Say Anything Blog

According to this story soon every child will be mandated to recieve the vaccine!

Check it out here.

Continued from Part 1

They brought out all the usual arguments.  But the Venetians were not so much convinced by the French as they convinced themselves.  They were, they said to themselves (just as Madeleine Albright would repeat centuries later), the “indispensible nation.” Without them, the effort would fail; therefore they must act.  Yes, they could still fail, they acknowledged, but look what they had to gain!  For not only would they being doing good, but they stood to do well, too-implanting trading posts and ports along the way.

And so a fleet of 50 galleys was assembled and set off, the old doge leading the way.  Finding their French allies a bit worse for wear and tear, the Venetians proposed a new deal:  Instead of attacking the infidels forthwith, they would warm up with an assault on Zara, a town on the Dalmation coast that had recently rebelled against its Venetian masters.

The French protested.  They had come to make war against the enemies of Christ, not against other Christians.  But since they needed the Venetians’ support, they had no choice.

In five days, the city of Zara surrendered; its defenses were no match for the armies in front of them.  And so the city was sacked and the booty divided up.  Soon after came a letter from Pope Innocent III, who wondered why they were killing fellow Christians; it was the pagans they were meant to be killing, he reminded them.  He commanded them to leave Zara and proceed to Syria, “neither turning to the right hand nor to the left”

The pope’s letters greatly troubled the pious French, but the Venetians seemed undisturbed.  They ignored the letters and remained in Zara until a new comic opportunity presented itself.

This time Constantinople was the unfortunate target.  A young prince from that city had come to them, asking for support for a mission at once as audacios as it was absurd.  His father had been blinded and thrown in a dungeon; the capital of Eastern Christendom was in the hands of men who must have been the ancestors of Saddam Hussein-evil usurpers, dictators whom the people detested.  If the Venetians would come to his aid, he promised , the would be rewarded genourously.  More than that, he and his father would return the entire Eastern Empire back to the one true church of St. Peter in Rome.

The Venetians couldn’t resist.  In April 1204, they set sail for Bosporus Strait.  And in a great battle that must have been an undertaker’s dream, they took the city.

It proved, however, that the young prince on whose stories and promises the campaign was launched had been a bit frugal with the truth.  Like the intelligence services’ warnings of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, his depiction of the circumstances prevailing in Constantinople at the time was inaccurate.  Much of it seemed fanciful.

Though the initial conquest was fairly easy and glorious, subsequent events were less so.  The local population rose up against the invaders.  The city had to be retaken; this time the battle was bloodier, and thousands of innocent citizens were put to the sword.

As near as historians can tell, the Venetians earned no lasting gain or benefit.  Dandolo died in 1205, never having set foot in his homeland again.  As for his compatriots, what was left of them eventually returned to Venice.

“But there still remains in Venice,” adds Mrs Oliphant, “one striking evidence of the splendid, disastrous expedition, the unexampled conquests and victories yet dismal end, of what is called the Fourth Crusade.  And that is four great bronze horses, curios, inappropriate bizaree ornaments that stand above the doorways of San Marco.  This was the blind doge’s lasting piece of spoil.’

“Been there. Done that,” whispers the old doge.

Tommorrow “The Tyranny of the Living”

The Following is an excerpt from “Empire of Debt”

“Democracy! Empire! Freedom! Nation building!” The ideas are cast into the murky lagoon of human affairs as if the words were clarifying magic.  Suddenly, wrong is as distant from right, as day from night.  Good from bad… success from failure… how clearly we see things in the crystal waters of our own delusions!

The United States congratulates itself as being the finest democracy the world has ever seen, but the system for ruling Venice eight centuries ago was also democratic.  People voted for people who voted voted for other people, who then voted for yet more people who elected the doge.  The whole idea was to allow ordinary people to believe that they ran the nation, while real authority remained in the hands of a few families-the Bushes, Kennedys, Gores, and Rockefellers of thirteenth-century Venice.

“So easy is it to decieve the multitude,” say Mrs. Oliphant. “The sovereignty of Venice, under whatever system carried on, had alway been in the hands of a certain number of families, who kept their place with almost dynastic regularity undisturbed by any intruders from below-the system of the Consiglio Maggiore was still professed to be a represenative system of the widest kind; and it would seem at the first glance as if all honest men who were da bene and respected by their fellows must one time or other have been secure of gaining admission to that popular parliament.”

To Mrs. Oliphant’s dictum on the multitude, we add a corollary: It is even easier to decieve oneself.  Today, rare are the Americans who are not victims of their own scams.  They mortgage their homes and think they are getting richer.  They buy Wall Street’s products as though there were gambling in Las Vegas and believe they are as clever as Warren Buffet. They went to the polling stations in November of 2004 and believed they were selecting the government they wanted, when the choice had already been reduced to two men of the same class, same age, same schooling, same wealth, same secret club, same society, with more or less the same ideas of about how things should be run.

In Washington, DC the United States Senate meets in the same solemn deceit as the Consiglio Maggiore-pretending to do the public’s business.  While down the street, America’s own doge, George W. Bush, takes up where the Michieli and the Dandolos left off: trying to hustle the East.

Making a very long story short, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, as at the beginning to the twenty-first, may people saw a clash of civilizations coming and sharpened their swords.  They were, then as now, the same civilizations, clashing in about the same part of the world- the Middle East.


More tommorrow

A woman in a hot air balloon realizes she is lost. She lowers her altitude and spots a man fishing from a boat below.

She shouts to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consults his portable GPS and replies, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolls her eyes and says, “You must be a Republican!”

“I am,” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answers the balloonist, “everything you tell me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’re not much help to me.”
The man smiles and responds, “You must be a Democrat.”

“I am,” replies the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the man, “You don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met , but, somehow, now it’s my fault.”

What do retired people do all day?

Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting. Well, for example, the other day I went down town and into a shop. I was only there for about 5 minutes and when I came out there was a cop writing out a parking ticket.

I said to him, “Come on, man, how about giving a retired person a break?” He ignored me and continued writing the ticket. I called him a “Nazi.” He glared at me and wrote another ticket for having worn tires. So I called him a “doughnut eating Gestapo.” He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first. Then he wrote a third ticket. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more I abused him the more tickets he wrote.

Personally, I didn’t care. I came downtown on the bus, and the car that he was putting the tickets on had a bumper sticker that said “Hillary in ‘08.”

I try to have a little fun each day now that I’m retired. It’s important to my health.

This is the theme song from “Pump Up the Volume” featuring Happy Harry Hard-On and his illegal radio station. Enjoy