Quote:Actually, the October 1844 debacle was the second great disappointment for followers of Miller’s chronology and prophecy blueprint. He had previously announced that the coming of Jesus Christ would occur in about the year 1843. The year came and went without Christ’s return. Miller’s prophetic claim had failed and disappointed many people.

Then someone pointed out that he had neglected to take into account the transition from B.C. to A.D., so that his calculations were one year off. Miller then moved the expected return of Jesus forward by one year, this time to Oct. 22, 1844. But the great disappointment happened once again to the thousands of followers who had given away their possessions and waited in expectant belief — for nothing.

William Miller, as all Christians do, yearned for the coming of God’s kingdom. However, this yearning was translated by him into a misguided belief that Christ’s return would occur in his time on a specific date. Miller thought he had discovered in the Bible certain prophecies, which if rationally studied, could provide him with a certain date for Jesus’ return. His study and calculations of various prophecies, such as the 70 weeks prophecy of Daniel 9 and the 2300 days of chapter 8, brought him, he believed, to Oct. 22 as the date for Christ’s return.

The Great Disappointment

Quote:Wetter-Funkgerät Land–26 (WFL-26), which was placed on Labrador, was a simple array of ten one-meter-high drums. One of the drums contained the meteorological instruments and radio transmitter. Out of that canister sprouted a 33-feet antenna and a weather vane. The other drums contained nickel-cadmium batteries weighing 220 lbs each. The batteries were designed to power a two-minute broadcast every three hours around the clock for six months.

Weather Station Kurt never lived up to its promise. The Germans stopped receiving transmissions after about a month. No one knows what went wrong. Perhaps the batteries drained, or maybe the transmissions were jammed. There’s no record of the Allies discovering and disabling Kurt.

“Weather Station Kurt”: The Only Armed German Operation on North American Soil in WWII

Quote:That strategy, part of a “build Haiti back better” vision, took a crowning if controversial step this week. On Monday, Haitian President Michel Martelly, joined by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a host of political and business luminaries that included her husband (and U.N. special envoy to Haiti) former U.S. President Bill Clinton, inaugurated the Caracol Industrial Park, a $300 million, 600-acre (246-hectare) facility near the country’s north coast, east of the seaport city of Cap Haitien. The Caracol inauguration was the first joint trip to Haiti by the Clintons since they visited the Caribbean nation shortly after they wed in the 1970s. Now they’re hoping Caracol will be the start of a more productive marriage between Haiti and the international donors and investors it so desperately needs just to build back, let alone build back better.

A mock Haitian village was erected for the occasion, as celebrities like British tycoon Richard Branson looked on beneath banners proclaiming “A New Day in Haiti.” Martelly, whom Hillary Clinton gushingly praised as the “chief dreamer and believer,” declared the modern plant and the 130,000 jobs it’s expected to create as proof that despite the usual “sad images of Haiti,” the country “is open for business, and that’s not just a slogan.”

Like Martelly, the U.S., which is leading the international effort to rebuild Haiti, has been eager to present an accomplishment of Caracol’s magnitude amidst what critics have called a slow reconstruction effort. Reassuring evidence of progress is crucial to getting the billions of dollars that international donors have pledged to Haiti—but half of which has yet to be delivered, largely because of the uncertainties on the ground—into the pipeline. “The people of this country have made real progress in a short time,” Hillary Clinton told investors after touring the park, “and we’ve reached a critical moment.”

The Clintons in Haiti: Can an Industrial Park Save the Country?

Quote:(Bloomberg) -- The plot of A House of Dynamite, the new thriller from Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow, hinges on — spoiler alert —  US missile defenses failing to knock down a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile headed for Chicago.

The Pentagon agency responsible for the more than $50 billion system of ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California designed to avoid just such a scenario isn’t happy about it. The movie, starring Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, had a limited theater release and is now streaming on Netflix.

A Missile Defense Agency internal memorandum argues that the doomsday scenario depicted in the movie is inaccurate. The Oct. 16 memo, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News, is meant to make sure agency leadership “has situational awareness and is not ‘surprised’ by the topic, which may come up in conversations or meetings.”

The object of the Missile Defense Agency’s angst is depiction of US missile defense as ineffective, especially in light of the fact that President Donald Trump wants to spend tens of billions of dollars on missile defense, including with his bid for a “Golden Dome” defensive umbrella.

The document, labeled “Only For Internal MDA and Department of War use and is not public releasable,” is dated a day after almost every member of the Pentagon press corps, including Bloomberg News, vacated the building rather than agree to rules that could restrict news gathering of documents such as the MDA assessment.

It was prepared to “address false assumptions, provide correct facts and a better understanding” of the US’s currently deployed system, it said. While the film “highlights that deterrence can fail, which reinforces the need for an active homeland missile defense system,” its fictional portrayal also underestimates US capabilities, according to the memo.

“The fictional interceptors in the movie miss their target and we understand this is intended to be a compelling part of the drama intended for the entertainment of the audience,” but results from real-world testing “tell a vastly different story,” the Pentagon says in the memo.

As guidance for questions about the system’s cost, the memo avoids a dollar amount, saying “the cost is high but not nearly as high as the cost of allowing a nuclear missile to strike our nation.”

A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 said the Pentagon had spent about $53 billion on the ground-based system and planned to spend about $10 billion through this year to continue developing, producing and sustaining it. The system is managed by Boeing Co. and operated by personnel under the US Northern Command.

Pentagon Frets Over ‘A House of Dynamite’ Nuclear Doomsday Film