Kaimusailing

It was now 10 days until I pick up my rental car, so I looked at the 10 day forecast at wunderground.com. It looks like weather will continue as it has recently with a couple of scorchers in there. I have plenty of time to prepare for my journey but have to prepare and not procrastinate and leave things to the last minute.
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It is the Memorial Day weekend and the Sunday morning oped shows are focused on the very recent slaughters, murders, of innocent children. One victim, a school teacher, was followed in death by her bereaved husband who died of a heart attack, his heart broken. I can sympathize. The weight of all this grief comes at a time when we stop to reflect on all the grievous pain that has been thrust upon us by senseless wars, terrorist acts, and now an out of control gun violence spree that is occurring only here in America the Free. The right to bear arms lobby is upset that anyone wants to try to stop all the killings, but the right to bear arms was a good idea when most people needed a gun to help put food on the table, and the country was young and susceptible to attack from outside. It is still a deterrent to outside attack, but now it is a suicide tool that is eating our country from the inside.
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I have written before that I don’t believe strict gun laws will prevent mass shootings. I have not expressed my argument that, without any proof, I think the growing march toward civil war could well be spurred on by outside actors, the corrupt Russian agents and others that watch in glee as Americans blow each other away every day. The fuel for this internal war is fear and disinformation, conspiracy memes offered with no proof, no facts, just rabble repeating what they heard on political radio shows, extreme on both right and left sides of the issues. It is easy to fund a radio show, getting someone to listen to it is also easy, just make outlandish comments and someone will say, holy cow, I didn’t know it was like that, well, it isn’t, but at the office water cooler the topic becomes grist for a debate. The bell curve has a few idiots down at the low end and a few brilliant gems on the high end, no one wants to listen to the gems, no one seems to want to figure things out using common sense, much better to gravitate to some outlandish line of thought, and soon you have a group opposing another group, both with extreme opposite views, both based on nothing but radio hot air, both incapable of reasoning things out. The only thing left is to shoot it out after a big shout down.
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I’ve grown fond of the old Dick Cavett shows and they were aired in the early 70’s when there was a war going on and the USA was aggressively dropping bombs on Southeast Asia and mining the grounds, killing both military and civilian. Joan Baez was on Dick’s show and expressing her views on what is essentially senseless killing. It struck me that we at that time had no real reason to fear Vietnam or wage war against them, but we did. The Domino Theory was what was proposed then, if Vietnam falls to the communists, then there will be another domino to fall, and so on, till the world goes communist and our capitalist system gets shoehorned into a corner, defeated by the advancing ideological tide. Of course that is hogwash, the reality that was happening then is that the colonialism of the West was falling apart while we tried to prop it up. The French failed in Vietnam and we stepped in and caused a lot of pain on them and ourselves and ended up retreating and causing more pain to those who helped us. We see Russia today doing the same thing as we did, but closer to their home, and how much pain is being inflicted there. There are never any winners when war is at stake.
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My recent goal was to get PBS on my terrestrial TV, but I could never get it, no matter how I pointed the antenna. I retired as a TV engineer, so it is very frustrating not to be able to do something so basic. Point the antenna at the TV transmitter and you should get your broadcast. They are only about 30 miles away. I began to methodically track down the antenna’s location. First find the Jacksonville TV schedule lineup, then find the call letters of the station you want to get. Search on Google for that station and look at the Wikipedia entry, somewhere they will have the latitude and longitude of the transmitter. Then go to a navigation app such as Marine Navigator and scroll the cursor around till you have the correct lat and long, drop a marker there, doesn’t matter that it is on dry land, the result will be a heading and distance to the marker from your location. The nav app also displays a virtual compass on the screen, go to your antenna, line up the smart phone to the heading of the transmitter, then line up the antenna in the same direction. Do a channel scan. Now select the PBS stations with all their cooking shows, etc. I didn’t get PBS, but I got ABC, which I didn’t get before, and they had the Monaco Formula One race on, and if there is one Formula One race to see each season, it is the Monaco Grand Prix. I watched a bit, then had to get out of the cabin, it was too hot on the boat. I retreated to the communal porch that had a cooling breeze. I was cooling down and writing, but not before I ranted some hot rhetoric. That’s enough work for today.
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It is now Memorial Day, hence this blog post’s theme, Monday, Pizza Night day, boatyard ghost town, no customers for my pies. I will see what transpires.
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The image is a sunset photo over the North River Marsh taken with the Galaxy S20+.