Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” Book Review

I have taken some time tonight to pass on my review of Dan Brown’s book, “The Lost Symbol.” As many know it is about the influence of the Freemasons, whom many of our founding fathers were members of, had on the foundation viewpoints of the creation of this country. The ideas of “All men are created equal, pursuit of happiness, religious freedoms, etc.” are all viewpoints of Freemasons and were the bases of what this nation was founded on.

1. No matter at what station or stratification of birth one person had, all are viewed as equal within the Freemasons.

2. Every man has the right to pursue the truth of what is within ones own soul and the evidence obtained from science facts. (The Age of Enlightenment…i.e. Illuminati)

3. No matter if you are of the Jewish faith, Muslim faith, Christian faith, all are well accepted into the Freemasons.

So “NO,” this country was not founded as a Christian Nation as many of the ignorant claim today!


I have enjoyed many of the books Dan Brown has written and as I too am a Freemason, I took great interest in this book.

As many whom have been familiar with my writings in this blog and contributing to others, I have made it very well known how I have spent my life straining to be heard above the din of ignorance.

Below is an excerpt from the book, “The Lost Symbol,” that I found profound, speaking for my thoughts, and saw value in passing it on.

Page 327, 3rd. chapter from the top.
“From the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to American politics, the name Jesus had been hijacked as an ally in all kinds of power struggles. Since the beginning of time, the ignorant had always screamed the loudest, herding the unsuspecting masses and forcing them to do their bidding. They defend their worldly desires by citing Scripture they did not understand. They celebrated their intolerance as proof of their convictions. Now, after all these years, mankind had finally managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.”

This passage taken from the book sums up current events so true today.

So in conclusion, I highly recommend reading this book, I found it enlightening, educational but keeping in mind it is still fiction so don’t take everything as verbatim of everything that is within the Freemasons. A good easy read and will make a very good movie in the future.

The Profound Brilliance Of Carl Sagan

I belong to a book discussion group at the Seaford Library in Seaford, DE. We just finished reading Carl Sagan’s book, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.” I highly recommend this book to anyone with an open mind and follows science where the facts take them.

Below are some quotes I would like to pass on from the book because I thought they were so profound.

“When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China. When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago--when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashanah and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old.”

Think how profound and foresight this next quote was. Carl Sagan predicted the George Bush years so accurately back in 1995 when it was published.

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?”

I think that this next quote applies to the delusional, narcissistic aspect of the fundamentalist Christians that think the world revolves around them and their viewpoints.

“If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?....For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

Then he goes onto say, “At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.” I see this could very well be applied to the “Intelligent Design” that was trying to be shoved into our public school systems by the Religious Nut Jobs!

“Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?”

These are just a few examples of how profound Carl Sagan really was in his time. Even though the book was written over fourteen years ago and Carl has since passed away, his words are even more current today than they ever were!

The Great Tea Party Rip-Off

Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement. “I’m a tea partier, I’m a town-haller, I’m a grass-roots-er” is how Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville, even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.
The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel.

Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show.

Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention “smells scammy,” likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold millions.

Such rumbling about the movement’s being co-opted by hucksters may explain why Palin used her first paid appearance at Fox last Tuesday to tell Bill O’Reilly that she would recycle her own tea party profits in political contributions. But Erickson had it right: the tea party movement is being exploited and not just by marketers, lobbyists, political consultants and corporate interests but by the Republican Party, as exemplified by Palin and Steele, its most prominent leaders.

Tea partiers hate the G.O.P. establishment and its Wall Street allies, starting with the Bushies who created TARP, almost as much as they do Obama and his Wall Street pals. When Steele and Palin pay lip service to the movement, they are happy to glom on to its anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-government, anti-big-bank vitriol. But they don’t call for any actual action against the bailed-out perpetrators of the financial crisis. They’d never ask for investments to put ordinary Americans back to work. They have no policies to forestall foreclosures or protect health insurance for the tea partiers who’ve been shafted by hard times. Their only economic principle beside tax cuts is vilification of the stimulus that did save countless jobs for firefighters, police officers and teachers at the state and local level.

