HANGOVER EM REVISTA

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Of the miseries regularly inflicted on humankind, some are so minor and yet, while they last, so painful that one wonders how, after all this time, a remedy cannot have been found. If scientists do not have a cure for cancer, that makes sense. But the common cold, the menstrual cramp? The hangover is another condition of this kind. It is a preventable malady: don’t drink. Nevertheless, people throughout time have found what seemed to them good reason for recourse to alcohol. One attraction is alcohol’s power to disinhibit—to allow us, at last, to tell off our neighbor or make an improper suggestion to his wife. Alcohol may also persuade us that we have found the truth about life, a comforting experience rarely available in the sober hour. Through the lens of alcohol, the world seems nicer. (“I drink to make other people interesting,” the theatre critic George Jean Nathan used to say.) For all these reasons, drinking cheers people up. See Proverbs 31:6-7: “Give . . . wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” It works, but then, in the morning, a new misery presents itself.
A hangover peaks when alcohol that has been poured into the body is finally eliminated from it—that is, when the blood-alcohol level returns to zero. The toxin is now gone, but the damage it has done is not. By fairly common consent, a hangover will involve some combination of headache, upset stomach, thirst, food aversion, nausea, diarrhea, tremulousness, fatigue, and a general feeling of wretchedness. Scientists haven’t yet found all the reasons for this network of woes, but they have proposed various causes. One is withdrawal, which would bring on the tremors and also sweating. A second factor may be dehydration. Alcohol interferes with the secretion of the hormone that inhibits urination. Hence the heavy traffic to the rest rooms at bars and parties. The resulting dehydration seems to trigger the thirst and lethargy. While that is going on, the alcohol may also be inducing hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which converts into light-headedness and muscle weakness, the feeling that one’s bones have turned to jello. Meanwhile, the body, to break down the alcohol, is releasing chemicals that may be more toxic than alcohol itself; these would result in nausea and other symptoms. Finally, the alcohol has produced inflammation, which in turn causes the white blood cells to flood the bloodstream with molecules called cytokines. Apparently, cytokines are the source of the aches and pains and lethargy that, when our bodies are attacked by a flu virus—and likewise, perhaps, by alcohol—encourage us to stay in bed rather than go to work, thereby freeing up the body’s energy for use by the white cells in combatting the invader. In a series of experiments, mice that were given a cytokine inducer underwent dramatic changes. Adult males wouldn’t socialize with young males new to their cage. Mothers displayed “impaired nest-building.” Many people will know how these mice felt.

But hangover symptoms are not just physical; they are cognitive as well. People with hangovers show delayed reaction times and difficulties with attention, concentration, and visual-spatial perception. A group of airplane pilots given simulated flight tests after a night’s drinking put in substandard performances. Similarly, automobile drivers, the morning after, get low marks on simulated road tests. Needless to say, this is a hazard, and not just for those at the wheel. There are laws against drunk driving, but not against driving with a hangover.

Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as “the metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.” Some people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.

The severity of a hangover depends, of course, on how much you drank the night before, but that is not the only determinant. What, besides alcohol, did you consume at that party? If you took other drugs as well, your hangover may be worse. And what kind of alcohol did you drink? In general, darker drinks, such as red wine and whiskey, have higher levels of congeners—impurities produced by the fermentation process, or added to enhance flavor—than do light-colored drinks such as white wine, gin, and vodka. The greater the congener content, the uglier the morning. Then there are your own characteristics—for example, your drinking pattern. Unjustly, habitually heavy drinkers seem to have milder hangovers. Your sex is also important. A woman who matches drinks with a man is going to get drunk faster than he, partly because she has less body water than he does, and less of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol. Apparently, your genes also have a vote, as does your gene pool. Almost forty per cent of East Asians have a variant, less efficient form of aldehyde dehydrogenase, another enzyme necessary for alcohol processing. Therefore, they start showing signs of trouble after just a few sips—they flush dramatically—and they get drunk fast. This is an inconvenience for some Japanese and Korean businessmen. They feel that they should drink with their Western colleagues. Then they crash to the floor and have to make awkward phone calls in the morning.

Hangovers are probably as old as alcohol use, which dates back to the Stone Age. Some anthropologists have proposed that alcohol production may have predated agriculture; in any case, it no doubt stimulated that development, because in many parts of the world the cereal harvest was largely given over to beer-making. Other prehistorians have speculated that alcohol intoxication may have been one of the baffling phenomena, like storms, dreams, and death, that propelled early societies toward organized religion. The ancient Egyptians, who, we are told, made seventeen varieties of beer, believed that their god Osiris invented this agreeable beverage. They buried their dead with supplies of beer for use in the afterlife.

Alcohol was also one of our ancestors’ foremost medicines. Berton Roueché, in a 1960 article on alcohol for The New Yorker, quoted a prominent fifteenth-century German physician, Hieronymus Brunschwig, on the range of physical ills curable by brandy: head sores, pallor, baldness, deafness, lethargy, toothache, mouth cankers, bad breath, swollen breasts, short-windedness, indigestion, flatulence, jaundice, dropsy, gout, bladder infections, kidney stones, fever, dog bites, and infestation with lice or fleas. Additionally, in many times and places, alcohol was one of the few safe things to drink. Water contamination is a very old problem.

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”) There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews—fifty per cent, in one estimate—carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol.

As for hangover remedies, they are legion. There are certain unifying themes, however. When you ask people, worldwide, how to deal with a hangover, their first answer is usually the hair of the dog. The old faithful in this category is the Bloody Mary, but books on curing hangovers—I have read three, and that does not exhaust the list—describe more elaborate potions, often said to have been invented in places like Cap d’Antibes by bartenders with names like Jean-Marc. An English manual, Andrew Irving’s “How to Cure a Hangover” (2004), devotes almost a hundred pages to hair-of-the-dog recipes, including the Suffering Bastard (gin, brandy, lime juice, bitters, and ginger ale); the Corpse Reviver (Pernod, champagne, and lemon juice); and the Thomas Abercrombie (two Alka-Seltzers dropped into a double shot of tequila). Kingsley Amis suggests taking Underberg bitters, a highly alcoholic digestive: “The resulting mild convulsions and cries of shock are well worth witnessing. But thereafter a comforting glow supervenes.” Many people, however, simply drink some more of what they had the night before. My Ukrainian informant described his morning-after protocol for a vodka hangover as follows: “two shots of vodka, then a cigarette, then another shot of vodka.” A Japanese source suggested wearing a sake-soaked surgical mask.

Application of the hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself drunk enough so that you don’t notice you have a hangover, but, according to Wayne Jones, of the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Medicine, the biochemistry is probably more complicated than that. Jones’s theory is that the liver, in processing alcohol, first addresses itself to ethanol, which is the alcohol proper, and then moves on to methanol, a secondary ingredient of many wines and spirits. Because methanol breaks down into formic acid, which is highly toxic, it is during this second stage that the hangover is most crushing. If at that point you pour in more alcohol, the body will switch back to ethanol processing. This will not eliminate the hangover—the methanol (indeed, more of it now) is still waiting for you round the bend—but it delays the worst symptoms. It may also mitigate them somewhat. On the other hand, you are drunk again, which may create difficulty about going to work.

