As I reflect on this last blog of 2022, I’m happy for one thing to see the general passing of the masks. (Though the Evil Princess probably wishes I had kept wearing mine, if only because it makes me better looking … )

I plan to spend the evening indoors; in the town near where I live, there’s always irresponsible gunfire into the air at the stroke of midnight on the New Year.  I want a roof between me and the bullets that inevitably follow the law of gravity.  Yes, I saw the Mythbusters thing which prognosticated that falling spent bullets would be too feeble to cause harm.  Unfortunately, the bullets don’t watch Mythbusters.  I’ve been to homicide schools where we saw the slides of the corpses with bullet holes in the top of their skulls from that stupid crap.

The EP and I (and our rescue dog Alba) wish you all a happy, prosperous, and peaceful 2023.

The tradition of New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t have much to offer in that regard, but please post here your resolutions, thoughts, and predictions for the coming year.

39 COMMENTS

  1. HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone!!!

    Yes, I’m also glad to see fewer and fewer masks. Yesterday, we picked up an old family friend from a nursing home in Scranton, PA, and to my surprise, and delight, no one in the nursing home lobby was wearing a mask! Then, we went to the Viewmont Mall, and I only saw two people wearing masks! I felt like I was transported back into the good, old, pre-COVID days. Hip, Hip, Hooray!!!

    Mas, I did like the mask you wore in the beginning of the lockdown, the cowboy bandana. That looked good! (“Who was that masked man?”)

    I wish, instead of wearing N-95 masks, I had walked around during the “pandemic” with a gas mask which looks like this;

    https://www.spirithalloween.com/product/brown-gas-mask/176003.uts?Extid=sf_froogle&utm_content=MASK%20%26%20WEAPONS&utm_term=SKH&scid=scplp01429182&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_campaign=sc-shopping-nb-mid&utm_content=campaign&utm_inex=e&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0db7qKCk_AIVB-DICh3lZw4dEAQYAiABEgKlefD_BwE

    After almost three years, I only know one person who died from COVID. I received two Moderna vaccines and one booster, because I trusted the healthcare industry. I admit I don’t know much about medicine. Looking back, I would not take the vaccine. Once I learned the average age of those dying from COVID was 78, I was not afraid of it, and only took the vaccine because I thought if enough of us took it, the state governments would end the lockdowns.

    When I was young, I dreamed big, too big. Now, I consider every day that I am not a patient in a hospital to be a good day.

    My way of celebrating New Year’s Eve is to watch The Twilight Zone Marathon on the SyFy channel, and to drink egg nog straight.

    I keep preparing for Doomsday, but it never arrives, unless we are experiencing a Doomsday in VERY slow motion. The United States could be a fine country, and solve most of its problems, if we could just convince the Democrats to leave. You want proof? Hiroshima and Nagasaki are doing better than most American cities. That means Democratic leadership is more destructive than atom bombs. Yet, Democrats still vote for Democrats. SMH.

    • After almost three years, I know well over one hundred people who died from Covid, as I am an ICU Nurse. I remember one in particular – a Cook County Corrections officer whose hand I held for 40 minutes as he died from respiratory failure after battling Covid for more than a month. Have you ever seen a fish carelessly left on a dock flopping around suffocating? That’s how people die from respiratory failure (except we do give pain killers and anti-anxiety meds to help alleviate the suffering even if only a little). Due mainly to wearing my N95 mask at work and anytime I was out and about in public I NEVER caught the virus, even though I was often coughed on as I performed procedures or helped perform procedures right in the faces of Covid patients.

      I am glad the need for proper PPE for both healthcare workers and the public is diminishing finally. But when I read what you wrote (“to my surprise, and delight, no one in the nursing home lobby was wearing a mask”) I cringe. I guess no one in that lobby liked old people…

      • John Mohan,

        Thanks for commenting. As an ICU nurse, your experience was different than mine. I have almost zero knowledge of biology and healthcare, and I will always back down and shut up when a healthcare professional talks about those subjects.

        Frankly, I live in a bubble. I keep up with the news, and I know about many of the bad things happening in the world, and in America, especially American cities. Nevertheless, I live in a town where the people made good career decisions, and they are well-behaved.

