Americans helped to create hell on earth, and reigned over it. Not content merely with rulership, they created Hollywood to project to the world the imagery of America, a form of bragging, needling, and self-promotion.

What the left asks for, pleads for, fights for, is heaven on earth. No war, no hunger, no disease.

But as the mighty survey the hell they rule, surrounding themselves in a pleasure bubble so as to not see outside. they simply do not accept a heaven where they are merely one lifeform among many equal ones. Heaven is defined as a place where I rule, they say. So they aim to achieve their “heaven on earth”, and at the present time they have clearly achieved that. This achievement itself fuels their belief that they deserve to rule, thus making any change of course impossible.

Which leads to the conclusion that only an outside force, destroying rulers and the structures which bring them to power, can destroy hell on earth.

The definition of hell the powerful believe in is “a place where I have lost power”. They will do anything to avoid their “hell on earth”, including the use of nuclear weapons and the utter destruction of the environment.

God, I had no idea about Camus’s support of occupied Algeria. I think it’s perhaps best not to have heroes. Two of mine – Mark Twain and John Muir – I’ve recently discovered loathed Native Americans. Judas Priest!!

I’ll look up Hess’s book, thanks.

Your slanders against motives of the late John Hess notwithstanding, he remains the finest guide to the “Paper of Record” that does much to sow confusion. Here is an amazon.com review of his memoir:

With a diamond-hard honesty rare, if not unique, among today’s journalists, John L. Hess has written a memoir that deflates the gas-filled balloon that is the New York Times. A reporter and editor for the Times for 24 years, Hess shows how from the moment Adolph Ochs purchased the newspaper in 1896 it has cozied up to corrupt politicians and wealthy businessmen. In a blurb on the jacket, Kurt Vonnegut terms the newspaper a “mighty crowd-control engine,” and indeed Hess provides many examples of the Times leading the way in suppressing news and information that might educate the public as to how they are being bilked. No one could read this book and still think that the Times is a liberal, much less an honest, newspaper.

excellent reality check as originally proposed by Camus, a taboo subject on almost every level.

While mankind is full of potential, we continue to fall far short of reaching it. How many more millennia do we need to reach our capacity? When will we learn to live in harmony with nature while becoming stewards of our home? When will we learn to stop killing for the wasted sake of killing and practice absolute kindness and love toward one another? When will humanity learn to unselfishly put others before themselves? Those are our shortcomings.

Mr. Smith in Matrix may have summed it up most accurately when he identified our species not as a mammal, but as a virus that continues to spread and contaminate once we’ve squandered all the resources of a region. While that may be a bit extreme, it also reflects an inarguable truth.

Our problem as a species is a lack of collective ascended consciousness which has been suppressed by our faulty belief systems that have remained quite static since before the days of Christ. How many people still believe in the traditional concept of heaven, hell and God as proposed by the church? Millions, billions? Ignorance breeds ignorance, and until our species learns to consistently think outside the box of conformity, and take others into consideration, that reality check which you propose again has merit.

Thanks for the article.

Best to you.

your point stands on its own, as sadness like any other emotion has value. It is the sadness that wells up when we travel the world and witness the injustices thereof which keeps us connected to our species. It is sadness that reminds us we are human indeed when observing human suffering, and sadness may thus lead us to do something about it; response writing, protesting, volunteering, proposing change. It is sadness that prevents us from accepting the world as it is, and consequently emboldens us to move in a direction toward positive change. Sadness is underrated.

Best to you.

I was relieved that you closed by saying that few escape, so as not to over-generalize. As a teacher, who went through the system realizing the basis of conformity in first grade, I make it a point to encourage my students to think critically and outside the appropriate confounds of acceptability. Their job is not to agree with what they are taught, but to analyze for themselves whether or not it adds up. While I don’t always agree with these young peoples’ perspectives, I continue to encourage their free thinking, and the dire necessity for more kindness in the world.

Best to you.

