in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue
Lots of folks don’t see Columbus as a hero.
Any feelings on this issue?
194 Thoughts to “Open Thread Monday, October 11”
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All contents copyright Moonhowlings.net
Blogroll
- 9500Liberty
- Bacons' Rebellion Blogspot
- Bearing Drift
- Blue Virginia
- Citizen Tom
- Counts of Monte Cristo. The
- Derecho, The
- Dixie Pig, The
- My Side of the Fence
- My Star Journey
- NARAL Pro-Choice VA Blog
- New Dominion Project
- Nova Common Sense
- NovaTownHall Blog
- One Libertarians's Point of View by Al Alborn
- Pete Candland's Blog
- Potomac Local
- Prince William Muckraker
- PW Conservation Alliance
- PWC Moms
- PWCPolitics.com
- PWCPolitics.com
- Red NoVA
- Shad Plank, The
- She the People
- State of NoVA, the
- The Jeffersoniad
- Townhall
- VEA Daily Reports
- VivianPaige
- WDGolden.com
- You, Me and the Lamp Post
“God In America” on PBS this week.
Am reminded of a New Yorker cartoon with a salesman in God’s office
waiting room asking the secretary “Well, is he in an Old or New Testament mood today?”
That’s actually very funny.
It starts at 9 pm and runs 2 hours. If you cant watch then, you can watch on channel 22 from 1 to 3 am.
George sent us the quiz to take. I missed 2. One x was gone head. The other I just didn’t know. http://features.pewforum.org/quiz/us-religious-knowledge/
Yep. I’m very glad that he bumped into America and that the English actually didn’t find gold, forcing them to colonize and grow things to make money.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.
columbus was an evil white male colonialist emperialist brute who in his quest for glory and wealth opened the floodgates for likeminded evil europeans to pillage the new world, decimate through the sword, gun, and smallpox the native populations who were living in utter tranquility with nature, and ultimately lay the groundwork for the most ugly behemoth to ever bestride the planet, namely, the u.s. of a
Weren’t most people back then?
I guess many of us have reaped the benefits. It was a dirty job but if it werent him it would have been someone else.
@e
Does Columbus owe you money or something?
i am ashamed that my country was founded on such turpitude and moral cowardice. at least in the soviet union everyone was considered an equal comrade without distinction to race or class, and if that damn reagan hadn’t come along the whole world would be now singing the internationale
@e
Wow, I’m pleased to tell you that your spaceship landed in the right place here! Lots of kindred spirits! You’ve met Starry, yes?
the dismal days of exploitative capitalism and dog-eat-dog mentality are rapidly coming to an end. soon universal healthcare will be law of the land, no one will go hungry or homeless because some selfish banker denies him access to capital, and we will join the brotherhood of nations as an equal partner, without any misguided preconceptions of american exceptionalism
E, youu can’t smoke something THAT good and not share…. That’s just rude.
i just returned from an extended summer vacation at a liberal re-education camp. no drug is as exhilarating as finally seeing the world as it really is. workers of the world unite!
moonhowler, can you change in comment 11 “summer camp” to “summer vacation”? thanks 😉
Liberal Re-education Camp. I can just picture it!!
@e
So, I’m guessing you’re a public school teacher?
actually the public school system and academia are doing a fine job along the same lines
Or a member of Obama’s cabinet?
no, but a democrat politician would certainly qualify too, if he were honest about his convictions
Well hi, e. I’m Slowpoke Rodriguez…the resident Xenophobe! Good to know ya’!
ditto. elena loves me
Hah. Like to pull legs, do you, e?
an old rush limbaugh tactic: demonstrate absurdity by being absurd
Yeah, we’re mixing Columbus Day and April Fool’s Day here.
The scary part is that there are people who would agree with everything “e” wrote and, in fact, does not go far enough……
If the English had found America we’d never had been done with them. So, I am a Columbus fan.
Besides growing up in New England, I’d have been really sad to miss all that great food produced in his honor by the best Italian cooks in the US!!!
@Juturna yeah, otherwise we’d be dining on pemmican. Three cheers for the dead white guy!
Wolverine has called it. e is doing some leg pulling. He is so darn conservative he makes slowpoke look like a wild haired liberal. (sorry slow)
e, Elena will starve you next time you visit for fooling her readers!!!
I knew I could suss you out with that!! The food, the food, the food and the happiness. My dad was one of the very few non-italians in his class – he was picked to play CC many times to avoid the arguments….!! He’s quite proud of that – being 100% Irish and RC it worked out well.
No pemmican – sopresatta. Or “soupy” as we call it from Dipollino’s – That’s SOUTHERN RI, Emma 🙂
http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/20101011/pl_dailycaller/greekhealthsystemoptsforamputationasmoneysaver
Greek Health System Opts for Amputation as Money-Saver
I think I’m insulted…….I think……..I’m not sure……..maybe I better just go to bed. 🙂
@Slow, don’t be. I was actually using you as a standard bearer.
Juturna, was that Christopher O’Columbus?
