Lalo Alcaraz for October 12, 2021

It is no more of a theory than gravity… But the GQP doesn’t believe in that either.

Some people make me sick and I’m not talking smallpox, I mean small brains when they say things like critical race theory . . .

Two of the most eye opening books I ever read were 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann.

Paul Colabufo

October 8, 2018

There’s lots of controversy around Columbus Day, and since I’m 100% Italian, I figure I should give my two cents.

You can’t have an opinion about Columbus Day without knowing something about Christopher Columbus himself, so lets take a quick look at his life …

He grew up in a time where the globe already existed, the existence of North America was already known in Europe, and people generally weren’t as stupid as we make them out to be.Columbus wanted to find a faster route to Asia, and his sales pitch was that Japan’s shore was only three thousand kilometers away to the West. In reality its about 20,000 kilometers away and there’s a little thing called North America in the way as well. Even back then people knew he was full of crap. Columbus was what we would call a science denier today.

Well, you can imagine how a science denier might be treated during the Renaissance in the country that birthed the Renaissance. He was basically laughed out of Italy. He was then laughed out of Portugal and England before Spain decided to finance him.

Columbus then sailed West, and he never found a fast rout to Asia, and he never discovered America. In fact, Columbus NEVER SET FOOT ON AMERICAN SOIL at any time in his life! He actually landed in what is today the Dominican Republic and found a peaceful people who lived in a society with no weapons.

Of course he decided to enslave them.

A few trips back and fourth to Spain and he worked out an agreement with the royals, he got to keep 10% of all the wealth he created for them.

His method of enslaving the natives was to come in with guns and weapons, capture hundreds of them, dismember them, and then march their dismembered body parts across the Island for everybody to see.

Yeah, he was that crazy. <pHis rule, as you might imagine, was no less gruesome. He was known for cutting off the body parts of people who displeased him and selling them into

slavery minus an ear, or a nose, or an arm, etc. So he was a science denying, torturing, murdering, madman who enslaved a peaceful people … at least he wasn’t a child molester.Oh wait, he did that too!

A lot of Columbus’s money was made selling women into slavery, or what we would call today sex trafficking. He still liked to dismember them too. And he thought the ideal age for a woman, sexually, was under 13, so you can imagine the types he targeted not only personally, but to sell in his sex trafficking business.

When Spain found out how he was making them money, instead of giving him 10% of it they threw him in jail.

Think about that. He was treating these people so badly that a society who thought it was okay to enslave their own people, put him in jail for what he was doing to foreigners!

So how did a science denying, murdering, child rapist who never once set foot on American soil, and who was outcast by the Italian people come to be celebrated as an American hero and a symbol for Italian Americans?The answer to this question is found in Upstate New York.

America’s first worldwide celebrity was an author named Washington Irving. You’ve probably read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Rip Van Winkle. That’s him. He also wrote a lesser known FICTIONAL story called A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

In this fictional work, Christopher Columbus is a proud Italian, who proved the world was round instead of flat, and discovered America while doing so.

When Italian immigrants started coming to America the people who were already living here treated them like shit (proving that nothing good ever happens when you treat immigrants like shit)… and they found, in the pages of arguably America’s greatest ever author, justification for why Italians should be accepted. Hey an Italian discovered this place, you can’t tell us we don’t belong!

So Italian American’s pushed for this fictional version of

LOL, people around here are now accusing every teacher about CRT! I teach an electronics course at a local college, and don’t discuss anything with students except electronics stuff, but I’ve been having run-ins with locals who insist that I MUST be teaching all kinds of bad stuff – they don’t care whether their accusations are true, they just want to make noise. I offered some of them an opportunity to ask my students about it, or to sit in a class or two, but they declined – one just added an accusation that I was lying and that I would coach those students’ responses…

Some “people” think (?) that “Great Replacement Theory” should be taught instead of “Critical Race Theory”.

I have found that most people who are vehemently opposed to CRT cannot tell you what it is, not in the least, but they’re opposed to it. That alone speaks volumes about race in America.

The audience member was just “assuming” the girl learned it in school—bright kids can learn more outside of school than they do in school—there is a lot more to learn than the ol’ “3 R’s”…….

Shouldn’t it be ‘’First Nation’’?

Or North American Pre Columbian indigenous people?

Well dona Lalo.

Another stirring drawing, Lalo!

Just like Hernan Cortes did, right?

Fact is…CC even went too far for Ferdinand and Isabella (who were OK with the Inquisition) and they jailed his a $$. This was not a fine person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus

Like science, History has evolved as new knowledge is found about the past. When I was growing up, I (and other kids growing up at the time) was taught that Columbus sailed in the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria to search for India (which at the time was called Hindustan by European mapmakers) and/or to prove the Earth was round (even though most, if not all, world historians now say the notion of a round world was already widely accepted throughout Europe in Columbus’ time). And Columbus did not “discover” America, Lief Erikson discovered it in the 1300’s (and the Indigenious Tribes discovered it thousands of years earlier). But all history needs to be discussed, both the bad (slavery, displacement, etc.) as well as the good (civil rights, the voting rights movement). As George Satayana wrote, “Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it”.

Is that screaming woman Karen?

Funny how Lalo Alcaraz condemns this. Maybe he needs to take a look at what the Spanish did to Mexico and South America

Im crying white tears

I agree Columbus did some bad things, but we gotta learn to take the good with the bad.