replies for all

Hi John, reference your nice comments on the blog, I must apologise for lack of blog writing, I probably write more frequently now with friends on Facebook, slightly less controversially but with some depth to our questions to one another. I am in fact now living in France and have been deep in trying to resettle and improve my French to the level I had got with Portuguese, without now losing English or Portuguese.  I am pleased that I can at least move some thoughts along with different points of view, that was my intention, I found that I had to write some simple things for different countries to log on and read but hope that once there they would look at other postings and gain a little from them. I am no scholar but enjoy conversation and discussion about worldly things... so many now seem focused on the Islamic theme, although I think much of this is getting over rated and losing the real problems with each Hi John, I must apologise for lack of blog writing, I probably write more frequently now with friends on Facebook, slightly less controversially but with some depth to our questions to one another. I am in fact now living in France and have been deep in trying to resettle and improve my French to the level I had got with Portuguese, without now losing English or Portuguese.  I am pleased that I can at least move some thoughts along with different points of view, that was my intention, I found that I had to write some simple things for different countries to log on and read but hope that once there they would look at other postings and gain a little from them. I am no scholar but enjoy conversation and discussion about worldly things... so many now seem focused on the Islamic theme, although I think much of this is getting over rated and losing the real problems with each of the countries involved countries involved, when countries have been so repressed and then get a hint of expansion and literary freedom, they should question what has gone before and where they are heading now, even America and Europe must be feeling something of this but with the security of many years of some peace since the second world war I should think they would not wish to rock any boat at the moment.
Brazil is in need of a real shake up, a lack of diverse political thinking as left it with out any true direction, it exists and dees not truly know why. politicians have never thought about the population or what their country means to the world outside its borders, but now it is about to embark on a journey of soul searching and financial waves, it has dipped its toes into the cold waters and now wonders what is expected of it. The long and short is they should have at least thought about the infrastructure before starting want international competitions in Brazil, now facing the world cup and the Olympics, both of which may prove to be an embarrassment in many ways, unless they get very very lucky, it is apparent to all outside that there is no good roads, no trains, no public city transport of any real quality ( Salvador is the pits for this) the docks are not sufficient for goods let alone tourism on the scale that Brazil should be attracting, and a nation that does not see value in its own natural wealth. As I have commented before, the Portuguese in many ways started this pattern and it as never changed, a lack of inventive thinking for one, a real failure to educate the very young and a depressing desire to get rich and famous at all expense.....my fingers are crossed for next years cup matches, I guess the tourists should invest in hammocks and solar powered chargers for the tablets and phones...I will stop at this point so I am not writing another book....take care

Dilma e Brasil

o que é uma pena, pois Dilma esqueceu suas raízes políticas a agora vive acima da linha de pão e sobre o desejo de resolver problemas para aqueles na linha de pão. Por que seria necessário realizar um referendo para o que é seu compromisso político para conseguir, ela tem o poder de fazer o que ela prometeu para pedir um debate não é a verdadeira questão agora, as marchas são por causa da falta de vontade de completar o que foi prometido e não o que é teoricamente necessário ou desejado. Há unidade clara no país sobre os problemas e o desejo de mudança também é clara, apenas exige honestidade e uma abordagem humilde dos políticos que foram eleitos com fé para uma vida melhor no futuro. Pegue uma  regime, Dilma, emagrecer e ganhar o seu salário como o guia para brasileiros vida melhor.

MSG

I was asked to pass this email on so here it is bt a larger audience I hope   Subject: Fwd: MSG Update ....Wow...Mind boggling!

If you are not cynical about nearly all large corporations and the ethics of nearly all of those in power (particularly politics), you are very young, or not involved, or not paying attention.------------ In recent past pharmaceutical companies have been fined some 11 BILLION dollars in fines-- hmmm??---

I thought I knew the horrors of MSG ... But here's the latest scoop 

This could explain the reason why you can't go without a Tim Horton's coffee, you can't stop eating those snacks or you can't lose that weight! It's definitely given me something to think about and maybe throw out a few things!!! 

Here's an interesting article that warrants a read. We will be extra vigilant in checking labels from now on.

The content of this article has links to substantiate its claims - Scary stuff!

MSG (a slow poison)

Very interesting

The food additive MSG (Mono-Sodium Glutamate) is a slow poison. MSG hides behind 25 or more names, such as "Natural Flavoring." MSG is even in your favorite coffee from Tim Horton's and Starbucks coffee shops!

I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, and so did a friend of mine, John Erb. He was a research assistant at the University of Waterloo in Ontario , Canada , and spent years working for the government. He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called The Slow Poisoning of America ..

In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies. No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so scientists have to create them. They make these creatures morbidly obese by injecting them with MSG when they are first born.

The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates, causing rats (and perhaps humans) to become obese. They even have a name for the fat rodents they create: "MSG-Treated Rats."

When I heard this, I was shocked. I went into my kitchen and checked the cupboards and the refrigerator. MSG was in everything -- the Campbell's soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavored potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, and Kraft salad dressings, especially the "healthy low-fat" ones.

The items that didn't have MSG marked on the product label had something called "Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein," which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate.

It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. MSG is hidden under many different names in order to fool those who read the ingredient list, so that they don't catch on. (Other names for MSG are "Accent, "Aginomoto," "Natural Meat Tenderizer," hydrolyzed protein etc.)

But it didn't stop there.

When our family went out to eat, we started asking at the restaurants what menu items contained MSG. Many employees, even the managers, swore they didn't use MSG. But when we ask for the ingredient list, which they grudgingly provided, sure enough, MSG and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein were everywhere.

Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's, Taco Bell, every restaurant - even the sit-down eateries like TGIF, Chili's, Applebee's, and Denny's - use MSG in abundance. Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to be the WORST offender: MSG was in every chicken dish, salad dressing. And gravy. No wonder I loved to eat that coating on the skin - their secret spice was MSG!

