returning to her country, demanding she no longer "be granted access" to South Africa's natural resources.

"She is an absolute contradiction to the culture of conservation this country prides itself on," claimed Burman.

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

Bachman with another one of her kills from South Africa.

More than 7,300 people have signed the petition.

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

Burman, who started the Change.org petition against Bachman (pictured), said the hunter should not be granted access to South Africa's resources.

One signee, Richard Robinson, wrote: "You didn't kill a lion, you stood behind a machine and pulled a little trigger, you pathetic, sad excuse of a human."

The cause was even picked up by celebrities, such as the comedian Ricky Gervais.

MELISSABACHMAN.COM

Television presenter and hunter Bachman poses with a dead warthog in the 'trophy room' section of her website.

Hunting lions is legal in South Africa.

Bachman's website reveals a "trophy room" showing her next to slain animals including deer, zebra and crocodile. She also stars in the "hardcore-style hunting" show "Winchester Deadly Passion."

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

Bachman posted this photo on her Facebook page on Oct. 27: 'My first Alaska brown bear ... a beautiful and extremely blonde one to top it off!'

MELISSA BACHMAN VIA FACEBOOK

A resident of South African started a petition to ban Bachman (pictured) from the country.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tv-presenter-slammed-photo-lion-killed-article-1.1519039#ixzz2kv9nAPKr

León Tolstoi

Mark Twain

Manuel Scorza

VOY A LAS BATALLAS
SED FELICES PARA QUE
YO NO MUERA

América,
aquí te dejo.
Me voy a las batallas.
Luchar es más hermoso que cantar.
Yo te digo,
a pesar del dolor,
a pesar de las patrias derrumbadas,
ama a los gorriones.
Yo sé que es difícil
hallar entre las tumbas un lugar para la risa.
Yo mismo, a veces, caigo,
y el viento
levanta mi cara como una alfombra rota,
pero aun en las celdas,
bajo la lluvia,
yo no perdí la fe.

Amigos,
aunque os golpeen,
jamás perdáis la fe;
aunque vengan días sucios,
jamás perdáis la fe,
aunque yo mismo os ruegue de rodillas,
no me creáis,
amad la vida,
¡ guardad rocío
para que las flores
no padezcan las noches canallas que vendrán !

Sed felices, os ruego,
salid de los cuartos sombríos,
sed felices para que yo no muera.
Yo no escribí estos cantos
para dar espuma a las muchachas.

Yo canté porque los dolores
ya no cabían en mi boca:
yo siempre estuve aquí
peleando con mastines de pavorosa nieve;
conozco todas las caras,
he visto a los deudores tratando
de meterse en sus zapatos cada amanecer.
¿ Dónde no estuve ?
¿ En qué pantano no bebí ?
¿ a qué pozo no rodé ?

Ay, a mi alma caían las cáscaras
que amargas cocineras pelaban.
Amigos: en mi corazón jamás reinó silencio,
yo oí todas las voces,
escuché a las sábanas quejarse,
supe cuando las criadas escribían cartas de tristeza,
y cuando no llegó a tiempo el único pie del cojo,
y canté, América, los dolores,
y recliné en ti mi cabeza.
Más ahora digo:
degollad la tristeza,
cantad frente al mar.
Dadme la mano, amigos.
Amo la tierra flaca
que me siguió cojeando a los destierros.
No quise confesarlo antes.
Era difícil,
me ahogaba el esqueleto,
el aire me dolía,
la voz me llagaba
pero ahora te amo.

No soy herrero,
ni jinete, ni sembrador.
Yo sólo sé cantar, pero te amo;
¡ también la aurora se construye con canciones !

¡ Amigos,
os encargo reir!
Amad a las muchachas,
cuidad a los jazmines,
preservad al gorrión.
No me busquen amargos en la noche:
yo espero cantando la mañana.

Un gran viento se levanta.
Hay demasiado dolor.
Un gran viento se levanta.
He visto arder extraños ríos.
Un gran viento se levanta,
preparad la hoguera,
preparaos.

Aquí dejo mi poesía
para que los desdichados se laven la cara.
Buscadme cuando amanezca.
Entre la hierba estoy cantando.

Aldous Huxley

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Henry Miller

Czeslaw Milosz

A Felicitous Life

His old age fell on years of abundant harvest. 

There were no earthquakes, droughts or floods. 

It seemed as if the turning of the seasons gained in constancy, 

Stars waxed strong and the sun increased its might. 

Even in remote provinces no war was waged. 

Generations grew up friendly to fellow men. 

The rational nature of man was not a subject of derision. 

It was bitter to say farewell to the earth so renewed. 

He was envious and ashamed of his doubt, 

Content that his lacerated memory would vanish with him. 

Two days after his death a hurricane razed the coasts. 

Smoke came from volcanoes inactive for a hundred years. 

Lava sprawled over forests, vineyards, and towns. 

And war began with a battle on the islands. 

Michael Moore

Capitalism: A Love Story is a 2009 American documentary film directed, written by and starring Michael Moore. The film centers on the late-2000s financial crisis and the recovery stimulus, while putting forward an indictment of the current economic order in the United States and capitalism in general. Topics covered include Wall Street's "casino mentality", for-profit prisons, Goldman Sachs' influence in Washington, D.C., the poverty-level wages of many workers, the large wave of home foreclosures, corporate-owned life insurance, and the consequences of "runaway greed".^[2] The film also features a religious component where Moore examines whether or not capitalism is a sin and if Jesus would be a capitalist,^[3] in order to shine light on the ideological contradictions among evangelical conservatives who support free market ideals.

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

Steven Spielberg

Christopher McCandless

---

 

Many people, especially Alaskans, harshly judge and condemn 24 year old Chris McCandless http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless  for being a reckless, (or suicidal)  fool when he walked into the Alaskan Wilderness on April 28, 1992, without the skills & knowledge to survive.  On September 6, 1992 his emaciated body was discovered by hunters.  He had starved to death 2 1/2 weeks earlier.

Those who condemn him, don't understand or can't relate to his adventure seeking, risk taking, Explorer Spirit and his philosophy for living freely, which he clearly expresses in his letter below.  Those who judge and condemn him are motivated by their Egotistical Need, to elevate themselves as wiser, more superior beings.  But I'll bet that they are prisoners of their own fears, trapped in a mundane civilized life.  I do not think that Chris McCandless was a fool at all... I think that he was naive about the reality of surviving in the wild, without an umbilical cord to  the outside civilized world.  But then niavete goes hand in hand with being young and inexperieinced.

I think that he was very brave, daring and willing to take risks so that he could feel truly alive and free.  I admire and am inspired by his adventuresome spirit.   Even when he realized that he was starving and would soon die, he took one last photo of himself  happy and smiling and holding a hand written note for those he was leaving behind... 

"I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD.
GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!"

I think that Alex (his road name) expresses perfectly his philosophy of living in the letter he wrote to his 80 year old friend  Ron Franz who had befriended him in Salton City CA, and even wanted to adopt Chris as his son.  He encourages the old man to  put a camper on the back of his pickup, give up his apartment, pull up stakes and hit the road, and begin to really experience being alive.  I found his letter on the internet, here it is...

"Ron,

Alex here. I have been working up here in Carthage South Dakota for nearly two weeks now. I arrived up here three days after we parted in Grand Junction, Colorado. I hope that you made it back to Salton City wihtout too many problems. I enjoy working here and things are going well. The weather is not very bad and many days are surprisingly mild. Some of the farmers are even already going into their fields. It must be getting rather hot down there in Southern California by now. I wonder if you ever got a chance to get out and see how many people showed up for the March 20th Rainbow gathering there at the hotsprings http://tinyurl.com/58n7xr . It sounds like it might have been a lot of fun, but I don’t think you really understand these kind of people very well.

I will not be here in South Dakota very much longer. My friend, Wayne, wants me to stay working at the grain elevator through May and then go combining with him the entire summer, but I have my soul set entirely on my Alaskan Odyssey and hope to be on my way no later than April 15. That means I will be leaving here before very long, so I need you to send any more mail I may have received to the return address listed below.

Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times we spent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It may be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get through ths Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing form me again in the future. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing or been to hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one piece of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to this scheme of life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the American West. you will see things and meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and experiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did.

Take care Ron,

Alex"

His letter of encouragement inspired the old man to do as he suggested, but instead of living on the road,  he set up his home camp in the nearby desert at "Oh My God Hot Springs" http://tinyurl.com/58n7xr  ...at the same campsite where Alex had camped for 2 months when they met.  There he waited everyday for Alex to return.  One day he picked up a couple of hitchhikers who started talking about an article in "Outside magazine" http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html
about a young kid who was found starved to death in the Alaska Wilderness..  and he knew it was his young friend Alex.

I guess the only person that really holds us back from chasing our wildest dreams is ourself.  I know the feeling of being trapped by my own fears and inhibitions.  Once we can overcome that gatekeeper, we can begin to really live feeely.

If an 80 year old man was inspired by Chris to give up his secure, mundane conventional, civilised life, for the adventure and freedom of a more primitive , simpler life on the land...  I imagine that he has inspired countless younger people to step outside and chase their wildest dreams.

"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin living"

George Orwell

Esperanza

Monsanto

Eduardo Galeano

 

La tarántula universal


Ocurrió en Chicago, en 1886.

El primero de mayo, cuando la huelga obrera paralizó Chicago y otras ciudades, el diario «Philadelphia Tribune» diagnosticó: 'El elemento laboral ha sido picado por una especie de tarántula universal, y se ha vuelto loco de remate'.

Locos de remate estaban los obreros que luchaban por la jornada de trabajo de ocho horas y por el derecho a la organización sindical.

Al año siguiente, cuatro dirigentes obreros, acusados de asesinato, fueron sentenciados sin pruebas en un juicio mamarracho. Georg Engel, Adolf Fischer, Albert Parsons y Auguste Spies marcharon a la horca. El quinto condenado, Louis Linng, se había volado la cabeza en su celda.

Cada primero de mayo, el mundo entero los recuerda.

Con el paso del tiempo, las convenciones internacionales, las constituciones y las leyes les han dado la razón.

Sin embargo, las empresas más exitosas siguen sin enterarse.

Prohíben los sindicatos obreros y miden la jornada de trabajo con aquellos relojes derretidos que pintó Salvador Dalí.

Rockefeller

Luther Standing Bear

Eduardo Galeano

Alejandra Pizarnik

 

LA JAULA 

Afuera hay sol. 
No es más que un sol 
pero los hombres lo miran 
y después cantan. 

Yo no sé del sol. 
Yo sé la melodía del ángel 
y el sermón caliente 
del último viento. 
Sé gritar hasta el alba 
cuando la muerte se posa desnuda 
en mi sombra. 

Yo lloro debajo de mi nombre. 
Yo agito pañuelos en la noche y barcos sedientos de realidad 
bailan conmigo. 
Yo oculto clavos 
para escarnecer a mis sueños enfermos. 

Afuera hay sol. 
Yo me visto de cenizas.