Hustlers like Steele and Palin take the money and run. All their followers get in exchange is a lousy tea party T-shirt, or a ghost-written self-promotional book, or a tepid racial sideshow far beneath the incendiary standards which has driven away nearly every black American except Steele for the past 40 years.

The true prime mover in this story was Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican Party and by far the loudest and most prominent Beltway figure demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority leader as punishment for his “racism.”

Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, had to throw a bone after criticizing the fanatical extreme right of the Republican Party. His actions in this incident offer some hilarious and instructive insights into what’s going on in the Republican hierarchy right now as it tries to cope not just with our first African-American president but with a restive base embracing right-wing tea-party populism that loathes the establishment in both parties. Although Steele is black and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money.

A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he found it “way too male” for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just before “Game Change” emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig. The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele’s arrival at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November, with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. “He needs to raise money for the party, not his wallet,” one Republican leader griped to Politico.

Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his own, “Right Now.” He hadn’t told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me,” he taunted them. “But until then, shut up. Get with the program, or get out of the way.”

Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said that white Republicans are “scared” of him.

Steel is very good at playing head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he’s publicly professing “slum love” for the Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled “What Up?,” or announcing that he would use “fried chicken and potato salad” to recruit minority voters.

On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.

Rush Limbaugh’s Brilliant Logical Debating Retort Criticizing His Haiti Comment

I have not posted in a while but this was just too much of a motivation that I just had to write about the latest Rush Limbaugh SHIT SPOUTING SPEWING from his radio show.

Today Rush Limbaugh attacked those criticizing his dumb ass statements and is not backing down from his claim that President Obama is trying to score political points off the earthquake in Haiti.

Challenged by a caller during his show Thursday, Limbaugh said: “If I said it, I meant to say it, and I do believe that everything is political to this president.”
“Everything this president sees is a political opportunity, including Haiti, and he will use it to burnish his credentials with minorities in this country and around the world, and to accuse Republicans of having no compassion.”

I am pleased to say that Limbaugh has come under fire from both the RIGHT and the LEFT for saying that the earthquake played directly into President Obama’s hands, allowing him to look “compassionate.” The host claimed the White House’s response would bolster Obama’s standing in the “light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country.”

He also appeared to discourage help for the island nation, saying, “We've already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.”

Critics have characterized Limbaugh’s comments as insensitive and tone-deaf at a time when heartbreaking images of the devastation dominate news coverage.
Confronted with some of that criticism, Limbaugh slammed a caller as “close-minded.”
In Rush Limbaugh’s own brilliant debating technique went on to say, “What I’m illustrating here is that you’re a blockhead,” Limbaugh shot back. “What I’m illustrating here is that you’re a close-minded bigot who is ill-informed.”
“If you had listened to this program for a modicum of time, you would know it,” he said. “But instead, you’re a blockhead. Your mind is totally closed. You have tampons in your ears. Nothing is getting through other than the biased crap that you read.”



Yes Rush, what a brilliant logical debating retort showing how complete your debating skill are. Now go overdose on what ever your drug of choice is at this time and continue with your everyday bantering on how brilliant you are.

!NEWS FLASH!

From the news offices of “Engineer of Knowledge” comes an exclusive news report of a news breaking investigation that shows there may very well be a scam perpetrated on the “Believe Anything So Long As It Has a Conservative Spin!!”
I am here to show that there may very well be proof that Ann Coulter of Conservative Radio is really the rocker and practical joker, Tom Petty.

Below are photos that show too much similarities between photos of Tom Petty and if you dressed him as a Drag Quean. Well as many may see that there is what some may conclude that Ann Coulter does look just like Tom Petty in Drag. Just add some hair extensions and fake eye lashes on Tom Petty and "Hocus Pocus" …..You have Ann Coulter.

There is some photograph evidence that Ann Coulter may very well be an Alien that has Pod People Tom Petty.
YOU BE THE JUDGE!!!

