Photo: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Book Review:

WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order By Martin Jacques

NY Times | Dec 31, 2009

Waking Dragon

By JOSEPH KAHN

Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.

China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.

Related

New order: A stimulating yet ultimately flawed portrait of a China-dominated world

In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.

This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.

Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”

Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power.

China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.

Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.

Joseph Kahn is a former Beijing bureau chief and now a deputy foreign editor of The Times.

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“The Masons have had very long and deep traditions of secrecy, they have drastic oaths of loyalty, and in the past they have had extensive and sometimes excessive influence in the power elites of many societies. And so, they have been uniquely successful in covering their tracks and in completely sanitising their past.” – B.Victor Preston

. . .

Did Dan Brown “sample” ideas for “The Lost Symbol” from a little-known Australian novelist who beat him to the punch? The claim that he may have done so, and other claims about Freemasonry, are likely to stir controversy among Brown fans, Masons and all those who love a good literary stoush.

Masonic Mystery Thriller Author Notes Similarities in Dan Brown Book

PressRelease

Earthtimes.org | Dec 4, 2009

Picture this. A mystery thriller is published in 2009 with a Masonic theme throughout. Near the beginning there’s a violent incident in Washington DC, critical to the plot. Much of the book consists of a hunt for a mysterious lost artefact, an object linked to super-secrets from the distant past known only to the highest level Freemasons. There is much reference to Masonic symbols and numerology, to past history, pyramids and to obelisks. In fact, an obelisk holds the final key to the book’s ending. The place name “Alexandria” comes up often, and so on, and so on.

Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”, surely? No, B.Victor Preston’s “The Lion and the Covenant,” published a full six months before Brown’s work, in March 2009. “It’s possible that Dan Brown borrowed a few ideas from my book,” says author Preston. “Reports indicate that he tore up the early versions of his own book, and references to recent technology such as the iPhone, to Twitter and tweeting and so on in “The Lost Symbol” show that some elements of his story were inserted very late in the piece.”

However, author Preston is not accusing the best-selling American novelist of plagiarism. Preston’s own “The Lion and the Covenant” runs to 530 pages by the way, a few more than Brown’s opus. “He hasn’t reproduced any of my sentences or anything like that,” confirms the Aussie writer. “And there’s no copyright in literary ideas. So there’s no suggestion of illegality on his part, even if he did borrow.”

Asked what he thinks of Dan Brown as a writer though, author Preston replies: “I think he has both great strengths and great weaknesses. He is a master of pace and suspense. His research is prodigious, although not always entirely accurate. On the other hand, his characterisation is paper-thin and some of his prose much less than glorious. But perhaps he doesn’t care about that. He writes cracking mystery thrillers that many people enjoy, and he sells extraordinarily well. It’s difficult to argue with that.”

How about Dan Brown and Freemasonry, though? “You get the feeling that he doesn’t actually know much about the subject in real terms, despite all his research,” says author Preston, who has Freemasonry in his own family. Two of his uncles were Masons, one a Master Mason. His English grandfather also bore the same name as one of the leading British Freemasons of the eighteenth century. That was William Preston, who wrote the seminal Masonic text “Illustrations of Freemasonry”, a book still in print more than two centuries later.

“Some families have hundreds of years of Masonic traditions,” explains Preston. “Dan Brown however seems to be looking in from the outside and believing nearly everything he’s been told by Masonic sources.” And what’s wrong with that? “It’s a little bit naive,” author Preston explains. “There’s good and bad in every group. However the Masons have had very long and deep traditions of secrecy, they have drastic oaths of loyalty, and in the past they have had extensive and sometimes excessive influence in the power elites of many societies. And so, they have been uniquely successful in covering their tracks and in completely sanitising their past.”

“The fact is, there was definitely some undesirable stuff that went on in previous eras, although they never admit to any of it these days. Instead a lot of double-talk is engaged in, as in yes we were very influential back then, but no, none of us ever ever did anything wrong whatsoever. You have to be very gullible indeed to believe that. Unfortunately, very few non-Masonic historians have written about Freemasonry, so that on the whole Freemasons have been allowed to write up all of their own past. Non-Masonic writers usually just quote from or summarise books and articles already written by Freemasons. The result is, inevitably, less than fully frank. The whole situation is lacking in objectivity; in fact it’s academically unsound and perhaps even a blot on scholarship.”

“This doesn’t mean,” Preston adds thoughtfully, “that people shouldn’t join the Freemasons if they’re drawn to them, or that they don’t aspire to high morality and practice charity and other good works – they do. It just means that as with every group that has had access to both influence and secrecy for long periods, stuff really did go on at times. My book points in particular at something almost unbelievable, something that will really astonish readers. Yet I’ve ferreted out a very large amount of evidence to suggest it may well be true. People who are open-minded enough and sufficiently independent of thought to read my book can form their own judgements on that. Hopefully they’ll enjoy all the lighter and romantic aspects of the novel too.”

Author Preston also found Brown’s letter sent to the 33rd degree Mason’s Council in Washington, subsequent to publishing “The Lost Symbol”, “a bit on the obsequious side.” ”Perhaps,” he speculates, “Dan Brown didn’t want to offend the Freemason elite the way he offended the Catholic Church with The Da Vinci Code. After all, there are still many powerful Freemasons around, including a number in the publishing industry, although not nearly as many as in the past. I guess he thought, time to stop making more enemies.” The effect? “The effect is that Dan tiptoes around most Masonic issues, and there are no real secrets in his book.” Preston adds that if anyone is interested in sensational Masonic secrets “they’re much better off with my book, in point of fact.”