So why is MSG in so many of the foods we eat? As a preservative, or a vitamin?

Not according to my friend John Erb. In his book The Slow Poisoning of America, he said that MSG is added to food for the addictive effect it has on the human body.

Even the propaganda website sponsored by the food manufacturers lobby group supporting MSG explains that the reason they add it to food is to make people eat more.

A study of the elderly showed that older people eat more of the foods that it is added to. The Glutamate Association lobbying group says eating more is a benefit to the elderly, but what does it do to the rest of us?

"Betcha can't eat [just] one," takes on a whole new meaning where MSG is concerned! And we wonder why the nation is overweight!

MSG manufacturers themselves admit that it addicts people to their products. It makes people choose their product over others, and makes people eat more of it than they would if MSG wasn't added.

Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance. Since its introduction into the American food supply fifty years ago, MSG has been added in larger and larger doses to the pre-packaged meals, soups, snacks, and fast foods we are tempted to eat everyday.

The FDA has set no limits on how much of it can be added to food. They claim it's safe to eat in any amount. But how can they claim it's safe when there are hundreds of scientific studies with titles like these:

"The monosodium glutamate (MSG) obese rat as a model for the study of exercise in obesity." Gobatto CA, Mello MA, Souza CT , Ribeiro IA. Res Commun Mol Pathol Pharmacol. 2002.

"Adrenalectomy abolishes the food-induced hypothalamic serotonin release in both normal and monosodium glutamate-obese rats." Guimaraes RB, Telles MM, Coelho VB, Mori C, Nascimento CM, Ribeiro. Brain Res Bull. 2002 Aug.

'Obesity induced by neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment in spontaneously hypertensive rats: An animal model of multiple risk factors." Iwase M, Yamamoto M, Iino K, Ichikawa K, Shinohara N, Yoshinari Fujishima.

AHypertens Res. 1998 Mar.

"Hypothalamic lesion induced by injection of monosodium glutamate in suckling period and subsequent development of obesity." Tanaka K, Shimada M, Nakao K Kusunoki. Exp Neurol. 1978 Oct.

No, the date of that last study was not a typo; it was published in 1978. Both the "medical research community" and "food manufacturers" have known about the side effects of MSG for decades.

Many more of the studies mentioned in John Erb's book link MSG to diabetes, migraines and headaches, autism, ADHD, and even Alzheimer's.

So what can we do to stop the food manufactures from dumping this fattening and addictive MSG into our food supply and causing the obesity epidemic we now see?

Several months ago, John Erb took his book and his concerns to one of the highest government health officials in Canada . While he was sitting in the government office, the official told him, "Sure, I know how bad MSG is.

I wouldn't touch the stuff.." But this top-level government official refuses to tell the public what he knows.

The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing issues with their advertisers. It seems that the fallout on the fast food industry may hurt their profit margin. The food producers and restaurants have been addicting us to their products for years, and now we are paying the price for it. Our children should not be cursed with obesity caused by an addictive food additive.

But what can I do about it? I'm just one voice! What can I do to stop the poisoning of our children, while our governments are insuring financial protection for the industry that is poisoning us?

This message is going out to everyone I know in an attempt to tell you the truth that the corporate-owned politicians and media won't tell you.

The best way you can help to save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic is to forward this article to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before politicians can pass the legislation protecting those who are poisoning us.

The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on nicotine?

If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine at www.pubmed.com . Type in the words "MSG Obese" and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear.

We the public do not want to be rats in one giant experiment, and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, feeding the food industry's bottom line while waiting for the heart transplant, the diabetic induced amputation, blindness, or other obesity induced, life-threatening disorders.

With your help we can put an end to this poison. Do your part in sending this message out by word of mouth, e-mail, or by distribution of this printout to your friends all over the world and stop this "Slow Poisoning of Mankind" by the packaged food industry.

Blowing the whistle on MSG is our responsibility, so get the word out.

------------------If you believe this, pass it on.  As Socrates said:  "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" 

Well maybe not Socy baby, but if you don't pass this on YOU and the rest of us are "up S-creek without a paddle."

And non-involvement explains why the bad guys win.  

plastic armour

I think that this latest scare is quite a real threat to security at home, the fact that 3D printers are capable of allowing guns and bombs to be made at home and with down loaded software from the internet, opens up a new age of security problems and a new age of de sensitive armour. It may take away the larger scale of arms sales but puts the local theif with a new and more scary possesion, the working and light weight plastic gun or grenade.....the 3D printer seems to g open up the market for artisan crafts but also the artisan terrorist.....a worry and a real threat to social behaviour .....no law will stop such a basic enterprise as it offers so much for a country to grow and have entrepreneurs  on every street corner, but to have one corner of the street robbing the other is not what any one wouldhope  for......a thought for the future

cycling in São Paulo

I had a lot of noise from neighbours the other night so I have taken the time to write a couple of notes that I have stuck on a lamp post in the road, one to remind the folks in the road of the anti noise law that exists here and in most countries world wide and also how a road that is kept free of litter is a road more pleasant to live in, I have no idea if it will change the attitudes at all but it shows that there is opposition to their attitudes and acknowledges that If others feel the same they are not alone.......

yesterday in Sao Paulo there was a road accident that although typical and not so unsual was shocking in the attitude of the driver, a student of psychology. He and his friend had been drinking and then driving, in a new Honda Fit, I am not clear about the accident but the driver hit a cyclist so hard that the arm of the cyclist was removed and forced into the window of the car.....the driver left his friend in the car and left the scene, at the point of leaving he pulled out the arm of the cyclist and through it into a river drain at the side of the road and then went to his house, later, much later, he went to the police. In the mean time he did not phone for help or an ambulance ....so when the ambulance and police arrived they could not find the arm for the cyclist and it took hours for them to eventually find it in the foul water of the drain, so the cyclist had been left ages and with no chance of having his arm reattached.....The sad thing in Brazil is that this sort of accident is common and the attitude is common, this driver will pay a fine and go free within hours and is unlikely to suffer a prison sentence . The law allows for a person, with money, to pay a fine that is the equivalent of the penalty, normally it is five times the minimum salary, for many that is just about one months salary.....

