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This is not a work of fiction.
The Isle of Flowers actually exists.
God does not exist.
Isle of Flowers
We are in Belém Novo, in the city of Porto Alegre,
state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the extreme south of Brazil.
More precisely: we are at latitude 30 degrees, 12 minutes, 30 seconds South, and longitude
51 degrees, 11 minutes, 23 seconds West.
Right now, we are walking through a tomato field,
and standing there in front of us, we can see
a human being. In this case, a Japanese.
The Japanese are distinguishable from other human beings...
by the shape of their eyes, their black hair, and their characteristic names.
The Japanese in question is called Suzuki.
Human beings are mammals that are distinguishable
from other animals, like the whale, or from bipeds like the chicken,
principally by two characteristics:
their highly-developed brain and opposing thumbs.
The highly-developed brain gives human beings the capacity
to save information, relate it, process it, and understand it.
The opposing thumb enables human beings to make a pinching movement,
which allows them to precisely manipulate things.
The highly-developed brain, combined with the ability
to pinch with their fingers, allows human beings
to make countless improvements on their planet.
Among these was the cultivation of tomatoes.
The tomato, unlike the whale,
the chicken and the Japanese, is a vegetable.
A member of the botanical family Solanaceae, the tomato has been cultivated
for its nutritional properties since the year 1800.
The planet Earth produces around sixty-one million tons of tomatoes each year.
Mr Suzuki, despite working about twelve hours each day,
is responsible for a very small share of that production.
The main use of the tomato is to feed human beings.
Mr Suzuki is Japanese, and therefore a human being. Even so,
Mr. Suzuki doesn’t plant the tomatoes with the purpose of eating them.
Almost all the tomatoes produced by Mr Suzuki are delivered to a
supermarket in exchange for money.
Money was probably invented on the initiative of Giges, King of Lydia, a
great kingdom of Asia Minor, who lived seven centuries before Christ.
Christ was a Jew.
The Jews have highly-developed brains and opposing thumbs.
They are therefore human beings.
Until the introduction of money, economics was based on direct exchange.
The difficulty of deciding the amount of tomatoes that would be equivalent
to a chicken, and the problems of directly exchanging chickens for whales
were the main reasons for the invention of money.
Since the third century before Christ, any action or object created by
human beings (because of the combined effort of their
highly-developed brains and opposable thumbs) - in fact everything on earth,
living or not, tomatoes, chickens or whales - can be exchanged for money.
To make it easier to exchange tomatoes for money, human beings created supermarkets.
Mrs Anete is a biped, a mammal, and a Roman Catholic.
She has a highly-developed brain and opposing thumbs.
She is therefore a human being.
She came to this supermarket, among other things, to exchange her money for tomatoes.
Mrs Anete earned her money in exchange for the work she does.
She uses her highly-developed brain and her opposing thumbs to exchange perfumes for money.
Perfumes are liquids that are usually extracted from flowers, and that give
human beings a more pleasant odor than their natural one.
Mrs. Anete does not extract the perfumes from flowers.
At a factory, she exchanges a certain amount of money for perfumes.
Then, Mrs Anete walks from door to door exchanging those perfumes
for a slightly larger amount of money.
The difference between these sums of money is known as profit.
Profit was once forbidden to Catholics, but today is free for all human beings.
Mrs Anete’s profit is smaller then the factory’s profit,
but is enough to be exchanged for one kilogram of tomatoes and two kilograms of meat - in this case, pig meat.
Like human beings and whales, the pig is a mammal, but it is a quadruped.
It is eaten as food by the Japanese, by Catholics and by all other human beings, except Jews.
The items that Mrs Anete exchanged for the money she exchanged for the perfumes extracted from flowers will be completely consumed by her family in one day.
One day is the time interval that the planet Earth takes to make a complete rotation upon its own axis.
In the middle of the day, it is twelve o'clock.
The family is a community formed by one man and one woman,
united by a matrimonial bond, and by the children born from that marriage.
Some of the tomatoes that Mr Suzuki exchanged for money with the supermarket, and that were again exchanged for Mrs. Anete’s money
obtained as profit from the exchange of the perfumes extracted from the flowers are transformed into sauce for the pork.
One of those tomatoes, which Mrs Anete thought
not good enough to be used in the sauce, was thrown in the garbage.