Has author Preston in fact revealed too much for his own good? He acknowledges that a bank account of his in Australia was “hacked” three times on 09/09/09 from the United States and cleaned out, in what he describes as a “worrying” incident. The significance is that the Masonic numbers “3” and “9” feature prominently throughout his “The Lion and the Covenant,” novel, and in the discussions of hidden Masonic numerology that it contains (some of this information is also revealed in the book’s website at www.elecbk.com). Indeed, as described on the website, a meeting code of the Royal Arch order of Freemasonry, which is mentioned in the book in relation to a major secret, says that members of the group will recognise each other by “three times three”.

A defiant smoking gun? Asked if he thought any Freemasons might have been involved in this criminal act “The Lion and the Covenant” author replied, “You know, it’s difficult to believe in that level of coincidence, isn’t it? However, I think that if so it would have been the work of a rogue individual or just a few extremists, not behaviour any Masonic lodge would ever subscribe to. Freemasons swear to uphold very high moral standards. Of course, I probably have upset a few people in revealing what I have, I guess. But I’ve never taken any Masonic oaths myself, so they have no justifiable grounds under their own system for any punitive actions against me. I believe most Masons would reject that kind of behaviour altogether. It will be interesting to see if any Freemasons speak out about this, though. Organisational loyalty does often cloud proper judgement, that’s true for all kinds of groups everywhere. And Freemasons are as human as the rest of us, they are neither devils nor saints. We need to remember both points there”.

The Real Global Warming Disaster By Christopher Booker

Daily Mail | Nov 23, 2009

By Christopher Booker

Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world – simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried – and even very angry – if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday’s Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming.

Hundreds of emails leaked from the internal computer system of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how a small group of highly influential senior British and U.S. scientists have for years been secretly discussing ways in which their evidence could be manipulated to make the threat posed by global warming sound much worse than it is.

To place the significance of these revelations into context, let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government’s own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion a year – that’s £720 for every household in the country – every year from now until 2050.

We shall be paying this through soaring ‘green taxes’ on everything from air travel to the £3,300 tax being proposed on each new car; through rocketing fuel bills to subsidise thousands more wind turbines and to pay for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

In fact, the true cost of the act, if complied with to the letter, would certainly be far higher, because what it lays down is that, over the next 40 years, we must cut our emissions of carbon dioxide by over 80 per cent.

Pretty well every aspect of our lives in today’s industrialised society involves emitting carbon dioxide – and short of some technological revolution as yet undreamed of, the only way we could meet that target would be to close almost every part of our economy. Yet, astonishingly, scarcely a single MP even questioned the need for such a law; only three voted against it.

I recently published a book on what I have no hesitation in calling the most alarming story I have ever reported in all my years as a journalist.

This is the story of how the belief that the world has to fight the threat of global warming has crept to the top of the political agenda, to the point where, not just in Britain but across the world, governments are solemnly discussing by far the most costly series of measures any bunch of politicians has proposed.

This is what they will all be discussing at next month’s great UN conference, when 20,000 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists from all over the world gather in Copenhagen to discuss a new treaty to decide just what measures we shall all have to accept to keep the supposed threat of global warming at bay.

We all know the basic thesis: that thanks to mankind burning fossil fuels, the world’s temperatures are hurtling upwards, and that unless the most drastic action is taken, we can look forward to an unprecedented global catastrophe – droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps, sea levels rising to the point where many of the world’s major cities are submerged.

All this is what has been predicted by the expensive computer models relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), which the politicians tell us we must trust as the ultimate source of authority on the future of the world’s climate.

On every side we are told that ‘the science is settled’, that ‘2,500 of the world’s top climate scientists’ agree that these terrifying predictions will all come true unless we take the most drastic action. So carried away have they all been by this belief that scarcely a single politician dares question it.

Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening, certainly not in the way those computer models have been predicting. Although carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, temperatures have not been rising in the way the computer models all agree they should have done.

In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down.

The hard evidence tells us that there have actually been fewer major droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades.

There is no less ice at the Earth’s poles today than there was 30 years ago. Sea levels may have been rising very slowly, but no faster than they have been for 200 years.

In other words, as a growing army of genuine experts across the world has been trying to tell us, there is not a single item on the list of apocalyptic predictions we have been fed for so long by the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore which is not being called into question by what is actually happening to the world’s climate.

The scientists who have been challenging almost every aspect of the official theory on global warming have ranged from world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professors Will Happer and Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, to 700 scientists of many disciplines.

These include Nobel Prize-winners and former contributors to the IPCC, who signed a ‘minority report’ of the U.S. Senate’s environment committee.

It is beginning to look as though the panic over global warming, which has our politicians so in its grip, may have been no more than a colossal scare story – to line up alongside all those other scares which have raced in and out of the headlines in recent decades, such as the ‘Millennium Bug’, which at midnight on December 31, 1999, was going to crash the world’s computers.

So the real question which arises from this most terrifying of all scare scenarios is: why did the world’s politicians get swept along by it?

One of the more suspicious features of the man-made global warming theory is precisely this extraordinary pressure, which has been built up to insist the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it is a moral crime to question it.

For several years, anyone daring to doubt the theory – not least some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists – has been vilified as a ‘denier’, to be compared with those who try to deny the historical reality of Hitler’s Holocaust.

Al Gore was one of the first to condemn as ‘flat earthers’ anyone who was sceptical of his reckless scaremongering, likening such people to the cranks who believe the Moon landings were all somehow ‘faked on a movie lot in Arizona’ (delightfully, among the scientists who have come out as ‘climate sceptics’ are two of the U.S. astronauts who did land on the Moon, Dr Buzz Aldrin and Dr Jack Schmitt).

