Education Does Not Necessarily Lead to Wisdom

human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

Clarence Thomas

What in the hell does this crap have to do with treating people fairly under the law, and this from a man who left the shores of dignity for some weird island of thought where governments of, by and for the people don’t have to give a damn about 99.9 % of the people, a supposedly well educated man who cannot see the injustice in inhumanity. Who the hell gives a damn about dignity if nobody is looking out for each other. I say to hell with dignity, give me compassion and empathy and justice instead.

Posted in banality of evil, can't really complain but, Check this out, delusions of progress, philosophy | Tagged , | Leave a comment

I’m Still Learning It- Chris Smither and a Lifetime of Killing the Blues.

How have I never heard of this guy before. His life and his music are one. He has lived his music. That can’t be a bad way to move along with this living thing.

Here is Chris Smither talking about his life as a musician and some great songs he wrote.

Thom Hickey's avatarThe Immortal Jukebox

‘Somebody said they saw me, swinging the world by the tail,
Bouncing over a white cloud – killing the blues’. (Roly Salley)

‘I been left for dead before – but I still fight on
Don’t wait up – Leave the light on, I’ll be home soon’. (Chris Smither)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s groups of earnest, intense young men in the great academic institutions of America began to develop what can only be called an obsession with Afro-American blues music which had been recorded in the pre war period.

Names like Son House, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James began to take on a hallowed and mythical status. As they endlessly played the few records they could find of these mystery figures from the 1920s and 1930s (to the despair of their room and dorm mates) they wondered: could it be that some 30 or more years after…

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Posted in Check this out, make your own world, music, my museum of inspiration, Other peoples words | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Pen, Paper and a Room Full of Sleeping Babies

I doodled two images while I watched some sleeping babies and worked with them on Photoshop.

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The Last Light of a Day in Late May

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Pieces of a Puzzle

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The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth— as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of the indigenous communities that stood in their way. The technical and scientific forces that created unparalleled luxury and unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite are the forces that now doom us. Ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel— thirteen of the fourteen warmest years since weather record-keeping began over a century ago have occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century— we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism.

– Chris Hedges,  Wages of Rebellion

Posted in delusions of progress, make your own world, Other peoples words, thinking in words | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment