Today's film was called Sharkwater. A French guy with a consuming interest in sharks since childhood studied biology and sharks in particular. Learned underwater swimming and camera use. It's a kind of Dances With Wolves. Swims with sharks. The shark whisperer. He swam in among them, petted them like you'd pet a dog. He studied their ways. He said they're afraid of us. What isn't? We're the most predictable monsters on earth. We see it, we kill it. He swam among them relaxed, consciously keeping his heart rate down, no fear. They can read the fear through is heartbeat. Fear translates visually as aggression. Aggression triggers defensive attacks. Then it's on. He also noted that when they bite humans, it's out of curiosity of what it is. He said they don't bite chunks. At the end he noted that 5 people are killed a year by sharks. A list follows of a hundred killed by elephants and tigers, ultimately 8,000,000 by starvation.
It's like all of humanity is in agreement the shark is dangerous and has to go. It is being poached unto endangered species for the fins that are popular all over Asia for good health. It's more a symbol than a reality. It has no value of any sort taken internally. It's from a belief that sharks never get diseases like cancer. Turns out they do. He said 90% of the shark population of the oceans has been wiped out over the last 20 years. He explains their value in the life cycles of the ocean, such that when sharks are gone, we're gone. But who is going to inconvenience himself because sharks have a problem? Presumably a lot of people. A short film about the film in the special features gallery showed a huge demonstration in whatever city it was in Costa Rica after the film was shown there. The people did not want the big Taiwanese mafia using their country as their base of operations for incredible slaughter of sharks. Of course, the mafia was paying the government very well.
Rob Stewart is the name of the guy who made the film. He set out to make a low-budget documentary in 4 months of the sharks around an island way off the coast of Costa Rica and the Galapagos further south off Ecuador. What he discovered was shark poaching boats everywhere. With the help of a guy from Greenpeace who was confrontational at sea, they attempted to do something about it, but it turned on them. They were functioning by the law. But the law was money from shark fins, which is evidently as big an underground business in Asia as drugs in the West. It is a fair likelihood that the shark will be extinct in not very many years. The balance in the ocean is going way off. Oil spills take a major toll too. We only hear about a few of the oil spills. It's no wonder tsunami's are so frequent over the last few years. The ocean is reaching up to slap us, saying, Let me be! A few years ago I saw a couple of paragraphs in Time or Newsweek. Lumber companies were bulldozing down all the trees of a small island in the Southeast Asia archipelago. At a certain point, tigers started attacking bulldozer operators.
The film evidently has drawn quite a lot of attention to this serious issue. Then there is the other serious issue, and the other serious issue, ice caps melting, humans deconstructing the planet, killing anything and everything to extinction without any self-awareness nor any willingness to entertain self-awareness. We have quite advanced science by now and all of science has been telling us for years that we can't consume infinitely any longer. But who pays attention to science? Brainiacs. What do they know? They're off to themselves unknown to the average tv watcher. The Reagan Revolution gave a thumbs down to science, and anti-science has been GOP party line ever since. It's not just us. It's all over the world. Now that money madness has hit Asia and they have international corporations to consume with the potential to match ours, and now that the western world has consumed the earth to the point the earth is beginning to fight back, the Asian market is coming of age.
Everybody who pays attention knows we're on the highway to self-eradication. Like capital punishment does not stop capital crimes, everybody on earth knowing our balance is about to fall over like the the statue with clay feet means nothing. We go headlong in denial, going for the gold while it's still to be got. The passion among Christians for apocalypse, destruction, tear it all down, is such that if there's no apocalypse they'll tear civilization down just to be right. We humans are so at odds with each other, good sense gets lost in the shuffle with all the nonsense. Problems with our next door neighbors are the same as problems with a nation the other side of a border, like Cuba.
When we can learn to get along with our immediate neighbors, we'll be able to get along with our nation's neighbors. Not before. Two thousand years in the past, the one who knows the secrets of life and death advised us to get along with our neighbors as a formula for the peace we talk like we desire for ourselves. If the Lord Coming Again doesn't manifest pretty soon, we're sunk, not just as people who value taste, but economy sunk first, then all hell break loose next, and from there, no telling what. Sha-la-lalalala-live-for-today. Hey-e-heyhey. Sayeth the Mamas and the Papas. That's all we have. It's all we've ever had. It's all there is. And the best part: It's all illusion. Poof. No problem.
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