In the scientific world, notably in the U.S. and Europe, it has long been a major scandal that those daring to doubt the official orthodoxy on global warming face ostracism from their academic colleagues, have had research funding withdrawn and have not been allowed to publish their papers in the leading scientific journals.

But equally suspicious has been the way the advocates of the warming orthodoxy have been repeatedly shown to have fiddled the scientific evidence being used to promote it.

The most notorious example of this was the so-called ‘hockey stick’ graph, which for years was brandished to show that, after flat-lining for 1,000 years, global temperatures had suddenly soared upwards in the late 20th century to levels never known before in recorded history.

The hockey stick was used by the IPCC and Gore as the supreme icon of their cause. Then, two statisticians revealed that the graph had been created by a computer model programmed to produce hockey stick shapes whatever data were fed into it.

And now come these leaked emails showing that the very scientists who were responsible for championing the hockey stick – all at the heart of the IPCC establishment – have been regularly discussing how the evidence could be manipulated to promote their cause.

The greatest myth of all in this story is the claim that the succession of alarmist reports produced by the IPCC represents a ‘consensus’ of the views of ‘2,500 of the world’s top climate scientists’.

In every way, this is wildly misleading. The vast majority of those who contribute to those IPCC reports are not climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all, but economists or sociologists – even just environmental activists with no scientific qualifications whatever.

The IPCC was never intended to be an impartial body, weighing the evidence for and against man-made global warming and coming up with objective conclusions.

It was set up by a small group of scientists already so firmly committed to the belief in ‘human-induced climate change’ that they were not prepared to examine any evidence which contradicted it.

A detailed study of the contributors to the most recent IPCC report has shown that the number of scientists responsible for the key chapter on the extent and causes of global warming – on which everything else in the report depended – was not 2,500, but barely 50.

Almost all this handful of scientists were firmly committed to the official view on global warming before they were appointed – and they include those whose leaked emails have now created a shock wave running around the world.

Tellingly, what they also all have in common is that their findings are based on computer models programmed to assume the chief cause of global warming is the rise in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

It is precisely this assumption which more than anything else has been called into question by the fact that global temperatures have not been continuing to rise as the computer models insisted they should.

Even some of the most committed scientific supporters of the global warming theory now admit the warming process has come to a halt – although they insist that in a decade or two it will re- emerge again stronger than ever.

The fact remains that the models on which the whole global warming panic was based have been proved dismally wrong, suggesting that the theory on which they were programmed may itself have been fundamentally flawed.

Yet on this basis, the world’s politicians, led by our own in Britain, are nevertheless proposing the most damaging measures ever put forward in history – cuts in carbon emission which, if implemented, would plunge our world back into the Dark Ages – to meet a crisis which it now seems was never going to happen anyway.

Before it is too late, we must insist our politicians re- examine the increasingly shaky scientific case on which all those proposals are based.

For nearly 20 years, from Al Gore to President Obama, they have been intoning to us that ‘the science is settled’. But as ever more scientists from outside the IPCC’s self- selected ‘magic circle’ now maintain, it has never been more obvious that this simply isn’t true.

No one has put this better than Professor Lindzen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, when he wrote: ‘Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age.’

With the entire future of our civilisation at stake, it is no longer good enough for our politicians just to shout ‘deniers’ and ‘flat earthers’ at all those genuinely expert scientists now begging them to look properly at the evidence. They must be prepared to listen – and, for the sake of our planet, to think again.

Pages from Japan’s manga style “Mein Kampf”

Sales of a comic version of Adolf Hitler’s notorious political tract Mein Kampf have become a hit in Japan.

Telegraph | Sep 30, 2009

By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo

The manga book describes both Hitler’s autobiography and his infamous Nazi manifesto in the unlikely form of easy-to-read comic pictures and captions.

Since it was published in Japan last November, its popularity has soared, with sales of more than 45,000.

The book, which forms part of a series on world classics turned into manga, covers a range of aspects of Hitler’s life, from his childhood to the formation of his political party.

Its success in Japan has reportedly ignited a debate in Germany about whether the ban on the work imposed since 1945 should be overturned.

The current copyright of the book within Germany lies in the hands of the finance ministry of the state of Bavaria which will not reproduce it out of respect to the relatives of those who suffered during Hitler’s regime.

Japanese publishers East Press are no strangers to tapping into the trend of bringing political tracts into the 21st century: the current series also includes a popular manga version of Karl Marx’s seminal anti-capitalist tome Das Kapital.

Manga enjoys a soaring popularity in Japan, with its most high-profile fans including the former prime minister Taro Aso.

Along with Nazism and anti-capitalism, there are few topics that are regarded as sacred from being transformed into manga. Previous issues tackled range from delicate Japanese-Chinese relations to the spread of bird flu.

Repeat Abortions Baffle Experts, as Author Irene Vilar Explores Her ‘Impossible Motherhood’

ABC | Sep 21, 2009

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

Irene Vilar worries that her self-described “abortion addiction” will be misunderstood, twisted by the pro-life movement to deny women the right to choose.

Her book, “Impossible Motherhood,” which will be released by Other Press on Oct. 6, chronicles her own dark choices: 15 abortions in 16 years, much of it as a married woman.

As press on the book has begun to leak out, Vilar — a literary agent and editor — says she has already sensed “an inkling of hatred.”