As for the non-alcoholic means of combatting hangover, these fall into three categories: before or while drinking, before bed, and the next morning. Many people advise you to eat a heavy meal, with lots of protein and fats, before or while drinking. If you can’t do that, at least drink a glass of milk. In Africa, the same purpose is served by eating peanut butter. The other most frequent before-and-during recommendation is water, lots of it. Proponents of this strategy tell you to ask for a glass of water with every drink you order, and then make yourself chug-a-lug the water before addressing the drink.

A recently favored antidote, both in Asia and in the West, is sports drinks, taken either the morning after or, more commonly, at the party itself. A fast-moving bar drink these days is Red Bull, an energy drink, mixed with vodka or with the herbal liqueur Jägermeister. (The latter cocktail is a Jag-bomb.) Some people say that the Red Bull holds the hangover at bay, but apparently its primary effect is to blunt the depressive force of alcohol—no surprise, since an eight-ounce serving of Red Bull contains more caffeine than two cans of Coke. According to fans, you can rock all night. According to Maria Lucia Souza-Formigoni, a psychobiology researcher at the Federal University of São Paolo, that’s true, and dangerous. After a few drinks with Red Bull, you’re drunk but you don’t know it, and therefore you may engage in high-risk behaviors—driving, going home with a questionable companion—rather than passing out quietly in your chair. Red Bull’s manufacturers have criticized the methodology of Souza-Formigoni’s study and have pointed out that they never condoned mixing their product with alcohol.

When you get home, is there anything you can do before going to bed? Those still able to consider such a question are advised, again, to consume buckets of water, and also to take some Vitamin C. Koreans drink a bowl of water with honey, presumably to head off the hypoglycemia. Among the young, one damage-control measure is the ancient Roman method, induced vomiting. Nic van Oudtshoorn’s “The Hangover Handbook” (1997) thoughtfully provides a recipe for an emetic: mix mustard powder with water. If you have “bed spins,” sleep with one foot on the floor.

Now to the sorrows of the morning. The list-topping recommendation, apart from another go at the water cure, is the greasy-meal cure. (An American philosophy professor: “Have breakfast at Denny’s.” An English teen-ager: “Eat two McDonald’s hamburgers. They have a secret ingredient for hangovers.”) Spicy foods, especially Mexican, are popular, along with eggs, as in the Denny’s breakfast. Another egg-based cure is the prairie oyster, which involves vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and a raw egg yolk to be consumed whole. Sugar, some say, should be reapplied. A reporter at the Times: “Drink a six-pack of Coke.” Others suggest fruit juice. In Scotland, there is a soft drink called Irn-Bru, described to me by a local as tasting like melted plastic. Irn-Bru is advertised to the Scots as “Your Other National Drink.” Also widely employed are milk-based drinks. Teen-agers recommend milkshakes and smoothies. My contact in Calcutta said buttermilk. “You can also pour it over your head,” he added. “Very soothing.”

Elsewhere on the international front, many people in Asia and the Near East take strong tea. The Italians and the French prefer strong coffee. (Italian informant: add lemon. French informant: add salt. Alcohol researchers: stay away from coffee—it’s a diuretic and will make you more dehydrated.) Germans eat pickled herring; the Japanese turn to pickled plums; the Vietnamese drink a wax-gourd juice. Moroccans say to chew cumin seeds; Andeans, coca leaves. Russians swear by pickle brine. An ex-Soviet ballet dancer told me, “Pickle juice or a shot of vodka or pickle juice with a shot of vodka.”

Many folk cures for hangovers are soups: menudo in Mexico, mondongo in Puerto Rico, işkembe çorbasi in Turkey, patsa in Greece, khashi in Georgia. The fact that all of the above involve tripe may mean something. Hungarians favor a concoction of cabbage and smoked meats, sometimes forthrightly called “hangover soup.” The Russians’ morning-after soup, solyanka, is, of course, made with pickle juice. The Japanese have traditionally relied on miso soup, though a while ago there was a fashion for a vegetable soup invented and marketed by one Kazu Tateishi, who claimed that it cured cancer as well as hangovers.

I read this list of food cures to Manuela Neuman, a Canadian researcher on alcohol-induced liver damage, and she laughed at only one, the six-pack of Coke. Many of the cures probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin. So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to the washroom every five minutes.” The high-fat and high-protein meals operate in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating it. As for the differences among the many food recommendations, Neuman said that any country’s hangover cure, like the rest of its cultural practices, is an adaptation to the environment. Chilies are readily available in Mexico, peanut butter in Africa. People use what they have. Neuman also pointed out that local cures will reflect the properties of local brews. If Russians favor pickle juice, they are probably right to, because their drink is vodka: “Vodka is a very pure alcohol. It doesn’t have the congeners that you find, for example, in whiskey in North America. The congeners are also toxic, independent of alcohol, and will have their own effects. With vodka you are just going to have pure-alcohol effects, and one of the most important of those is dehydration. The Russians drink a lot of water with their vodka, and that combats the dehydration. The pickle brine will have the same effect. It’s salty, so they’ll drink more water, and that’s what they need.”

Many hangover cures—the soups, the greasy breakfast—are comfort foods, and that, apart from any sworn-by ingredients, may be their chief therapeutic property, but some other remedies sound as though they were devised by the witches in “Macbeth.” Kingsley Amis recommended a mixture of Bovril and vodka. There is also a burnt-toast cure. Such items suggest that what some hungover people are seeking is not so much relief as atonement. The same can be said of certain non-food recommendations, such as exercise. One source says that you should do a forty-minute workout, another that you should run six miles—activities that may have little attraction for the hung over. Additional procedures said to be effective are an intravenous saline drip and kidney dialysis, which, apart from their lack of appeal, are not readily available.

There are other non-ingested remedies. Amazon will sell you a refrigeratable eye mask, an aromatherapy inhaler, and a vinyl statue of St. Vivian, said to be the patron saint of the hung over. She comes with a stand and a special prayer.

The most widely used over-the-counter remedy is no doubt aspirin. Advil, or ibuprofen, and Alka-Seltzer—there is a special formula for hangovers, Alka-Seltzer Wake-Up Call—are probably close runners-up. (Tylenol, or acetaminophen, should not be used, because alcohol increases its toxicity to the liver.) Also commonly recommended are Vitamin C and B-complex vitamins. But those are almost home remedies. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have come up with more specialized formulas: Chaser, NoHang, BoozEase, PartySmart, Sob’r-K HangoverStopper, Hangover Prevention Formula, and so on. In some of these, such as Sob’r-K and Chaser, the primary ingredient is carbon, which, according to the manufacturers, soaks up toxins. Others are herbal compounds, featuring such ingredients as ginseng, milk thistle, borage, and extracts of prickly pear, artichoke, and guava leaf. These and other O.T.C. remedies aim to boost biochemicals that help the body deal with toxins. A few remedies have scientific backing. Manuela Neuman, in lab tests, found that milk-thistle extract, which is an ingredient in NoHang and Hangover Helper, does protect cells from damage by alcohol. A research team headed by Jeffrey Wiese, of Tulane University, tested prickly-pear extract, the key ingredient in Hangover Prevention Formula, on human subjects and found significant improvement with the nausea, dry mouth, and food aversion but not with other, more common symptoms, such as headache.