Imunidade do Papa e do Vaticano

que eu queria saber esta porque de igreja católica preciso de Vaticano e de Papa ? 
certamente uma fundação como já tinha séculos de leis escritas para fornecer 
preists orientação e suficiente para fornecer revisão diária da fé, não pode haver
 qualquer razão para a modernização de uma religião como a natureza básica do 
ser humano como nunca mudado para o bom para que as mudanças apenas em 
a fé trará pior comportamento e fé menos verdadeiro. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/15/us-pope-resignation-immunity-idUSBRE91E0ZI20130215



Este foi o primeiro Benedictto abdicar ......
Forçado sobre os cardeais como papa: outubro, 1032

Correr para fora de Roma: 1044
Retornou a Roma: Abril, 1045
Resignado: Maio, 1045
Voltou novamente a Roma: 1046
Oficialmente deposto: Dezembro de 1046
Instalou-se como papa pela terceira vez: novembro de 1047
Removido de Roma para o bem: 17 julho, 1048
Morte: 1055 ou 1066

Colocado no trono papal por seu pai, o conde Alberico de Tusculum,
 Teofilatto Tusculani tinha 19 ou 20 anos quando se tornou o Papa Bento IX.
Claramente não adequado para uma carreira no clero, Bento teve uma vida de
licenciosidade e deboche por mais de uma década. Na última
enojados cidadãos romanos se revoltaram e Bento teve que correr por sua vida.
Enquanto ele estava fora, os romanos eleito Papa Silvestre III, mas
Irmãos de Bento XVI dirigiu-lo poucos meses depois, e Bento
voltou a ocupar o cargo novamente. No entanto, agora Bento cansou
de ser um papa, ele decidiu demitir-se, possivelmente, de modo que ele pudesse se casar.
 Em maio de 1045, Bento XVI renunciou em favor de seu padrinho,
Giovanni Graziano, que lhe pagou uma bolada.
Você leu certo: Bento vendeu o papado.
E, no entanto, esta não seria a última de
Bento, o Papa Despicable.

futebol responsável

Pode ser que eu sou muito cínico sobre algumas atitudes brasileiros, mas parece-me que o Corinthians e associações de futebol brasileiros têm interesse em limpar o caminho para as equipes brasileiras de jogar com um estádio cheio. Assim, a idéia de uma possível pedir ou pagar um menor, tudo isso se um de 17 anos e não o que o resto do mundo como uma classe seria menor, para assumir a culpa para o foguete, que foi disparado e matado um jovem no último Corinthians jogo na Bolívia. O fato também é que o jovem está no Brasil e sujeito agora a lei brasileira! e não na Bolívia e sujeitos à sua lei e sentimentos! será que este rapaz foi pago para assumir a culpa e livre daqueles na Bolívia e Corinthians livre para ter uma porta aberta para os adeptos para os seus próximos jogos?

capacete no Maranhão

você ouviu sobre o estado do Maranhão decidir contra a lei no Brasil, permitindo que as pessoas a conduzir motocicletas sem licença e sem capacete, também menor de idade dirigir e dirigir depois de consumir álcool. Eles dizem que é por causa da necessidade de as pessoas a usar um motor, mas por que não dar ao povo capacetes e exigir um teste para dirigir, com certeza a segurança é mais importante, mas claramente é a forma absurda de lugares em Brasil.

British Empire Crimes

You can be forgiven for beleiving that the rest of the World holds  sadistic killers but this article in the Guardian shows what Britain has tried to keep sectret for a long time and yet felt the desire to point a finger at Germany, Japan, Iraq or African states, for being beds of atrocites....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities

Plano Estadual- Bahia programa Água Doce

água..interessante por tudo qual morar no Bahia

http://www.iica.int/Esp/regiones/sur/brasil/Lists/DocumentosTecnicosAbertos/Attachments/295/PLANO%20ESTADUAL%20BAHIA%20-%20PAD%20VERSÃO%20FINAL%20-%20IICA.pdf

tragedy in santa maria

Yet again a case if money first and consideration last, if at all. There is almost a guarantee that nothing in reality will be done after this tragedy, the deaths after the floods of more than a year ago show this, Dilma cries but does nothing to change the situation or help the folk that have been affected directly by the tragedies. A blind eye is no way of running a morally conscient country and there is the problem, me first and sod the others,  what certainly strikes me about the fire and the deaths in the Rio Grande de Sul, Brazil, is the lack of concerns  before the event, it is not just a case of fires and fire safety, or in any particular location. There is a distinct lack of any wish to apply to any service a sense of care for others, if any one of the different services, which includes the fire services and the municipal authorites,  that were connected to this tragedy, had made arrangements to take care of their clients there may not have been so many deaths.
It is not a case of thinking that you can only expect to get a basic service for what you have paid, when a show is performed the exchange is not just for money, there is a expectation that there is care for the client and their health and enjoyment, it is equally true in a restaraunt, when money is taken for a service there as to be an obligation and a wish to provide care in the service, with food it must not only taste good but be prepared in a healthy and hygenic location, this is true with a night club, there as to be consideration for the safety of the client as part of the payment, there as to be a responsibilty on the owners part to take care of each person as a separate client, there should be a wish on the owners part to guarantee that they have all fire precautions, have not exceeded the quota of persons allowed into the building, and like aircraft, there should be an assurance of guides to remove the clients in case of an emergency. When it is clear to the owners of a boate that the numbers are too great for the security of the building and the clients, it should a moral obligation to limit the entry to the number that as been agreed with the authorities and it should be a moral decision to provide fire recautions more than adequate for what ever occurance may arise.
What will now happen is that there will arrests and then releases of different folk, mainly the owners of the night club, the pop group and security guards, but as Brazilians do not like to accept responsibilty they will also not condeem others for the mistaes that have taken so many lives, this is seen on a daily basis, the police will end up saying that it is impossible to apply fault to one person and therefore there is no chance of winning a condemnation of any person, the case of the high rise buildings last year in Rio, there is little possibilty in applying fault to one person and providing proof for the failure of the construction of the building, the night club tragedy is not one persons fault but a corporate one, it is best to apply rules and make certain that they are applied befire a tragedy occurs.