Vilar has scheduled only closed-door interviews and will not do a book tour. At the urging of her husband, they have made sure all public property records do not reflect her name, so she cannot be targeted at their home.

“I am worried about my safety and the hate mail,” she told ABCNews.com in a telephone interview as her home-schooled children were at work on a painting project.

“No book like this has ever been written,” she told ABCNews.com. “I just imagine the ‘baby killer’ and I could be a poster child for that kind of fundamentalism. And there are my little kids in all of that.”

Today, at 40, the Latina author has two young children, but her troubled past continues to haunt her well into motherhood.

She grew up in the shadow of her notorious grandmother Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron, who stormed the Capitol steps with a gun in 1954. Lebron served 25 years in jail for the crime until receiving a pardon from President Carter in 1979.

Her mother committed suicide by throwing herself from a moving car when Vilar was 8 and two of her brothers were heroin addicts.

Mass Sterilization in Puerto Rico

Vilar’s story is set against the backdrop of the American-led mass sterilization program in her native Puerto Rico from 1955 to 1969, a fitting symbol for her struggle with her own reproduction.

By 1974, 37 percent of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been permanently sterilized in that experiment.

“Women tend to repeat behaviors,” Vilar said of herself. Her mother’s forced hysterectomy without hormone treatment at the age of 33, led to depression and a Valium addition.

Vilar attended boarding school in New Hampshire and was just 15 when she left for Syracuse University, where she fell in love and later married her first husband, a tyrannical 50-year-old professor.

With a predilection for young women, he bragged that his relationships had never lasted more than five years and that having children killed sexual desire.

She says their emotionally dependent relationship was riddled with shame, self-mutilation and several suicide attempts.

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American Freemason Lauds Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol; Launches Website as Proof to Brown’s Claim

PRWeb | Sep 21, 2009

American Freemason and New York psychologist Dr. Patrick Swift launches website InterfaithReligiousTolerance.net as proof to one of Dan Brown’s claims regarding Freemasonry in the Lost Symbol. Swift is editor of the website, a member of George Washington Lodge #285 in New York City, and a practicing Catholic who previously studied to become a Jesuit priest.

New York, NY (PRWEB) September 21, 2009 — American Freemason and New York psychologist Dr. Patrick Swift launches website InterfaithReligiousTolerance.net as proof to one of Dan Brown’s claims regarding Freemasonry in the Lost Symbol. Swift is editor of the website, a member of George Washington Lodge #285 in New York City, and a practicing Catholic who previously studied to become a Jesuit priest.

In The Lost Symbol (http://www.thelostsymbol.com/), Dan Brown presents his main character Robert Langdon teaching that, “One of the prerequisites for becoming a Mason is that you must believe in a higher power. The difference between Masonic spirituality and organized religion is that the Masons do not impose a specific definition or name on a higher power.” Swift supports that statement as accurate, but says Brown takes artistic license as well. “He is absolutely correct to write that religious tolerance is one of the foundational principles of Freemasonry,” says Swift. “It’s what drew me to the Fraternity in the first place, and continues to inspire me today. I must say though that I’m no official voice for Freemasonry.”

“I have enormous respect for the Masons,” Brown told The Associated Press during a recent interview (Yahoo! News) (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090915/ap_en_ot/us_books_brown_masons). “In the most fundamental terms, with different cultures killing each other over whose version of God is correct, here is a worldwide organization that essentially says, `We don’t care what you call God, or what you think about God, only that you believe in a God and let’s all stand together as brothers and look in the same direction.”

A healthcare provider to 9/11 victims and author of One Mountain, Many Paths, Swift promotes religious tolerance with his website and offers it as proof that at least one of Brown’s basic claims about Freemasonry is accurate. According to the website, the mission of InterfaithReligiousTolerance.net is to promote communication and constructive dialogue between people of faith – regardless of any difference in spiritual orientation, faith, creed, or religious denomination (details) (http://www.interfaithreligioustolerance.net/About.html).

“I feel compelled to speak out in support of religious tolerance because intolerance and bigotry threaten to tear our country and our world apart,” says Swift.  “Religious tolerance is a basic American value within our government and our Constitution. Founding Fathers like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, and John Hancock understood the importance of this as Freemasons.”

Holding a firm belief that our likenesses vastly outnumber our differences, Swift compiled his award-winning book One Mountain, Many Paths (Double Eagle Press) in the wake of 9/11. Swift’s book contains uplifting quotes from the sacred texts of all the great religious traditions, organized into chapters such as “Love One Another” and “Love Your Enemy.” Swift is giving away free copies of his book online at InterfaithReligiousTolerance.net (http://www.interfaithreligioustolerance.net/).

A clinical psychologist at a major medical center in Manhattan with faculty appointments in neurology and rehabilitation medicine, Swift has cared for thousands of people from different faiths and offers diversity training to healthcare providers (details at PatrickSwift.com (http://www.patrickswift.com/). “One of my favorite stories involves a time when I worked with a Muslim physician from Pakistan to care for a Hindu patient from India, with me as a Catholic neuropsychologist from Texas. Religion doesn’t have to be a dividing force between us. It can actually bring us closer together.”

Click here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af6WKMh-t7o) to watch Dr. Swift speak at a performing arts center in Ohio. See him on the O’Reilly Factor here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1djiEEARA).

About Double Eagle Press LLC:

Established in 2006, Double Eagle Press’ mission is to produce hardcover, trade paperback, and e-book editions that make a positive difference in the world. Their consumers are people who care about the world in which they live and strive for peace and tranquility in their own lives. National and international book distribution is available through Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and The Bookmasters Group. Double Eagle Press publishes Interfaith Religious Tolerance.net and is solely responsible for its content.

