Flippant Remarks about Death by Design/The Life and Times of Life and Times
This documentary, by Jean-François Brunet and Peter Friedman is another “annoying” example of how to make educational material—especially scientific material—dramatic, engaging and “for adults”—which essentially means developing work that has room for reflection. Young people are supposed to be assaulted with dense walls of images and sound—otherwise they “lose interest.” To me, this astute observation is a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by millions of imperial citizens who don’t really know how life works.
This documentary shows us that life works within the unity of creation and destruction. You would not have the fingers on your hands were it not for the cells that grew between the digits “dying.” According to the documentary, the subject of cellular death was “discovered” and forgotten twice in Western history. The name of Rita Levi-Montalcini is important here because she was woman while a scientist—and she was Jewish while living in Italy in World War II—two very “good” reasons why this subject is often overlooked—since she made the first “discovery” of cellular death doing research in her lab/bedroom under a form of house arrest. (However, the billions of dollars in many world currencies swirling around AIDS research does touch upon the Western science of cellular death—and cancer, such as Leukemia, touches here as well. It does seem very strange that the military industrial complex would pass up research on how to spontaneously cause all the cells in an organism’s body to die—very unlikely…)
The documentary ends with a jab at the political elites who are proud to know nothing about science—this sentiment guarantees that Bill Nye the Science Guy (and all the hyped-up “kids” shows that copy him) will continue his reign here in the United States. And this documentary leaves me with a new way to see a future generation of fascist racists justify murder: you can recite this poem based on the misinterpretation of biological science that says, “Nature overproduces millions only to select a few thousand in its progressive journey of evolution.” Of course, the implication will always be that the “few thousand” just happen to be in and around George Bush’s Rolodex—and definitely all will be into central banking.
The science does show that life forms change in response to stimuli—the religious implication of evolution is that these changes are always for the “better.” There is a difference between change for change and a change for the better. Many political experts depend on us to fail to make this distinction.