For those who are paying strict attention left and right, 2010 will be remembered as the year in which a major threshold was crossed and the door closed behind it. It is the humble opinion of the editors that the dice have been thrown and the destiny of the planet sealed.

The signs were there:

• The absolute disregard of governments for the rights of air travelers and citizens and the open arrogance of the imposition of Orwellian measures
• The continuation of ever more absurd fake-terror tricks to scare the people into compliance
• The increasingly violent anger of the masses on the streets as a result of the economic pressure and other forms of abuse from the top
• The great ease with which the global media took over, diluted and distorted the aspirations of political truth seekers via the Wikileaks show, and the obvious omission of Israel from such 'leaks'
• The all too timid opposition of the world to such crimes against humanity as the genocide aboard the Mavi Marmara
• And the ongoing imperial campaigns of western powers in the Middle East and Asia

Particularly disastrous was the chain reaction ignited by BP's ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico - courtesy of corporate psychopathy and the complicity of our governments - this festering wound might yet contribute significantly to tipping the global climate into an Ice Age by disrupting ocean currents and, in turn, wind currents. The Gulf Loop current is reportedly already broken, disrupting the northern Jet Stream and bringing yet another harsh winter to most of the northern hemisphere.

It is admittedly speculative to blame the meters of snowfall in the US and Europe this winter on the Gulf oil spill, but if you're looking for concrete in-your-face evidence of the unprecedented scale of the disaster, just ask the thousands of local residents and oil spill workers living along the coast of the Gulf from Texas to Florida.

But the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is only one factor. We believe we are witnessing the beginning of a dramatic episode of human history linked to climate change within the solar system. We see it in signs ignored by most: comets, fireballs and changes in the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, somewhat symbolically, the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean is trembling violently, setting off so many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that we've lost count. The potential for disaster is horrific, as events in Japan have recently shown. Human infrastructure is fragile and a direct hit on a key facility - like the Fukushima nuclear power plant - can effectively erase all prospects of normal human life across whole areas. Indeed, Fukushima is turning out to be 2011's 'oil spill', one which at this point looks even darker than the one in the Gulf of Mexico.

But as we ponder the present and what remains of our future, let's back up and recapitulate 2010... Connecting the Dots has been dormant for a while and there's much to catch up on!

In February 2004, The UK Observer reported that a study commissioned by the Pentagon predicted that food riots would result from abrupt climate change. The grim document described how the planet would reach the edge of anarchy and countries would threaten each other with nuclear weapons to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," the analysis concluded. "Once again, warfare would define human life."

The Pentagon paper is remarkable for several reasons. Through it we see how the United States establishment understands that the real threat we are facing is climate change, not the manufactured threat of 'terrorism'. But a more frank admission is that 'climate change' is an abrupt phenomenon - not relatively gradual as most proponents of man-made global warming insist when they refer to computer models that chart rises in temperatures over a time-frame of several decades. The report specifically states that Britain will plunge into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.

The real threat of a sudden transition to an ice age took on new urgency last summer when a study published by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics suggested that BP's greed in the Gulf of Mexico may have caused the Gulf Loop current's complete separation from the Gulf Stream in mid-June 2010. This critical oceanic artery is a significant factor holding back a thick layer of snow and ice from descending upon the northern hemisphere. Should the Gulf Stream significantly weaken or cease to flow northwards altogether, Britain - along with whole swathes of northern America and Europe - would indeed be plunged into a 'Siberian' winter.

Reading "Columnist Calls for Internet "Quality Control" to Quash Dissent sent absolute shivers up my spine. As I posted on my Facebook Wall: "Is it just me noticing the increasing lock-down, the increasing propaganda FOR lockdown and abrogation of human rights, and the masses seem to be sleep-walking through it all?"

But what is happening has happened before in many times and places; it's just that now it seems to be spread over the entire globe. Just so you know, I'm not one of those who is taken in by the saber-rattling war propaganda. That too, has happened before and before and before. It's a ruse, a drama played out between ostensible adversaries to keep the masses afraid and loaded with stress so that they will welcome draconian controls everywhere.

Another thing that has happened before is the end result of such dramas: mass death and destruction AKA "collateral damage". A few comments on my FB wall indicate that I am not alone in what I see. One poster wrote: "Not just sleep-walking, but sycophantically justifying their own abuse and mindlessly trying the same failed methods to "solve" it over and over. It's been said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different." (HB)

That's it, exactly. Psychopaths in power never seem to be able to get it that the end result is always and ever the same: the germs do not realize that they will be burned alive in the fire to which the body they have infected and killed will be consigned.

