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There's an old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I don't think that's true. There are things happening today that have never happened before. My grandfather was thirteen years old when the Wright Brothers flew the first plane. He watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon.

World War II was the last war where the armies could throw everything at one another without destroying the world.

I remember seeing a television program, many years ago, where a newsman was standing in front of a live feed of images of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a split screen. He noted that it was the first time in history that people had seen the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the same time.

In the 1700s, a fast voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was a month. A normal voyage was longer. That meant it took nearly three months to send a message from the US to Britain and get a reply.

When I was a child, I had an uncle that drove an eighteen wheeler. He would leave and be gone for a couple of weeks. Long distance was so expensive that he couldn't call. Today, if you can't contact a family member in five or six minutes, you start getting worried.

There used to be frontiers never seen by man. With global satellites today, the idea of an unknown island is laughable. I was thinking about this as I went jogging a few days ago. An application on my cell phone, Runkeeper, uses the GPS on my iPhone and tracks my mileage. I looked up in the sky, and somewhere, out of my sight, a satellite was tracking me and could tell if I was moving five feet in any direction.

Ten years ago, Pat Robertson was talking about a trip he made to Africa. He was going deep into the wild country to visit some missionaries. He said they stopped at a small town, about fifty miles from the nearest paved road. There was a small building there that served as a hotel. They took Mastercard, and verified his card.

To a man living in the first century, the idea of not being able to buy or sell without a mark and the one world government seemed like mad ramblings. Today, we're hurtling towards it.

These are indeed different times than have ever been before.