More Evidence of Changes To Come

"In late March 1944 a rebellious US Army Major is 'volunteered' to train twelve convicted military criminals for a suicide mission - to parachute to a heavily-guarded Nazi general staff officers' retreat to try and assassinate German officers on leave. To get his unorthodox assignment done the Major must convince Army brass to grant pardons to the men, then try to mold the twelve recidivists into a functioning unit."

That's the synopsis for The Dirty Dozen, at least as synopsized by the IMDB (Internet Movie Database). One recidivist, played by Donald Sutherland, ended up masquerading as a general inspecting a band of well polished troops. I've included the YouTube clip below. The money scene starts around 2:30.

For those of you not fond of embedded video, I've screen capped it for you.

Where you from, son?

Madison City, Missouri, SIR!

Never heard of it.

[Crushed]

I had never heard The Register web site before a followed a link to it today.  I assume they won't be crushed. I had to search around a bit to find out who they were and what they were all about.  Here's what I found.

The Register is the one of the world's biggest online tech publications, with more than five million unique users worldwide. The US and the UK account for more than 1.5 million readers each a month.

Most Register readers are IT professionals - software engineers, database administrators, sysadmins, networking managers and so on, all the way up to CIOs. The Register covers the issues they face at work every day – in software, hardware, networking and IT security. The Register is also known for its "off-duty" articles, on science, tech culture, and cult columnists such as BOFH and Verity Stob, which reflect our readers' many personal interests.

They posted an interesting and alarming article yesterday.

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade

Physicists say sunspot cycle is 'going into hibernation'

They include the following plot. The "Spots" / "No Spots" text makes the plot pretty much self explanatory. An unidentified magnetic field has been getting smaller in unidentified units. Once the unidentified magnetic field drops below 1500 unidentified units, we go from spots to no spots. That may happen around 2013, if the sun obeys the straight line extrapolation of the guy who plotted the data.

See!  I told you. We could soon be sunspotless, and you all know what that means.

In case you forgot what I wrote, here's what the Register wrote:

The big consequences of a major solar calm spell, however, would be climatic. The next few generations of humanity might not find themselves trying to cope with global warming but rather with a significant cooling. This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO₂ emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide.

I think government policy on global warming is going to change much more slowly than the Sun's magnetic field, but it might change. They may eventually be requiring all of us to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Walking, rather than driving, will be treasonous and result in forcible tatooing or strangulation in your sleep. Farting cows will be honored. [I never thought I would write that.]

I'm inching up to the point where I'm going to relate all this to my thoughts on how we as a country can get our groove back.

Stay tuned.