This may be all we have. To live slightly better lives than the people who came before us.
Critical, feminist, broad in scope, Life of refinement aims to share insight and expose the operation of power. The goal of this web page is to get at the important stuff. To talk about living — with an emphasis on reflection and deep consideration. To write, fight and lovingly articulate a more just world into existence.
Editor, author and site owner is Maxwell Schnurer (Ph.D) — aprofessor of communication at Humboldt State University. Maxwell is the co-author of the best-selling debate textbook Many Sides: Debate across the Curriculum (IDEA Press, 2000, 2002). He is also a contributor to groundbreaking texts on animal liberation, earth liberation, and anarchism. Schnurer has written for journals such as Wax Poetics and Adbusters.
Maxwell is also known as King Maxwell, a Humboldt county DJ whose exploits and gigs are chronicled here.
Life of refinement 
Life of refinement as reflected by my uncle:
“Enlightenment 101 is that ecstasy and suffering are never far apart. Max could talk blues about the news well enough to make your hair curl, turn grey, and jump off your head after two paragraphs, as often he does, while I have been living the glorious life of refinement since maybe 1960.”
“It is possible to have a full belly and still comprehend famine. It is possible to drink fresh lemon balm tea from the garden while appreciating what it is like to crawl for miles through the desert with a bullet in your back, looking for non-existent water. My Paradise is located right in the middle of the Real World. Things could change at any time.”
“So I might live a “life of refinement,” but I choose to “Talk Blues About The News,” to remind my readers, who are probably mostly people almost as lucky as me, of how the other 99% lives. It does you no good to hear how comfortable I am. You learn nothing from that. But if you can identify with the poor cows being whipped into the slaughterhouse in Indonesia, or with the cats in Beijing who were taken off the streets and locked in warehouses to starve during the Olympics so they wouldn’t bother the tourists, then maybe the world might someday become a better place. ”
http://barryhyman.wordpress.com
My brother can be depressing, and he kind of oozes out from the dark side and throws guilt grenades, and takes you where you don’t want to go. But he’s a prophet., And he never lies (he never could). Also he does it for vitally good reasons. Hey, Max, you can just put other people’s blogs in your blog some days? That’s pretty cool. Gives you a bigger wardrobe, And it’s also like brain-to-brain transfers, where you send a few minutes from Barry’s heart/mind right to your readers, sploosh. In your “blog”. Let me see if they will let me sign up. love, Sadie Damascus (Listen to The Laughing Lady Show on the radio—streaming at KGGVFM.ORG at ten pm Sundays, at KOWS.FM at five pm Weds)