I guess that did stop the fights.
@Juturna Now you’re making me homesick. I’m from the middle of the state–you’re making me think of D. Palmieri’s and Federal Hill.
e,
You are causing trouble and I may just starve you, or at best, you can get some stale Challah bread and water 😉
Where is our visit BTW?
America started at Plymouth rock when we said : Amen, let’s eat! 🙂
Columbus didn’t actually come to what we think of as “America.” If I am not mistaken, he landed at what became Hispaniola–now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. As to Plymouth Rock–not so–Jamestown was settled in 1607′; thirtenn years before the Pilgrims. But folks are right–Columbs surely did screw over the folks he found there. And the crew introduced those nice Ruopean diseases we all know and love. 😎
Ooops–supposed to be European 😉
What was wrong with Leif Eriksson? He landed in No. America circa 500 years before Columbus but didn’t make much of a mark.
I’ve got a very large and interesting work on American Indians put together by National Geographic some years ago. The NG writers certainly did not cover up for what the original Spanish explorers and adventurers did to the local populations at that time. They, in fact, emphasized the howls of protest from some of the accompanying priests and monks in their efforts to stop the excesses. Interesting aside from the NG writers, however. They opined that the Conquistadors were only doing to the Indians what Europeans had been doing to each other for centuries.
These writers did not cover for the Indians either, especially when it came to the Aztecs and their penchant for ripping the hearts out of living prisoners of war or other hostages as their way of paying homage to their pantheon of gods. One sentence put the whole conquest scene very succinctly: “The cruel and sophisticated theocracy of Tenochtitlan had met its match with the arrival of the Conquistadors.” Sounds to me like what we had here in particular was two different slices from the same loaf of bread and that the stronger slice won. Which is about the way almost all history has gone.
The writers also tried to put the lie to that old shibboleth that the Native Americans just lived in peace and harmony with each other before the arrival of the Europeans. Quick to point out, they certainly were, the fact that the Aztecs had not just bought the Valley of Mexico from the previous owners at a real estate office.
Another sentence also stands out on the issue of the colonization of Central America: “In the next five years at least four more expeditions plundered up and down the Costa Rica-Nicaragua-Honduras region, usually accompanied by thousands of Indian allies happy to help the mighty strangers destroy their traditional enemies beyond the mountains.” Didn’t sound to me like it was all peace and harmony before Columbus showed up, anymore than Africa was all peace and harmony before the White Man came to assume his “burden.” Incidentally, I found that the Spanish got their Conquistador asses kicked pretty hard from time to time by the Indians. There must be old Spanish bones scattered all over the jungles of Panama.
I did a term paper in college on Columbus bringing syphilus back from the new world to Europe. Supposedly that disease was unknown in Euope before the age of discovery. I expect DNA testing would blow my theory all to hell nowadays.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Syphilis-Was-Brought-to-Europe-by-Columbus-But-Not-Via-Sex-76316.shtml
@punchak
But good ol’ Leif didn’t land in what we think of as the US of A–he landed in Newfoundland, which was called Vinland.
I think the “original people” as they are sometimes called or Amerindians may have been the first–coming across the Bering sea and down the west coast into what is now the US of A. I recent heard that there is some thought that perhaps there may have been a similar pathway across the Atlantic but there doesn’t seem to be any proof of that whatsoever. I guess we will never really know.
@Slowpoke Rodriguez
Thanks Slowpoke–here is some more “stuff” from Wiki–
Origins
Three theories on the origin of syphilis have been proposed. It is generally agreed upon by historians and anthropologists that syphilis was present among the indigenous peoples of the Americas before Europeans traveled to and from the New World. However, whether strains of syphilis were present in the entire world for millennia, or if the disease was confined to the Americas in the pre-Columbian era, is debated.
The “pre-Columbian theory” holds that syphilis was present in Europe before the discovery of the Americas by Europeans. Some scholars during the 18th and 19th centuries believed its symptoms were described by Hippocrates in Classical Greece in its venereal/tertiary form. There are other suspected syphilis findings for pre-contact Europe, including at a 13–14th century Augustinian friary in the northeastern English port of Kingston upon Hull. This city’s maritime history, with its continual arrival of sailors from distant places, is thought to have been a key factor in the transmission of syphilis. Carbon-dated skeletons of monks who lived in the friary showed bone lesions that supporters say are typical of venereal syphilis, although this is disputed by critics of this theory. Skeletons in pre-Columbus Pompeii and Metaponto in Italy with damage similar to that caused by congenital syphilis have also been found,although the interpretation of this evidence has been disputed. Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and other supporters of this idea say that many medieval European cases of leprosy, colloquially called lepra, were actually cases of syphilis. Although folklore claimed that syphilis was unknown in Europe until the return of the diseased sailors of the Columbian voyages, … syphilis probably cannot be “blamed”—as it often is—on any geographical area or specific race. The evidence suggests that the disease existed in both hemispheres from prehistoric times. It is only coincidental with the Columbus expeditions that the syphilis previously thought of as “lepra” flared into virulence at the end of the fifteenth century.