Five years ago, there was a flurry in the press over a new O.T.C. remedy called RU-21 (i.e., Are you twenty-one?). According to the reports, this wonder drug was the product of twenty-five years of painstaking research by the Russian Academy of Sciences, which developed it for K.G.B. agents who wanted to stay sober while getting their contacts drunk and prying information out of them. During the Cold War, we were told, the formula was a state secret, but in 1999 it was declassified. Now it was ours! “HERE’S ONE COMMUNIST PLOT AMERICANS CAN REALLY GET BEHIND,” the headline in the Washington Post said. “BOTTOMS UP TO OUR BUDDIES IN RUSSIA,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer said. The literature on RU-21 was mysterious, however. If the formula was developed to keep your head clear, how come so many reports said that it didn’t suppress the effects of alcohol? Clearly, it couldn’t work both ways. When I put this question to Emil Chiaberi, a co-founder of RU-21’s manufacturer, Spirit Sciences, in California, he answered, “No, no, no. It is true that succinic acid”—a key ingredient of RU-21—“was tested at the Russian Academy of Sciences, including secret laboratories that worked for the K.G.B. But it didn’t do what they wanted. It didn’t keep people sober, and so it never made it with the K.G.B. men. Actually, it does improve your condition a little. In Russia, I’ve seen people falling under the table plenty of times—they drink differently over there—and if they took a few of these pills they were able to get up and walk around, and maybe have a couple more drinks. But no, what those scientists discovered, really by accident, was a way to prevent hangover.” (Like many other O.T.C. remedies, RU-21 is best taken before or while drinking, not the next morning.) Asians love the product, Chiaberi says. “It flies off the shelves there.” In the United States, it is big with the Hollywood set: “For every film festival—Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival—we get calls asking us to send them RU-21 for parties. So it has that glamour thing.”

Most cures for hangover—indeed, most statements about hangover—have not been tested. Jeffrey Wiese and his colleagues, in a 2000 article in Annals of Internal Medicine, reported that in the preceding thirty-five years more than forty-seven hundred articles on alcohol intoxication had been published, but that only a hundred and eight of these dealt with hangover. There may be more information on hangover cures in college newspapers—a rich source—than in the scientific literature. And the research that has been published is often weak. A team of scientists attempting to review the literature on hangover cures were able to assemble only fifteen articles, and then they had to throw out all but eight on methodological grounds. There have been more studies in recent years, but historically this is not a subject that has captured scientists’ hearts.

Which is curious, because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a great deal of money. Doing the research is hard, though. Lab tests with cell samples are relatively simple to conduct, as are tests with animals, some of which have been done. In one experiment, with a number of rats suffering from artificially induced hangovers, ninety per cent of the animals died, but in a group that was first given Vitamins B and C, together with cysteine, an amino acid contained in some O.T.C. remedies, there were no deaths. (Somehow this is not reassuring.) The acid test, however, is in clinical trials, with human beings, and these are complicated. Basically, what you have to do is give a group of people a lot to drink, apply the remedy in question, and then, the next morning, score them on a number of measures in comparison with people who consumed the same amount of alcohol without the remedy. But there are many factors that you have to control for: the sex of the subjects; their general health; their family history; their past experience with alcohol; the type of alcohol you give them; the amount of food and water they consume before, during, and after; and the circumstances under which they drink, among other variables. (Wiese and his colleagues, in their prickly-pear experiment, provided music so that the subjects could dance, as at a party.) Ideally, there should also be a large sample—many subjects.

All that costs money, and researchers do not pay out of pocket. They depend on funding institutions—typically, universities, government agencies, and foundations. With all those bodies, a grant has to be O.K.’d by an ethics committee, and such committees’ ethics may stop short of getting people drunk. For one thing, they are afraid that the subjects will hurt themselves. (All the studies I read specified that the subjects were sent home by taxi or limousine after their contribution to science.) Furthermore, many people believe that alcohol abusers should suffer the next morning—that this is a useful deterrent. Robert Lindsey, the president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, told me that he wasn’t sure about that. His objection to hangover-cure research was simply that it was a misuse of resources: “Fifteen million people in this country are alcohol-dependent. That’s a staggering number! They need help: not with hangovers but with the cause of hangovers—alcohol addiction.” Robert Swift, an alcohol researcher who teaches at Brown University, counters that if scientists, through research, could provide the public with better information on the cognitive impairments involved in hangover, we might be able to prevent accidents. He compares the situation to the campaigns against distributing condoms, on the ground that this would increase promiscuity. In fact, the research has shown that free condoms did not have that effect. What they did was cut down on unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.

Manufacturers of O.T.C. remedies are sensitive to the argument that they are enablers, and their literature often warns against heavy drinking. The message may be unashamedly mixed, however. The makers of NoHang, on their Web page, say what your mother would: “It is recommended that you drink moderately and responsibly.” At the same time, they tell you that with NoHang “you can drink the night away.” They list the different packages in which their product can be bought: the Bender (twelve tablets), the Party Animal (twenty-four), the It’s Noon Somewhere (forty-eight). Among the testimonials they publish is one by “Chad S,” from Chicago: “After getting torn up all day on Saturday, I woke up Sunday morning completely hangover-free. I must have had like twenty drinks.” Researchers address the moral issue less hypocritically. Wiese and his colleagues describe the damage done by hangovers—according to their figures, the cost to the U.S. economy, in absenteeism and poor job performance, is a hundred and forty-eight billion dollars a year (other estimates are far lower, but still substantial)—and they mention the tests with the airplane pilots, guaranteed to scare anyone. They also say that there is no experimental evidence indicating that hangover relief encourages further drinking. (Nor, they might have added, have there been any firm findings on this matter.) Manuela Neuman, more philosophically, says that some people, now and then, are going to drink too much, no matter what you tell them, and that we should try to relieve the suffering caused thereby. Such reasoning seems to have cut no ice with funding institutions. Of the meagre research I have read in support of various cures, all was paid for, at least in part, by pharmaceutical companies.

A truly successful hangover cure is probably going to be slow in coming. In the meantime, however, it is not easy to sympathize with the alcohol disciplinarians, so numerous, for example, in the United States. They seem to lack a sense of humor and, above all, the tragic sense of life. They appear not to know that many people have a lot that they’d like to forget. In the words of the English aphorist William Bolitho, “The shortest way out of Manchester is . . . a bottle of Gordon’s gin,” and if that relief is temporary the reformers would be hard put to offer a more lasting solution. Also questionable is the moral emphasis of the temperance folk, their belief that drinking is a lapse, a sin, as if getting to work on time, or living a hundred years, were the crown of life. They forget alcohol’s relationship to camaraderie, sharing, toasts. Those, too, are moral matters. Even hangovers are related to social comforts. Alcohol investigators describe the bad things that people do on the morning after. According to Genevieve Ames and her research team at the Prevention Research Center, in Berkeley, hungover assembly-line workers are more likely to be criticized by their supervisors, to have disagreements with their co-workers, and to feel lousy. Apart from telling us what we already know, such findings are incomplete, because they do not talk about the jokes around the water cooler—the fellowship, the badge of honor. Yes, there are safer ways of gaining honor, but how available are they to most people?

