Kafka In Amadora

Estamos nas vésperas da Revolução: Voltaire não a sonha, mas pressente-a; não a deseja, mas prepara-a.  Entre 2007 e 2016 477 mil pessoas pediram a nacionalidade portuguesa e mais de 400 mil cidadãos tornaram-se portugueses.  Entre os países da União Europeia, Portugal vem em segundo lugar no "rácio de aquisições de nacionalidade por total de residentes estrangeiros", logo a seguir à Suécia.  As alterações legislativas para a concessão da nacionalidade feitas nas duas últimas décadas muito contribuíram para tal. As políticas e enquadramentos legais portuguesas têm sido consideradas inovadoras ao conciliar critérios de nascimento, descendência, residência, a opção voluntária para o pedido de nacionalidade e o papel que os imigrantes requerentes podem assumir para a demografia de um país naturalmente envelhecido. No ano de 1996 houve 3700 concessões de nacionalidade portuguesa mas em 2016 esse número ascendeu a 50.793 de acordo com o Observatório das Migrações. Nasci em

For the last 30 years, the two liberalisms have prevailed in the UK, the economic liberalism of the right and the social liberalism of the left. The Conservatives concentrated on deregulation, union busting and privatisation, while talking tough, but avoiding any action on, on immigration, political correctness and traditional values. Meanwhile, Labour focused on a socially liberal agenda without attempting to roll back the economic gains of the right. It was almost as though a tacit deal had been struck; you can have diversity, minority rights and discrimination laws if we can have privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts. The effect was to take policies that were popular with the public off the agenda on the grounds that they were publicly unacceptable. This applied both to left-wing and right-wing policies. - https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/the-end-of-the-long-90s

We cannot live with that awareness of the future always in our minds; uncertainty and hope are as essential to man as breath.  [ Judith Starkston]

Two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/opinion/donald-trump-poisons-the-world.html

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. [Henry David Thoreau (1863), Life Without Principle] Steve Cutts

Governments across Europe have accidentally paid taxpayer-funded welfare benefits such as unemployment funds, disability pensions and housing allowances to Islamic State militants who have used the money to wage war in Iraq and Syria, authorities and terrorism experts say.  Danish officials said this week that 29 citizens were given $100,000 in public pension benefits because they were considered too ill or disabled to work, and they then fled to Syria to fight for the radical group . It took eight months before welfare authorities cut off benefits paid to a Swedish national who had joined the terror group in its Syrian stronghold Raqqa. Michael Skråmo, who grew up near Gothenburg, fled in 2014 with his wife and four children to Syria. Over the eight months, Skråmo was paid more than $5,000. Authorities concluded that several of the plotters in the Brussels and Paris terror attacks that killed 162 people in 2015 and 2016 were partly financed by Belgium's social welfare system whil

O princípio que o trabalho é objeto de uma construção, de um tornar-se; e não objeto de uma essência, de um ser. ( O Operário em Construção )