Another comment was: "This is the long-planned and meticulously coordinated recrudescence, on a global scale, of Nazism." (DST)

Exactly. And that is why I am resurrecting this topic which I wrote about back in 2008, back when Bush - remember Bush, the guy who was the puppet who got all this mess started? - was still president of the U.S. The article was focused mainly on Bush and the U.S., but since then, so many other world leaders and nations have gotten on the Totalitarian/Fascist/Nazi bandwagon that I have done a little re-working of the piece to bring it up to date.

Back then I wrote: Reading Robert Parry's When a Great Power Goes Mad gave me the shivers especially when I read:

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 US dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what's transpired. [...]

In the news media, there were specials, including a much-touted PBS "Frontline" two-parter on "Bush's War" which followed the mainstream line of mostly accepting the Bush administration's good intentions while blaming the disaster on policy execution - a lack of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, rash decisions and wishful thinking. [...]

Remaining outside the frame of mainstream U.S. debate was any serious examination of the [Iraq] war's fundamental illegality.

During the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, the United States led the world in decrying aggressive war as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Yet, "Frontline" and other mainstream U.S. news outlets shy away from this central fact of the Iraq War: by invading Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council and under false pretenses, the Bush administration released upon the Iraqi people "the accumulated evil of the whole" - and committed the "supreme" war crime.

An obvious reason why the mainstream U.S. press can't handle this truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other U.S. officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals.

To accept that reality would, in turn, create a moral imperative to take action. And that would require a great disruption in the existing U.S. power structure, which hasn't changed much since Bush won authorization from Congress in October 2002 to use force and then invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Not only are Bush and Cheney still in office - and two of the three remaining presidential candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, voted for the war - but the roster of top Washington journalists remains remarkably intact from five years ago.

We realize, of course, since the above was written, that even Barack Obama - supposed to be the NKOTB who was not part of the insiders was, in fact, very much an insider and selected to carry on the Bush/Neocon/Fascist legacy. The only "change" that Obama has brought has been more of the same and worse.

It is obvious to many, though certainly not to everyone, that the World Body Social, following the Pied Pipers of the Body Politic have increasingly lost their ability to think rationally and perceive psychological reality with even a modicum of common sense. Almost the whole planet has descended into half-wittedness with its growing intellectual deficiencies and moral failings. Any group of people that can sit down and discuss the Iraq War as though it were anything other than a War Crime of the highest order, or debate whether or not waterboarding is torture, or whether or not torture is acceptable in this or that situation, has lost not only their moral compass, but their qualification as sentient beings on the evolutionary scale.

From as far back as 2008, video recordings of strange and disturbing noises that seem to come from the sky have been appearing on the internet. In the last 12 months, many more of these 'strange noise' videos have been recorded and uploaded by people from many different parts of the globe.

The precise origin and meaning of this phenomenon is, as yet, unknown. Are we dealing with a cosmic version of the 'bell tolling' for life on planet earth, or is there a more mundane explanation?

The Sott Report investigates.

On 25 June 1992, Dr. D. Corydon Hammond of the University of Utah delivered a talk at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. It was entitled 'Hypnosis in MPD: Ritual Abuse'. In it, he described a strange set of symptoms that he and other clinicians had discovered (often independently) in patients, which indicated a massive, nationwide, well-coordinated program of systematic abuse and mind control, which was often, although not always, indicated in family members of NASA, CIA and military personnel. Using ideomotor responses elicited under hypnosis, Dr. Hammond and his colleagues uncovered layers of 'programs' that were installed in victims (often starting in infancy) via repeated abuse (really amounting to torture), sensory deprivation, disorientation, hypnosis, hallucinogens and other drugs.

Many different layers of programming were found, each with a different purpose, e.g. sexual, suicidal (i.e., 'self-destruct'), ritual and 'psychic killing' programs, as well as built-in shutdown codes, among others. Victims were also programmed with booby traps (called the 'green bomb'), so that if they ever began to recover they would go insane. Incidentally, the number and frequency of individuals 'going off' and killing for no reason seems to have been increasing in recent years. Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho in 2007; Vince Li, the man who decapitated another man on a Greyhound bus in Canada in 2008; and the Fort Hood shooter(s) of 2009 are just a few examples who have made big headlines and show indications of possible mind programming.

