I’m bored as fuck, so I turn on the tube. Not much to pick from on the 900 channels I have to pay for so I can get the one that I do want.
Humm… Andy Griffith Show? Nah. How about What On Earth? I’ll take a look.
Premise of the show is they look at strange satellite photos and, well, tell you something, kind of, about what they are on Earth. Okay.
A Lake of Blood in Iraq! Well, no, probably not. 10 minutes of wild speculation with no conclusion. Strange lights in the Australian Outback! Fires? Probably not. Mining? No. 10 minutes of wild speculation with no conclusion.
A strange “cave-like” entrance in Antarctica? Here is what the “Science” channel proposes:
An underground Arctic Nazi Fortress, naturally. :rolleyes: Give me an Actual Fucking Break!
That’s when I turned that shit off. Fucking “Science”, Indeed!
Holy crap! Martin Durkin is one of the world’s leading douchebags and disreputable fraudsters!
But I note that IMDB describes NASA’s Unexplained Files as “A look is taken at exclusive NASA footage and firsthand accounts of mysterious fly objects”. There is no doubt that such things exist as I had one buzzing around in my house the other day, but a rolled-up magazine took care of it. I never really bothered to identify what it was so it remains mysterious, but I can definitely give a first-hand account of it.
This sort of educational vandalism is extremely corrosive to society.
Conspiratards can’t shut up about the -insert shadowy cabal here- plans to keep the masses ignorant and stupid, while being completely oblivious to the well established and profitable woo industry preying on them (and mucking up things for all the rest).
I don’t think there is a single channel left that does. When NatGeo started down the road, it signaled the end of smart TV.
Maybe, as JohnMace notes, PBS. They just don’t have too much of it. But when they do, it’s usually good. Narrated with the dulcet tones of Will Lyman. It’s like comfort TV.
When it changed ownership some years ago. New owners wanted to trade mark “SciFi” so they could sell t-shirts and coffee mugs but they were told no so they changed the name of the channel to “SyFy” so they could trade mark and brand nad merchandise.
They have since figured out it is more lucrative to make shitty movies for $10 a pop than to make original series or even to pay to syndicate previous shows like Stargate.
Let’s see, which program is more likely to be aired: “Haunted Alien Civilizations Levitating At The Bottom Of The Bermuda Triangle” or “Sustainable Energy Production For The 21st Century”?
I have to give a little tiny thumbs up in that at least NASA Unexplained and What On Earth don’t conclude “it was aliens”. Sure, they include these hypothesis in the speculation but always they are discarded. It wasn’t always that way.