Outside the United States, there is less finger-wagging. British writers, if they recommend a cure, will occasionally say that it makes you feel good enough to go out and have another drink. They are also more likely to tell you about the health benefits of moderate drinking—how it lowers one’s risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on. English fiction tends to portray drinking as a matter of getting through the day, often quite acceptably. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, a hangover is the occasion of a happy event, Bertie’s hiring of Jeeves. Bertie, after “a late evening,” is lying on the couch in agony when Jeeves rings his doorbell. “ ‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’ ” Bertie says he would have preferred a mortician. Jeeves takes one look at Bertie, brushes past him, and vanishes into the kitchen, from which he emerges a moment later with a glass on a tray. It contains a prairie oyster. Bertie continues, “I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody . . . was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more. ‘You’re engaged,’ I said.” Here the hangover is a comedy, or at least a fact of life. So it has been, probably, since the Stone Age, and so it is likely to be for a while yet. 

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UM REPUBLICANO COM O REI NA BARRIGA

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"A polémica em torno das acusações das autoridades angolanas segundo as quais Mário Soares e seu filho João Soares seriam dos principais beneficiários do tráfico de diamantes e de marfim levadas a cabo pela UNITA de Jonas Savimbi, tem sido conduzida na base de mistificações grosseiras sobre o comportamento daquelas figuras políticas nos últimos anos.

Enquanto desde logo a intervenção pública da generalidade das figuras políticas do País, que vão desde o Presidente da República até ao Deputado do Bloco de Esquerda, Francisco Louçã, passando pelo PP de Paulo Portas e Basílio Horta, pelo PSD de Durão Barroso e por toda a sorte de fazedores de opinião, jornalistas (ligados ou não à Fundação Mário Soares), pensadores profissionais, autarcas, «comentadores» e comentadores de serviço, etc. Tudo como se Mário Soares fosse uma virgem perdida no meio de um imenso bordel.

Sei que Mário Soares não é nenhuma virgem, e que o País (apesar de tudo) não é nenhum bordel. Sei também que não gosto nada de Mário Soares e do filho João Soares, os quais se têm vindo a comportar politicamente como uma espécie de versão portuguesa da antiga dupla haitiana «Papa Doc» e «Baby Doc». Vejamos então porque é que não gosto deles.

A primeira ideia que se agigante sobre Mário Soares é que é um homem que não tem princípios, mas sim fins. É-lhe atribuida a frase "Em política, feio, feio, é perder".

São conhecidos também os seus zigue-zagues políticos desde antes do 25 de Abril. Tentou negociar com Marcelo Caetano uma legalização do seu (e dos seus amigos) agrupamento político, num gesto que mais não significava do que uma imensa traição a toda a oposição, mormente àquela que mais se empenhava na luta contra o fascismo.

Já depois do 25 de Abril, assumiu-se como o homem dos Americanos e da CIA em Portugal e na própria Internacional Socialista. Dos mesmos Americanos que acabavam de conceber, financiar e executar o golpe contra Salvador Allende no Chile, e que colocara no poder Augusto Pinochet.

Mário Soares combateu o comunismo e os comunistas portugueses como nenhuma outra pessoa o fizera durante a Revolução, e foi amigo de Nicolae Ceausescu, figura que chegou a apresentar como modelo a ser seguido pelos comunistas portugueses.

Durante a Revolução Portuguesa, andou a gritar nas ruas do País a palavra de ordem "Partido Socialista, Partido Marxista", mas mal se apanhou no poder meteu o socialismo na gaveta e nunca mais o tirou de lá. Os seis Governos notabilizaram-se por 3 coisas: políticas abertamente de direita, a facilidade com que certos empresários ganhavam dinheiro e essa inovação da austeridade soarista (versão bloco central), que foram os salários em atraso.

Insultos a um Juiz. Em Coimbra, onde veio uma vez como Primeiro-Ministro, foi confrontado com uma manifestação de trabalhadores com salários em atraso. Soares não gostou do que ouviu (chamaram-lhe o que Soares tem chamado aos governantes angolanos), e alguns trabalhadores foram presos por polícias zelosos. Mas, como não apresentou queixa (o tipo de crime em causa exigia a apresentação de queixa), o Juiz não teve outro remédio se não libertar os detidos no próprio dia. Soares não gostou e insultou publicamente esse Magistrado, o qual ainda apresentou queixa ao Conselho Superior da Magistratura contra Mário Soares, mas sua excelência não foi incomodado.

Na sequência, foi modificado o Código Penal, o que constituiu a primeira alteração de que foi alvo por exigências dos interesses pessoais de figuras públicas.

Soares é arrogante, pesporrante e malcriado. É conhecidíssima a frase que dirigiu, perante as câmaras de TV, a um agente da GNR em serviço que cumpria a missão de lhe fazer escolta enquanto Presidente da República durante a presidência aberta em Lisboa: «Ò Sr. Guarda! Desapareça!». Nunca em Portugal um agente da autoridade terá sido tão humilhado publicamente por um responsável político, como aquele pobre soldado da GNR.

Em minha opinião, Mário Soares nunca fdoi um verdadeiro democrata. Ou melhor, é muito democrata se for ele a mandar. Quando não, acaba-se imediatamente a democracia. À sua volta não tem amigos, e ele sábe-o: tem pessoas que não pensam pela própria cabeça e que apenas fazem o que ele manda e quando ele manda. Só é amigo de quem lhe obedece. Quem ousar ter ideias próprias é triturado sem quaisquer contemplações.

Algumas das suas mais sólidas e antigas amizades ficaram pelo caminho quando ousaram pôr em causa os seus interesses e as suas ambições pessoais.

Soares é um homem de ódios pessoais sem limites, os quais sempre colocou acima dos interesses políticos do partido e do próprio País.

Em 1980, não hesitou em apoiar objectivamente o General Soares Carneiro contra Eanes, não por razões políticas, mas devido ao ódio pessoal que nutria pelo General Ramalho Eanes. E como o PS não alinhou nessa aventura que iria entregar a Presidência da República a um General do antigo regime, Soares, em vez de acatar a decisão maioritária do seu partido, optou por demitir-se e passou a intrigar, a conspirar e a manipular as consciências dos militantes socialistas e de toda a sorte de oportunidades, não hesitando mesmo em espezinhar amigos de sempre como Francisco Salgado Zenha.

Confesso que não sei porque é que o séquito de prosélitos do soarismo, onde, lamentavelmente, parece ter-se incluído o actual Presidente da República, apareçam agora tão indignados com as declarações de governantes angolanos e estiveram tão calados quando da publicação do livro de Rui Mateus sobre Mário.

Soares. Na altura todos meteram a cabeça na areia, incluindo o próprio clã dos Soares, e nem tugiram nem mugiram, apesar de as acusações serem então bem mais graves do que as de agora. Porque razão é que Jorge Sampaio se calou contra as «calúnias» de Rui Mateus?

Dinheiro de Macau. Anos mais tarde, um senhor que fora Ministro de um Governo chefiado por Mário Soares, Rosado Correia, vinha de de Macau para Portugal com uma mala com dezenas de milhares de contos. A "proveniência" do dinheiro era tão pouco limpa, que um membro do Governo de Macau, António Vitorino, foi a correr ao aeroporto tirar-lhe a mala à última hora.