Hindu, respect for nature

It is not in my own nature to have a religious belief, I rather dislike the human first attitude that is embedded in nearly all religions, the central theme that all is placed for human consumption and now human distraction, is rather too egoistic for me. This navel gazing that is more and more a central theme in human attitudes to each other and to the environment that surrounds them. If there is one form of religion that perhaps as a more eco attitude it is Hindu, their central theme seems to be that nature is God and we are subservient to it and indeed are obligated to it, as opposed to other religions that place the human race as a form of God and all of natural resources are placed at their disposal, thus allowing the human race d to decide on changes and modifications that will affect all life on the planet, clearly without any possible education to allow this to be achieved in any way as well balanced as nature may achieve on its own, my own feeling is that the only way to protect nature is to exclude humans, what ever a human does is a negative and in no way a good thing, even to each other this principle is true.  This a fairly easy site to look at and get some alternative sentiments in your life, I like the statement that we are just one but can do something, we can not do everything but something that we can do will always change things, I suppose it is the butterfly effect, or a ripple in the sea.
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Nature_Worship.htm

lavagem do Bonfim

I cannot see what this as to do with the historic church and the original washing of the steps of the church of Bonfim, it seems to me that it is now definitely another way of publicising the pop musicians that dominate the less cultural side of Brazilian music and certainly now dominate Carnaval , the religious side is being lost to comercial and political desires and the young are becoming even less involved in traditional culture but activly creating new forms of disposable fun that changes each year to be slightly different but its aim is the same, that is certainly not a religious aim. I do not beleive in these large crowd pulling events as the aim is to create a fever and not an appreciation of past endeavours or positions, politics is also a similar example of this attitude and results in a similar loss of cultural aims..

ordem e progresso

quando eu vim para o Brasil foi impressionante a incidência de mulheres solteiras que tiveram mais de três filhos e que muitas vezes teve cinco filhos, mas cada um com um pai diferente, tphe criança possivelmente viver com uma mãe, tia ou grande, esses pais muitas vezes também separados e ter sido de um terreno de volta semelhante parental. As crianças que crescem sem a necessidade de conhecer o seu pai verdadeiro sangue e muitas vezes ter um pouco menos de bom relacionamento com o pai de direito ou sogra, ou o amante de sua mãe ou pai. Portanto, não é surpreendente que, com terreno de volta, há uma porta aberta para o tráfico de crianças e prostituição, um valor do dinheiro e não o amor, eo progresso em seguida, para o tráfico de pessoas e tráfico de drogas.
É comum estar ciente da falta de sensibilidade na vida diária de muitos brasileiros, e sua falta de confiança na política e polícia, a natureza independente e seu trazendo parece ser uma receita para amizades alienação e apropriação indevida, o desejo de mostrar alguma forma de sucesso pessoal está se tornando muito mais visual, seja na compra de um carro novo ou o mais recente modelo de telefone celular, ou no modo de vestir e hábitos de condução, é o modo de a natureza excessiva e compulsiva que parece seguir ao lado de uma vida que é falta de auto-confiança verdade, quase comprando um novo mundo e chegando a uma nova classe.
Este sentimento de abandono da moral, uma vez mais sólidos e laços familiares que remonta muito tempo, está sendo alimentada pelo desejo político para espalhar a população de uma forma que é muito baseado no dinheiro e tradição nit, a mistura não é tão benéfico quanto o público pode pensar, não se criando uma grande família, mas sim uma raça de rato foram todos estão no sistema e desejar Getto topo por qualquer meio, a BBB gigante, toda a casa inthe mesmo, diferentes origens e ainda uns contra os outros numa forma muito desagradável. Para os jovens de uma grande família que é uma forma de reconhecimento, se ela fica grávida, ela não é de interesse para ela quem é o pai ou o que é seu potencial ou a educação, o governo está ajudando este grupo pela ajuda financeira dada para o número de filhos que uma mulher tem, não é de ajudar a carregar sobre as escolas apenas para fornecer a mão para o número de nascimentos. Pelo contrário, parece que é necessário no momento para melhorar a educação e apoiar o estado das finanças ganharam por melhor desempenho devido a uma sociedade melhor educada.
Eu só posso supor que parte, se a razão para o povo muitos jovens optando por tomar drogas é o elemento da família de suas amizades com outros compradores e revendedores, não é claro que a natureza da política e autoridades no Brasil é de qualquer forma diferente da os traficantes de drogas e trafficants, parece ser um ser de mentira e engano, agora incorporado na sociedade no Brasil e aceita como natural, cada uma queixa sobre isso, mas, de alguma forma ou de outra participa das fraudes mesmas, esta indiferença é ampla e parte do cotidiano brasileiro, a cada um de parques em áreas restritas, as velocidades em excesso, bebidas e drives, toca música acima dos níveis permitidos, água e eletricidade rouba e joga lixo em um rio já poluído ou mar.Ninguém deseja para apontar o dedo aos outros quando se sentem culpadas por sua própria conduta, ele permite que o ladrão para ir livre e para a poluição de um país, uma vez bonito.
Referindo-se a este item eu não tenho certeza se ele faria sentido para cada estado a ser obrigados a ter uma melhor reciclagem de lixo de construção e pneus de veículos, algo na linha do Estado ser obrigado a usar este tipo de resíduos para a construção de estradas e resurfacing bem como para construções de estado de agregação, também um controlo melhor e mais rígida do lixo doméstico, o estado a ser novamente necessária para utilizar os resíduos de materiais que são usados ​​em escolas ou hospitais e edifícios municipais, que vão desde o papel de plásticos.
O que me preocupa é o fato de que tanto no Brasil é baseada no castigo e não a educação, no momento em que eu me pergunto se a situação realmente seria pior se não houvesse mais da intervenção política atual, o pesado policiamento de alguns são parece ter movido a concentração de outros são, mas não reduziu o problema.
Há ainda vai ser o desrespeito pelos direitos dos outros em prefernce para o direito pessoal de fazer o que sempre que uma pessoa sente que ele deseja fazer o seu direito, os direitos pessoais são sempre colocados na frente, sobre as necessidades sociais e desejos. Os públicos mais de estimativa de soluções políticas, enquanto acreditavam na riqueza pessoal sobre a riqueza social como meio de melhorar a situações pessoais, aceitando assim em alguma empresa a idéia de que é necessário ter a corrupção, a fim de atingir o seu próprio ganho pessoal. Junto com uma falta geral de boa educação, há também uma falta de educação financeira, o Brasil está se expandindo em uma crise e parece ignorar este fato, como pode riqueza pessoal entrar durante o maior número de pessoas que utilizam instalações mais e mais e aparelhos quando não é nenhum movimento para melhorar a infra-estrutura para estes produtos e empresas, não haverá energia suficiente ou água para o público a usar o que sempre aparelhos que estão comprando, e muito menos o aumento do lixo e degradação das estradas, estes custos não parece ter qualquer financiamento previsto pelo governo ou estados.
Eu não sinto que é apropriado para o Brasil para copiar uma liderança europeia ou norte-americana, deve-se usar a sua no conhecimento e recursos para desenvolver de uma maneira diferente do que as economias últimos super, América terá de mudar como a vontade de Europa, eles sei que isso e tenho certeza de que nos próximos anos haverá um movimento para criar um tipo diferente de comerce, o Brasil precisa começar a liderar e não apenas comprar o que os outros estão produzindo, isso requer uma grande melhoria na educação e na grupo etário mais jovem, um aumento na universidade financiamento não é a minha mente um sinal de boa educação, mas sim um sinal de que há uma manipulação dos resultados.

