The Vatican, the P2 Lodge & the Mafia

Banco Ambrosiano was an Italian bank which collapsed in 1982. At the center of the bank's failure was its chairman, Roberto Calvi and his membership in the illegal masonic lodge Propaganda Due. Vatican Bank was Banco Ambrosiano's main shareholder, and the death of Pope John Paul I in 1978 is rumored to be linked to the Ambrosiano scandal, giving one of the subplots of The Godfather Part III. Vatican Bank was also accused of funneling covert United States funds to Solidarity and the Contras through Banco Ambrosiano.

The body of a top Italian banker has been found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Known as God's banker for his links with the Vatican, 62-year-old Roberto Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan and a central figure in a complex web of international fraud and intrigue.

He had been missing for the last nine days before his body was discovered by a passer-by hanging from scaffolding on a riverside walk under the bridge.

Police are treating the death as suicide.

Mr Calvi became chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, now Italy's largest private bank, in 1975 and built up a vast financial empire.

In 1978, a report by the Bank of Italy on Ambrosiano concluded that several billion lire had been illegally exported.

In May 1981, Mr Calvi was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, but released pending an appeal. During his short spell in jail he attempted suicide.

Mr Calvi was due to appear in an Italian court next week to appeal against this conviction.

Later this month he was to be tried for alleged fraud involving property deals with Sicilian banker Michele Sindona, who is himself serving 25 years in America over the collapse of the Franklin National Bank in New York in 1974.

The Vatican is directly linked to Mr Calvi by Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the Pope's bodyguard, a governor of the Vatican and head of the Vatican bank which has a shareholding in Ambrosiana.

Now Ambrosiano is on the verge of collapse amid press reports that investigators found a £400m "hole" in its accounts. Last week the bank's executive board decided to strip Mr Calvi of his authority.

The Italian Treasury dissolved the bank's administration and the Bank of Italy is now a temporary commissioner.

Mr Calvi fled to Venice nine days ago after shaving his mustache to avoid being recognized.

From there it seems he hired a private plane to take him to London.

The day before he was found dead, his secretary committed suicide in Milan by jumping off the fourth floor of the bank's headquarters.

Teresa Corrocher, aged 55, left an angry suicide note condemning her boss for the damage she said he had done to Ambrosiano and its employees.

It was later revealed that Roberto Calvi was found with five bricks in his pockets and had in his possession about $14,000 in three different currencies.
On 23 July an inquest jury returned a verdict of suicide. This was overturned in 1983 when a second inquest delivered an open verdict on the death.

In October 2002 forensic experts appointed by Italian judges concluded that the banker had been murdered.

They said his neck showed no evidence of the injuries usually associated with death by hanging and his hands had never touched the stones found in the pockets of his clothes. American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was sought for questioning but was granted immunity as a Vatican employee. He retired in 1990 and died in 2006.

In October 2005 five people went on trial in Rome. They were Sardinian financier Flavio Carboni, his former girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig, Roman entrepreneur Ernesto Diotallevi, Calvi's former bodyguard, Silvano Vittor and convicted Cosa Nostra treasurer Pippo Calo.

Prosecutors said the Mafia had killed Calvi for stealing from them and from Italian financier Lucio Gelli, who was the head of the shadowy P2 masonic organization.

Propaganda, black public relations & mind control report

A series covering propaganda; the history of propaganda, the origin of word propaganda, what propaganda is, how it used and how to recognize it, how propaganda relates to truth.

Memorial program focuses on gay Holocaust victims

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Geoffrey Giles began his dissection of the Nazi mind with a message not conventionally tied to the genocide of six million Jews.

“Adolf Hitler was not particularly anti-Semitic,” he told the audience of about 350.

Instead of focusing solely on the Jewish demographic, the program remembered victims from the gay community Sunday night at the B'nai Israel Jewish Center.

This year's Holocaust memorial examined the persecution and violence targeted against German homosexuals by the Nazi regime.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, is a reminder for everyone across the nation to remember and learn about the horrors of the Holocaust.

“The Holocaust is something that really concerns us all in terms of the relative ease with which hate groups can really gain support and how easily that can spiral out of control,” Giles said.

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Deutsche Bank settles spy affair lawsuit

Deutsche Bank AG has agreed to pay about five million euros ($6.7 million) to settle a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit brought by the former head of investor relations it accused last year of helping to spearhead a spying operation against a shareholder and others, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Deutsche Bank confirmed that it had settled the case involving the former executive, Wolfram Schmitt, as well as a related lawsuit brought by its former head of security, Rafael Schenz. The two have declined to comment on the bank's allegations against them.