Parece que se tratava de dinheiro que tinha sido obtido de empresários chineses com a promessa de benefícios indevidos por parte do Governo de Macau. Para quem era esse dinheiro foi coisa que nunca ficou devidamente esclarecida. O caso Emaudio (e o célebre fax de Macau) é um episódio que envolve destacadíssimos soaristas, amigos intímos de Mário Soares e altos dirigentes do PS da época soarista. Menano do Amaral chegou a ser responsável pelas finanças do PS, e Rui Mateus foi durante anos responsável pelas relações internacionais do partido, ou seja, pela angariação de fundos no estrangeiro.

Não havia seguramente no PS ninguém em quem Soares depositasse mais confiança. Ainda hoje subsistem muitas dúvidas (e não só as lançadas no livro de Rui Mateus) sobre o verdadeiro destino dos financiamentos vindos de Macau. No entanto, em Tribunal os pretensos corruptores foram processualmente separados dos alegados corrompidos, com esta peculiaridade (que não é inédita) judicial: os pretensos corruptores foram condenados, enquanto os alegados corrompidos foram absolvidos. Aliás, no que respeita a Macau só um Pais sem dignidade e um povo sem brio nem vergonha é que toleravam o que se passou nos últimos anos (e nos últimos dias) de administração portuguesa naquele Território, com os chineses pura e simplesmente a chamarem ladrões aos portugueses. E isso não foi só dirigido a alguns colaboradores de cartazes do MASP que a dada altura enxamearam aquele território. Esse epíteto chegou a ser dirigido aos amis altos representantes do Estado Português. Tudo por causa das fundações criadas para tirar dinheiro de Macau. Mas isso é outra história cujos verdadeiros contornos hão-de ser um dia conhecidos. Não foi só em Portugal que Mário Soares conviveu com pessoas pouco recomendáveis. Veja-se o caso de Betino Craxi, o líder do PS italiano, condenado a vários anos de prisão pelas autoridades judiciais do seu país, devido a graves crimes como corrupção. Soares fez questão de lhe manifestar publicamente solidariedade quando ele se refugiou na Tunísia.

Veja-se também a amizade com Felipe Gonzáles, líder do Partido Socialista de Espanha que não encontrou melhor maneira para resolver o problema político do País Basco senão recorrer ao terrorismo, contratando os piores mercenários do Lumpen e da extrema-direita da Europa para assassinar militantes e simpatizantes da ETA.

Mário Soares utilizou o cargo de Presidente da República para passear pelo estrangeiro como nunca ninguém fizera em Portugal. Ele, que com tanta austeridade impôs aos trabalhadores portugueses enquanto Primeiro-Ministro, gastou, como Presidente da República, milhões de contos dos contribuintes portugueses em passeatas pelo Mundo, com verdadeiros exércitos de amigos e prosélitos do soarismo, com destaque para jornalistas. São muitos desses «viajantes» que hoje sem põem em bicos de pés a indignar-se pelas declarações dos governantes angolanos.

Enquanto Presidente da República, Soares abusou como ninguém das distinções honoríficas do Estado Português. Não há praticamente nenhum amigo que não tenha recebido uma condecoração, enquanto outros cidadãos, que tanto mereceram, não obtiveram qualquer distinção durante o seu «reinado».

Um dos maiores vultos da resistência antifascista no meio universitário, e um dos mais notáveis académicos portugueses, perseguido pelo antigo regime, o Prof. Orlando de Carvalho, não foi merecedor, segundo Mário Soares, da Ordem da Liberdade. Mas alguns que até colaboraram com o antigo regime receberam as mais altas distinções. Orlando de Carvalho só veio a receber a Ordem da Liberdade depois de Soares deixar a Presidência da República, ou seja, logo que Sampaio tomou posse. A razão foi só uma: Orlando de carvalho nunca prestou vassalagem a Soares, e Jorge Sampaio não fazia depender disso a atribuição de condecorações.

Funcação com dinheiros públicos. A pretexto de uns papeis pessoais cujo valor histórico ou cultural nunca ninguém sindicou, Soares decidiu fazer uma Fundação com o seu nome. Nada de mal se o fizesse com dinheiro seu, como seria normal.

Mas não: acabou por fazê-lo com dinheiros públicos. Só o Governo, de uma só vez, deu-lhe 500 mil contos, e a Câmara de Lisboa, presidida pelo seu filho, deu-lhe um prédio no valor de centenas de milhares de contos, Nos Estados Unidos, na Inglaterra, na Alemanha ou em qualquer país em que as regras democráticas fossem minimamente respeitadas muita gente estaria, por isso, a contas com a justiça, incluindo os próprios Mário e João Soares, e as respectivas carreiras políticas teriam aí terminado. Tais práticas são absolutamente inadmissíveis num país que respeitasse o dinheiro estorquido aos contribuintes pelo fisco. Se os seus documentos pessoais tivessem valor histórico Mário Soares deveria entregá-los a uma instituição pública, como a Torre do Tombo, ou o Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril, por exemplo. Mas para isso era preciso que Soares fosse uma pessoa com humildade democrática e verdadeiro amor pela cultura. Mas não. Não eram preocupações culturais que motivavam Soares. O que ele pretendia era outra coisa. Porque as suas ambições não têm limites ele precisava de um instrumento de pressão sobre as instituições democráticas e dos órgãos de poder e de intromissão directa na vida do País. A Fundação Mário Soares está a transformar-se num verdadeiro cancro da democracia portuguesa.

O livro de Rui Mateus, que foi rapidamente retirado do mercado após a celeuma que causou em 1996 (há quem diga que "alguém" comprou toda a edição), está disponível em:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12699901/Livro-Contos-Proibidos

ou http://www.ferrao.org/documentos/Livro_Contos_proibidos.pdf

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MEN WHO TAIL THE COD

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MY MAN

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A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’ ”
—The Times.

Fine, now you know: Jesus was married and for many years I happily answered to the name Mrs. Melissa Christ. I met Jesus when we were both teen-agers, at a Young Hebrews mixer in Bethlehem. I was there with my best friend, Amy of Nazareth, and we were getting ready to leave, because we were sick of all those chubby Orthodox boys in rough burlap robes and untrimmed sideburns coming up to us and saying things like “I hope you’re not menstruating, because I’d really like to touch you.”

But then, across the room, I saw this beautiful guy with gorgeous flowing hair, wearing a simple white linen tunic and swaying gently to the music with his eyes shut, which was especially impressive because the band consisted of two elderly men rhythmically squeezing a goat. I couldn’t help staring, even after Amy told me, “I’ve heard about him. His name is Jesus and he doesn’t have a job.” But then Jesus opened his stunning blue eyes and gazed upon me, and I said to Amy, “I think I’ve just discovered one of the lost tribes of Israel.” “Which one?” she asked, and I said, “The blonds.”

Then Jesus came over and introduced himself and we chitchatted about everything, from keeping the Sabbath to how we both felt really sorry for the lame. Then I asked Jesus about his family, and he said, “My father is a carpenter,” and I could feel myself getting all flushed as I immediately thought, Hello, new coffee table.

After that, Jesus and I started seeing each other, although Jesus’ being unemployed did start to bother me, and finally one night I asked him, “So what are your plans?” And he replied, “Well, I’m thinking about inventing Gentiles.” “Gentiles?” I asked. “What are those?” “You know,” Jesus answered. “Jews who drink.”

