CARLOS Tiger without Time

I would argue, conversely, that it is critically important to have a spiritual sense of God and ethical standards, rather than be well versed in the underpinnings of all religious doctrines in the world.

Too many Americans feel they know everything they need to about Jesus and the Bible. Too many profess to be devout Christians, observe their Sunday obligations and claim to be saved, but seem to have a tremendous blind spot to the actual teachings of Jesus.

These same Christians are quick to judge (first ones to cast a stone), and then wonder why Americans are so reviled in other parts of the world.

I wish people would study what Jesus actually taught, rather than go through the motions of their religious doctrine.

If they tried to practice what Jesus preached, they might have an entirely different sense of God and the world around them.

· Tom Caffery (FLA.) / NewsWeek March 26, 2007

DAY 1
The widow Suaada Saadoun (mom with blue veil and dark suit) told soldiers about problems in her neighborhood with two Shiite men. The soldier arrests the two men.

DAY 2
Ms. Saadoun was killed at a market. Her Granddaughters were among those in mourning.

3) It’s long been in fashion, to believe that people are innately good, and that upbringing and environment are responsible for nasty personalities. But research is beginning to show that mean, sometimes outright evil behavior has a strong genetic component. Some of us, in other words, are truly born badly.

4) In case of Virginia tech massacre: Cho Seung Hui did not emerge in our world full grown with guns blazing. He has been with us a long time. He was a child in U.S. School system. He was a person in our community. What about funding ways to help people, desperate, angry, isolated and miserable among us?

I think, to prevent future massacres, we don’t need metal detectors, armed guards or reflexive campus lock downs. We need to act more like a family with justice and solidarity

See you later,
CARLOS, Tiger without Time

To punish Iran for backing terrorism and going nuclear, Washington has slapped on trade sanctions and moved aggressively against its banking industry. But in one area, business between the two nations is booming smokes.

Exempted from the sanctions regime as agricultural products, U.S. tobacco exports to Iran have grown to $142 million over the past five years and now dwarf those all other American goods shipped there.

From 2002 to 2005, Tobacco made up nearly half the value of all U.S. exports to Iran, according to trade data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. The $5o million worth of tobacco products shipped there in 2005.
More details look at the next picture.

What curiosities have the life, isn’t it?

See you later,
CARLOS, Tiger without Time

* A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
 

* All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.
 

* All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.
 

* All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
 

* All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
 

* All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
 

* All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
 

* All things truly wicked start from innocence.
 

* Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

* Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.

* If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.

* It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

* No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

* Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

* There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

* Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa

1. All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
2. Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
3. Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
4. Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
5. Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
6. Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
7. Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.
8. I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

* Kurt Vonnegut

NEW YORK: The feud between the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, one-time best of friends, had all the elements of a literary classic: accusations of betrayal, jealousy and adultery, and a brutal encounter 31 years ago when things turned bloody.

What it had lacked, however, was a wealth of documentary evidence.
That all changed this month, with the publication of two black-and-white portraits taken on Valentine’s Day, 1976, in Mexico City that show García Márquez with a shiner – in turns smiling and serious – two days after being slugged by Vargas Llosa. The writers are said not to have spoken to each other since the fight.

The Mexican newspaper La Jornada used the image of the smiling García Márquez as the cover of an issue created for his 80th birthday on March 6. Other newspapers in Latin America have followed suit, said the photographer Rodrigo Moya, who took both images and has recently been interviewed by radio stations in Argentina, Colombia and Chile.

“It’s been a little overwhelming,” Moya said by telephone in Spanish from Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he lives. “I have thousands of very good photos, but this one has generated so much interest due to the subject.” García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, largely in recognition of his masterpiece “100 Years of Solitude.”

Moya said that his friend García Márquez had asked him to take his portrait with a black eye. Though the photographs had never been published, Moya long ago had printed one for a friend who displayed it in his house. A journalist saw the photograph there and inquired about gaining permission to use it for his magazine, but they couldn’t agree on terms, Moya said.
“Word got out that this photo existed, however,” he said, “and I got a call from La Jornada, for which I have worked occasionally and with which I have a good relationship. I decided that sufficient time had passed.”

