Sunday night, nothing on TV.  Decided to have a look at this PBS documentary:  Lafayette: The Lost Hero.  Growing up in Louisiana, I found the title of this show a bit odd.  Everybody in Louisiana remembers Lafayette.  Turns out I didn’t know a fraction of this story.  I’m going to have to read up a bit on the French Revolution, too.

I have been a huge fan of Henry Miller since I read Tropic of Capricorn many years (ok, decades) ago.  I ran across a later book of his, Books in my Life, and decided to give it a read, mostly on the hope of finding some other good books to read, on his recommendation.  He mentions lots of writers from the previous century that I have heard of and might get around to one day (Hamsun, Rider Haggard, Celine).  But the book rambled on, a bit like listening to a talkative fellow in a bar.  An interesting fellow no doubt, but I kept wondering when he was going to get around to something interesting.  Maybe never, but it was worth soldiering on.

Somewhere around page 200 he goes off on a tangent about Walt Whitman and Dostoevsky.  As good as anything the has ever written.  Been meaning to read Dostoevsky for a long time.   Might have to take the plunge.  After a bit of Krishnamurthy (also from this book by Miller).

Gene Sharpe’s writings on nonviolent revolution are available for free download at the Albert Einstein Institution.  Worth reading, even if you aren’t planning a revolution.

The latest in patriotism, from India.  I don’t go to the movies much. Hope they don’t start doing this on Netflix.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice table / map of gun deaths by state.  What led me here was an article about the (relatively) restrictive state gun laws in Hawaii.  I was wondering how that was working out for them.  If lowering gun deaths is the goal, I would say:  pretty well.

Number of Deaths Due to Injury by Firearms per 100,000 Population

Most of the data wasn’t very surprising.  My home state of Louisiana is #2 (behind Alaska) in gun deaths, despite a somewhat lower rate of gun ownership.  Hawaii was #49.  The map pretty much echoed the red state / blue state theme.  One exception was New Mexico.  A Blue State with a high gun death rate.  Not sure what is going on over there.  Have to add Texas wasn’t as bad as I would have thought.  But maybe it isn’t as Red as we are all led to believe.

Listening to some old music on Spotify and some Oasis came on.  Re-read this old article from The Big Issue:

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory: The true story behind the cover

From Slate:  What Happens If Hundreds of Thousands of Puerto Ricans Flee for the Mainland United States?

The upshot:  Puerto Ricans are US citizens and tend to vote Democrat.  They  probably aren’t fans of President Trump at the moment.  This could upset the political balance in places like Florida.  Will Republicans (cynically) offer a big aid package to keep them on the island? Will Democrats (cynically) block a large aid package to try and stack the deck in their favor in future elections?

One of the places I tend to get content is from The Next Platform.  A bit of a silicon / High Performance Computing focus, but very well written.  Lots of good info on emerging architectures, particularly accelerators.  Also exists as a mailing list that arrives weekly.

Two Dark American Truths From Las Vegas

On the certainty of more shootings

An article from the Atlantic.  I am sure much will be written in the coming days.  The same pundits will be on TV repeating the same lines.  I keep thinking of the line from the old song “he can see no reason, because there are no reasons, what reason do you need to be shown?”  Who cares who this person is, or why he did this?  It does not have to be this way, but I am afraid I don’t see the will to change in America today.

Another good thing about this blob is (maybe) otherwise controversial subjects can be discussed without the ‘professional’ commenters getting involved.  I just watched a video on Social Media with two gun rights advocates exercising their rights by walking into a police station, heavily armed and with faces partially covered.

Certainly poor judgement, IMO.  And barring the racial issues (yes, they were white, and no, they didn’t get shot up) it made me consider something that has always bothered me:  Are guns a defensive weapon?

I think part of the problem here is that guns are inherently used on offense, not defense.  If you fear being shot, wear body armor.  It harms no one else and protects you.  Carrying a gun makes you indistinguishable from the people you are trying to defend against, at least from other people’s point of view.

At some point your right to guns bump up against my rights to safety.  Say I had a neighbor afraid of a gasoline shortage.  Is it ok for him to store a few hundred gallons in his garage?  At what points do his fears cross the line and start to encroach on my right to safety?  Or even just my fear of being blown up?  Are his fears more important than anyone else’s? No matter how unrealistic they might seem?  Even if he tells me he has training and knows what he is doing, isn’t this just an accident waiting to happen?

(Update: I happened to write this the day before the mass shooting in Las Vegas (Las Vegas shooting: Stephen Paddock kills over 50 people). It was not meant as a commentary on that event.)