Throughout history, sadness has typically been regarded as an undesirable abnormality, the most severe cases of which can and should be counteracted through behavioural modification or medical treatment. Contemporary discussions of the neurochemical basis of emotion have reinforced this view by presenting sadness and depression as neurological flukes easily managed and cured through the use of serotonin-boosting anti-depressant medications. As a result, it is now commonly believed that one can overcome sorrow merely by taking a pill.
Against this view, some philosophers have argued that sadness is neither a disease to be cured nor a passing emotional quirk but rather a fundamental and constitutive aspect of being. Miguel de Unamuno, for example, has suggested that sadness “is the path of consciousness, and by it living beings arrive at the possession of self-consciousness.” 1 For Unamuno and other existentialists, sadness is an innate condition which arises out of the conflict between human aspirations for order, meaning, and immortality and the reality of a meaningless, inconstant world. Seen in this way, sadness is not something to be overcome, but embraced with a kind of stoical resolve.
Taking Unamuno as a point of departure, my aim in this paper is to defend a view which regards sadness as intimately related to the basic metaphysical condition of human beings. As I will argue, sadness is not chiefly a response to particular losses or failures. Rather, it is a deep-seated, numinous feeling shared universally by all human beings who continue to desire permanency in spite of the inevitability of loss.

The truth is that we humans are little better than primitive savages, ones with grossly inflated egos and little real intelligence. Look at our world. It condemns us.

A fowl yard is more inspirational, more worthy!

finally, regarding the Algerian question, camus said: When two of our brothers engage in a fight without mercy, it is criminal madness to incite one or the other. Between wisdom reduced to silence and madness which shouts itself hoarse, I prefer the virtues of silence.”

SK–I encourage you to read the works of camus and do some further research. he was as imperfect as any of us, but your concept of him is sadly warped. in my view, he was genuine outsider and “other.” Hess had ulterior motives.

Be not too hasty to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

In that other modern racial settler state of the Mediterranean, French Algeria, our teacher of morality ‘”opposed extremism and violence on both sides” and “favored a multicultural Algeria.”‘, yet his ‘”multicultural” vision presupposed French rule over Algeria. “I believe in justice,” Camus said, “but I shall defend my mother above justice.” This meant seeking solutions well short of majority rule and self-determination for Algerian Muslims, including bizarre schemes evocative of later Afrikaner designs to retain power in South Africa.’

Camus also “refused to speak out against the French terror in Algeria–a refusal that drew reproaches not only from the left but also from the Christian Democrat Francois Mauriac, the Gaullist Andre Malraux, the conservative Raymond Aron, and Camus’s allies in the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Stephen Spender.”

Here’s an excerpt from a review of Camus’ biography done by the late John Hess:

Intellectuals who along with Camus protested the crimes of Stalin appealed to him in vain to protest the crimes of France in Algeria. He did write to military judges several times asking clemency for condemned Algerians, Todd says, but became enraged when one such letter was made public. He expressed outrage at the Soviet assault on Budapest in 1956, but approved the French-British-Israeli assault on Egypt that year. He declined to speak out when Arab bodies turned up floating in the Seine, and protesters were crushed to death by a police charge in Paris. In fact, he broke a proclaimed withdrawal from political affairs to attend a dinner in support of Algérie Française, sitting at the head table with none other than Maurice Papon, then police prefect of Paris.

For this and other reasons many people were upset when Camus was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in December, 1957. It was thought that his anti-Soviet stand was a factor (Boris Pasternak was the choice the following year). Be that as it may, the occasion was marked by a single terrible phrase. Challenged in Stockholm to explain why he protested repression in Eastern Europe but not in Algeria, he replied, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”

It was a reply that could have been made by an Afrikaner, a Bosnian, an Israeli, an Arab, a Hindu, a Moslem, a white supremacist, a hard liner on crime – anyone in the worldwide war against the Other. And it was, of course, pure folly. The danger to Camus’s mother arose from the refusal of the settlers to contemplate equal rights for Arabs. They wreaked havoc and brought down the Fourth republic, and destroyed any chance to live in peace in their beloved country.

