...e de repente na rádio, uma grande música que me deixou nostálgico

Remar, Remar

Xutos & Pontapés

Mares convulsos, ressacas estranhas
Cruzam-te a alma de verde escuro
As ondas que te empurram
As vagas que te esmagam
Contra tudo lutas
Contra tudo falhas

Todas as tuas explosões
Redundam em silêncio
Nada me diz

Berras às bestas
Que te sufocam
Em abraços viscosos
Cheios de pavor
Esse frio surdo
O frio que te envolve
Nasce na fonte
Na fonte da dor

Remar, remar
Forçar a corrente
Ao mar, ao mar
Que mata a gente

Influx Capacitor

Eric J. Juneau

Eleven-year-old Martin had nothing to do on his day off from school. So he sat alone in his room, doodling in his diary and watching talk shows, since it was too early for cartoons. The particular topic today was "What would you say if you could go back and tell your fifteen-year-old self one thing?"

Every forty and fifty-year old confessed some regret or mistake. Half of them broke down in tears. One balding, grizzled man even looked like him.

"I wish I knew my future," Martin said to himself. He wrote down If I read this in the future and someone's invented a time machine, I'll be alone on June 22nd, he looked at the clock, 1:45 PM.

*FLASH*

A man with a receding hairline appeared at the foot of his bed, wearing a green-collared shirt and black pants. His arrival was accompanied by a loud whirring noise coming from a black box on his arm. The man had a bigger nose and a saggy face, but Martin knew he was looking at his future self.

"Oh my god, it worked. It worked," the man said as he adjusted his box.

"Jesus," Martin said. "Are you...?"

"I'm you, yes. From the future. You must have just written..." Older Martin pointed to the diary.

"...From a time machine?"

"Yes. I don't have much time. I took a lot of risks to get here."

Martin managed to nod, mouth hanging open.

Older Martin said, "Okay, first thing, ask out Michelle. She really digs you. No matter how scared or shy you are. If you don't, you'll regret it."

"Who's Michelle?"

"College. Freshman year. She lives in Sutherland Dorm. Second, invest in Giga-Write this down!" Older Martin barked.

Young Martin started writing furiously.

"Invest in Gigawire, YorkMark, and Torama."

"Those are companies?"

"Yes, and don't bother buying those collectible comic books. They're worth nothing. And Mom throws them out when you go to college anyway."

"What college do I go to?" Young Martin asked.

"Cantrell. And that's another thing. You've got to get your grades up. In tenth grade, study really hard. I mean it. Maybe you could've gone to a better school if you hadn't gotten angsty and goofed off."

As Martin scribbled, he realized this man, who he would become, wasn't very pleasant.

He continued, "And quit hanging out with those friends by the stairwell all the time. They're losers. They'll just get you into trouble."

*FLASH*

Another man appeared in the room next to older Martin. He wore a shiny blue jumpsuit and looked identical, but with more hair and freckles. "Good," he said, "I'm not too late." He was holding a black device in front of him like bike handlebars.

"Who are you?" Older Martin said.

"I'm you. Well, I'm the you that you become," he pointed at young Martin, "After you're done with your speech. Your temporal bubble must be protecting you from disappearing. Listen," he addressed young Martin, "That thing with Michelle. Don't do it. Or, if you do, wear condoms."

"Condoms?" Green-suited older Martin said, aghast.

"I swear to god, she's crazy. It won't be worth it. And pull your money out of the stock market before the 'Jefferson-Pershing' incident."

Young Martin started writing again at breakneck speed. "What's that?" he said.

"You'll know it when it comes. Also, while I'm at it, don't buy a Honda Gaia. They're terrible."

"Is that a car?" young Martin asked.

"Sort of," blue-suited Martin-of-the-future said.

*FLASH*

Now a man wearing a light periwinkle suit, partially ripped at one sleeve, stood before him. He took his glass helmet off. "Did you just tell him about Michelle?"

Blue-suited Martin nodded, jaw gaping.

"Okay, I don't know how bad she is, but she can't be as bad as Amber."

"Amber?" young Martin and blue-suited Martin said at the same time.

*FLASH*

A Martin wearing a futuristic visor and tight clothes said, "Amber? Try Fred."

