National Scare-o-Graphic Channel

[common_sense]

Is it me, or does watching the National Geographic channel anymore remind you of a cheap carnival haunted house ride? It seems they can't describe any part of the Earth without attatching a gloom and doom scenario and telling us how plague, destruction, and the end of society is coming. I mean EVERY TIME.

I've never gotten into those 'deadly disease' or Armegeddon or 'wipeout Los Angeles' movies, it seems a certain group of the population craves nothing less than watching the human race wiped out every afternoon in different ways. Not exactly my idea of entertainment.

Just about every National Geographic program from the incoming meteors, to the cyclical comets........to our "Sister Sun" which causes mass extinctions every so often, to giant sleeping supervolcanoes well within our range, to the explosive Yellowstone weak spot.......to our weaking magnetic shield exposing us to deadly radiation, or the Moon (which makes life possible, by keeping the earth's tilt from wobbling) on a course to float away and abandon us........says the danger is long overdue and could happen at any moment, in fact, its expected. They always tell you about the stuff with a moderator using suspenseful tones of drama and background music.

Among my favorites in stupidity have been the earthquake episode which spent about half an hour trying to convince you that earthquakes can happen anywhere and have no relation to fault lines, so you should basically live in fear from this point on no matter where you live. They proceeded to show
diagrams of how the Midwest sits on a weak, cracked fragile shell due to a magma bubble in the past and this could explode at any moment.

My all time favorite N.Geographic episode was about plate tectonics.... which spent awhile explaining how the continents drift, sometimes at the lightning rate of one inch a decade. They followed up OF COURSE by explaining that the European plate is expected to "slam" into the North American plate at some time in the future, even though currently they are drifting away from each other, one day this will change (remember this is all at a rate of one inch per decade)--- wiping out the cities of New York and Boston and other huge metropolitan areas. They said it would 'slam' into the coast and 'crush' our cities. Then they added, due to the resulting long distance from the moderating effects of the oceans, the survivors (yours and our precious children, mind you) will bake and fry in a firey inferno in the summer and freeze in the winter............ending of course once again, human life as we know it................For wasn't the Permian extinction, the greatest extinction of all time where 90% of life was wiped out on the planet, caused when all the continents came together? Makes perfect sense. And I gotsta have my extinctions.

Hmmm.... I don't know if I will be able to outrun that. Too bad they couldn't get around the time frame, say a million years from now, but it was a nice try.

Can't they just show people stuff about the world without trying every time to terrorize us, or are the producers getting off on this kind of circus crap? Give me a break.
It's a wonder I even leave my house.