Obama on Gun Control

Buried back ten years you can get an idea of where Barack Obama stands on Gun Control from this note at Jawa.

What else do we know about Obama? Well he likes to use the words “Social Justice” almost as much as Green candidates do, he’s got a solidly liberal voting record in the Senate, and he speaks authoritatively about sweeping, general concepts that few will disagree with, but which are all sound and fury signifying nothing. Peggy Noonan points out that if you just read the transcript, it’s typical political boilerplate without content.

So is Barack just a cult of personality, or is there more to him? I suspect there’s more, but it’s stuff he doesn’t want us to know. Stuff like this, like the upcoming Rezko trial, and other things that will likely come to light if he does become the candidate. The free pass days are over now that he is the front runner for the Democratic nomination.

One other note, also from Jawa – Barack is likely to stumble more often now that he’s in the limelight, as demonstrated by his slip here, where he uses faux-journo Scott Beauchamp as a source.

Greater Hurricane Damage Caused by Population Shifts

The NOAA released a study Thursday which you aren’t going to read much about in the MSM. The study concludes that the greater hurricane damage we are seeing in coastal areas is due to population shifts to those areas rather than more or bigger hurricanes. So the greater damage is due to demographic shifts. Here’s a link to the actual paper. This basically says that a much of the damage increase that we are seeing is due to inflation and more people living in coastal regions – wingnut denialists everywhere are trying to make this out to mean that there’s no AGW, when all actual measure of climate indicate that there is AGW. This paper just means that as sea levels rise we are going to see even more damage than expected.

There’s also some concern in scientific circles regarding the sunspot cycle – normally this would have started in March last year, but so far it’s been a bust with only one abortive sunspot in early Feb this year. The sun is remarkably quiet, and we could be headed into another minimum. The record cools we are seeing recently are anecdotal so far, but they could be indicative of things to come.

Update 5/1/14 – I’ve updated this after finally tracking down the actual paper – the paper doesn’t indicate or say that the damage isn’t because of AGW, it merely states that we are seeing more costs due to several factors. Costs aren’t a measure of AGW, but it’s somewhat likely that we will see costs rise as AGW does.