Lobdell and Owsley wrote that a European writer who recorded an outbreak of “lepra” in 1303 was “clearly describing syphilis.”
The “Columbian Exchange theory” holds that syphilis was a New World disease brought back by Columbus and Martin Alonso Pinzon. They cite documentary evidence linking crewmen of Columbus’s voyages to the Naples syphilis outbreak of 1494. This theory is supported by genetic studies of venereal syphilis and related bacteria, which found a disease intermediate between yaws and syphilis in Guyana, South America.
Finally, historian Alfred Crosby suggests both theories are partly correct in a “combination theory”. Crosby says that the bacterium that causes syphilis belongs to the same phylogenetic family as the bacteria that cause yaws and several other diseases. Despite the tradition of assigning the homeland of yaws to sub-Saharan Africa, Crosby notes that there is no unequivocal evidence of any related disease having been present in pre-Columbian Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Crosby writes, “It is not impossible that the organisms causing treponematosis arrived from America in the 1490s…and evolved into both venereal and non-venereal syphilis and yaws.” However, Crosby considers it more likely that a highly contagious ancestral species of the bacteria moved with early human ancestors across the land bridge of the Bering Straits many thousands of years ago without dying out in the original source population. He hypothesizes that “the differing ecological conditions produced different types of treponematosis and, in time, closely related but different diseases.”
Columbus landed at Gitmo in April 1494 during his second trip to the new world. Here’s a picture of a monument marking the spot where he landed. It was just down the hill from my office. He and his men stayed one night, realized there was nothing there, and left. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plaque_marking_Columbus_first_landing_in_Cuba.jpg
We know how syphilis and gonorrhea got to Guatemala in the late 1940s … courtesy of the USA. http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/rm/2010/148546.htm
Those Amerindians weren’t so innocent either. They saw a new market for their “product.”
Somewhere on a corner in the New World….
Indian: Psst. Hey! Over here…..want some?
Innocent explorer (IE): What do you mean? What’s that?
Indian: I got the good stuff. Primo Organic….
IE: What do you mean? I don’t know……..
Indian: C’mon…It won’t hurt you. Just one taste. You’ll like it…you’ll see.
IE: I don’t know…….just one?
Indian: Here man, this one’s on the house. Free…can’t get better than that. Just a little taste.. You can roll it or put into this thing call a “pipe.”
IE: Ok….ok…..what do I do…..
Indian…Well, first you light one end….
Woman Claims She Worked For Nevada Candidate Brian Sandoval While She Was Undocumented
With California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman still facing questions over whether she hired an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, another Republican hopeful is now facing similar allegations.
Channel 2 News in Nevada reported Monday night that a woman has stepped forward saying that the family of Republican Brian Sandoval, who is challenging Democrat Rory Reid for Nevada’s governorship, hired her to be a housekeeper while she was undocumented. (She and her family have since obtained citizenship.) The woman, Anna Padilla, said she stopped working for the Sandovals in July 1997.
Padilla said that while she was initially happy to see Sandoval running, she was disappointed to hear his stance on immigration and now no longer supports anyone in the gubernatorial race. “In the time I worked with him, he supported me,” said Padilla. “Now he says he does not support Latinos that are already here?”
http://www.8newsnow.com/story/13305389/gubernatorial-candidate-denies-employing-illegal-immigrant
Golly, there sure are a lot of Republicans hiring illegal aliens out there. They’re making a good case for making them legal.
With California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman still facing questions over whether she hired an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, another Republican hopeful is now facing similar allegations.
Except, of course, that those questions have been found to be, well…stupid. And answered.
Of course, if said illegals provide ID, it is AGAINST CURRENT LAW to fire them even if the SS admin states that there is a problem……
Nice try Starry.
Though it is nice to see that California and Nevada have already covered the important issues and are now worried about hired help issues.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/why-is-this-gop-house-candidate-dressed-as-a-nazi/64319/
Why is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?
Oct 8 2010, 10:00 PM ET 1592
An election year already notable for its menagerie of extreme and unusual candidates can add another one: Rich Iott, the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio’s 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite, who for years donned a German Waffen SS uniform and participated in Nazi re-enactments.
I keep hearing he is a re-enactiment history buff. @Pinko
Who knows.
George, I sure hope I don’t have to give my A back for that paper. I got so darn few of them back then, It might be the only one, as a matter of fact. That was so long ago they might not have discovered carbon dating even.
KRYSTAL BALL NATIONAL PRESS SCHEDULE TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12
10:30 am EST MSNBC Jansing & Co.
Live interview with Chris Jansing
1:20 pm EST FOX America Live
Live interview with Megyn Kelly
9:00 pm EST HLN The Joy Behar Show
Interview with Joy Behar
I love it that after the trash I read about her on the dark side she has been catapulted into national fame.
She needs to thank the master and the minions for her leap from obscurity.
@Moon-howler
But Nazis? What kind of person would do that? Is that someone who should be in office?