The story Hammond pieced together in his practice goes as follows. At the end of World War II, Allen Dulles and others from the U.S. intelligence community recruited Nazi scientists and doctors who were conducting mind control research in concentration camps and brought them to the United States, where they began doing similar research for military intelligence in military hospitals. A teenager raised according to Hasidic Jewish tradition and with a background in Kabbalistic mysticism (themes from the Kabbalah turned up repeatedly in the programming), saved himself by collaborating and assisting in the death-camp experiments, and he was brought to the United States as well. The boy Americanized his name, obtained a medical degree, became a physician and continued work that appears to be at the center of cult programming today. Patients throughout the country know him by the name 'Greenbaum'. Of course, this is just a story. Hammond apparently had no means of verifying what he was able to piece together from the victims.

The topic of obesity is popular in mainstream media. We are constantly warned of the dangers of being overweight, and while many groups have been targeted for 'health advice' in the past, it seems those labeled as obese bear the brunt. While having more weight than one is physically comfortable with can be unhealthy, the fact that our governments and media have chosen to take a parental role by constantly telling us what we should and shouldn't look like, should give us pause. To add insult to injury, people are made to feel bad or guilty for not fitting into a restrictive and arbitrary body size. It can actually discourage people who are trying to effect change when they feel demonized. The way information is presented can sometimes be an impediment to those genuinely seeking assistance.

Take, for instance, the word 'diet'. It's one of the most hated words. There are several meanings, but the most popular seems to be understood as 'an habitual way of eating'. Viewing it this way can, and has, led to thoughts of having to restrict what we eat, but the word's original definition, according to the Oxford dictionary, means 'way of life'. If we view it as a lifestyle, perhaps it won't feel as oppressive.

The word 'obesity' is a good example of how language can change abruptly. Don't think this can happen? Back in 1998, with the adoption of the Body Mass Index (BMI), it did. The National Institute of Heath (NIH), the primary governmental health related and biomedical research agency, made changes to the definition of this word that affected 25 million Americans who, under the old guidelines were considered of average weight, but who suddenly became obese. What's interesting is that just prior to that change:

The American Heart Association recently added obesity to its list of major risk factors for heart disease and heart attack, along with smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and a sedentary lifestyle.

From that moment on, not only was a percentage of the population suddenly classified as obese, but they were now considered at risk from other diseases. Was all of this just the result of good intentions gone awry?

This is going to be a long one so get a cup of tea or coffee and settle down. Those of you who like your information in short bytes, this article is not for you!

I've been reading a lot lately. I mean a LOT. Well, so what else is new? Anyway, the range of topics I've been covering are varied; I tend to follow my nose. I often will read one book that suggests another book, and off I go, but lately, it's been very eclectic and seemingly unconnected. Let me give you a sample going back just a couple of weeks: I picked up You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney because I read a snip of it on my husband's kindle reader. I don't do kindle because I underline and make notes, so I bought my own copy. That led to Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Timothy D. Wilson which then led to another of his books: Strangers To Ourselves. That then led to Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality by Samuel Barondes. Some books I had ordered some time ago then arrived: Amarna Sunset by Aidan Dodson; Akhenaten: Egypt's False Prophet by Nicholas Reeves; Akhenaten & Tutankhamun: Revolution & Restoration by Silverman, Wegner and Wegner; Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt by Dominic Montserrat. Then came The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Next: Dark Ages: The Case For a Science of Human Behavior by Lee McIntyre, followed by The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness by B. Alan Wallace. Here and there I've been reading snatches of Bertrand Russell. (I also read three mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, but that was just fun reading.) And now I'm reading War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley alternating with Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? By Dennis R. MacDonald.

As I said, this all may seem unconnected, even to me, but the strange thing is that all of the above books circle around a particular theme: Science/academia - has really lost the plot, and the thing that was proclaimed to be the answer to all of humanity's problems has turned into the probable means of our destruction. This is no small matter, I can assure you, and deserves some consideration. In the book Dark Ages: The Case For a Science of Human Behavior, we read:

What would it feel like to live in a Dark Age? Would you realize it? Or would you just see the achievements of the day - perhaps even feeling lucky to live in such "modern times" and fail to see all that had not been achieved. Of course, no one living in a Dark Age would call it that; rather this label is placed on a backward era only by a later one, in which the state of human civilization is more advanced. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to see what has been missed. But isn't there nonetheless some way to judge one's own era?

Look around you. We live in a time of enormous technological achievement, when we are able to bend nature to our will, and yet we suffer from the same social problems that have plagued the human race for millennia. Despite the enormous progress that we have made in our understanding of nature, who can honestly say that the bulk of the problems that are the cause of human misery today are not of our own creation? And yet what have we done about them?