Whenever Jesus would start telling me about this whole new-religion business, I would get nervous and ask, “But why isn’t the Torah enough?” And then Jesus would look deep into my eyes and smile and murmur, “First draft.” Which would make me even more nervous, until one afternoon Jesus sat me down on a rough-hewn bench and said, “All I’m talking about is everyone loving and respecting each other, and sharing the Lord’s bounty and bringing peace to the world.” And, while I was definitely intrigued, a tiny voice inside my head kept repeating, “Don’t lend him money.”

As the months went by, Jesus began to get more serious about spreading his message of compassion and understanding, and he began to attract hundreds of followers, and all I kept thinking was, Where is everyone going to sit? What if we run out of dried figs and almonds? That’s when Jesus waved his hand and, I couldn’t believe it, but there it was: an all-you-can-eat buffet. And I said to Jesus, “This is incredible, but I’m still a Jewish girl,” and so he waved his hand again and there they were: napkins.

Of course, like any couple, Jesus and I had our challenges. I didn’t like his friends, especially Judas, who kept telling people that he was Jesus’ manager, and who kept coming up with ideas like “What if everyone who comes to hear the Sermon on the Mount gets a free, crude wooden bobblehead of one of the apostles, so they’ll have to keep coming back, to collect them all?” and “What if Jesus wore his hair up?”

By this point, Jesus and I had been dating for seven years, and my friends kept saying things like “So when is Jesus going to pop the question?” and “Maybe Jesus would like you better if you were crippled” and “I bet Yimmel the Moabite is starting to look pretty good right now, even with the chronic perspiration.” At last, I got up my courage and I told Jesus, “You can either become a divine beacon of light for the entire world or you can marry me and start thinking about moving out of your parents’ manger.” For a second, Jesus looked dejected, but then he glowed even brighter and he took my hand and declared, “We can have it all! I want you to become my wife!” Which made me even bolder, and I asked, “But what about Mary Magdalene?” And Jesus said, “That was the old me.”

We were married in a simple, private ceremony in the desert, by a rabbi and someone whom Jesus called a Baptist minister. Right before the vows, the rabbi whispered to me, “Think about what you’re doing. Your children will be half Christian.” Which was when the minister whispered, “So what? College isn’t for everyone.”

But at our reception, at a lovely oasis, Jesus won over my family completely, when he healed my cousin Barry of Galilee, who’d been wracked with boils his entire life, although even after Barry was instantly cured my Aunt Ruth commented, “He also has lice.”

For the next few years, I accompanied Jesus as he travelled from village to village, spreading the word of God to all who would listen. I’d tell myself, “Let him get it out of his system.” Everything came to a head one night at a dinner party at a local inn. All of the apostles had gathered, and I was trying out a new recipe for unleavened cupcakes. “These are delicious,” Judas said, which made me suspicious, because, frankly, have you ever tasted an unleavened cupcake? Then Jesus announced that someone at the party would betray him, and I stood right behind Judas and I kept pointing and mouthing the words “It’s him! Wake up!” But Jesus told me privately that he suspected Luke, and, when I asked him why, Jesus said, “Because when I told him about my turn-the-other-cheek idea Luke said, ‘But wouldn’t it be stronger if you said, “Turn the other cheek, bitch?” ’ ”

Then, of course, everything went to pieces and terrible things happened, and when I was finally allowed to visit Jesus in prison I begged him to abandon his beliefs and to save his own life. But he wouldn’t do it, because that’s not who he was. “I love you so much,” I told him, “but I guess you always have to be right about everything.”

A few days after Jesus passed away, I was sitting in our hut, crying my eyes out, when the door swung open and, bingo, there he was. Of course, my first thought was, Hold on, maybe he had a twin brother. But then he kissed me and said, “No, it’s really me, and I’m dead and I’m back, but only for the day.” And I just felt so angry and hurt and confused about everything that had happened that I pounded on his chest and I howled, “JESUS CHRIST, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”

Then, after he left for good, I discovered that Mark and Matthew and the rest of them had been jealous of my marriage, so I was erased from the earliest Gospels, which were called Just Jesus, Bachelor Messiah, and Duderonomy. And, as for that scrap of papyrus, it was actually one of Jesus’ notecards, from his early days doing standup, as an opening act for Little Esther and the Purim Posse, and Avram and Roy. The phrase “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’ ” was the setup for a joke, which continued, on the next card, “is so fat . . .,” and you can imagine the rest. 

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VÃO-SE FODER

Na adolescência usamos vernáculo porque é “fixe”. Depois deixamo-nos disso. Aos 32 sinto-me novamente no direito de usar vernáculo, quando realmente me apetece e neste momento apetece-me dizer: Vão-se foder!
Trabalho há 11 anos. Sempre por conta de outrem. Comecei numa micro empresa portuguesa e mudei-me para um gigante multinacional.