Contact:

Dr. Patrick Swift

Double Eagle Press LLC

(862) 205-1924

###

Contact Information
Patrick Swift
InterfaithReligiousTolerance.net

http://www.interfaithreligioustolerance.net/

(862) 205-1924

Michael Baigent is one of the world’s leading published experts on Freemasonry. Photo / AP

Baigent, a Freemason and editor of UK’s Freemasonry Today, is one of the world’s leading published experts on the esoteric subject. His 1989 history, The Temple and the Lodge, may not have been a bestseller but it broke new ground in exploring links between the Masons, the establishment of Washington DC, and the American War of Independence.

It claimed that commanders on both side were Masons, and they agreed that the English would “throw” certain battles because it was in no one’s interests to destroy the economic base of the American colonies in their entirety.

NZ Herald | Sep 20, 2009

By Jonathan Milne

Michael Baigent might feel a little as if he were in the middle of thriller, ever looking over his shoulder at the small, blond baby-faced man following behind him.

Worse, that thriller is written by the baby-faced man – and that man, Dan Brown, has made Baigent’s story his own.

Not in the sense of copyright breach, you understand. Brown was cleared of that in 2006 by one of England’s highest courts.

No, in the sense that Brown’s own take on Baigent’s book about Jesus of Nazareth’s bloodline turned into The Da Vinci Code – the biggest success story in adult publishing since – well, since the Bible. It has sold 81 million copies worldwide, and was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks.

This month, Random House in New Zealand ordered a print-run of 100,000 copies of Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol.

And the book chains are setting aside almost their entire Christmas contingency budgets to buy in more copies, should it – as they expect – go lunar.

The irony for Nelson-born Baigent, who unsuccessfully sued Brown for breach of intellectual property over the Code, is that the subject matter of the new book is Freemasonry.

And Baigent, a Freemason and editor of UK’s Freemasonry Today, is one of the world’s leading published experts on the esoteric subject. His 1989 history, The Temple and the Lodge, may not have been a bestseller but it broke new ground in exploring links between the Masons, the establishment of Washington DC, and the American War of Independence.

It claimed that commanders on both side were Masons, and they agreed that the English would “throw” certain battles because it was in no one’s interests to destroy the economic base of the American colonies in their entirety.

The Herald on Sunday was the only New Zealand paper to cover the Code trial at London’s Royal Courts of Justice, and it was to this paper that Auckland-educated Baigent spoke.

The £2.3 million ($6.3m) legal fees cost Baigent and his wife Jane all the royalties from his 2006 bestseller, The Jesus Papers – and their elegant five-storey terraced house in the cathedral town of Bath.

“The lawyers took it,” Baigent says this weekend. “They took everything. But that’s the way it goes: you win or you lose.”

Now they have a small place in the Home Counties.

Dan Brown, he says, knew The Temple and the Lodge well.

Indeed, this week’s book about Freemasonry was to have been published in 2006 as The Solomon Key – but for unspecified delays. Baigent says an early draft script based on the book went to Columbia Pictures three years ago, “exploring similar themes” to his book.

The reasons for the delay are unknown. But the published version this week steers well clear of the specific historical claims made by Baigent about the War of Independence.

Book reviewer Nicky Pellegrino writes today (Detours magazine) that Brown’s new book is “laced with every talisman, myth and symbol Brown could muster and dotted with his signature indigestible lumps of historical research”.

Baigent is to review the book for The Daily Beast in the US. Yesterday, he laughed off the book’s portrayal of a powerful and secretive Masonic Lodge. “I’ve never heard of wine being drunk from a human skull,” he says. “And if Freemasonry had been that powerful, I would never have lost the case.”

Masons: the reluctant text symbols

heraldscotland.com | Sep 20, 2009

by Ed McCracken

The Freemasons held their fraternal breath as midnight approached last Monday.

After centuries of dwelling in history’s shadows – being blamed for everything from assassinating JFK and establishing a New World Order to the Jack the Ripper murders and controlling the police force – the organisation waited anxiously for Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol, to appear in bookstores at the stroke of 12, dragging the secret society into the glare of a 21st-century media feeding frenzy.

Brown’s most famous literary offering, The Da Vinci Code, threw harsh light on another secretive society – the Catholic Church’s Opus Dei – causing serious PR problems for the organisation in real life. Would Brown’s creation, symbologist Robert Langdon’s latest adventure, follow suit, portraying the Masons as history’s conspiratorial bogeymen?

But a most unexpected thing happened: despite his trademark tortured prose, inexplicable use of italics, starchy exposition and plot twists borrowed from a Latin American soap opera, Brown may have pulled off something of a PR coup for the Masons.

Now instead of preparing a defence of what they call “their gentle Craft”, they could well be stockpiling application forms as readers see the society in a kinder, gentler light, because in The Lost Symbol, the Masons are – wait for it – the good guys.

By contrast, The Da Vinci Code portrayed Opus Dei as shadowy religious fanatics charged with lethally suppressing the secret of Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s relationship. Despite being fiction, it had a very real effect on the organisation.

“The book turned a private existence for our members into a more public one,” said Andrew Soane, Opus Dei spokesman. “The Da Vinci Code meant that members had the occasion to speak about their membership and had to explain themselves to a lot of people.”

The week The Da Vinci Code was released in 2006, enquiries increased tenfold. Membership numbers have remained steady, despite the negative depiction in a book that sold 80 million copies. With The Lost Symbol expected to do similar business, “the Masons should be prepared for increased interest”, warned Soane.

