Biblical Foundation Builder Chuck Smith

Among the push for "Terrorist terror" scenario there is something else quietly going on with USA Military.

Cold War 2.0: The US military is beefing up its presence in the former Soviet Bloc

Over the past century, Russia and Germany have repeatedly clashed in a swath of Eastern Europe that Yale historian Timothy Snyder has termed "bloodlands."

As the US Army Strykers rolled through the Polish countryside, they passed road signs pointing to the sites of battles and pogroms, sieges and Nazi death camps.

 At the end of World War II, the 2nd Cavalry Regiment was the US unit that pushed farthest east, liberating parts of what was then Czechoslovakia from the Germans. By that time, Poland and the Baltics were already firmly under Soviet domination.

While the officers of Fourth Squadron were well aware of the region's dark history, they were preoccupied with making the road march as safe as possible.

Soldiers spent their nights sleeping inside or next to their Strykers at sprawling Soviet-era military bases. Departure times were often set before daybreak to avoid clogging up highways.

Because of local requirements, one 170-mile leg of Dragoon Ride turned into a 330-mile steeplechase.

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Meanwhile on another front...

 Some commanders were eager to participate.

 “It was supposed to be an organized army where no one had benefits over anyone else,” said Abdul-Razaq Freiji, who had defected from the Syrian Army early in the uprising and led a small fighting group near the central city of Hama.

 “We are military men and we like order, so we wanted training and organization.”

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It is not easy playing with your toy soldiers and their equipment...

 Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.

 The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales, using the money to buy expensive SUVs, iPhones and other luxury items, Jordanian officials said.

Local Calvinist’s Sense Of Superiority Visible From Space

Yuri Malenchenko, a Russian cosmonaut aboard the International Space Station, spotted the dark structure as the vessel passed over the Southern United States late Monday afternoon Eastern Standard Time.

Tempered glass can break if an object hits it just right, a watch for instance.

This poor lady eats it on her head. Play it in slow motion (youtube player settings)

Remember When You Could Call the Time?

Here in the LA Area the phone number for "The Time " was UL3-1212.

"At the tone the time will be two twenty nine and ten seconds....beep." 

 "It was always there," said Orlo Brown, 70, who for many years kept Pacific Bell's (and subsequently SBC's) time machines running in a downtown Los Angeles office building.

"Everybody knew the number."

Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s.

He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like

audio tracks on the exterior.

Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly.

"The people who worked on it took it very seriously," Frenkiel, 64, recalled.

 "They took a lot of pride in it."

In a twist of historical irony, Frenkiel went on to play a leading role in development of the technology that makes cellphones possible -- the very device that's now instrumental in killing time.

 

 An article on The Atlantic this week takes a stroll down the memory lane. 

It talks about phone services that people could call for knowing the time.

 The service, according to the article, was quite popular in 1980s.

But many of them don't exist now.

For instance, Verizon discontinued the line -- as well as its telephone weather service -- in 2011.

 But what's fascinating is that some of these services still exist, and are getting more traction than many of us would've imagined.

 From the article: 

"We get 3 million calls per year!" said Demetrios Matsakis, the chief scientist for time services at the Naval Observatory. 

"And there's an interesting sociology to it. 

They don't call as much on the weekend, and the absolute minimum time they call is Christmas.

 On big holidays, people don't care about the time.

 But we get a big flood of calls when we switch to Daylight [saving] time and back." 

As it turns out, people have been telephoning the time for generations. 

In the beginning, a telephone-based time service must have seemed like a natural extension of telegraph-based timekeeping -- but it would have been radical in its own way, too, because it represented a key shift to an on-demand service.

 In the 19th century, big railroad companies had used the telegraph to transmit the time to major railway stations.

 By the early 20th century, people could simply pick up the telephone and ask a human operator for the time.

LA Times Talks About the End Of Time.