Acreditei, desde sempre, que fruto do meu trabalho, esforço, dedicação e também, quando necessário, resistência à frustração alcançaria os meus objectivos. E, pasme-se, foi verdade. Aos 32 anos trabalho na minha área de formação, feliz com o que faço e com um ordenado superior à média do que será o das pessoas da minha idade.
Por isso explico já, o que vou escrever tem pouco (mas tem alguma coisa) a ver comigo. Vivo bem, não sou rica. Os meus subsídios de férias e Natal servem exactamente para isso: para ir de férias e para comprar prendas de Natal. Janto fora, passo fins-de-semana com amigos, dou-me a pequenos luxos aqui e ali. Mas faço as minhas contas, controlo o meu orçamento, não faço tudo o que quero e sempre fui educada a poupar.
Vivo, com a satisfação de poder aproveitar o lado bom da vida fruto do meu trabalho e de um ordenado que batalhei para ter.
Sou uma pessoa de muitas convicções, às vezes até caio nalgumas antagónicas que nem eu sei resolver muito bem. Convivo com simpatia com IDEIAS que vão da esquerda à direita. Posso “bater palmas” ao do CDS, como posso estar no dia seguinte a fazer uma vénia a comunistas num tema diferente, mas como sou pouco dada a extremismos sempre fui votando ao centro. Mas de IDEIAS senhores, estamos todos fartos. O que nós queríamos mesmo era ACÇÕES, e sobre as acções que tenho visto só tenho uma coisa a dizer: vão-se foder. Todos. De uma ponta à outra.
Desde que este pequeno, mas maravilhoso país se descobriu de corda na garganta com dívidas para a vida nunca me insurgi. Ouvi, informei-me aqui e ali. Percebi. Nunca fui a uma manifestação. Levaram-me metade do subsídio de Natal e eu não me queixei. Perante amigos e família mais indignados fiz o papel de corno conformado: “tem que ser”, “todos temos que ajudar”, “vamos levar este país para a frente”. Cheguei a considerar que certas greves eram uma verdadeira afronta a um país que precisava era de suor e esforço. Sim, eu era assim antes de 6ª feira. Agora, hoje, só tenho uma coisa para vos dizer: Vão-se foder.
Matam-nos a esperança.
Onde é que estão os cortes na despesa? Porque é que o 1º Ministro nunca perdeu 30 minutos da sua vida, antes de um jogo de futebol, para nos vir explicar como é que anda a cortar nas gorduras do estado? O que é que vai fazer sobre funcionários de certas empresas que recebem subsídios diários por aparecerem no trabalho (vulgo subsídios de assiduidade)?… É permitido rir neste parte. Em quanto é que andou a cortar nos subsídios para fundações de carácter mais do que duvidoso, especialmente com a crise que atravessa o país? Quando é que param de mamar grandes empresas à conta de PPP’s que até ao mais distraído do cidadão não passam despercebidas? Quando é que acaba com regalias insultosas para uma cambada de deputados, eleitos pelo povo crédulo, que vão sentar os seus reais rabos (quando lá aparecem) para vomitar demagogias em que já ninguém acredita?
Perdoem-me a chantagem emocional senhores ministros, assessores, secretários e demais personagem eleitos ou boys desta vida, mas os pneus dos vossos BMW’s davam para alimentar as crianças do nosso país (que ainda não é em África) que chegam hoje em dia à escola sem um pedaço de pão de bucho. Por isso, se o tempo é de crise, comecem a andar de Opel Corsa, porque eu que trabalho há 11 anos e acho que crédito é coisa de ricos, ainda não passei dessa fasquia.
E para terminar, um “par” de considerações sobre o vosso anúncio de 6ª feira.
Estou na dúvida se o fizeram por real lata ou por um desconhecimento profundo do país que governam.
Aumenta-me em mais de 60% a minha contribuição para a segurança social, não é? No meu caso isso equivale a subsídio e meio e não “a um subsídio”. Esse dinheiro vai para onde que ninguém me explicou? Para a puta de uma reforma que eu nunca vou receber? Ou para pagar o salário dos administradores da CGD?
Baixam a TSU das empresas. Clap, clap, clap… Uma vénia!
Vocês, que sentam o já acima mencionado real rabo nesses gabinetes, sabem o que se passa no neste país? Mas acham que as empresas estão a crescer e desesperadas por dinheiro para criar postos de trabalho? A sério? Vão-se foder.
As pequenas empresas vão poder respirar com essa medida. E não despedir mais um ou dois.
As grandes, as dos milhões? Essas vão agarrar no relatório e contas pôr lá um proveito inesperado e distribuir mais dividendos aos accionistas. Ou no vosso mundo as empresas privadas são a Santa Casa da Misericórdia e vão já já a correr criar postos de trabalho só porque o Estado considera a actual taxa de desemprego um flagelo? Que o é.
A sério… Em que país vivem? Vão-se foder.
Mas querem o benefício da dúvida? Eu dou-vos:
1º Provem-me que os meus 7% vão para a minha reforma. Se quiserem até o guardo eu no meu PPR.
2º Criem quotas para novos postos de trabalho que as empresas vão criar com esta medida. E olhem, até vos dou esta ideia de graça: as empresas que não cumprirem tem que devolver os mais de 5% que vai poupar. Vai ser uma belo negócio para o Estado… Digo-vos eu que estou no mundo real de onde vocês parecem, infelizmente, tão longe.
Termino dizendo que me sinto pela primeira vez profundamente triste. Por isso vos digo que até a mim, resistente, realista, lutadora, compreensiva… Até a mim me mataram a esperança.
Talvez me vá embora. Talvez pondere com imensa pena e uma enorme dor no coração deixar para trás o país onde tanto gosto de viver, o trabalho que tanto gosto de fazer, a família que amo, os amigos que me acompanham, onde pensava brevemente ter filhos, mas olhem… Contas feitas, aqui neste t2 onde vivemos, levaram-nos o dinheiro de um infantário.
Talvez vá. E levo comigo os meus impostos e uma pena imensa por quem tem que cá ficar.
Por isso, do alto dos meus 32 anos digo: Vão-se foder"

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PAGAR E NÃO BUFAR

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Contribuinte - Gostava de comprar um carro.

Estado - Muito bem. Faça o favor de escolher.

Contribuinte - Já escolhi. Além do preço, tenho que pagar alguma coisa mais?

Estado - Sim. Imposto sobre Automóveis (ISV) e Imposto sobre o Valor Acrescentado (IVA)  

Contribuinte - Ah... Só isso.

Estado - ... e uma "coisinha" para o pôr a circular. O selo.

Contribuinte - Ah!...

  

Estado - ... e mais uma coisinha na gasolina necessária para que o carro efectivamente circule. O ISP.

Contribuinte - Mas... sem gasolina eu não circulo.

Estado - Eu sei.

Contribuinte - ... Mas eu já pago para circular...

Estado - Claro!...

Contribuinte - Então... vai cobrar-me pelo valor da gasolina?

Estado - Também. Mas isso é o IVA. O ISP é outra coisa diferente.  

Contribuinte - Diferente?!

Estado - Muito. O ISP é porque a gasolina existe.

Contribuinte - ... Porque existe?!

Estado - Há muitos milhões de anos os dinossauros e o carvão fizeram petróleo.. E você paga.

Contribuinte - ... Só isso?

Estado - Só. Mas não julgue que pode deixar o carro assim como quer.

Contribuinte - Como assim?!

Estado - Tem que pagar para o estacionar.

Contribuinte - ... Para o estacionar?

Estado - Exacto.

Contribuinte - Portanto, pago para andar e pago para estar parado?

Estado - Não. Se quiser mesmo andar com o carro precisa de pagar seguro.

Contribuinte - Então pago para circular, pago para conseguir circular e pago por estar parado.

Estado - Sim. Nós não estamos aqui para enganar ninguém. O carro é novo?

Contribuinte - Novo?

Estado - É que se não for novo tem que pagar para vermos se ele está em condições de andar por aí.

Contribuinte - Pago para você ver se pode cobrar?

Estado - Claro. Acha que isso é de borla? Só há mais uma coisinha...

Contribuinte - ...Mais uma coisinha?

Estado - Para circular em auto-estradas

Contribuinte - Mas... mas eu já pago imposto de circulação.

Estado - Pois. Mas esta é uma circulação diferente.

Contribuinte - ... Diferente?

Estado - Sim. Muito diferente. É só para quem quiser.

Contribuinte - Só mais isso?

Estado - Sim. Só mais isso.

Contribuinte - E acabou?

Estado - Sim. Depois de pagar os 25 euros, acabou.

Contribuinte - Quais 25 euros?!

Estado - Os 25 euros que custa pagar para andar nas auto-estradas.

Contribuinte - Mas não disse que as auto-estradas eram só para quem quisesse?

Estado - Sim. Mas todos pagam os 25 euros.

Contribuinte - Quais 25 euros?

Estado - Os 25 euros é quanto custa o chip...

Contribuinte - ... Custa o quê?

  

Estado - Pagar o chip. Para poder pagar.

Contribuinte - Não percebo ...

  

Estado - Sim. Pagar custa 25 euros.

Contribuinte - Pagar custa 25 euros?

Estado - Sim. Paga 25 euros para pagar.

Contribuinte - Mas eu não vou circular nas auto-estradas.

Estado - Imagine que um dia quer...tem que pagar.

Contribuinte - Tenho que pagar para pagar porque um dia posso querer?

Estado - Exactamente... Você paga para pagar o que um dia pode querer.

Contribuinte - E se eu não quiser?

Estado - Paga multa.

