Wonderful finds in my email backlog (updated regularly today)

Dealing with the backlog

I started off the holiday week with a small email backlog.  I ended up with a huge email backlog.  Non-stop family time wiped out my cyberlife.  Yesterday, I never even turned my computer on.

I’m now going through the 500+ email backlog and finding some wonderful gems.  I’ll put them in this post and just keep updating the post as I find more gems.  Also, please use this as an Open Thread.  Once I get through my backlog, my brain can reset and I can begin blogging anew.

At Rhymes with Right, Greg was prescient, creating a post with wonderful graphics that precisely sums up the situation we face today.

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David Swindle has a great list of new year’s resolutions for a new PJ Media topical approach.  He riffs off of that to make some promises for his own life.  I’m very careful with resolutions, because I get demoralized when I break them, but I could happily cherry-pick through David’s list to find some that work for me, and thereby improve my life in 2013.

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Is New Jersey using bureaucratic inefficiency as a backdoor way to impose gun control or is it merely being inefficient given the vast numbers of people who have rushed out to buy guns?

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My Dad was a wonderful harmonica player.  One of my earliest memories is of the dog howling along with him as he played.  This guy, however, is a harmonica prodigy.

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Voices from the past — the oldest recording ever found of a Christmas at home.

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What levels the playing field between a young boy babysitting his little sister and robbers intent on breaking in?  This:

The wonderful Wolf Howling, who sent me the link, provided a little useful background information regarding the AR15 that the boy used:

The AR15 is so popular for several reasons – but most importantly, it is a family friendly weapon when it comes to home defense.. First and foremost, it has almost zero recoil. That means virtually anyone of whatever level of strength can use it effectively. That is especially true in situations where multiple rounds need to be fired. Two, it fires a small round, but at incredibly high muzzle velocity. The “stopping power” of the round comes from cavitation, both temporary and permanent, inside the body. What that means is that you don’t have to be a perfect shot. A pistol round, where the damage comes completely from the round itself, needs to hit something vital to stop a person. A 5.56 round needs to get in the general area of something vital, with cavitation caused by the high speed round in fact hitting the vital area.

In comparison, all pistols have recoil, with the amount varying with the size and load of the bullet. For instance, a .45 caliber has a fair amount of kick – indeed, I have a scar on my forehead from 3 decades ago from the 1st time I fired one and, being unprepared for the recoil, my arms rotated backwards at the elbow until stopped by planting the weapons site in my forehead.

To get rid of the recoil problem with pistols, you have to go down to smaller caliber pistols carrying weaker bullets. Thus, as you get into categories of pistols that a weak woman or a small teen could fire, you get to weapons that would be having far less “stopping power” against a determined attacker.

Bottom line, banning the AR15 would ban the single most effective weapon for home defense on the market. Moreover, the people hardest hit by the ban would be women and teens, who would be forced to use less effective weapons to still be able to defend themselves.

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My sister asked me why socialized medicine worked for so long in European countries. Two reasons, I said. First, they had small, homogeneous populations that didn’t violate the social compact necessary to keep socialized medicine working. Second, America paid for it with Cold War funding (and by keeping them free of the obligation of having their own serious armies). With unlimited immigration, though, from Muslim and Eastern European countries, the social compact is over. People take out, but they don’t pay in. Also, a broke America is no longer funding European socialized medicine. The result. Ugliness abroad: the British kill their elderly; the Germans deport them.  That’s what ObamaCare will mean to us, because we don’t even have the decades long lead time of a homogenous population or a wealthy Sugar Daddy country.  For us, the journey from bad to worse will be counted in years, not decades.

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I very much enjoy Jeff Foxworthy, and I’m pretty sure his values are in the right place. However, a friend reminded me that, no matter how much we laugh at his “you might be a redneck” jokes (and they are funny), there’s another, very admirable side to rednecks that should be celebrated.

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Dave Barry’s year-end review is funny in a rather painful way.

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Is ostensibly pro-Israel Leftist Jewry killing Israel? I agree with Michael Lumish that it is. You can’t fight for a country you don’t believe in. This is the same reason Leftist Americans are destroying America — they don’t believe the country deserves to survive.

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Some time back, I recommended to you Judith Lown’s A Sensible Lady: A Traditional Regency Romance. I’d been ranting about the trouble I had finding a romance that wasn’t infused with 50 shades of awkward sex, and this charming book fit the bill. It had a clever plot, likeable characters, and a wholesomeness that’s gotten to be out-of-the-ordinary. What I didn’t know when I recommended the book is that Ms. Lown follows my blog! Isn’t that awesome? She just let me know that Amazon bought out her publisher, and reissued her first book, as a Kindle book. I just bought my copy of A Match For Lady Constance, and I expect to enjoy it every bit as much as I enjoyed Ms. Lown’s last book.

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