what is the real African legacy in Brazil

This is a very interesting and compelling article that I found on the web, rather than just linkit I have copied it and hope that it will now increase the number of readers for it is well worth the read.

John Geipel on how the enforced diaspora of the slave trade shaped South America’s largest nation.

John Geipel is the author of several books, including a chapter on the Gypsies of Spain in Languages and Jargons, edited by Roy Porter and Peter Burke, (Polity Press, 1996)

It was the seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher and missionary, Frei Antonio Vieira, who said that Brazil had ‘the body of America and the soul of Africa’ and this description continues, to some extent, to hold true. In Vieira’s day, Africans and their offspring – black and mulatto, slave and free – far outnumbered Europeans in Portugal’s South American colony.
Three centuries on, although the African element in the population is much diluted, Brazil’s economic, demographic, genetic and cultural debt to Africa remains inestimable. From the colony’s very infancy in the early sixteenth century, the contribution of Africa to the population and development of Brazil has been prodigious and pervasive and few aspects of Brazilian society and civilisation have 
remained untouched by its influence.
Over the four centuries of Portuguese involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 10 to 15 million Africans were transported to the European colonies in the Americas. Of these, over 3.5 million were taken to Brazil, many arriving after the growth of the coffee industry in the mid-nineteenth century. Even after the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil was declared illegal in 1850, contraband ‘Black Gold’ continued to be smuggled across the ocean.
The first Africans were herded ashore in north-east Brazil in the year 1538. The decision to exploit imported and unpaid black labour had been prompted partly in response to a Papal Bull of 1537, which forbade the enslavement of the indigenous ‘Indians’ (though this was soon to be totally disregarded), and partly because the African’s more robust constitution, greater immunity to the white man’s diseases and conditioning to hard, physical work in a tropical environment made him more suitable than the native as potential slave material. Besides, the Portuguese were long familiar with the African in the role of chattel.
The slave trade and the consequent miscegenation between Portuguese and black Africans had begun in Europe over half a century before Cabral’s discovery of Brazil in 1500. Indeed, the mingling of the two peoples had begun centuries earlier – with the Carthaginians, the Romans and the Moors, all of whom brought large contingents of slaves, servants and mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa to the Iberian peninsula. Systematic exploitation of an unpaid African labour force by the Portuguese, however, began in earnest in the mid-fifteenth century, when slaves from Guinea were transported to the Alentejo and the Algarve and to the sugar mills of Madeira. This traffic reached such a scale that, by the turn of the sixteenth century, one in ten of the inhabitants of such towns as Évora was of African descent, while Lisbon, was one of several cities with an African quarter.
The bulk importation of African slaves to Brazil thus perpetuated a tradition already deeply rooted in Portugal. The blood of Africa ran in the veins of many Portuguese colonial dynasties. As Gilberto Freyre (the sociologist who, writing in the 1930s and 40s, did so much to reconstruct the relationship between master and slave in colonial Brazil) suggests, the affection displayed by many Brazilian planters to their black chattels may be attributed to an ingrained respect for ‘Gente de Cor’ (People of Colour) dating back to the time of the Moors.
Compared with the Visigoths who had preceded them as overlords of Iberia, the Moors – themselves of hybrid Afro-Asiatic stock – were racially colourblind and did not discriminate against other monotheists (‘People of the Book’, meaning Christians and Jews) on the basis of ethnic origin or pigmentation. Moreover, as a consequence of five centuries of Arab occupation of their former homeland, the Portuguese in Brazil were long familiar with the Islamic religion practised by many of their African slaves.
From the 1580s, the importation of Africans to Brazil increased dramatically. After the initial expansion of the sugar industry, blacks soon constituted over two-thirds of the population of the north-east. A century later, the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais further increased the demand for slave labour. Meanwhile, in the sertao (hinterland) of the north-east, Pretos (blacks), Pardos (mulattos) and Cafuzos (Afro-Indian halfbreeds) formed the majority population of what would become the state of Piauí, where the traditional ranching skills of such West African pastoralists as the Fulani played a prominent role in the development of the region’s nascent cattle industry.
Despite the importance to Brazil’s economy of African mineworkers, stockmen, stevedores and domestics, by the mid-eighteenth century these groups were vastly outnumbered by the field-hands working the engenhos or sugar mills. At the height of the sugar boom, 40 per cent of Brazil’s slave population was involved in the cultivation of the cane. It was this group, largely composed of Bantu tribesmen obtained in sub-equatorial Africa, which endured the most severe and inhumane conditions – but which also contributed most to the popular culture of Brazil.
By contrast, in the urban centres, a burgeoning class of skilled black and mulatto artisans was well established by the 1750s: tailors, coopers, boilermakers, joiners, shipwrights, caulkers, stonemasons, blacksmiths and bakers. Many of these were ‘forros’ freedmen who had obtained manumission either by purchase (often through mutual-aid societies, some of which were organised on the basis of tribal affiliation), by completion of contract, or by the munificence of a liberal master. Many of these trades had long been practised in Africa, and black craftsmen were able to complement European techniques with those of their own traditions.