"Fred?" All the Martins chorused.

Green-suited Martin said, "I hope that's a nickname."

The older Martins started talking at once, asking questions and demanding to know what had happened that necessitated so many return trips. Young Martin couldn't understand what they were saying.

*FLASH*

A Martin in a pink and gray dress said, "Listen, ignore all these guys. There's something-"

"What's with your clothes?" young Martin said, his tongue out in disgust.

"It's the fashion. Something's going to happen on November 26, 2017. And you can stop it. I've already got a plan for you. Write this down."

*FLASH*

A Martin wearing a tight-fitting white one-piece with rings floating above his head said, "Dude, your plan sucks. You can't-"

*FLASH*

A Martin wearing all black with his hair slicked back said, "Kill them all. Kill everyone in the world. None of them deserve to live."

*FLASH*

A man appeared with a gray cat's head and yellow eyes. A white orb floated between his hands like he was holding it.

"Oh my god," young Martin said, "What-"

"Yes, this is me. There is much to explain. All of the preceding has been irrelevant."

*FLASH*

"Você precisa de compreender. Se você conserva o líder da claque, você excepto o mundo." said the recently arrived Martin with dark skin and a black box around his neck.

"What did he say?" one of the future Martins said.

Now the room was full of Martins, arguing and bickering with each other, pointing fingers, yelling like a U.N. debate. Young Martin covered his ears.

His eye caught the line in his notebook with the date and time. He tore the page out, ripped it up, and threw it away.

All the Martins looked up, startled. In a single bright light, they blinked out of existence.

Martin held his breath. Thirty seconds passed, but nothing happened. When he was sure the quiet had returned, he got up, turned off the TV, and got a soda.

Daqui: http://www.kasmamagazine.com/influx-capacitor.html

isto está sempre a acontecer-me

Best advice this month so far...

The End Of The World is upon us, after all...

Vamos viver tempos mesmo, mesmo muito complicados... não obstante o optimismo demonstrado por alguns

The Earth Is Full

NYTimes.com

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.

We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

Possivelmente um dos mais belos aviõies algum dia feitos

O A-12 OXCART, antecessor directo do fantástico SR-71 Blackbird. As diferenças são relativamente subtis...

The last unit of Patience

was consumed this Monday afternoon.
The new shipment of patience will be delivered next Friday evening.
I will proceed without any until then.

Um post absolutamente pertinente

Está no Aspirina B e eu reproduzo-o aqui:

Para que servem, e a quem servem, os jornalistas?

Outro aspecto importante destes últimos anos e desta campanha é a demissão dos jornalistas por uma informação isenta e exigente. Os jornalistas transformaram-se em actores políticos partidários. A informação livre é um dos pilares do regime democrático. Esta informação é tendenciosa, superficial, incompetente, com falta de rigor e sem o mínimo interesse de ser imparcial. Haverá excepções, obviamente, mas o panorama geral é desolador.

Sofia Loureiro dos Santos

Tudo o que a Sofia diz pode ser aferido diariamente, e não só em período eleitoral, mas o problema não está na falta de isenção dos jornalistas – ao ponto de se poder pôr em causa a mera possibilidade real de uma informação livre. O que seria? Em que parte do mundo existe? A produção de informação é sempre uma actividade inerentemente política, axiológica, posto que selectiva e hierarquizante. O que nos falta é a exigência do público para que os órgãos de informação, e os jornalistas individualmente, assumam as suas preferências partidárias quando relatam acontecimentos políticos ou os criticam. Porque quem feio ama, bonito lhe parece. E vice-versa.

Os jornalistas são useiros e vezeiros nos ataques aos políticos. Tanto aqueles que elegem como ódios de estimação, como à classe, numa rivalidade corporativa despeitada nascida da intimidade, da copofonia, das histórias de alcova. Todavia, dos políticos podemos dizer que se sujeitam a uma tarefa bastante complexa, desgastante e arriscada. Arriscam passar por incompetentes, arriscam perder amigos e ganhar inimigos, arriscam serem ameaçados e devassados – para além de não se conceber como apetecível o dia-a-dia de um Sócrates ou de um Teixeira dos Santos, dá ideia de que são obrigados a passar o tempo de forma algo distinta daquela pela qual os paxás ganharam a sua fama. Que arriscam os jornalistas? E que oferecem à comunidade, para além dos seus egocêntricos estados de alma? Têm estado a educar o povo, mas andamos todos distraídos e não reparamos?