Finally, Responsible Leadership From The White House Announcing A $250M Effort For Science And Math

Many of my readers have known for years that I have always said that the wealth and security of our nation is dependent on the education of our citizens. Those who are trying to deny science fact with religious myths within our education system are doing more harm to our country than any Al-Qaeda terrorist.

I am now proud to announce that the White House is making $250 million in public and private efforts to improve our science and mathematics instruction, aiming to help the nation compete in key fields with global economic rivals.
With funding from high-tech businesses, universities and foundations, the initiative seeks to prepare more than 10,000 new math and science schoolteachers over five years and provide on-the-job training for an additional 100,000 in science, technology, engineering and math.

"Passionate educators with deep content expertise can make all the difference," President Obama said in a prepared statement, "enabling hands-on learning that truly engages students, including girls and underrepresented minorities, and preparing them to tackle the “Grand Challenges” of the 21st century such as increasing energy independence, improving people's health, protecting the environment and strengthening national security."

The initiative effectively doubles, to more than $500 million, a philanthropic campaign called “STEM” education that Obama launched in November. I am proud to say that my youngest daughter is in this STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) program with our local high school.

Business and government leaders have sounded alarms over science and math education in recent years as concern has mounted that the United States may be losing the technological edge that fueled its economy in the 20th century. The nation's universities are still known as world leaders, but the performance of its K-12 schools has come under scrutiny. International math testing in 2007 found that U.S. fourth-graders trailed counterparts in some areas of Europe and Asia and those U.S. eighth-graders lagged behind those from a handful of Asian powers. Similar results were found in science.

The government spends about $700 million a year on elementary and secondary education in the STEM fields through agencies such as NASA, National Science Foundation and the U.S. Education Department. It is well noted that in a time of rising budget deficits, it's unclear how much federal spending can be grown.

I am glad to see private companies such as Intel Corp. are committing $200 million in cash and in-kind support over 10 years for expanded teacher training and other measures.

Private institutions such as The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation will expand a program that places math and science teachers with advanced degrees in hard-to-staff schools in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. With $40 million in foundation and state funding, the program will train 700 teachers over three years, many of them in Michigan, which has been pummeled in the economic downturn.

With this announcement I can see the ship of our nation being turned around after too many years of neglect in education, national leaders padding their own pockets with “No Bid Contracts,” and religious fantasists trying to expunge true science in our public school systems. I have said many times that if we're going to be economically competitive and continue to innovate and create jobs in this country and bring the “Value Added” manufacturing back into this country, we have to get much better in science and math and the “STEM” education program is the first step in educating the next generation to take up this torch and move forward.

There is now a huge sense of urgency being recognized in this country and that is a good thing.

Religious Myths Conflicting With Science Facts

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his book, "The American Scholar," predicted the day would come when America would end, and I quote, "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands."

His prediction came true in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Swedenborg.

Although I think that Emerson would have mixed feelings today about one consequence of the advance of science that has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.

Since the Renaissance, the tension between science and religion has primarily been the result of contradictions between scientific discoveries and specific religious doctrines. Galileo remarked in his famous letter to Grand Duchess Christina that "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes," and this was not just his opinion of the time. Many such as Leonardo Da Vinci and even Cardinal Baronius, the Vatican librarian, were discovering through science that religious teachings of the time were inaccurate.

Contradictions between scripture and scientific knowledge have occurred again and again, and have generally been accommodated by the more enlightened among the religious. For instance, there are verses in both the Old and New Testament that seem to show that the earth is flat, and as noted by Copernicus (quoted by Galileo in the same letter to Christina) these verses led some early Church fathers like Lactantius to reject the Greek understanding that the earth is a sphere, but educated Christians long before the voyages of Columbus and Magellan had come to accept the spherical shape of the earth. Dante found the interior of the spherical earth a convenient place to store sinners.

The direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, it is the tension between science and religion that has become important.

