You Know What Yanks My Cord …

… the history channel.

I enjoy watching history documentaries — I do study history after all. So what’s on that would interest me? Believe it or not, not much. To be fair, I looked at a period of time on Sunday and saw what they had on. They had movies from 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., then they had American Pickers from 4:30 until 5:00, then the next hour was Pawn Stars, then Ice Pilots, then Ice Road Truckers, then American Pickers again, and then at 9, another movie until 11:30p.m. Wow that was an informative twelve hours!

I also could not help but notice that they enjoy playing Ancient Aliens as if that is an informative documentary. The show’s basic premise appears to be grounded in a belief that if you do not know how someone did something, aliens did it. I do not know how my friend received a 98 per cent on that paper aliens must have written it for him.

Mind you, I lost respect for this channel as a source of history once they started showing The Nostradamus Effect, that bogus show that tries to prove that Nostradamus predicted everything by twisting what he had written. Yeah and Aristotle predicted the Nazis too, right? After all in Politics he writes a word that can be translated into English as “organized.” The fifth letter is an n, the fourth is a, the seventh letter is z and the sixth letter is is — Nazi! The numbers just mentioned are 5476 and divide that by four because Nazi has four letters and you get 1369. Did you know that in the year 1369 Timur rose to power seeking to restore the Mongol empire? Hitler also tried to restore an empire and during World War One the Allies portrayed that empire’s soldiers as Huns, Huns were from Asia and so are Mongolians. See Aristotle predicted Hitler and the Nazis.

I should hope their goal is to teach people critical thinking and not history with programs like that.

I am not asking for too much, just educational documentaries as opposed to far-fetched conspiracies. You know, programs like David Starkey’s Monarchy, and if they cannot put on respectable documentaries, perhaps it’s time to change the channel’s name.
– Ian Merkley