NEWS

“Monsignors’ mutiny” revealed by Vatican leaks

From: yahoo.com

Call it Conspiracy City. Call it Scandal City. Call it Leak City. These days the holy city has been in the news for anything but holy reasons.

“It is a total mess,” said one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke, like all others, on the condition of anonymity.

The Machiavellian maneuvering and machinations that have come to light in the Vatican recently are worthy of a novel about a sinister power struggle at a medieval court.

Yes, The War for the Internet Has Begun

Yes, The War for the Internet Has Begun
2012 01 23

By Anthony Wile | TheDailyBell

By now, people who use the Internet seriously, and even plenty who don’t, are aware of the arrest of six-foot-seven, 300-pound Kim Dotcom, an outsize figure in the business of facilitating Internet downloads.

The problem with his company, Megauploads, according to the US Justice Department and the FBI that carried out the arrest, is that his brainchild allowed users to traffic in “stolen” – copyrighted – entertainment on which no royalties had been paid.

In this article, I’ll comment on the arrest of Kim Dotcom and try to show how this one action is actually the beginning of an entirely new phase of what we may call the Internet Wars.

I’m not the first to notice this. As Kurt Nimmo and Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, pointed out in an article posted today entitled “The Great Internet Wars Have Begun,” we wake up to an entirely new Internet era this weekend.

Yes, a war has been joined and human history shall never be the same. For one thing, the outcome is NOT certain – and the power elite that seeks to control and constrain the Internet may yet end up taking a step back – at least in these early rounds, anyway.

For another, the directed history that the Anglosphere power elite has been so clever at inculcating over the past century is gradually fading away. That’s perhaps an even more important point. The Dotcom arrest actually reinforces this observation, as I’ll try to show in a moment.

There is no doubt, in my view, that the elites practiced directed history in the 20th century, setting up wars and economic catastrophes designed to consolidate world government. But in the 21st century, with so many understanding and evaluating the mechanisms of the elites, this is a considerably harder trick to pull off.

The elites actually have a limited playbook when it comes to influencing the larger society, though that is not intended to downplay its power. The elites use what we call dominant social themes – fear-based promotions – that are designed to frighten middle classes into giving up wealth and power to specially prepared globalist institutions like the UN, IMF, etc.

The other “tools” in the toolkit include war and a pervasive societal matrix of sociopolitical, economic, religious and military elements. The matrix itself was seamless in the late 20th century – for most Western citizens anyway – and allowed the power elite to advance its fear-based promotions without fear of contradiction.

[...]

Read the full article at: thedailybell.com

War of the Web: Anonymous strikes back after feds shut down file-sharing hub Megaupload

By Kurt Nimmo | Infowars.com

Following a wildly successful protest against SOPA and PIPA internet censorship legislation on Wednesday, the Department of Justice “conducted a major action” on Thursday and shuttered MegaUpload, a popular file-sharing site accused of trading in copyrighted movies and televisions shows.

Following action by a grand jury, the feds arrested four people and executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight foreign countries. They seized 18 domain names and around $10 million in assets, including a number of servers.

For Rent: (One of the Cradles) of Human Civilization

In a move bound to leave many Greeks and scholars aghast, Greece’s culture ministry said Tuesday it will open up some of the debt-stricken country’s most-cherished archaeological sites to advertising firms and other ventures.

The ministry says the move is a common-sense way of helping “facilitate” access to the country’s ancient Greek ruins, and money generated would fund the upkeep and monitoring of sites. The first site to be opened would be the Acropolis.

Archaeologists, however, have for decades slammed such an initiative as sacrilege.

The culture ministry said any renting of ancient Greek sites would be subject to strict conditions.

According to a ministerial briefing dating from the end of December, a commercial firm could rent the Acropolis for a professional photographic shoot for as little as 1,600 euros a day ($2,046). Demonstrators could also rent the ancient landmark.

Greece needs every euro it can get. The country’s public coffers are drained and the nation is struggling to avoid a historic debt default in March.

Greece was bailed out in May 2010 by the European Union and International Monetary Fund and is in the process of nailing down a second rescue, though it is undergoing tough talks with private creditors to reduce its massive debt mountain.

Commercial use of Greece’s archaeological sites has until now been the responsibility of the Central Council of Archaeology, which has been very choosy about who gains access.

In recent decades, only a select few people, including Greek-Canadian filmmaker Nia Vardalos and the American director Francis Ford Coppola, have been able to use the Acropolis, while most filming and advertising requests have been refused.