The emergence of the photographs – after “30 years of solitude” as one French commentator put it – has given renewed interest to the events leading to the celebrated knockout. As a literary showdown, Mario Vargas Llosa vs. Gabriel García Márquez ranks with some of the most famous feuds, including Lillian Hellman vs. Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal.

(When the encounter between Mailer and Vidal turned physical, if not bloody, Vidal is said to have responded from the floor, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”)

To accompany the photograph La Jornada asked Moya to write an essay, said Pablo Espinosa, the newspaper’s culture news editor, because while “this story was very familiar to everybody, not everybody knew the particulars.”

In his essay Moya sets the scene: a Mexico City movie theater packed with people attending the premiere of a film about the plane crash survivors in the Andes who turned to cannibalism.

At one point Vargas Llosa rushes up to García Márquez, who innocently tries to embrace him. Instead Vargas Llosa decks him, García Márquez’s blood gushing everywhere.

Some had surmised that the fight may have been over politics, since García Márquez has always been on the left and Vargas Llosa at the time had begun to migrate to the right. (He later made an unsuccessful attempt to run for president of Peru in 1990 as a free marketeer.) But, as Moya explains, the cause was a woman, specifically, Vargas Llosa’s wife, whom García Márquez consoled during a difficult period in the marriage.

While one of his photographs shows García Márquez in good spirits, Moya said that the immediate aftermath was grisly. “I took the picture two days after the incident, when he came to my house,” he said. “It was difficult to take a picture in which he looked this good. I have some pictures in which he looks like he was really beaten up, like beaten up by the Mexican police.”
Moya said he had not yet heard from García Márquez about the publication of the photographs. “We were good friends, but we’ve drifted apart,” Moya said. “I live in Cuernavaca. He travels all over the world.”
This week García Márquez is being honored in Colombia by the Fourth International Congress of the Spanish Language, which is meeting in Cartagena. A special 40th-anniversary edition of “100 Years of Solitude,” which includes an introductory essay by Vargas Llosa in praise of the book, will be presented. He is said to have written it before the fight but has kept it out of print until recently.
As for his friend’s motivations at the time, Moya said: “He is very meticulous and likes to document his life in different moments.
“He just had the idea that he wanted to have a picture with a black eye.”

By Noam Cohen
Published: March 29, 2007

1. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
2. A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. 
3. Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
4. Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
5. An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.

Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, is an American icon whose razor-sharp wit and inimitable genius have entertained countless readers for more than a century.

His many publications include such gallant childhood essentials as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, along with many dozens of other works ranging from airy magazine columns to focused, biting anti-imperialist satire.

He was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1835. The Clemens family consisted of two brothers, a sister, and the family-owned slave, Jenny, whose vivid storytelling was a formative influence on the young Sam. As he was growing up, his parents explained their perspective on the nature of things in the established South, about the slave-owning tradition, and about ‘rough western justice.’

Reflections of this pre-war southern upbringing are found in many of Twain’s writings, and although his images are quite idyllic, one cannot ignore the constant historical reminders of some of America’s more unacceptable social realities.

Sam Clemens first discovered his literary talents through an apprenticeship at a local printing shop. He was exposed to countless books and became an avid reader. For him, a career in journalism was more than natural, but it wasn’t until the marriage of his sister that Sam was inspired to real action. Bound by train, he left Hannibal for New York City. Shortly thereafter he found himself in Philadelphia, working in the publishing and journalism fields.

Eventually he relocated to Cincinatti, with the intention of saving enough money to explore the Amazon by way of New Orleans. His method of travel was to be the fateful steamboat, and while contemplating his future, he discovered his deep internal connection with the Mississippi river. Suddenly, he knew he had to learn how to pilot steamboats, and this urge proved stronger than anything he had known before. Stronger, even, than the idea of explorations in South America.

While working in Carson City he met his mentor, the popular humorist Artemus Ward, who recognized Clemens’ talent and encouraged him to write ‘as much as possible.’ Mark Twain did precisely that.