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THE BIOLOGICAL-DIGITAL CONVERTER, OR, BIOLOGY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT

J. CRAIG VENTER

These are exciting and challenging times for science and society. If you look at the practical side of things, in the next 11 years we're going to add a billion people to the planet, so basically the equivalent of China being added in 11 years, and 12 years after that we're going to add another billion people. Last October we just passed the 7 billion mark, and that took 12 years to happen from 6 billion. In the 1800s it took well over 100 years to go from 1 to 2 billion people. We're in a unique time in history where there are more people alive than have ever existed in human history, and we keep expanding tremendously, and exhausting the resources of the planet.

There are a number of things that come into play here. We've been doing everything from trying to understand the human genome, and human genetic inheritance, and we have teams that are doing some of the first genomes of early populations in Africa and have traced down actually the oldest populations in Southern Africa that we all have evolved from, from groups that migrated out of Africa. It turns out I have a Northern European ancestry primarily, and so we probably all share this. My ancestors, and probably most of yours found Neanderthals attractive and mated with them. And so what was thought to not be any coexistence, we now ... 3 to 4 percent of my genome is Neanderthal-derived. My friend, Bill Clinton, when we shared an honor a couple of years ago, told me he learned that he was 3 percent Neanderthal, and that explained all his problems while in office.

We're learning about our own history, our own migrations, but we have to do something different for the future. A major producer once argued that we have two hopes for humanity, one is to be able to populate distant planets, and the other is to alter our genetic code so we can survive in a very deteriorated environment here on the planet.

We're working on both, and there are some exciting changes. Science is changing things very quickly. Think about how the Internet has changed all of our lives in the last decade or so. I assume most people here have an iPad, and that's three years old, barely? And it's hard to imagine life without an iPad in our culture. But very soon we're going to be able to send something else across the Internet. We can now send biology at the speed of light, and this is one of the implications of our work, which we recorded two years ago making the first synthetic life form. We completely synthesized the genetic code of a cell starting with a digital code in the computer—it's the ultimate interface between computers and biology. The digital code and the genetic code have a lot in common; something Schrodinger pointed out in 1943, saying it could be something as simple as the Morse code.

Digital code, as you know, is a binary code, and ones and zeroes, and your genetic code is literally four-base code with ACGs and Ts. We can now readily convert in between the two, and we can define life at its most basic level. Things that were a mystery fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, we now understand completely.

We know what a cell is, know that all the components, all the proteins in the cell are miniature robots. They don't have a brain, they don't have a soul, they have a structure that defines their function, and their structure is determined by the genetic code, which defines the linear code of the protein, which determines how it folds, how it functions, and how stable it is. You don't feel it sitting there, but every one of your 100 trillion cells is rapidly metabolizing proteins. Your proteins have a half-life between a few seconds and ten or twenty hours. You don't know that you're sloughing 500 billion skin cells a day. All that dust you find around your houses, in your apartments? That's you, little bits of you. You turn over your entire skin every two to three weeks. Biology is a constant state of renewal, and it's a software-driven state of renewal. Take the DNA out of the cell, and the cell dies. In fact, that's why radiation kills people. It disrupts the genetic code, breaks it up, and people die because all the proteins degrade very quickly.

But imagine if you could e-mail yourself to Mars or some distant planet. We can actually do that now, because with our synthetic cell, we start with the digital code in the computer, and there's no difference between digital code and genetic code. Because digital code can move as an electromagnetic wave, basically close to the speed of light, we can now move biology at the speed of light. This has some practical applications.

The recent movie Contagion portrayed how everybody died from flu pandemic, while awaiting the vaccine. Real life is much better than science fiction. We can now make a new flu vaccine in less than twelve hours using synthetic DNA. Instead of having to deal with a major pandemic where you can't travel out of your home or your city, imagine that you had a little box next to your computer, and you got an e-mail, and that gave you a chance to actually make a vaccine instantly, sort of like 3D printers. What we do with information now, we will be doing with information and biology together.

Obviously the downside is you could instead of giving your partner a genetic disease or an infection, you can e-mail it. So people could use this to do harm, as we see with computer viruses all the time. You would, of course, want good computer and biological virus protection on your DNA decoder.

Many of us know the space, electric car, and solar energy inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose rockets are doing extremely well. Based on this success, within a decade we're likely going to see attempts to colonize the moon. Elon wants to colonize Mars. Depending on how close moon and Mars are to each other, it takes between four minutes and twenty-one minutes for an electromagnetic wave, for light, to go from Earth to Mars. But imagine you're on a colony on Mars, and you want a new cell that produces food, or fuel, or some medicine, or a vaccine, you can just e-mail that and convert it back into biology.

The idea that you're basically a DNA-driven software device is not the view that people necessarily have of themselves. But every cell on this planet works that way in a biological-to-mechanical kind of fashion. No brain controlling what happens with DNA reading and protein synthesis in your cells. The combination of one hundred trillion cells gives different people different abilities to make wonderful music, to make science advances, to think, but every one of those cells operates in the same fashion. And that means we will be able to decode how the brain functions by understanding these same mechanisms. There's no need to evoke mysticism or a higher being. That's what Schrodinger did seventy years ago. He couldn't explain things, so he did what people do when they can't explain something. He evokes mysticism. But science is getting very advanced with regard our understanding life. We know what it is, and we now know how to reproduce it. We produce life by writing new software.

Our announcement made eighteen months ago, was one of the few science announcements that received an immediate response from the President and the Pope. The President asked his Bioethics Commission to start looking at this development as their number one issue, and the Vatican released a statement that all we did was change one of the engines of life. They said it could lead to some important advances, but it wasn't creating life itself.

But DNA is not the engine of life, it's the software of life; the proteins are the engines, they're driven directly by that code in a very understandable, predictable fashion now. This has implications in many different areas.

We have teams trying to work on new sources of food, actually designing new food in the computer. It may be awhile before they taste as wonderful as some of the food we had tonight, but we can actually design foods that have very high nutritional components to them, and we're learning a lot as a society about food chemistry. The Olympics are about to hit London. Many of the Olympic athletes have special physicians and nutritionists. They're giving them certain types of proteins. These Olympic trainers can actually sculpt people's bodies in very specific fashions, depending on which muscle groups they want it to go.

We are chemical beings, and we're software-driven beings, and once you understand that, then you can write new software. Anything becomes possible. We're trying to design cells to make new sources of energy, recycling carbon dioxide, getting these same cells to maybe use their recycled CO2 to make food, as well as fuel. It was an exciting change at least at a stage when we're exhausting our existing natural resources, and unless we can just stop population expansion, we have to do something pretty drastic in new sources of food, fuel, water and medicine.

It's an exciting time for science, it's an exciting time for society, but I'm sure there are a lot of strange thoughts running through your minds about the implications of some of this and where it might take us. We were tossing around ideas earlier. We're trying to make meat just by making beef and chicken muscle proteins without the cow and the chicken. And so I was calling it "motherless meat". And then Brian Eno came up with the line that it was "murderless" meat.

Those of you who are vegetarians are going to have real dilemmas in the future of not knowing what's meat and what's vegetable, because in fact, we can grow these meat proteins in vegetables. In fact, vegetables have most of the same proteins that are in meat anyway. Our definitions of life are getting clearer; the social ambiguities are getting greater.

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