Utopia, you are standing in it!

Contrary to the BS from BOM, Australia is not warming, and their hottest recent year was 1998

I picked ten random locations around Australia, and averaged the RSS TLT monthly anomalies for those locations. There has been no net warming for 35 years, and the last two years were not their hottest.

Click on the map below to see the latitude/longitude of the ten locations.

David Carpenter, who recently published a new translation of the Magna Carta, reflects on its 800th anniversary:

In 1215 Magna Carta was an elitist document, yet by the end of the 13th century it had become known across society, and all sections of society, legitimately or not, were laying claim to its benefits. … Already in 1215 itself the Charter had been translated from Latin into French, the vernacular language of the nobility. By the end of the 13th century the Charter was being proclaimed in English, the language of everyone else.

In around 1300, the peasants of Bocking in Essex … appealed to Magna Carta in a struggle against their lord’s bailiff. In the 1350s, legislation defined the “no free man” as “no man of whatever condition”. The Charter seemed increasingly to have a universal application. It had established the base from which it would go around the world…

David Carpenter, who recently published a new translation of the Magna Carta, reflects on its 800th anniversary:

In 1215 Magna Carta was an elitist document, yet by the end of the 13th century it had become known across society, and all sections of society, legitimately or not, were laying claim to its benefits. … Already in 1215 itself the Charter had been translated from Latin into French, the vernacular language of the nobility. By the end of the 13th century the Charter was being proclaimed in English, the language of everyone else.

In around 1300, the peasants of Bocking in Essex … appealed to Magna Carta in a struggle against their lord’s bailiff. In the 1350s, legislation defined the “no free man” as “no man of whatever condition”. The Charter seemed increasingly to have a universal application. It had established the base from which it would go around the world…

David Carpenter, who recently published a new translation of the Magna Carta, reflects on its 800th anniversary:

In 1215 Magna Carta was an elitist document, yet by the end of the 13th century it had become known across society, and all sections of society, legitimately or not, were laying claim to its benefits. … Already in 1215 itself the Charter had been translated from Latin into French, the vernacular language of the nobility. By the end of the 13th century the Charter was being proclaimed in English, the language of everyone else.

In around 1300, the peasants of Bocking in Essex … appealed to Magna Carta in a struggle against their lord’s bailiff. In the 1350s, legislation defined the “no free man” as “no man of whatever condition”. The Charter seemed increasingly to have a universal application. It had established the base from which it would go around the world…

This is big news for the 2016 race. But Huckabee is gonna need to raise some serious cash:

“You’re going to need $150 million to win the nomination, and probably $75 million to get you through Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Ed Rollins, a former Huckabee adviser, said in an interview. “That means 200 to 300 fundraising events and a vast, focused apparatus. Mike didn’t have that last time, and he still has to prove he can develop one.”

Aaron Blake, who posts the above chart, focuses on Huckabee’s Evangelical support in 2008:

In all but eight of these states, Huckabee’s showing was within single digits of the evangelical population — or better. Now, does that mean Huckabee has a chance to win or will carry these states in 2016? Not necessarily. His devoted base is both a ticket to the dance and the reason he’ll struggle to win the nomination. There quite simply…

Above are some graphs for those of you interested in the remarkable, ongoing drought in intense hurricane landfalls in the US, which is stretching close to 10 years. The top graph shows the days in between intense (category 3+) landfalls in the US since 1900. The bottom graph shows the same information, but only for Florida landfalls.

You can see that for the US, the current “intense hurricane drought” is unprecedented in at least a century. For Florida, there have been other long stretches between intense hurricane landfalls. Over the past century the average time between intense landfalls in Florida has just about doubled, from about 3 years to 6 years.

Data, sources, discussion: Pielke (2014)

Writing in the New York Times today Coral Davenport makes a strong claim about typhoons in the Philippines:

A series of scientific reports have linked the burning of fossil fuels with rising sea levels and more powerful typhoons, like those that have battered the island nation.

I am unaware of any scientific report that has linked the burning of fossil fuels to more powerful typhoons, whether they have hit the Philippines or not. Via Twitter I have challenged Davenport to substantiate her claim (she is correct about sea level rise).

That’s not really fair of me, because she can’t. The graph at the top of this post comes from a 2009 paper by Kubota and Chan (here and here), which concluded “no trend is found.”

Below is a graph from a post I did last year when the exact same false claims were made following the disastrous landfall…

We previously discussed how a Chinese zoo displayed a lion that caused a bit of a commotion when it suddenly barked. The zoo could to afford a lion so it made a large dog into a lion. An Italian circus in Brescia has proven even more daring – and dishonest. It dyed two chow-chow dogs to pretend that they were pandas. It did not seem odd to many people that a small zoo would have not one but two of the endangered animals.

A Delta Airlines flight from New York’s JFK Airport to Israel was delayed by half an hour after a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refused to sit next to female passengers. We discussed the same type of disruption on a flight in September by ultra-Orthodox travelers refusing to sit down until people moved around to accommodate their extreme religious views. What is astonishing is that the disruptive travelers faced no reported repercussions for delaying a flight or refusing to comply with the instruction of flight attendants.

If Darwin wanted proof of natural self-selection, he would would need to look no further than Darwin, Australia where two men broke into the restaurant and loaded up a wheelie trashcan with 151 bottles of booze and eight cases of beer. However, the men aged 33 and 44 decided to stop and have a few for the road. Police later found one of the men passed out in front of the store with empty bottles scattered around him. The other man was not hard to find: he left his backpack with his ID card inside the store. They have competition in any race for the bottom of the criminal evolutionary scale this week with two master criminals of our own.

Barack Obama and the rest of the class-warfare crowd act as if “tax the rich” is an appropriate answer to every question about fiscal policy.

I’m not joking. Here are some of the President’s main tax hikes that have been enacted or proposed.

Obama imposed higher income tax rates on upper-income taxpayers as part of the fiscal cliff deal.

Obama also succeeded in increasing the double-taxation of dividends and capital gains for successful taxpayers.

Obamacare was a budget-busting nightmare with lots of tax increases, but the biggest tax hike targeted rich taxpayers.

Obama’s proposed solution for Social Security’s huge unfunded liability is a large tax increase on taxpayers making more than $100,000 per year.

Obama also has proposed big tax hikes for American companies trying to compete in global markets.

This list could continue, but I think you get the point. American leftists are like malfunctioning Chatty Cathy Dolls…