Garbage is everything that is produced by human beings,
in a combined effort of their highly-developed brain and opposing thumbs,
and that, according to the judgment of a certain human being, was not good enough to be used in a sauce.
A city like Porto Alegre, inhabited by more than one million human beings,
produces around 500 hundred tons of garbage daily.
The garbage attracts all kinds of germs and bacteria, which in turn cause diseases.
Diseases seriously impair the proper functioning of human beings.
Even when it doesn’t cause disease, the look and smell of garbage are extremely unpleasant.
That’s why the garbage is taken to certain places, far away, where
it can freely pollute, smell bad, and attract diseases.
At Porto Alegre, one of the places that is chosen for the garbage that smells
bad and attracts diseases is called the Isle of Flowers.
An island is a portion of land surrounded by water. Water is a clean-smelling substance,
lacking taste, colourless, and composed by two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen.
Flowers are the plant's reproductive organs, usually odoriferous and brightly coloured.
From odoriferous flowers are extracted the perfumes, such as those which Mrs. Anete exchanged for the money she later exchanged for tomatoes.
There are few flowers on the Isle of Flowers .
There is, however, lots of garbage, and among it, the tomato that Mrs. Anete thought was not good enough to make the pork sauce.
There are also many pigs on the island.
The tomato that Mrs. Anete judged unfit for the pork that she was going to serve to her family she will serve as food for the pig,
and it will be excellent nutrition for the pig and its family - from the pig’s point of view.
It must be pointed out that Mrs Anete has a highly-developed brain, while
the pig does not have any thumbs, let alone opposing ones.
The pig does, however, have an owner. The pig's owner is a human being, with a
highly-developed brain, opposing thumbs, and money.
The pig's owner traded a small part of his money for a lot on the Isle of Flowers,
thus becoming owner of that plot of land.
A lot is a plot of land that has an owner and a fence around it.
This lot, where the garbage is stored, was fenced off to keep the pigs from getting out,
and human beings from getting in.
Here, the employees of the owner of the pig separate from the garbage various materials of
organic origin that they consider appropriate as nutrition for the pigs.
"Of organic origin" refers to everything that was once alive, whether in animal or vegetable form.
Tomatoes, chickens, pigs, flowers, and paper are of organic origin.
This paper, for example, has been used to prepare a history test in the
Nossa Senhora das Dores High School, and has been given to student Ana Luiza Nunes, a human being.
A history test is a test of the capacity of a human being's brain to remember history.
For example: Who was Genghis Khan? Name the historical provinces.
To remember is to live.
Some materials of organic origin, like tomatoes and history tests, are given to the pigs as nutrients.
What was considered unfit as nutrition for the pigs will be used to feed women and children.
Women and children are human beings, with highly-developed brains and opposing thumbs, but no money.
They have no owners and, what is worse, there are many of them.
As there are many of them, the men who work for the owner of the pigs have organized them in groups of ten,
and give them permission to pass through the fence and get inside.
Once inside the fence, they can catch for themselves all the food the employees of the owner of the pigs have judged unsuitable for the pigs.
The men who work for the owner of the pigs have arranged things so that each group of ten human beings has
five minutes to stay inside the fence gathering material of organic origin, like tomatoes and history tests.
Five minutes equals three hundred seconds.
Since nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, the second was defined as the equivalent of nine billion,
one hundred and ninety two million, six hundred and thirty one thousand, seven hundred and fifty eight radiation cycles of the caesium atom.
Caesium is a non organic material that was found in garbage in the town of Goiânia.
The tomato planted by Mr Suzuki, exchanged for money at the supermarket,
exchanged for money that Mrs Anete exchanged for perfumes extracted from flowers, rejected for the pork sauce, and dumped in the garbage,
is now available to the human beings on the Isle of Flowers.
The thing that puts the human beings lower than the pigs on the Isle of Flowers
in the priority queue to search for food, is the fact that they have neither money nor an owner.
The human being is distinguished from other animals by his highly-developed brain, his opposing thumbs, and by that fact that he is free.
Freedom is the state of those that enjoy liberty.
"Freedom" is a word that feeds the dreams of human beings. No-one can explain what it means, but everyone understands it.
subtitles by Stella, Demon, Heph, Fnoop and auweia