By the start of the sixteenth century, Brazil’s population of African birth or descent already topped 20,000, with Africans being imported at a rate of 8,000 per year and making up 70 per cent of the labour force. The Portuguese, in common with the rival Western European slaving nations, did not confine their activities to particular parts of the African continent, but ranged far and wide in their insatiable quest for ‘Ebony Flesh’. By Vieira’s time, the bulk of the slaves destined for Brazil were obtained in the Senegambian region, from where many were ‘processed’ on the Cape Verde archipelago before being shipped across the Atlantic in hulks known mordantly as ‘tumbeiros’ (hearses), for as much as half their human cargo would frequently perish during the ocean crossing.
In the seventeenth century, the supply of slaves came mainly from Angola and the ‘Contra Costa’ (Indian Ocean coast) of Africa, including Madagascar, as far north as Zanzibar, where Portuguese slaving activities overlapped and competed with those of the Arabs. For a century and a half following the Portuguese recovery of Luanda from the Dutch in 1648, Angola provided an inexhaustible reservoir of human merchandise. During the eighteenth century, 70 per cent of the slaves shipped to Brazil were obtained in Angola; indeed, so massive was the human haemorrhage from its shores that large areas of the country remained virtually depopulated for generations.
Unlike the more urbanised Guinea (or ‘Sudanese’) blacks, who were highly valued as house servants, the bulk of the Bantu obtained in Angola and Mozambique were put to work on the fazendas (plantations) of Brazil. It was here that an Angolan Bantu language, Kimbundu, became the lingua franca of the fazendas and missionaries were obliged to learn this language in order to catechise the newly arrived African boçais – an opprobrious name similar in sense to the North American ‘Guineabird’ or ‘Salt-water Nigger’.
The opening up of the diamond deposits in the early eighteenth century increased the demand for blacks skilled in the techniques of prospecting, metallurgy and extraction. Many of these Africans were obtained in the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Dahomey (Benin) region of Guinea; known collectively as ‘Minas’ (from the fort of El Mina from which the majority were shipped out). They were often more familiar with mining methods than their masters and their contribution to the economy of both Portugal and Brazil was incalculable.
At the start of the Brazilian Empire in 1822, a demographic survey revealed that Gente de Cor constituted over two thirds of Brazil’s total population – 20 per cent of which still had slave status. The traffic of slaves was at its most intense between 1825-1850; during the nineteenth century, some 32 per cent of the total number of Africans imported since the start of the trade arrived in Brazil. It was these comparative latecomers who were to leave their indelible imprint on the culture of their new home.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the undiminished demand for unpaid labour, the Slave Coast of Nigeria became the primary source – whence the late survival in Brazil of traditions rooted in the culture of the Yoruba and the Fon (better known in Brazil by their alternative African nicknames, Nagô and Gegê).
Many of the slaves were purchased as war captives from neighbouring tribes – often after they had been deliberately incited by Europeans to fight one another; others were criminals, debtors or outcasts; while many, such as the hereditary caste of slaves of the Yoruba, already had slave status in their native community. The actual purchase was made, not by the negreiros or traders themselves, but by intermediaries, either white ‘degredados’ (exiled criminals) who had ‘gone native’ or half-castes who were themselves the slaves of Portuguese planters. In Angola, after its recovery from the Dutch the Portuguese established a Chartered Colony, which despatched conquistadores to levy feudal dues in the form of slaves for export from the tribal chiefs of the interior.
Unlike some of the Spanish-American colonies, such as Cuba and Colombia, where detailed records of the slave trade were preserved, much of the documentary evidence of the Brazilian trade was destroyed in 1891, when the liberal Republican minister and abolitionist from Baía, Rui Barbosa, ordered it to be consigned to the flames. However, statistics for the period 1817-70, made by British consuls in the major ports of Brazil, were retained in the archives of the British Foreign Office. These help to identify the general geographical – if not the specific tribal – origins of the slaves imported throughout much of the nineteenth century; while the investigations conducted earlier this century by the anthropologist, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and his disciple, Artur Ramos, filled in many details of the African background on the basis of identifiable tribal traditions surviving in Brazilian popular culture.
One of the first to stress the importance of acknowledging and evaluating the African contribution to the economy and civilisation of Brazil was the German naturalist, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martins, whose prize-winning essay on this hitherto neglected subject was published in 1844. This need was also emphasised by the literary critic, Sílvio Romero, who concluded that: ‘We owe much more to the Negro than to the Indian; he entered into all aspects of our development’, and by such influential commentators as Afonso Celso and the black historian, Manuel Querino, whose many publications stimulated further research into the nation’s African heritage.