        John, I would be interested to hear your idea of how this virus got started and passed around the world. Was this biological warfare? What should be done to all the Doctor Frankenstein-wannabes and Doctor Mengele-wannabes who worked on “gain-of-function”? I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr. Anthony Faustus (sic) invented this virus himself. He certainly knows all about it.

        My belief is that previous plagues (Spanish Flu, Black Plague, Smallpox) came from God. This one was created by men, and it did not have to happen. All the problems I see in the world today are man-made. If men behaved, the world would be a better place.

  5. Happy new year to you and the misses. The only resolution I will make is to do my best to be here this time next year. May all have a healthy happy year to come.

  6. Happy New Year to you, Mas, to the EP, and to all the readers of this blog.

    I shall not be sad about the passing of 2022. From my perspective, 2022 was a BAD YEAR!

    The economy tanked, the stock market went into “Bear” territory, and the left-wing mass insanity that prevails in this country, and the West-in-General, only got worse, if possible.

    On a personal note, I also lost my mother in 2022. All around, a sorry year that I am happy to be leaving behind!

    I look forward with hope that we have, at last, hit near the bottom and that things can only revive from these lows. Hope is not a plan but it is still something to cling to in these days and times.

    Therefore, I face 2023 with “Hope” for improvement. Maybe it will be, for me, a better year than miserable 2022.

    Certainly, it is my wish that 2023 be a “Good Year” for the readers of this blog and for America. May 2023 see a revival of the Spirit of another Year: 1776!

  7. Happy New Year to you Mas! My only resolutions are to always stay vigilant, practice often and keep my eyes peeled for great new gun deals! Lol

  8. HAPPY NEW YEAR AND BEST WISHES TO ALL!

    Since those bullets returning to earth are falling at 9.8 meters per second, squared, being indoors is an excellent idea. I read or heard once and somewhere that on-duty LA cops made a habit of parking under overpasses when the new year clock was closing in on midnight–shelter from celebrated projectiles. (Hard to believe that “Mythbusters” seemed to be in at least partial denial of gravity’s influence and the laws of physics. Wonder if they are planning an episode on flat earth by any chance? Whew!)

    • Hi Glenn,
      I have not watched the episode, but it would be in the absence of air resistance that a bullet would accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second (which for the Physics laymen, is what “per second squared” means) during its decent. Since the bullet encounters air resistance on the way up, reducing how high it reaches before its velocity reaches zero, and it encounters that air resistance on the way down as well, it will have a significantly lower absolute speed when it reaches the ground compared to when it was first fired. I guess years of physics classes were worth it after all… LOL

      All that said, according to what Mas wrote, bullets still have enough energy to bore through a skull after such a trip skyward, so I don’t hang outside at midnight on New Years Eves either.

      • The heavier the bullet, the more wallop at terminal velocity. Somewhere around 130 to 140 mph, IIRC. Give me my hard hat! The fastest baseball pitch might actually be around 105mph. Rarely will even a perfectly lethal hard-hit ball reach 130mph. Golf balls hit with a heavy club have been known to be deadly, which might give an apt comparison, Slingshots can be equally formidable. Not to mention thrown rocks. Icy snowballs are wicked. The list goes on, I guess. I never shoot bullets straight up any more. Hardly ever did, and only over an open field. That was not even smart.

      • “reducing how high it reaches before its velocity reaches zero”

        I think that was the error in the Mythbusters episode. They presumed that the bullet was going straight up, and therefore would stop before it started back down. But I have a feeling most people shooting in the air do so at an angle. I’m not going to attempt the math, but if the bullet describes a parabola, it will start back down without stopping, and therefore may retain more of its velocity.

      • I remember Saddam Hussein used to shoot a rifle in the air over the city of Baghdad. Weddings in the Middle East are known to sometimes be celebrated with bursts from AK-47s fired up into the air. Allah guides the bullets.

      • @larryarnold: The bullet will always reach a zero vertical velocity — the point where it stops going any higher and starts to descend. If the bullet is fired more-or-less “straight up”, the lateral velocity is pretty much negligible compared to the vertical velocity. The extra 1-2 mph to the side is orders of magnitude less than the 140-ish mph down. Wind could add more to this lateral movement than being fired not-quite-perfectly straight up.