In advance of the novel’s release, senior Masons in the US voiced concern that “we might have to spend the next 25 years responding to Dan Brown’s fiction”. A website was set up in advance to combat untruths. The tension was palpable.

Author Brad Meltzer, whose Book Of Fate, another Washington-based Masonic thriller, topped the New York Times best-seller list in 2006, explained why they were nervous.

“For better or worse, people read these novels and take truth from them,” he said. “We don’t get educated by newspapers any more. We get educated by comedians, pop culture and fiction. And we are talking about the biggest book of the year. The Masons are stars of it. Their symbol is on the front cover. Six million people are going to read it. Only a fool wouldn’t be nervous.”

Masonic apron hanging in the museum room of the Grand Lodge of Scotland

On Wednesday afternoon, however, the only thing jangling within the marble halls of the Grand Lodge of Scotland was the sound of a teaspoon against porcelain. The receptionist was making a cup of tea for the Grand Secretary, David Begg.

Brown’s Masonic revelation had been published the day before. Hardback copies were flying out the door of nearby Waterstone’s. But sitting in his large office within the lodge on Edinburgh’s George Street, the centre of the Scottish craft, Begg was a man at ease.

“We haven’t geared up for this at all,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me that Dan Brown wanted to write about the Masons. I’ll be interested to read it to make sure it isn’t too inaccurate.”

Begg’s calm may have to do with Brown’s benign view of his organisation. The plot, such as it is, involves Langdon attempting to rescue his kidnapped friend and senior Mason, Peter Solomon. His quest involves cracking Masonic codes set into the architecture of Washington DC, all the while evading the attentions of the CIA and a tattooed, castrated madman who believes the Masons hold the secret to becoming a god, the titular lost symbol. While in The Da Vinci Code Langdon raced to uncover Opus Dei’s secret, in The Lost Symbol he fights to protect the Masons. With a print run of six million, it has already become the biggest-selling adult hardback of all time.

Near the beginning Langdon says: “The entire Masonic philosophy is built on honesty and integrity. Masons are among the most trustworthy men you could ever hope to meet.” By the end of the novel, after being shot at, almost drowned and chased from monument to monument, his view is the same. They are “one of the most unfairly maligned and misunderstood organisations in the world”.

Brown’s view is not too far removed from his hero’s. “I have enormous respect for the Masons,” he said in a interview. “In the most fundamental terms, with different cultures killing each other over whose version of God is correct, here is a worldwide organisation that essentially says, ‘We don’t care what you call God, or what you think about God, only that you believe in a god and let’s all stand together as brothers and look in the same direction’.”

Begg is unsurprised by Brown’s generous treatment. “It wouldn’t surprise me that it is positive,” he said. “I’ve found a lot of misguided comments about freemasonry. I don’t find that overseas when I go there. I’d have to say it is more in Scotland and the UK that there is an inbuilt prejudice. But that is receding.”

The Freemasons possess a murky, misty history. Some trace their roots back to the builders of Solomon’s Temple, others claim Adam as the first Mason. But their modern origins are linked to the medieval stonemasons’ guilds who constructed cathedrals across Scotland and England.

The first recorded Freemasons as we know them, a brotherhood for all men not exclusively stonemasons, met at a lodge at Kilwinning in Ayrshire in 1599. The Grand Lodge of Scotland was formed in 1736 to unite the hundreds of lodges around the country. The first grand mason was William St Clair, whose family built the mysterious Roslyn Chapel. His portrait hangs in the grand lodge’s boardroom. The order’s creed of brotherly love, relief and truth still exists today, as well as some other medieval hang-ups: women are still barred from joining.

The Masons might not be subject to the negativity that plagued Opus Dei after its time in the Dan Brown spotlight, but The Lost Symbol still panders to another stereotype that dogs the organisation. Langdon’s ultimate discovery is that the Masons guard ancient secrets that can allow man to achieve god-like powers.

“The craft of Freemasonry has given me a deep respect for that which transcends human understanding,” says a senior Mason at one point. This could attract a new breed of excitable members, bewitched by the order’s alleged mysticism.

“It is a way of life, a philosophy. An approach to your fellow man and how to treat them,” said Begg. “But if they join in the anticipation that some cosmic secret will be revealed to them, they will be sorely disappointed.”

The codes and symbols that propel the novel appear to have a lot more substance than the book’s Masonic mysticism. Pyramids, double-headed phoenixes, all-seeing eyes, compasses and set squares lead Langdon deeper into his adventure.

The same imagery is dotted throughout the Grand Lodge of Scotland. A pyramid clock sits atop the mantelpiece in Begg’s office, near Robert Burns’s masonic apron. In the Lodge’s museum a painting hangs on the wall: a crescent moon and a sun with an eye in the centre float above a young Mason. A set square and compass hang from the chandelier in the main staircase.

“Symbols are still hugely important,” said AJ Morgan, a Masonic historian. “The order is immediately recognisable because of its universal logo of a set square and compass. Symbolism plays a large part in the lodge.”

But Begg said: “There are lots of signs and symbols involved, and they have allegorical meanings. I wouldn’t say they are hiding any secrets as such. They are symbolic within some of our ceremonies, but not in hiding any great secrets of the universe.”

At one point in the novel Langdon discusses the circumpunct, a circle within a circle, one of the oldest signs in the world. “It has many meanings,” he writes. “One of the most esoteric being the rose.”