The primary source of tension arises from the fact that religion originally gained much of its strength from the observation of mysterious phenomena such as, thunder, earthquakes, disease, that seemed to require the intervention of some divine being. There was a nymph in every brook, and a dryad in every tree. But as time passed more and more of these mysteries have been explained in purely natural ways. People believe in God because no other explanation seems possible for a whole host of mysteries, and then over the years these mysteries were one by one resolved naturalistically. The “Cause & Effect” outcome is a certain weakening of religious belief is to be expected. It is no accident that the advent of widespread atheism and agnosticism among the educated in the eighteenth century followed hard upon the birth of modern science in the previous century.

From the beginning, the explanatory power of science worried those who valued religion. Plato was so horrified at the attempt of Democritus and Leucippus to explain nature in terms of atoms without reference to the gods that in “Book Ten of The Laws,” he urged five years of solitary confinement for those who deny that the gods exist or that they care about humans, with death to follow if the prisoner is not reformed.

Isaac Newton, offended by the naturalism of Descartes, also rejected the idea that the world could be explained without God. He argued for instance in a letter to Richard Bentley that no explanation but God could be given for the distinction we observe between bright matter, the sun and stars, and dark matter, like the earth. This is ironic, because of course it was Newton and not Descartes who was right about the laws of motion. No one did more than Newton to make it possible to work out thoroughly nontheistic explanations of what we see in the sky, but Newton himself was not in this sense a Newtonian.

Of course, not everything has been explained, nor will it ever be. The important thing is that we have not observed anything that seems to require supernatural intervention for its explanation. There are some today who cling to the remaining gaps in our understanding, such as our ignorance about the origin of life, as evidence for God. But as time passes and more and more of these gaps are filled in, their position gives an impression of people desperately holding on to outmoded opinions.

Behind The 8 Ball Again

I want to start of this posting with a question. Does anyone know what country is leading the world in battery technology? The reason I have posed this question is that the country that develops the battery with the best storage per weight, size, and rechargeable time…will be the leaders in car manufacturing. Because whether or not who believes it today, the future in the auto industry will be in electric cars.

Answer:
It was mentioned on the news this morning that China is now leading the world in battery technology and any auto maker who wants to use this battery, will have to license and purchase the batteries from China. (I have to remind everyone that China is still a communist government and their industries are government owned)

China has just bought the Hummer product line from GM, are in the process of purchasing Volvo from Ford to obtain the leading auto technology from this purchase.

Now I ask, do you think that China will favor their own auto industry or GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes Benz, etc? It is my viewpoint that China is positioning themselves for a massive world economic war with the desired outcome to be the world’s economic leader. Instead of the world economy trading in U.S. Dollars as it is now, in the near future the preferred monetary to be traded will be the Chinese, “Meiyuan,” or what we here in the U.S. we pronounce, “yuan.”

In the early part of the decade, the largest tax cut was handed out to industry with the citizens being told that our U.S. industrial corporations need to purchase new, modernize, manufacturing equipment so we could be more competitive in the world market. The offset this loss in tax revenue was picked up and the burden was carried on the working class of this country. The accelerated tax right off of these expenditures was enjoyed by the corporate elite (as they awarded themselves large annual bonuses) and as they placed the tax burden on the working class citizens of this country, they purchased, built, and placed all manufacturing in Communist China. (Remember when my generation was drafted and sent to Viet Nam to fight communism over there so that it would not infiltrate and take over our country.) Well my “Dull and Dimwitted fellow citizens,” you have subsidized the loss of your own manufacturing jobs to be sent to Communist China. Yes our U.S. corporations found out that that subsidized communist labor force was pretty cheep and I guess communism was not so bad after all. Oh yea, I guess nobody cared that it was the U.S. labor force that supported our parents retirement and well being. I guess that was not important to those U.S. corporations that moved the manufacturing jobs to China.


I now just shake my head when I hear the hydro-carbon industry’s stogies like Sarah Palin touting, “Drill Baby Drill,” or any other corporate sponsored Republicans, without any world view lessons of what direction the rest of the world is going. Once again these corporations are marketing to the U.S. citizens to destroy our own environment, quality of living, future of our children, the health of our elderly parents, to prop up the status quo for the same corporations that would just as soon screw you up the bung hole as to have any social conscience to the country and citizens that enabled them to reach their status in the first place.