        (In normal “horizontal” shooting, it’s the opposite: bullets still travel in curved paths so there’s still a point of zero vertical velocity, but the vertical velocity is orders of magnitude less than the horizontal velocity, so unless we’re shooting at very long ranges where literally everything can affect point of impact, we usually ignore it.)

        What I wonder is, supposing a bullet is fired straight up, at precisely 90 degrees with zero lateral velocity (and no wind), will its stabilizing spin cause it to fall back to the ground backwards?

        And if so, between the extra air resistance slowing it down and the bullet hitting base-first instead of nose-first, how will that affect its ability to punch through obstacles?

  11. Soon after the TV networks created “Dick Clark’s Rocking New Years Eve” for teenagers to watch, the adults lost the annual “New Years Eve with Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians.” That show has never been replaced, and New Years Eve has never been the same.

  15. Happy New Years. I will continue to train and keep my edge remembering that each of us are responsible for our safety for ourselves and our family members and remember my instructors Captain Chuck Taylor & Kent Turnipseed who taught me how to use the 1911 Pistol to save my life several times in armed confrontations.Also looking forward to training with Captain Ayoob in 2023.

  16. Happy New Year.

    I am writing this from Illinois, where, if the Governor’s plans go as he plans, I will be a mega-felon within the month unless I give up thousands of dollars worth of my legally acquired private property.

    So far, it is not a happy new year.

    • Oregon, too. Unless the courts strike it down (in the Nutty Ninth Circus? hah!), magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds are verbotten, including tubular magazines on shotguns and .22 rifles. (Note, with the advent of “short” shotgun rounds, this means all shotguns with a tube magazine that can hold more than 3 or 4 shells.) No grandfathering unless you’ve kept your receipts (the burden is on you to prove you owned them before the law passed), you must serialize them yourself, and you can only keep them at home or the range.

      For now. They’ll come back later to try and ban them outright, no doubt.

      That and a permit-to-purchase scheme that requires training by law enforcement, which no law enforcement agency in the State is equipped or funded to provide (the law neither requires nor appropriates funding to provide training, so who pays for those classes to be developed and administered is anyone’s guess), and which requires live-fire training …

      … with firearms a new prospective gun owner is not yet allowed to have. How’s that going to work? Nobody knows.

      Yes, it goes against SCOTUS’ Bruen decision, but it was a ballot initiative, and the language and signatures were submitted pre-Bruen. I’m not sure the Secretary of State has the power to “pull” a patently unconstitutional anti-gun ballot initiative, but even if the office did, I’m sure the person currently occupying it wouldn’t.

      I’m glad we got out of there when we did.

  17. Regarding bullets being fired straight up, I did a bit of digging and I came across an excellent article written by a Physics Professor. I will include a link to the article at the bottom of this post. Summary: Factoring in air resistance, a bullet from a .30-06 fired straight up will have a speed of about 195 meters/second when it hits the ground. That works out to about 440 mph. Even a bullet fired from a 9 mm pistol fired straight up will have a speed of about 120 meters/second when it hits the ground. This works out to about 270 miles per hour. And again, this factors in the air resistance the bullet encounters while traveling up, and while traveling back down. I don’t think the bullets’ terminal velocities are factored in, but I am also not sure that either bullet’s terminal velocity would even be below the above numbers (terminal velocity is the maximum velocity that can be reach by a particular object of a particular size, shape and density during free fall). Due to the extreme density and relatively aerodynamic shape of most bullets I am sure the terminal velocities are extremely high.

    If anyone out there thinks they’d be okay getting struck by such a bullet and they want to volunteer to try it out, they better be sure to find someone to hold their sign. We don’t want anything to happen to it. 😀

    https://www.wired.com/2009/10/more-on-mythbusters-shooting-bullets-in-the-air/

    • Looking at a report of empirical Army results gives Army calculations of from 205 mph to as much as 300 mph for bullets’ terminal falling velocity, depending on the construction and aerodynamic features of each bullet. The professor’s calculation of 440 mph of a falling .30-06 rifle bullet is a lot higher, so the professor’s curve looks somewhat suspect to me. Still, even the lowball figure of 205 mph gives a common bullet with some weight a speed that will definitely do more than crack an egg. In Arizona getting caught firing a bullet into the air gets pretty much an automatic arrest.