A spokesman for the bank declined to discuss the terms of the settlements. The two men had sued Deutsche Bank in a Frankfurt labor court, arguing that they had been unfairly dismissed for their alleged role in the bank's spying activities.

Deutsche Bank said last year that it had hired detectives on four occasions to investigate and gather information on several individuals, including a shareholder and a journalist, among others.

The incident that received the most attention involved Michael Bohndorf, a gadfly shareholder who had sued Deutsche Bank a number of times on corporate-governance grounds.

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When science imposes on morality

From The amazing brain by Richard Gray:

Most of us tend not to contemplate the stuff sitting between our ears. But each of us is carrying around one of the most amazing objects ever created – and one that governs almost everything about how and why we think, feel, act and believe.

For example, we think of our ability to distinguish between right and wrong as a fundamental part of what makes us human, giving us a grasp of morality and philosophy. But yesterday, researchers revealed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had essentially been able to switch off their subjects' moral compasses, by applying powerful magnets to a small region of the brain just behind the right ear.

Volunteers subjected to magnetic pulses to the right temporo-parietal junction, an area that is highly active when we think about the thoughts and beliefs of others, were more likely to make morally dubious decisions.


From Moral confusion in the name of “science” by Sam Harris:



Most educated, secular people (and this includes most scientists, academics, and journalists) seem to believe that there is no such thing as moral truth—only moral preference, moral opinion, and emotional reactions that we mistake for genuine knowledge of right and wrong, or good and evil. While I make the case for a universal conception of morality in much greater depth in my forthcoming book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , I’d like to address the most common criticisms I’ve received thus far in response to my remarks at TED.

Some of my critics got off the train before it even left the station, by defining “science” in exceedingly narrow terms. Many think that science is synonymous with mathematical modeling, or with immediate access to experimental data. However, this is to mistake science for a few of its tools. Science simply represents our best effort to understand what is going on in this universe, and the boundary between it and the rest of rational thought cannot always be drawn. There are many tools one must get in hand to think scientifically—ideas about cause and effect, respect for evidence and logical coherence, a dash of curiosity and intellectual honesty, the inclination to make falsifiable predictions, etc.—and many come long before one starts worrying about mathematical models or specific data.

There is also much confusion about what it means to speak with scientific “objectivity.” As the philosopher John Searle once pointed out, there are two very different senses of the terms “objective” and “subjective.” The first relates to how we know (i.e. epistemology), the second to what there is to know (i.e. ontology). When we say that we are reasoning or speaking “objectively,” we mean that we are free of obvious bias, open to counter-arguments, cognizant of the relevant facts, etc. There is no impediment to our doing this with regard to subjective (i.e. first-person) facts. It is, for instance, true to say that I am experiencing tinnitus (ringing in my ears) at this moment. This is a subjective fact about me. I am not lying about it. I have been to an otologist and had the associated hearing loss in the upper frequencies in my right ear confirmed. There is simply no question that I can speak about my tinnitus in the spirit of scientific objectivity. And, no doubt, this experience must have some objective (third-person) correlates, like damage to my cochlea. Many people seem to think that because moral facts relate entirely to our experience (and are, therefore, ontologically “subjective”), all talk of morality must be “subjective” in the epistemological sense (i.e. biased, merely personal, etc.). This is simply untrue.

Many of my critics also fail to distinguish between there being no answers in practice and no answers in principle to certain questions about the nature of reality. Only the latter questions are “unscientific,” and there are countless facts to be known in principle that we will never know in practice. Exactly how many birds are in flight over the surface of the earth at this instant? What is their combined weight in grams? We cannot possibly answer such questions, but they have simple, numerical answers. Does our inability to gather the relevant data oblige us to respect all opinions equally? For instance, how seriously should we take the claim that there are exactly 23,000 birds in flight at this moment, and, as they are all hummingbirds weighing exactly 2 grams, their total weight is 46,000 grams? It should be obvious that this is a ridiculous assertion. We can, therefore, decisively reject answers to questions that we cannot possibly answer in practice. This is a perfectly reasonable, scientific, and often necessary thing to do. And yet, many scientists will say that moral truths do not exist, simply because certain facts about human experience cannot be readily known, or may never be known. As I hope to show, this blind spot has created tremendous confusion about the relationship between human knowledge and human values.

When I speak of there being right and wrong answers to questions of morality, I am saying that there are facts about human and animal wellbeing that we can, in principle, know—simply because wellbeing (and states of consciousness altogether) must lawfully relate to states of the brain and to states of the world.