The survival of African cultural traditions in Brazil must be attributed both to the direct links with the mother continent, which were maintained until the late nineteenth century, and to the fact that, as mortality was high and fertility low among the slave population, levels of imported Africans remained much higher, and for much longer, than in English-speaking North America. In contrast to Protestant Anglo-America, where slaves of similar tribal origin were deliberately kept apart in order to make communication – and potential insurrection – more difficult, the Catholic colonial countries did not enforce this segregation, policy so that African tribal identities were able to survive relatively intact.
Maintenance of African cultural traditions in Brazil was also made possible by the establishment there of quilombos, communities of maroons or runaway slaves located in the more inaccessible parts of the sertão. The earliest of these were already in existence by the mid-seventeenth century. During the disruptions caused by the thirty years of Dutch occupation of north-east Brazil (1624-54), when the Portuguese struggled to dislodge the interlopers, many more quilombos were founded in the Brazilian interior – this where the frequent occurrence of African place-names testifies to their wide distribution. Some of these ‘Black Republics’ comprised several mocambos or townships, each under the control of an African-style chieftain. The most renowned was Palmares, in the state of Alagoas, the so-called ‘Black Troy’, which held out for over fifty years until its final surrender to the Portuguese in 1697, when the paramount chief, Zumbi, and his followers committed mass suicide rather than succumb to slavery. Palmares was one of the last of the quilombos to succumb to the relentless wars of attrition waged by the colonial authorities against these well organised, well defended and self-sufficient renegade strongholds.
These fugitive communities, although not exclusively black (they also attracted many Cafuzos, dispossessed Indians and disaffected whites and mulattos) employed many of the agricultural techniques and other traditions of Africa, and many were still used as places of refuge for half a century after the fall of Palmares.
Despite the essential Bantu traditions derived from the cultures of sub-equatorial Africa, which predominated in the senzalas (slave quarters) of the plantations and in the quilombos, the influence of other African peoples persisted, on a more local scale, in specific parts of Brazil.
In Baía, for example, the most significant African retentions are those of the Nagô and the Gegê. Many of the dishes associated with Baían cuisine are of Nagô inspiration, such as acarajé (kidney bean paste fried in dendê palm oil), the sweet cakes of maize or rice flour known as aberém and the chicken, shrimp and garlic ragout, xinxim, popularly associated with Oxum, the Yoruba Goddess of Waters. The liturgical language of the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion, candomblé, was an archaic form of Yoruba, passed down orally by successive generations of babalaôs or priests. (Elsewhere in Brazil, similar cults are known by such Bantu names as quimbanda and macumba.) In the hagiology of candomblê, the gods of Guinea (the orixás) fuse with the Christian saints; Xangô, Thunder God of the Yoruba, is identified with St Jerome, while his brother, Ogun, God of Blacksmiths, is merged with St Anthony.
In the mid-nineteenth century, groups of so-called ‘Agudas’ (Brazilian slaves, largely of the Muslim faith) were ‘repatriated’ to Yorubaland, where they were rapidly assimilated. This Transatlantic connection has been maintained up to our own time by such institutions as the Centro de Cultura Afro-Brasileira and the University of Baía, the only faculty in the Americas which has a chair in Yoruba. It is also significant that one of Brazil’s most widely acclaimed touring music groups bears the Yoruba name of Oludun.
Specific Nagô sects, often commemorating places in Nigeria, such as Ifé, legendary cradle of the Yoruba, continued to survive in Brazil. Membership of these so-called ‘nations’ was by no means confined to those who claimed Nagô descent, but also attracted many adherents of other ethnic background, including whites. The multi-racial membership of these sects further emphasised the contrast between race relations in Brazilian society and those of Protestant Anglo-America.
Other distinctive African stocks were recognised during and long after the colonial period in Brazil. These included the Mandinga (from Mali and Senegambia), whose name is synonymous with witchcraft in much of Ibero-America, and the Fula, whose name is applied in Brazil to a light-skinned ‘Cabra’ or mulatto as a reminder of the fair complexions of the West African Fulani. Other African peoples continued to be remembered in the names of such black batallions of the Brazilian army as the Minas (from Ghana) and the Ardras (from Benin).
It was, however, the Islamicised blacks, known collectively in Brazil by the Yoruba name, Malê, who, while numerically inferior to the largely Bantu and Nagô masses, were to have the greatest impact on the ultimate destiny of Brazil’s slave population: for it was they who spearheaded the insurrections which punctuated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and accelerated the end of bondage.
Outstanding and most influential among the various peoples classed as Malê were the Hausa of northern Nigeria, a highly urbanised nation whose so-called ‘holy war’ against the white oppressor was a continuation of the jihad against the infidel which was part of Islamic tradition. In Brazil, many of these Malê, despite having obtained their freedom, remained unassimilated and aloof from white society. Besides the Hausa, the Mandinga and the Fula were solidly Muslim, while many of the Nagô had converted to Islam long before their arrival in Brazil.
The Hausa, esteemed as house slaves for their imposing bearing and courteous manners, were frequently superior, in both intellect and erudition, to their masters and many, notably the alufás (imams), were literate in the Ajami (Arabic) script and well versed in the Koran.