  19. My prediction for 2023 is that the totalitarians of the Left and the global elites are going to double-down on their effort toward firearms prohibition. Most nations are already in the process of disarming their citizens so that they can be enslaved to the State. The traditional points of democracy, the UK, Australia, Western Europe, New Zealand, etc. are already well down the path of transforming their populations into serfs of the State.

    The totalitarians are pushing full-bore in Canada at the moment. Their confiscation program is being planned. See this story:

    https://globalnews.ca/news/9381424/canada-planned-firearm-buyback-program-marco-mendicino/

    Only the US is bringing up the rear in the push to enslave the World’s populations. The recent Supreme Court decision upholding the 2nd Amendment has the totalitarians panicked.

    Have you noticed that their minions in the Anti-American media are publishing a steady stream of anti-gun propaganda? We are seeing propaganda pieces published daily. Nay, I well believe that they will soon be publishing them hourly.

    The big push toward firearms prohibition is underway. The left and globalists well know that disarmament of the World’s populations is absolutely necessary for the enslavement of the sheep. Therefore, the propaganda and fearmongering are at full bloom.

    Disarmament has not been going according to plan here in America. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms is still strong here. More than half of the States now support Constitutional Carry. The elites are beginning to panic. Therefore, the propaganda and indoctrination are rising to the point where the Left-wing totalitarians are practically screaming from the rooftops.

    Wonder what they will try next? Some false flag operation that would justify a crackdown and forced confiscation of firearms?

    Who can say? Desperate people do desperate things. The totalitarians are becoming desperate to disarm the American Citizen. Therefore, it is easy for me to predict a stronger push for firearms-prohibition in 2023.

    • Correct about the intent but they will use the financial and health care systems to do it, not storm troopers. Those systems are already all in on confiscation so no need to convince anyone.

  20. My resolution is to impart as much knowledge about hunting, fishing, firearms and the outdoors as possible to others, especially youngsters. Also, to politely tell young people that the United States is, in fact, a great country and that a lot of what they are taught in school & see on TV is absolute crap.

  21. TN_MAN wrote:
    The traditional points of democracy, the UK, Australia, Western Europe, New Zealand, etc. are already well down the path of transforming their populations into serfs of the State.’

    Could you please provide the evidence the UK is being enslaved? I’ve lived here all my life and can’t find it. Twenty years after practically all guns were banned (they were very rare anyway) we can remove any government at every election. Some of the media support one party, some others. Free speech is legal and so is campaigning for the government to be removed. As is the case in all the other countries you list.
    Not that removing guns makes any regime safer. The USSR fell without any shootings, regime after regime has.

    • UK subjects have went along with the totalitarian “sheep herding” without putting up much resistance. You are mistaking a frog, being slowly boiled, for comfort. Can the UK frog really jump out of the pot?

      “Free speech is legal…”

      Is it now? See this news report:

      https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2017/10/14/british-police-arrest-at-least-3395-people-for-offensive-online-comments-one-year/

      “Some of the media support one party, some others.”

      What difference does that make when all the parties are just different sides of the same coin?

      Same thing here in the US. The Democrats and the Establishment Republicans, together, form the “Uni-party”. Even on those rare occasions when the Republicans control government, they act like quislings rather than an opposition party.

      “…we can remove any government at every election.”

      So what, if all parties support the same policies and simply vary on the speed of implementation? Are your elections free and fair? Ours are not.

      Do the people of the UK really have voice? You voted for Brexit (twice) and you can see how that turned out.

      I refer you to the Neal Oliver video that I linked in my comment above. I suspect that he is a fellow subject of the UK that does not share your rosy viewpoint on the benevolence of your government.

      I am not a frog. I am not comfortable being slow boiled into serfdom.

      • TN_MAN,

        I suppose nicholas kane believes the United Kingdom is relatively free. Well, it is relatively free if you compare it to China and Iran. But, it is not free compared to Tennessee.

        The same can be said about New Jersey. It is free compared to the UK, (and Old Jersey), but New Jersey is not free compared to Tennessee.

  22. My New Year’s resolutions for 2023 are to gain 200 lbs, start chain smoking, drinking heavily and doing hard drugs, and also to vote Democrat in every election.

    Hey, I can never keep the damn things anyway; at least this year I won’t feel bad about it.

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