He links the flower to the Rosicrucians, a Masonic degree within the Scottish Rite which “contributed to Masonic mystical philosophy … had an enigmatic history that greatly influenced science”. In the Grand Lodge, roses emboss the staircase and wallpaper of the Grand Mason’s office.

Other aspects of Freemasonry that the book plays upon, such as the use of knives in ceremonies and chambers of reflection (rooms containing various symbols), are not dismissed.

“It is all symbolic,” said Begg. “The chambers of reflection would be part of a side order. It’s not something we would have in the Grand Lodge.”

The novel turns to Scotland at various junctures. Peter Solomon is head of the Scottish Rite in America, whose headquarters, the House of the Temple, has symbolism that “rivalled that of Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel”.

George Washington, the first US president, and several drafters of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were Masons.

Above the door of the Grand Lodge’s library, a painting hangs: Washington dressed in Masonic regalia laying the foundation stone for the US Capitol Building with a Masonic trowel.

Begg and his fellow Scottish Masons are very proud of their links around the world. Scottish lodges are in 43 countries including Zimbabwe, Lebanon and China.

The dark-wood-panelled museum in George Street houses artefacts from the international lodges. Daily tours are given to the public as part of Begg’s wish to “throw back the veil of secrecy”.

“Throughout history people have thought the order and its ceremonies were secretive,” he said. “But they are more private than secret.”

Now, prodded by Brown, the Masons may start to finally emerge from the shadows, symbols in hand.

Only mild concern with Dan Brown’s latest

Canwest News | Sep 16, 2009

By CHRIS LACKNER

Author Dan Brown may have made an enemy of the Vatican with his 2003 release of The Da Vinci Code, but his new book, The Lost Symbol, is being welcomed by Canadian Freemasons with only mild concern.

And unlike the furor unleashed from the Catholic Church with The Da Vinci Code’s assertions that Mary Magdalene bore a son to Jesus, some international Freemason leaders have openly endorsed Brown’s new book.

The only concern expressed by the Grand Lodge of Canada is that Brown’s latest tome may fuel the misconception that Freemasons act within a concealed alliance.

“There is still a lingering misapprehension that Freemasonry is a ’secret’ society, a notion fuelled by writers of popular fiction (Dan Brown) and screenplays (National Treasure),” Grand Master Raymond S. J. Daniels said in a statement posted online.

Brown’s novel, released yesterday, again features the fictional, mystery-solving Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, with the story taking place over a 12-hour period in Washington.

The history of Freemasonry, a fraternal organization, dates back to around the 16th century. While membership has dwindled since the 1960s, there are approximately

4 to 5 million members worldwide. Six Canadian prime ministers have been Freemasons, including John Diefenbaker and Sir John A. Macdonald.

Masons first appeared in Britain in the early 1400s as members of craft guilds. Their “secrets” included how to square a corner and how to build a cathedral. Claims of a connection to the Crusades and the Knights Templar, as suggested in The Da Vinci Code and the National Treasure movies, are fictitious, historians say. In the 1600s, non-stoneworking gentlemen began to join, and Masonry became fashionable.

Some Freemasons say the novel may help the organization.

But while the fictional storylines about conspiracy and the Catholic Church in The Da Vinci Code caused an uproar among some Catholics and drew censure from the Vatican, a senior representative of the Freemasons in Australia called The Lost Symbol the work of a “terrific novelist.”

Brown goes out of his way in “The Lost Symbol” to present the lodge as essentially benign and misunderstood. Masons are praised for their religious tolerance and their elaborate rituals are seen as no more unusual than those of formal religions.

AP | Sep 15, 2009

by Hillel Italie

WASHINGTON – The lodge room of the Naval Masonic Hall is a colorful and somewhat inscrutable sight for the nonmember, with its blue walls, Egyptian symbols, checkered floor in the center and high ceiling painted with gold stars.

Countless secrets supposedly have been shared in this and thousands of similar rooms of the Masons around the world. Facts of life have been debated, honors bestowed, rituals enacted. You would need to belong to a lodge to learn what really goes on.

Or you could simply ask.

“The emphasis on secrecy is something that disturbs people,” says Joseph Crociata, a burly, deep-voiced man who is a trial attorney by profession but otherwise a Junior Grand Warden at the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the District of Columbia.

“But it’s not a problem getting Masons to talk about Masonry. Sometimes, it’s a problem getting them to stop.”

Despite all the books and Web sites dedicated to Freemasons, the Masonic Order has been defined by mystery, alluring enough to claim Mozart and George Washington as members, dark enough to be feared by the Vatican, Islamic officials, Nazis and Communists. In the United States, candidates in the 19th-century ran for office on anti-Mason platforms and John Quincy Adams declared that “Masonry ought forever to be abolished.”

And now arrives Dan Brown.

Six years after Brown intrigued millions of readers, and infuriated scholars and religious officials, with “The Da Vinci Code,” he has set his new novel, “The Lost Symbol,” in Washington and probed the fraternal order that well suits his passion for secrets, signs and puzzles.

Brown’s book, released Tuesday, has an announced first printing of 5 million copies and topped the best-seller lists of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble online. At Kramerbooks in Washington, about two dozen copies were purchased the morning it went on sale and the store expects to easily sell out its order of 150 books.

In “The Lost Symbol,” symbolist Robert Langdon is on a mission to find a Masonic pyramid containing a code that unlocks an ancient secret to “unfathomable power.” It’s a story of hidden history in the nation’s capital, with Masons the greatest puzzle of all.

Brown’s research for “The Da Vinci Code” was highly criticized by some Catholics for suggesting that Jesus and Mary Magdalene conceived a child and for portraying Opus Dei — the conservative religious order — as a murderous, power-hungry sect.