The most spectacular of the slave insurrections, such as the 1835 ‘Malê Uprising’, were fomented and organised by these highly motivated people whose primary objective – alongside casting off the yoke of slavery – was to prosyletise their fellow Africans, many of whom had either adopted Catholicism or continued to observe their atavistic forms of worship. The crusading spirit of Islam was thus a dominant and unifying factor in the slave revolts that spread terror through a white population for whom the Haitian revolution of 1791 was still a fresh memory. When the uprising was finally put down, its ringleaders were either executed or exiled to Africa. Although many of these uprisings were well organised, the sheer size of the country meant that they could not be co-ordinated as they had been in the compact geographical setting of Haiti. Threatening though they were on a local scale, the Brazilian slave insurrections were much easier to isolate, contain and extinguish than their successful Haitian exemplar. Moreover, they could not boast a charismatic, supra-regional leader of the stature of Toussaint L’Ouverture or of Antonio Maceo, the mulatto general who waged guerrilla war against the Spanish in Cuba in the 1870s.
In 1850, fifteen years after the Malê Uprising, the slave trade was officially abolished in Brazil, one of the last former European colonies in the Americas to do so. Pressure to emancipate their slave population had been exerted on the Brazilians by both the British and the French since the early days of the empire, and in 1831 Dom Pedro had agreed to declare that all Africans entering the ports of Brazil were free.
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 added further impetus to the movement in Brazil and in 1871 a ‘Lei do Ventre Livre’ (Law of the Free Womb) was passed, granting freedom at birth to every child born of a slave. A Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society was founded under the presidency of Joaquim Nabuco in 1880, with the backing of the Emperor and such black abolitionists as Luis Gonzaga Pinto da Gama, José do Patrocínio (author of an influential anti-slavery novel, Motto Moqueiro) and Antônio Bento, editor of the journal, Redemption, and organiser of an ‘underground railroad’, a network of escape routes which enabled slaves to flee from servitude into the mountain and jungle depths of the interior.
In contrast to the prominent role of Afro-Brazilians in the emancipation movement, mulattos were conspicuously under-represented. Indeed, many Creoles (Brazilian-born blacks) and mulattos were themselves slaveowners who stood to lose a great deal from abolition, and black leaders such as André Robouças expressed deep regret at the disinterest and lack of involvement of their racial half-brothers, especially as many of the earlier insurrections, such as the Baía uprising of 1798 (again inspired by the Haitian Revolution) had been led by mulatto intellectuals, craftsmen and artisans. In 1885, a step closer to full emancipation was taken, with the proclamation of a law freeing all slaves aged sixty and above, and in 1888 the Aurea Decree liberated all 1.5 million still in bondage.
Today, 109 years after the end of slavery in Brazil, and despite the immigration of other, chiefly European and Asian, ethnic groups, an estimated 30-40 per cent of the Brazilian population (ie: upwards of 70 million souls) is still of direct or partial African descent. In the state of Baía alone, the landfall of the majority of Africans in the north-east, the percentage of blacks and mulattos remains, even today, as high as 70 per cent, much as it was in the eighteenth century at the height of the sugar boom.
The demographic pattern, however, is dynamic rather than static; the Afro-Brazilian population is far from uniform and its density continues to vary greatly between regions.
While only 5 per cent or less of the country’s ‘coloured’ population is estimated to be of unbroken African descent, the African element in Brazil’s ethnic composition is still visible, as is the indelible African influence on popular culture, from the decorative arts to folklore, cuisine, herbal medicine, music and dance – including the all-pervasive samba, whose Bantu name means ‘belly button’ and which began life, as did so many other traditional Brazilian dances, on the sugar and coffee fazendas. The African influence manifests itself in spectacular form in such institutions as theCongadas and Maracatus – dance re-enactments of African regal processions – which have become such an integral part of the country’s carnival parades.
In candomblé, macumba and other Afro-Brazilian religious cults – despite the influence of European Spiritualism and the Catholic veneer – the ancestral gods of Guinea live on, in dual Afro-Catholic guise, while the African influence on the variety of Portuguese spoken in Brazil is demonstrable. This consists not only of a compendious vocabulary derived mainly from Kimbundu and (notably in Baía) Yoruba, but also of details of syntax and word usage and in the soft and sensuous pronunciation of what is often referred to as ‘Portuguese with Sugar’.
While it may no longer be possible, as it was in Nina Rodrigues’ day, to attribute individual aspects of Brazilian civilisation to specific sources in Africa, it is this deep and ineradicable influence, the legacy of five centuries of intimate and almost continuous contact with the mother continent, which has given Brazilian popular culture so much of its unique identity.

John Geipel is the author of several books, including a chapter on the Gypsies of Spain in Languages and Jargons, edited by Roy Porter and Peter Burke, (Polity Press, 1996)

Further reading: 

• Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (University of California Press, 1986)
• Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas, 1441-1900 (Longman, 1987)
• Roger Bastide, African Religions of Brazil (University of Baltimore Press, 1978)
• José Honório Rodigues, Brazil and Africa (University of Berkeley Press, 1965)
• Leslie Bethell (ed) Colonial Brazil (University of Cambridge Press, 1991)
• Joseph E. Holloway (ed) Africanisms in American Culture (University of Indiana Press, 1990)