Sometime ago I wrote a short essay which may help make my point clearer. Here it is:

APOCALYPSE NOW

On August 6, 2005, was the anniversary of the dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, sixty years ago. In a split second over one quarter million people were exterminated. Never before in the History of Mankind have so many people been killed within an eye’s blink. This still remains the Undisputed World Record, held by America, the world record buster par excellence.
Adolph Hitler must have spun in his grave green with envy. It took him years and years to do away with six million, Gipsies, Jews, Poles, the retarded, the deformed, the incapacitated, and all those that did not conform to his ideal Aryan standard. How much more efficient would he have been if he had that gadget, he must have gritted his teeth with rage in that grave…
But world records are here to be broken sooner or later. We see it regularly in the Olympics. Or, who hasn’t seen, for example, those pub beer contestants guzzling large volumes of beer in the shortest time? From guzzling beer in the shortest time to the largest number of people incinerated in virtual no time is a very short step in any one’s imagination, shorter even than the celebrated Neil Armstrong’s hop on the Moon. And let me assure you, dear God, there is no lack of imagination in this Bush Administration.
A 60-year old world record has become rather stale. From the noises I hear from the media, I get the feeling that America is poised to break this staleness. Trigger-happy morons in the Administration are already looking around for possible candidates to strike at. Iran and North Korea are front line candidates. Oh, gee-whiz, I just heard on the news. Venezuela could be another! A Christian Coalition guru, an obviously brain-dead senior citizen, Pat Robertson, advocates that its Head of State, Hugo Chavez, should be murdered and save America over $200 billion in future war costs if it does act NOW. After all, is it not the new international diplomatic standard? Wanna get even with a Nation’s Head of State? Wipe out the whole Nation, pronto! Isn’t this what happened with Iraq? Once the precedent is established, thereafter it’s easy street.
Nevertheless, I still place my bet on North Korea. It’s long been a pariah nation. It is densely populated and with the modern WMD technology that evolved since Hiroshima, one could easily see a new world record of 2 million plus people blotted out of existence in a blink of an eye. Such a record would hold for many decades to come.

NOW, CONSIDER THIS:
If a much smarter and far more advanced Civilization in Outer Space hears of this record breaking frenzy on Earth, they might decide to jump in the act. They, too, would love to be Tops of the Pops, the Number One on the Podium. As in the lyrics of that popular song, they would blurt out:

Anything you can do, /we can do better. /We can do anything /better than you! /No, you can’t. /Yes, we can. No, you can’t.
Anything you can be / we can be smarter./ No, you can’t./ yes, we can. No, you can’t.
Anything you can be / we can be much greater./No, you can’t.
Yes, we can. No, you can’t.
Yes, we can.
Yes, we can.
Yes, we can !
Oh, Yea? Wanna try, LOVE?
Ok! You Dumb Asses, for the last few millennia, you have been ranting and harping over an imminent APOCALYPSE, so there you have it, NOW!
So, one morning, on a crystal clear blue sky, at 11am, on ground zero in New York, a massive hit from Outer Space pierces deep down into the Earth’s womb and blows up this planet and its 7 billion people to smithereens. Thus, a NEW (not World, because there wasn’t a World to speak of, any longer) INTER-GALACTIC RECORD of instantaneous destruction is established.
Sadly, there wasn’t even time to bundle and shove a Noah, his wife and ilk, into an Ark, a NASA Space Shuttle, and blast them off to another planet …
Curiously, but not surprisingly, the other Planets, Stars, Galaxies out there in this Universe continued moving, circling, contracting and expanding in their own Merry and Happy way, completely oblivious to this Cosmic Non-Event.
May be, God, in Your Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, You will decide to recreate another issue of Adam and Eve in some other corner of this Vast Cosmic Space. A greatly improved kind, I’m sure, for practice does make perfect. For that, moreover, You, dear God, will have all the time in the Universe to do it in. There won’t be any need to rush, like the first time round. A couple of days was too short a time to achieve Absolute Perfection. Even for a God!
Take Your Time, dear Almighty, you have all the time, an Eternity, to do it all in….

But assuming this will not be the case in our lifetimes, the best thing to do is just to work for our own happiness, and of course, the happiness of those connected to us, in the face of constantly impending disaster.

Here is my modest contribution: http://changedirection.wordpress.com

CHOPRA: In the meanwhile though, I think we have to seriously suffocate the financial pipeline that goes from Saudi Arabia to where we’re privy and part of through our oil addiction. We have to look at the weapons trade that we are part of, that supplies and sells weapons to every side of every conflict. So there are lots of issues here that have to be looked at. I think in the long term, there has to be a marshall plan that looks at the deeper causes of global instability, poverty, radicalism, lack of education.

KING: Dr. Chopra, we’ll come back and have a much greater time with him as this unfolds. His new book by the way is “Jesus: The Story of Enlightenment.” Thanks for the time. We’ll be back. Don’t go away

Let’s see if Chopra comes back on CNN.