The comparison between our success in understanding nature and our failure to understand ourselves is vast. We have satellites and fax machines that transmit stories of barbarous cruelty that could have been told by our ancestors. We have ever more sophisticated weaponry of war and yet no true understanding of what causes war in the first place. ...We are as ignorant of the cause-and-effect relations behind our own behavior as those who lived in the eighth or ninth centuries ... [we're ignorant of the causes] behind disease, famine, eclipses, and natural disasters. We live today in what will someday come to be thought of as the Dark Ages of human thought about social problems. (McIntyre, MIT, 2006)

For those readers who are part of the 40% of human beings who think Ignorance is Bliss, stop reading now. This article is about a truth so hard that it was actually depressing to write it. You might think that working on SOTT for many years, most of us are pretty tough and can deal with the hard stuff. But sometimes, you see something that rings a bell, and you know that you've had a glimpse behind the curtain, because somebody went before and left a map to show you the way. In this case, that person was Hannah Arendt.

The modern world can't be an easy place to live in for those who are born genetically predisposed to crave absolute power over others. I mean, these days, any would-be totalitarian has only a very small chance of being born into one of the world's few remaining overt dictatorships, and a much greater chance of being born into a large Western nation that is nominally democratic. While fulfillment of the megalomaniac's innate drive is a walk in the park in a dictatorship, it requires all sorts of protracted subterfuge in a democracy. Bummer.

The main problem with giving free reign to one's dictatorial leanings in a democracy is the whole 'citizen's rights' and 'Rights of Man' thing. How is any self-aggrandizing despot to lord it over the masses, and watch them squirm and suffer and beg, when everyone seems convinced that there are not only democratic and legal rights but also natural 'inalienable' rights that come with just being a human being? Ideas that everyone is 'created equal' and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness etc. can cause a lot of problems for the average authoritarian. Naturally then, in any democracy, all those rights would have to be removed before any oligarchy could transform citizens into subjects, and they'd have to be removed under the cloak of 'protecting' the very rights that were slated for extinction. A tall order indeed, but there are ways to do it. One tried and tested way is to create a foreign or external threat from which the people of a democracy must be protected. All sorts of draconian laws that subvert civil rights can be passed to combat this 'threat', and if the 'threat' can then be made internal or domestic, and suspicion of 'siding with enemy' cast over the citizens, you're well on your way to banishing those pesky legal and natural rights.

At 2:46 pm on a Friday afternoon in March last year, residents in the prefecture of Fukushima in Japan were jolted by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake centered off the Pacific coast at a depth of approx 15 miles. Almost immediately, three of the six reactors which were in operation at that moment in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - located on the eastern shore of Honshu Island - automatically shut down as a result of the shaking.

The plant automatically switched to its backup diesel-fueled generators to supply the uninterrupted electric power required to keep the plant's reactors cooled. Approximately one hour later, a 46 foot tall tsunami wave swept over the seawall between the Fukushima plant and the Pacific Ocean, flooding and disabling the backup generators and washing away their fuel tanks. The seawall had been designed to withstand a 19 foot wave and was considered sufficient to protect the plant from the worst possible tsunami that could ever happen.

We know now that within days, fuel rods in three of the reactors melted and breached the reactor containment structures designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment, though nothing of the sort was revealed at the time. We are still not certain how much airborne radioactive contamination escaped.

There were violent explosions and multiple fires at the plant which some observers now indicate were far more serious than how they were initially portrayed. There were, and continue to be, unspecified large releases of extremely contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, but no data on what the results of that might be. It took several months for TEPCO, the Japanese utility company running the plant, to publicly admit the severity of the accident. There have been repeated 'explanations' that downplayed, understated or outright ignored the risks to the public and hid the reality of what was actually happening at any given time.

Here we are, New Year's Eve 2011, and a whole lot of folks on this planet believe that the World is going to End - one way or another (again) - sometime in December of the coming year: 2012. All I can think is "Geezus! Here we go again!"

Back in 1996 and 1997, there was the Hale-Bopp Flopp that resulted in the mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate Cult. I was out there at the time desperately trying to convince people that most of what was flying around the internet was a load of Horse Hockey, and all I got for my trouble was flamed and defamed. But I was right.

Then, there was the Millennial Madness that was gaining steam in 1999. By this time, we had a website and I wasn't just doing battle on discussion lists, so I published an article in November of that year trying to calm things down a bit. Things were so weird then that even my cousin, who was (at that moment) an aerospace engineer employed by NASA, told me in full confidence that things WOULD get squirrely because there was a flaw in computer dating systems and the global computer systems would glitch up in unpredictable ways, causing chaos. Not even that happened! Anyway, the take-home message of my article at that time was pretty clear: