Warm winter blessings to our readers this New Year! And midsummer's greetings to our readers in the southern hemisphere! We thought we'd begin this month's Connecting the Dots by welcoming in the new year with some reflection upon the old: 2009 was a truly smashing year in more ways than one.

Climategate broke out just as Connecting the Dots went to print last month. As we felt might happen, the Copenhagen Summit took a mighty hit from the 'truth vibrations' and despite frantic efforts, no binding international treaty came to pass. For now.

The mother of all cosmic ironies was not lost on us as the temperatures plummeted and negotiations at the 'Global Warming' summit froze! But the question remains: is the freezing weather in the northern hemisphere simply explained by regular variations in weather patterns? Or is climate change, in the sense of a fundamental change in the planet's climate, really happening, only not in the way we're being told?

As the solstice is a time for festive fun, we have a special treat for you this month, a pantomime, complete with odd characters in funny costumes and underwear that sparkles! Even Silvio Berlusconi makes a cameo appearance, until his mask nearly breaks in two. Sadly, not everyone saw the funny side, so we'll be looking at some of the darker implications of such episodes. We'll also be assessing the likely impacts upon our lives as a result of the latest phony act of terror.

Venture with us now into the shadow world of espionage and subterfuge, where the heroes refuse to bow before the Evil Empire and the villains do their Zionist master's bidding on the grand stage of power politics. Who are the real terrorists in this Faustian drama? Are they connected to those who claim ownership of the planet's resources for themselves at the expense of humanity? Would they really have us pay for the air we breathe and the water we drink? Is it possible that 'evil' is a real phenomenon?

Researcher and author Dave McGowan has unearthed a tightly held guarded secret for quite some time in his ongoing series, "Inside the LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation." While digging around the history of the odd birth of the sixties' music scene in LA when none had existed before with it's constant revelations of celebrities tied to US military intelligence and CIA, he found out about a secret CIA movie studio...

"What would become known as Lookout Mountain Laboratory was originally envisioned as an air defense center. Built in 1941 and nestled in two-and-a-half secluded acres off what is now Wonderland Park Avenue, the installation was hidden from view and surrounded by an electrified fence. By 1947, the facility featured a fully operational movie studio. In fact, it is claimed that it was perhaps the world's only completely self-contained movie studio. With 100,000 square feet of floor space, the covert studio included sound stages, screening rooms, film processing labs, editing facilities, an animation department, and seventeen climate-controlled film vaults. It also had underground parking, a helicopter pad and a bomb shelter.

A general who was once in charge of Israel's nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a "very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability".

Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.

Listening to the local ClearChannel AM news radio station on the way to work this morning, I heard a famous local pundit ranting about how the Christmas Day underwear bomber's "terror attack" was a stark warning that terrorists are out to kill Americans and bring down the country. He angrily accused the public of foolish laziness for not urging their leaders to use every resource at the U.S. government's disposal to lock down America and purge it of the many homegrown terrorists scheming to murder us all!

Presumably with a straight face, he squawked about how lucky we were because the failure of this near-disaster could be chalked up to yet another "terrorist" who turned out to be bumbling and inept, like the "shoe bomber" and a string of others. Yet, still, we should all be having nightmares about this suicidal "gang who couldn't shoot straight" because they represent a clear and present danger to the lives of all Americans!

This commentator is of the highly articulate, smart-sounding, yet profoundly ignorant type who claims free thought and independence from partisanship, but would immediately join the Xenophobic Jingoist Authoritarian party if one officially existed. He seems to believe that entire nations of people are "crazy" and that vast populations "hate freedom" (which makes about as much sense as "hate breathing," if you think about it).

Europe's small, debt-strapped countries could follow the lead of Argentina and simply walk away from their debts. That would shift the burden to the creditor countries, which could solve the problem merely by a change in accounting rules.

Total financial collapse, once a problem only for developing countries, has now come to Europe. The International Monetary Fund is imposing its "austerity measures" on the outer circle of the European Union, with Greece, Iceland and Latvia the hardest hit. But these are not your ordinary third world debtor supplicants. Historically, the Vikings of Iceland successfully invaded Britain; Latvian tribes repulsed the Vikings; and the Greeks conquered the whole Persian empire. If anyone can stand up to the IMF, these stalwart European warriors can.

Although ignored by much of the Western media, a battle which echoes the biblical story of David and Goliath is taking place in The Hague. In the modern-day version, young David is personified by a soft-spoken 15-year-old girl named Amira Alqerem. Goliath takes the form of the world's fourth most powerful, nuclear-armed military state: Israel. At stake is victims' rights the world over and the international commitment to "never again." It is this commitment - as well as to international law, as laid down in the Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - that Amira is asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to recognize and uphold.

The photographs below were sent in today from a SOTT.net correspondent at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen who witnessed local police in riot gear mass-arrest hundreds of demonstrators, apparently at random, force them to sit hand-cuffed with legs apart in chain-gang formation on the cold hard street for up to four hours at a time. The demonstrators were offered no water or medical attention and many were left with no choice but to urinate in their clothes.

Danish police numbered today's demonstration at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen at 30,000 people, but Danish TV tripled that figure to at least 100,000.

The British Telegraph reported that 21 people were arrested "after some 300 youths, many wearing black and with their faces covered, went on the rampage in the heart of the city." If recent experience at the G20 demonstrations in London and Pittsburgh is anything to go by, we naturally wonder if they were incited to serve as a distraction and justify a heavy-handed police response. When asked what the "youths" were arrested for, a police spokesman said that wearing a mask on your face was illegal under Danish law.

In fact, around 700 people were arrested and humiliated in the freezing temperatures:

The First Global Revolution, A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (King, Schneider 1991):

"The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor. Some states have striven to overcome domestic failure and internal contradictions by blaming external enemies. The ploy of finding a scapegoat is as old as mankind itself - when things become too difficult at home, divert attention to adventure abroad. Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else one invented for the purpose." (p.71)

The common enemy of humanity is Man

"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself." (p.75)

Against The Tide - A Critical Review by Scientists of How Physics and Astronomy Get Done, W. Kundt, 2008:

The term 'Gold Effect' was coined by Raymond Lyttleton in [1981], after a conversation with [Austrian astrophysicist Thomas Gold] during which Gold had explained how a mere unqualified belief can occasionally be converted into a generally accepted scientific theory - a dogma - through the screening action of refereed literature, of meetings planned by scientific organizing committees, and through the distribution of funds controlled by 'club opinions'.

For 11 months Amanda Knox remained impassive as she sat in a Perugia courtroom, assailed by the accusations of prosecutors and a series of harrowing crime-scene photographs and films.

Even when she was sentenced to 26 years in prison for murdering the 21-year-old British exchange student Meredith Kercher, she bowed her head and wept noiselessly, burying her head in her lawyer's chest.

It was only as she was leaving the courtroom just after midnight yesterday morning and was being led back to the prison van by armed guards that she truly cracked. "No, no, no!" she shouted in desperation.

After 12 hours of deliberations with a colleague and six jurors, Judge Giancarlo Massei read the verdict in a low monotone in the frescoed courtroom in the picturesque hilltop city of Perugia in central Italy.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was today urged to investigate campaigners' claims that Amanda Knox may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

The American is beginning a 26-year jail sentence after she convicted of murdering British student Meredith Kercher.

But U.S. senator Maria Cantwell said there were 'serious questions about the Italian justice system' and claimed there had been an anti-American element at the trial.

She said: 'I am in contact with the U.S. Ambassador to Italy and have been since the time of Ms. Knox's arrest. I will be conveying my concerns to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.'