In elementary school I won a Columbus Day essay contest sponsored by the Roman Cultural Society of Springfield, Illinois for making the audacious claim (so I was told) that Columbus did not discover America. I have ignored Columbus since then, except as a disease vector. I doubt I would have managed to win that contest had I known of another aspect of Columbus, which I only learned about today:

By the time Christopher Columbus appeared in Lisbon in 1477 an Old World slave trade was thriving in the eastern Atlantic between West Africa, the Atlantic islands, and Europe. In his famous letter on his first voyage he informed Ferdinand and Isabella he could, with their help, give them “slaves, as many as they shall order.” On his second voyage Columbus loaded five hundred Indian slaves aboard returning caravels. On the last leg of his voyage to Cadiz, “about two hundred of these Indians died,” a passenger recorded, appending, “We cast them into the sea.” In this manner the discoverer of the New World launched the transatlantic slave trade, at first in Indians and from west to east.

–James Rawley, with Stephen Behrendt, The Transatlantic Slave Trade

This via Byran Caplan’s timely post Columbus: The Far Left is Dead Right, which includes an always timely plea to dishonor ‘great men.’

It is long past time to terminate officious recognition of Columbus Day and remove representations of slave owners from currency and other objects of jurisdiction worship. I consider this a mild compromise position on the road to smashing hero worship, which I admit has near zero constituency.

This evening I stumbled upon the California gubernatiorial debate on the radio during the opening statements. At one point the moderator claimed he would be “brutal” but was completely ineffective. Every question evoked a vacuous response from each candidate, nearly all of which completely ignored the question asked. Angelides in particular needs to be banned from saying “hard working” and “middle class”, which seems to cover annual household icomes from $18,000 to $500,000 — feel the vacuity! Both need to be banned from saying “education” (and what the heck does “fully funding” education mean? relative to what?).

But a response from Schwarzenegger was the most offensive. Asked what he would do to balance the state budget in the face of an economic downturn, he said “Talking about hypotheticals is not my style.”

Try using that in a job interview.

…

Please stop this insane deference to royalty. Start by addressing by name, not job title or former job title. Yes, president, vice president, senator, governor and the like are job titles, not peerages.

Although raised Catholic I did not realize there was a difference between purgatory and limbo. According to the BBC the Roman Catholic Pope may shortly “abolish” the latter:

The Pope, himself, has been quoted in the past as saying that he would let the idea of limbo “drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis”.

That would be rich if it weren’t redolent. Get back to me when the theologians have a test for this hypothesis.

Limbo may deter sheep in regions with high infant deathrates from joining the Roman Catholic flock, so doctrine may be changed such that unbaptised infants and the unborn go straight to heaven instead of languishing in limbo, to improve the competitive position of this particular earthly church. I’d rather they switch back to RCC’s old mythology — the unbaptised go straight to hell. Otherwise, new signs will be needed, and that would be a waste.

Ratzinger head from here.

Via Mahalanobis, where I also found a nice cartoon two years ago.