Lest Blood Be Shed

Well, the eggs have gone missing and I don't see any fry swimming around in the tank My guess is that the plecostomus ate the eggs right out of the nest. The picture to the left is the alleged culprit. Look at him all happy and sucking away at the rocks! Oh well, such is life. At least the pleco was happy having a breakfast of scrambled eggs.

In other news... I think my iPod is cheating on me.

In my daughters of ethiopia class last night the professor declared that all of history is a fiction story told by a person with a bias. I tend to agree. We only have the records of facts that someone in the past thought was important to tell a story. That is to say, to explain why they think something ended up the way it did. It does not give the full picture only the story the "historian" wants to tell.

For example, the French Revolution was interpreted to have been caused by the monarchy and various other aristocratic and political (I hope you all know your history I don't want to recount it) blah blah blah. But that was a history from the aristocratic perspective written by people concerned with why their upper middle class system was revolting against the king. This was accepted as history as to why France had a revolution and beheaded their king. Another perspective has been written recently though that looks at the revolution from the perspective of the sansculottes (shoeless people) and as it turns out they were the ones (in their minds and chronologically) who started the French Revolution and the reason was because they wanted bread. The king was beheaded because the sansculottes could not get bread.

History is perspectival and filled with personal emphasis on particular events that may or may not give the reader an accurate picture of what every single person affected by the event felt, thought, or how they reacted to this event.

I would say that Theology is the same but even more tribal in nature. It's a good thing may of the early church leaders knew this and wrote their story accordingly. The early church was very diverse and it liked it until it was taken over by "The Empire." Christianity is a faith that should be based on a unity that brings about diversity not a unity that brings about uniformity as Constantine molded it.

Added September 29th, 2004 09:27: It seems the discussion for this entry has moved to David McNelis' blog

I did a search(vanity of vanity all is vanity) for my name recently. You've done it too! While I was searching I found out there is a Mutant named Emma deLauro and I confirmed that my relative in congress is in fact hideous. The really interesting thing (and the reason I'm writing this) is that I found people referring to this blog! Thanks everyone for the interest... even if you are a dink (David McNelis).

I have been taking care of two black angelfish along with many other fish for quite some time now and they have been a real joy to watch. Today while I was cleaning their tank I noticed one of the angelfish acting really strange. Usually when I clean the tank all the fish run away from the siphon that I use to drain some of the water. The angelfish didn't move away while I started to drain the tank. I looked a little closer to where she was and noticed that she was protecting a nest of eggs! It should have been the first thing I looked for since her ovapositer has been haning out for two or three days now. If all goes well the eggs should be hatched in 36-48 hours and if the other fish don't eat the fry I'm going to be a daddy.

Life is such a joy! Dispite all the horrible things our imperialist government is doing simple things like an angelfish laying eggs brings things into perspective. Life is good, very good. It really is a shame that our current civilization treats life with such disregard by polluting and destroying the only place we and all the other forms of life have to live.

Our current government is running on a Pro-Death platform. God save us!

[rant]
Slowly but surely over the past 25 years the gap between the rich and the poor has grown in the united states. I was aware of that "fact" just as I'm sure all of you are but what is troubling is that it's not just some slow social darwinism at work in a capitalistic democracy and the gap is far from slow growing. The United States of American is the most economically unequal nation in the industrialized world! This inequality is breaking our democracy and turning our country into a fascist state. There has been carefully crafted legislation over the past 25 (or more) years that has given money to corporations or the wealthiest in our country at the detriment of the middle or poor classes. The legislation that has been put in place looks more like a "fascist constitution" than it does a democratic constitution for the people. Did you know that a corporation is considered a person? Well it is, I can't wait until a corporation gets a vote in our democracy (though I'm sure they get votes on individual legislations with money).
[/rant]

The reason I bring this up is I was surfing the PBS website and in particular the NOW with Bill Moyers program information. (Bill Moyers is such a great journalist, commentaryist?, philosopher, speaker I'm glad pbs carries his show) One of his programs was devoted to this class struggle when a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) found that the United States was the most economically unequal industrialized nation. There is some good information on the pbs page: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/income.html Even better are Bill Moyers comments.

The question now becomes... What can be done to stop the juggernaut that is fascist corporate america? How would Jesus react to the poor becoming more oppressed and poor as well as a ruling class of rich aristocracts imposing moral law upon the people? Brood of vipers anyone?

All these people running around like chickens with their heads cut off... Following party lines without critical examination of the facts... Listening to the media organizations that are owned by multinational corporations that fund the political parties... The American Political System is in ruins! We need a new system of government based on local authority over federal authority. Not the hierarchical crap that we and many ancient throwbacks of organizations have now.

I want a black japanese american lesbian woman for president! I wonder if she would run on a platform of discrimination?

For sure she wouldn't cover up a missle going into the pentagon and not an airplane http://pages.infinit.net/noc/pentagon.swf