"A B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several states last week, prompting an Air Force investigation and the firing of one commander, Pentagon officials said Wednesday... The Air Combat Command has ordered a command-wide stand down on Sept. 14 to review procedures, officials said."

-- A.P. News article (2007-09)

If you haven't seen Stanley Kubrick's classic film "Dr. Strangelove", go to your video store and rent it.

"General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was NO possibility of such a thing ever occurring!"

"Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir... "

One wonders why this incident was publicized to begin with, and even more disturbing, why a system-wide "stand down" has also been publicly announced. The planned "stand down" will take place during the Jewish new year holiday of Rosh Hashanah, when the Congress will be in recess.

"RAF fighter jets were scrambled to intercept two Russian strategic bombers heading for British airspace yesterday, as the spirit of the Cold War returned to the North Atlantic once again... There was no evidence to suggest that the incident was connected with the diplomatic row over the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, the main suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko."

(Cue the stunt planes!)

See: London Times article (2007-07-18)

"A group of Russian and U.S. dignitaries gathered Friday at the presidential residence near Moscow behind closed doors in a bid to repair shattered ties. The panel called "Russia-USA: A Look Into the Future," led by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov... includes former Secretary of State George Schultz; former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; former Special Representative for Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr.; former Senator Sam Nunn; and Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David O'Reilly."

(The crew scrambles madly about before the curtain rises on the next scene in the Hegelian drama. Lights! Action!)

See: RIA Novosti article (2007-07)

"[President] Putin said Moscow was unilaterally withdrawing from the Soviet-era Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CAFE) because of 'extraordinary circumstances that affect the security of the Russian Federation', the Kremlin said. These required 'immediate measures'... In Brussels, NATO bluntly condemned Russia's decision to abandon the treaty, under which NATO and the Warsaw Pact agreed to reduce their conventional armed forces immediately after the Cold War."

See: Guardian article (2007-07)

"The US aircraft carrier Enterprise has been deployed to a strategic area that includes waters close to Iran. The warship joins two carriers already in the Fifth Fleet area of operations and strengthens the US Navy's biggest presence in the Gulf since the first Iraq invasion."

Some writers have speculated that this aging vessel might be "sacrificed" in order to provide a pretext for war, much as the battleships at Pearl Harbor were sacrificed half a century ago. Let's hope that they are wrong.

See: RTE Ireland article (2007-07)

"Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has urged soldiers to prepare for a guerrilla-style war against the United States... Dressed in olive green fatigues and a red beret, Chavez spoke yesterday inside Tiuna Fort, Venezuela's military nerve-centre, before hundreds of uniformed soldiers standing alongside armoured vehicles and tanks decorated with banners reading: Fatherland, Socialism, or Death! We will triumph!

"It's not just armed warfare", said Chavez, a former army officer who is leading what he calls the Bolivarian Revolution, a socialist movement named after 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar. "I'm also referring to psychological warfare, media warfare, political warfare, economic warfare." Under Chavez, Venezuela has recently purchased some 3 billion dollars worth of arms from Russia, including 53 military helicopters, 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 24 SU-30 Sukhoi fighter jets."

-- Evening Echo

Note that Simon Bolivar was a Mason, and Chavez himself served under Gen. Victor Higuera, former Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Venezuela. Perhaps the so-called "Bolivarian revolution" is yet another example of Ordo ab Chao.

"Is the 'War Party' inside the Bush Administration, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, borrowing a page from Hitler's 1936-39 playbook, carefully orchestrating a near- term war with Iran? Recent events, when viewed through the lens of history, suggest that this may be precisely what is going on."

See: Jeffrey Steinberg article (2007-06)

In a token gesture, congressman Dennis Kucinich has filed articles of impeachment against vice president Dick Cheney:

"Because I believe the vice president's conduct of office has been destructive to the founding purposes of our nation, today I have introduced House Resolution 333, Articles of Impeachment Relating to Vice President Richard B. Cheney... It became obvious to me that this vice president, who was a driving force for taking the United States into a war against Iraq under false pretenses, is once again rattling the sabers of war against Iran with the same intent to drive America into another war, again based on false pretenses."

-- Washington Post article

Speaking at Duke University on March 29, Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, said:

"If the war is enlarged in the next 20 months to include Iran -- if that happens -- for the next 20 years the United States is going to be bogged down in a war which spans Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then you can forget about American global leadership."...

Brzezinski reserved his harshest criticism for the current president, George W. Bush, saying he'd helped cultivate "a self-paralyzing culture of fear" after the Sept. 11 attacks, squandered the government's credibility, and fed anti-Americanism in many parts of the world."

See: Ray Gronberg article (2007-03)

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, Zbigniew Brzezinski said:

"The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy... If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large... A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated... "

Quite a slap in the face, especially considering the source.

See: The Washington Note article (2007-02)