The Mason response could well be milder. Brown goes out of his way in “The Lost Symbol” to present the lodge as essentially benign and misunderstood. Masons are praised for their religious tolerance and their elaborate rituals are seen as no more unusual than those of formal religions. The plot centers in part on an “unfair” anti-Masonic video that “conspiracy theorists would feed on … like sharks,” Langdon says.

“I have enormous respect for the Masons,” Brown told The Associated Press during a recent interview. “In the most fundamental terms, with different cultures killing each other over whose version of God is correct, here is a worldwide organization that essentially says, `We don’t care what you call God, or what you think about God, only that you believe in a god and let’s all stand together as brothers and look in the same direction.’

“I think there will be an enormous number of people who will be interested in the Masons after this book (comes out),” Brown said.

Crociata and other Washington Masons expressed amusement, concern, resignation and excitement about Brown’s novel. Crociata anticipates a “page-turner,” like “The Da Vinci Code,” and assumes, for the sake of a “good read,” that Brown will make the Masons seem more interesting than they actually are.

Fellow Mason Kirk McNulty can’t wait to read the novel: “Dan Brown is a writer of fiction; he’s not writing an article for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Whatever he says is OK. But it would be better if he says something nice about Freemasonry.”

Mason Michael Seay says some members are “not pleased about all the hoopla,” but sees the attention as a chance to “get our story across.” Lodge member Darryl Carter says he expects some “artistic license” and senses from conversations with other Masons that they expect to benefit from the attention.

“We welcome Dan Brown doing his work because Masonry has not had the kind of popularity that it once did and that a work by somebody of Dan Brown’s caliber could really attract people to Masonry,” Carter says.

The Freemasons date back to the Middle Ages, to associations of workmen who built cathedrals in Britain, though some also believe in a connection to ancient times with the mines where King Solomon took material for his Temple. Freemasonry has endured, and transformed. The British began to accept members who were not stonemasons and by the 1700s, lodges were being called “speculative,” philosophical societies rather than worker guilds.

The Masons, Crociata and others emphasize, are not a political or religious organization. No theology beyond the belief in a divine being is required and no causes are advocated beyond millions of dollars in annual contributions to children’s hospitals, cancer wards and other charities.

“This is the world’s oldest fraternity and it has an old and distinguished history,” Crociata says. “There’s much beauty to be found in its ritual. On the other hand, it’s a fraternity, not a religion. It’s a place to get together with guys that you know, that you trust, that you are willing to trust. A place where you can speak from the heart, if you want.”

No official gathering is taking place at the hall on this recent afternoon, so it’s all right for a reporter to have a look around. The Naval Masonic room has features common to other lodges, such as the Mason emblem, a set square and compass and letter “G” (for both God and Geometry), and some decorative images, such as the Egyptian-styled eyes and snakes painted throughout.

Brown’s book moves quickly among such Washington landmarks as the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument and draws upon the Masons’ very public presence in Washington, dating back more than 200 years.

George Washington used a Masonic gavel and trowel in 1793 as he lay the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol. The same trowel would be included 55 years later when President James K. Polk, a Mason, presided over the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, and again in 1907 when President Theodore Roosevelt, also a Mason, laid a cornerstone for a Masonic temple.

According to “Freemasons for Dummies” author Christopher Hodapp (his book is so well regarded at the Naval lodge in Washington that it’s kept in a glass cabinet outside the meeting room), membership peaked in the United States just after World War II, when there were close to 5 million Masons.

The number dropped in the 1960s, when the Masons seemed hopelessly antiquated to a rebellious generation, and dropped again in the late 1980s as older members died. Hodapp, himself a Mason based in Indianapolis, says there are now around 1.5 million in the U.S. and 3 million worldwide.

“But it’s picking up again, in part because of people like Brown and (novelist) Brad Meltzer (‘Book of Lies,’ ‘Book of Fate’). Younger men are seeing popular references to it. We’re also seeing people from single-parent households who don’t have that kind of brotherhood feeling you get in the lodge,” Hodapp says.

Meetings at the Naval Masonic room are presided over by a Master who sits in a high-backed chair on the East side of the room, in honor of where the sun rises. On the South and West are chairs for the top aides, the senior warden and the junior warden. Only the North, “a place of Masonic darkness” (a belief related to the lighting of Solomon’s Temple) is not represented.

Every lodge has an altar on which is placed a holy book, or books. A Bible is usually there, but because only a belief in a higher being is required, a Quran or other religious text might be found, depending on the religious faith of the members present. The black and white squares of the checkered floor below the altar represent “good” and “evil,” terms the Masons resist defining too closely.

“As far as what is good and bad for any individual … the idea is to inspire thought on some of the important questions of life on the minds of our members so that they can go home and think about them and draw their own conclusions,” Crociata says.

Would-be members pass through three degrees of acceptance: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason. In “The Lost Symbol,” Brown describes an initiation ceremony that Hodapp says is essentially accurate. A man is blindfolded, has a dagger pressed against his chest and is instructed to vow that, “uninfluenced by mercenary or any other unworthy motive,” he will offer himself as “a candidate for the mysteries and privileges of this brotherhood.”

Brown is not a Mason, but said that working on the novel helped him imagine a time when religious prejudice would disappear and added that he found the Masonic philosophy a “beautiful blueprint for human spirituality.”

He was tempted to join, but, “If you join the Masons you take a vow of secrecy. I could not have written this book if I were a Mason,” he says.

And now?

“They’ve let me know the door is always open.”