Nesta campanha, estar a ler e ouvir o comentário depreciativo dos jornalistas a respeito das vicissitudes deste e daquele político, a que se segue a inevitável acusação de faltar discussão disto ou daquilo, é um tormento. Os jornalistas-comentadores, obrigados a seguirem a actualidade hora a hora, esquecem-se do seu papel mediador, pedagógico, analítico, e assumem missões que não lhes foram – nem devem – ser confiadas. A sua proximidade com os objectos que supostamente assimilam não permite a convencida e vaidosa sentença que se arrogam estarem sempre capazes de oferecer à audiência. Acima e antes de tudo, ao se permitirem brincar aos juízes dos políticos, os jornalistas-comentadores entram na arena e passam a rivalizar com eles. Mas com uma disfuncional diferença: os jornalistas-comentadores não vão a votos, nunca perdem, não saem de cena. O resultado é maníaco, com a repetição dos mesmos clichés eleição após eleição, o que leva ao aumento do fosso entre a política e a sociedade, entre os partidos e os cidadãos. Sobre este distanciamento que ajudam a criar e a aumentar, borboleteiam como carpideiras que se extasiam eroticamente nessas dulcíssimas e lânguidas dores que lançam no éter em troca de modestas ou chorudas remunerações.

Quem são os grandes nomes do jornalismo contemporâneo? Onde estão as autoridades, os exemplos, as escolas? Alguém me pode ajudar? É que há muito mais mérito, e proveito, naquele que se candidata a uma junta de freguesia em Alguidares de Baixo, seja ele quem for e para o que for, do que no pimpão que interroga altivo e cínico o Primeiro-Ministro ou tecla displicentemente a respeito da enésima falha do líder da oposição.

No fundo, quer para a extrema-esquerda, quer para a direita que temos, trata-se de voltar a pôr as coisas nos eixos, cada macaco em seu galho. Ambas conviveram, e convivem, mal com o pós 25 de Abril.

A extrema-esquerda, falhado que foi o PREC, teve que tolerar a democracia, embora a contragosto, pois sempre soube que não era a votos que chegava ao poder. Na versão mais “moderna” transformou-se em organizações de protesto, onde tudo entrou, inimigos figadais da véspera, verdadeiros sacos de gatos sem vocação para poder. Para essa esquerda, convicta do quanto pior melhor, o centro-esquerda, representado em Portugal pelo PS é, naturalmente, o inimigo a abater, porque só perante um governo de direita, de preferência ditatorial, encontrará o terreno que lhe verdadeiramente é familiar para preparar a revolução, única forma que vislumbra para alcançar o poder. Diga-se que, neste aspecto, as notícias da Grécia agradarão porventura à extrema-esquerda, nomeadamente se se confirmar a lunática intenção de ser o trio FMI/BCE/Comissão a coordenar a cobrança de impostos e o programa de privatizações, com a consequente não descartável hipótese de uma intervenção militar, previsivelmente de direita.

Já para a direita portuguesa, o PS representa aquilo que ela sabe que foi a verdadeira conquista – e, até ver, o maior sucesso – do 25 de Abril e que visceralmente abomina: a possibilidade de, sem nacionalizações ou amanhãs cantantes, se criarem mecanismos, democráticos, sobretudo ao nível do ensino, de mobilidade social e de rotura com auto-atribuídos privilégios de classe. E mesmo se esses mecanismos são ainda incipientes em Portugal, o certo é que para a direita portuguesa, que na sua maioria, e tal como a extrema-esquerda, não se entusiasma com o regime democrático, a mera possibilidade de aqueles mecanismos serem aprofundados é manifestamente intolerável. A direita não tem ilusões: em democracia é, obviamente, do PS que vem o verdadeiro perigo de esvaziamento da cultura de privilégios que a direita portuguesa sempre assumiu. Daí o ódio.

Oferta do nosso amigo José Pires

O Sueco Vociferante