A Little More B.A.R.F.

OK. So I fly off the handle sometimes. But it is Saturday night again and PBS is full of flat English humor AGAIN. Yes, Virginia, there is a conspiracy and it reeks of the blood of an Englishman.
But, I may have flown off the handle, been over the top a bit, asking for the demise of our Public Broadcasting Network. The same may hold true of my feelings about forest fires. BUT...

PBS is currently hyping PBSKids. There is little doubt of the value of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), who began by giving us Sesame Street. Those efforts, by act of Congress, created a unique legal situation called a public-held corporation; like the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), PBS and others.
Although I have never read or heard of the reason, my suspicion of why this was necessary has always been that there were real conflicts between the principles involved that only could be resolved in this manner. Again, suspicion is my only remaining pathway, as the facts are not public information, even though the organizations are.

And there are the so-called "educational" aspects of PBS. Some programming has real value, even though narrow in scope and elemental in content. Some folks need to learn the basics. Without formal education, and the incredible dropout rate reveals that needs are dynamic, the logic of social organization, and the methods of navigation necessary therein, remains a mystery.

So that leaves the "animal shows." All PBS nature programming carries a message that is either correct or a lie. It is so dynamic a message that no middle ground is possible.We are either quickly killing this planet or not.
Some creatures are dying faster than they are being born. Darwin called that Natural Selection. Whether or not (or how) these events fit into the overall evolution of the human environment (and its greater and lesser contingent consequences) is only conjecture. The whole and only truth about all this is that a large number of people are involved in studies of things that mean very little to all but a very few other people. They fund their "research" by taking movies of their quests. PBS buys into this [for us?] and we see what they do. Ho-hum.

Important? Maybe. Are there other human needs on the planet that the effort would be better spent on? Probably. [But, we have no collective forum (on PBS or anywhere) to reveal such matters. There is no, for example, Inside The United Nations This Week.]

My point? Somebody has to say something. PBS sucks!

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