Source: google.com

It’s called economic warfare… and who is behind the destruction of these aspects of human civilization? The fine nuggets at Goldman Sachs

Garbage Culture – The New World Order Culture

Dead On Arrival: SOPA Shelved Indefinitely, Obama Succumbs to Pressure, Issues Official Veto Threat

Mac Slavo
January 15th, 2012
SHTFplan.com

Amid significant pressure from tens of thousands of internet users and major web behemoths like Google, Facebook, and Reddit, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is, in its current form, Dead on Arrival:

Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” It added that any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.”

…

Though the administration did issue a formal veto threat, the White House’s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form.

A few hours later, Congress shelved SOPA, putting off action on the bill indefinitely.

Sourced From Washington Monthly via The Daily Sheeple

Sponsored primarily by purported free speech advocates that include democrats and republicans alike, the SOPA would have fundamentally transformed the internet as we know it today. As Daisy Luther writes at Inalienably Yours, the bill was nothing short of  a direct attack against the first Amendment and the right to free speech:

The Story of Broke Response

Prof. Art Carden responds to “The Story of Broke“, a recent video by the creators of “The Story of Stuff.” In “The Story of Broke,” Annie Leonard claims that the government isn’t actually broke. Rather, the government just wastes resources on the wrong things like subsidies to the dinosaur economy and war. She claims that the government should change its ways, and instead, subsidize firms that will bring us the future we really want.

Art Carden agrees with Leonard that war and subsidies are wasteful, but is skeptical of notion that there is one unified vision for the future. To Carden, everyone has a different vision for the future. Our path to the future, he argues, is determined by the interactions of billions of unique individuals pursuing their own objectives.

Additionally, Carden questions Leonard’s distinction between bad subsidies and good subsidies. Every subsidy, deemed good or bad, must be allocated through the political process. Lobbyists and special interests exert a large degree of influence on political decisions, and they use this power to direct subsidies in their own favor at everyone else’s expense.

Carden concludes that government spending won’t buy a brighter future. A brighter future will emerge when people are allowed to spend money on things they care about. Put another way, positive change will come from billions of people cooperating freely and voluntarily with one another, not from pushing trillions of dollars through a broken political process.

The Euro Circus Continues: S&P downgrades France, Italy, Spain, 6 others

From: usatoday.com

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the government debt of France, Austria, Italy and Spain, but maintained Germany’s at the coveted “AAA” level.

The cuts, which eliminated France and Austria’s triple-A status, deal a heavy blow to the currency union’s ability to fight off a worsening debt crisis. In total, S&P cut its ratings on nine eurozone countries.

France and Austria both dropped one notch to AA+. Italy was lowered by two notches to BBB+ from A, and Spain fell to A from AA-. Portugal and Cyprus also dropped two notches. The agency also cut ratings on Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The downgrades come as crucial talks on cutting Greece’s massive debt pile appeared close to collapse Friday.

Caffeine-Induced Psychosis

When I first heard about caffeine-induced psychosis, I laughed but a few days later when I drank too much coffee and felt crazed and then strung out, it wasn’t so funny anymore. The western world (but not excluding the east) loves caffeine in every form, especially coffee. Have you noticed that coffee is available for free in most offices and waiting areas? Behind petroleum, coffee is the second most traded product in the world. Could you imagine what it would be like if coffee production stopped and the planet had to suffer caffeine withdrawals? It would be a month of madness.

Caffeine can have a powerful psychological and physical hold on you. It makes me think of the TV series SGU Stargate Universe where a team of soldiers and scientists from present day Earth escape through the stargate to find the ancient ship called Destiny, which was launched by the ancients from our galaxy several million years ago. Incredible revelations are being had yet the brilliant lead scientist, Dr. Rush spirals into a dark place because of his caffeine withdrawal. He was in hell and missing his 4 cups of coffee a day. Watch this clip until the end: The Coffee Deprived “Mad Scientist”.

“Unbuilt Washington”: Alternative Designs, Proposed Buildings

By Philip Kennicott | WashingtonPost.com

“Unbuilt Washington” is the National Building Museum’s best chance at drawing blockbuster crowds in years. Devoted to the might-have-beens in the wastebasket of Washington’s design history, it begins with variations on the basic city plan laid out by Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 and ends with a spectacular sculptural bridge the museum would like to construct in the enormous atrium of the Pension Building.

Medvedev threatens US over missile shield

Russia’s president said country would deploy missiles to target the shield in Europe if the US fails to provide guarantees

Russia’s president has threatened to deploy missiles to target the US missile shield in Europe if Washington fails to give a legal guarantee that it will not be aimed against country’s nuclear forces.