Clemens married, and his finely-honed abilities earned him international renown as a writer, lecturer and traveller. Along the way, he composed some of the best-loved and most widely known literature of 19th-century America. As the chancellor of Oxford University told an aged Clemens in 1907: ‘Most amiable and charming sir, you shake the sides of the whole world with your merriment.’

Mark Twain spent the remaining three years completing his official autobiography, concluding with the death of his beloved wife. Four months later, on the evening of 10 April 1910, he flipped through a book and bade his doctor ‘goodbye’. Thence he drifted into eternal slumber.

Bio written by Andrew G. Lewis

At present this appearing a reproof, in the environment of countries, for the use of the Internet.

There are two position:

1) Information wants to be free, because it lowers the cost of distribution of words and pictures, and it enables information to spread freely within countries and across borders.

2) Information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.

So you have these two fighting against each other. For example, Viacom’s decision to sue youtube and its owner, Google, for $1,000,000,000 (a billion dollars) is part of the commercial battle over whether information should be free or expensive.

The fact that individuals can follow suit, publishing everything from political tracts to pictures of their friends naked, makes censorship a virtually impossible job.

The Internet does not respect national laws or conventions.
China still does its best to censor information, both by blocking sites and companies such as Yahoo and Google into self-censorship.

The US government’s efforts to control child pornography are an exception and have faced legal challenges under the first amendment in the courts.
The Supreme Court struck down one effort to ban on line distribution of simulated sexual acts in 2002.

Another example is the short-lived effort by a Turkish court to block youtube because of an insulting film about Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, led to international ridicule and internal criticism. The ban has been lifted after the offending film was removed from the site.

In Saudi Arabia, the Internet services unit filters and block sites deemed to violate Islamic tradition or national regulations.

On conclusion the country that they have more censorship are: (Source, Reporters without borders, march 2007)

1) CHINA … USERS: 137.0 Millions
2) TURKEY … USERS: 16.0 Millions
3) THAILAND … USERS: 8.4 Millions
4) IRAN … USERS: 7.5 Millions
5) EGYPT… USERS: 5.0 Millions
6) BELARUS … USERS: 3.4 Millions
7) SAUDI ARABIA … USERS: 2.5 Millions
8) SYRIA … USERS: 1.1 Millions

So Internet information want to be free, but does not always get the choice when write about political, religion or some issue that does not like some countries.

See you later.
CARLOS, Tiger without Time

Some pieces of science history aren’t worth as much as you might expect.

Thomas Edison’s first lightbulb which was
used in a demonstration at Menlo Park, NJ.

Which is worth more—the original lightbulbs that clinched Edison’s career as legendary inventor and launched the age of artificial illumination or Eric Clapton’s guitar? At Christie’s first science-themed auction, held in London last December, appraisers lowballed Edison’s bulbs at $380,000, less than half of what Clapton’s Stratocaster brought in a 2004 auction at Christie’s.

Even at that price, they didn’t sell. “It’s surprising because the bulbs are so unique and historically important,” says Christie’s spokesperson Matthew Paton. They were used as evidence in a highly publicized decadelong trial that proved Edison invented the lightbulb. Lost for 114 years, the bulbs recently turned up in an attic.

There were also no takers for a rare Enigma code-breaking machine from the 1940s or for one of the first X-rays of DNA, taken by Rosalind Franklin’s research assistant.

Old reliables did draw some bidders: a handwritten letter by a 16-year-old Einstein that alludes to ideas about relativity was the top seller, going for more than $670,000, and a fresh first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species (yawn) topped $150,000.

More surprising was the $140,000 bid for a technical manuscript from 1945 describing the creation of the atomic bomb, signed by Manhattan Project legends like Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman.
Maybe next time Christie’s should put Edison’s phonograph on the block in an effort to attract the money of music fans.

* by Susan Kruglinski, 03.30.2007

The present fashion requires that the tattooing do play with the shoes that be used…

Here we see one of the advantages to have a small car…