Monday, November 21, 2016

That's why it's the District of Columbia, not District of Cabot!


Bloomington Indiana renamed Columbus Day to "Fall Holiday".
In the name of Political Correctness gone awry
or because you can never make amends for history?

Would they have renamed it if it  had been called Leif Erickson's Day or John Cabot's Day or even Ponce de Leon Day, as each of them actually set foot on North America, Christopher Columbus never did?

What Columbus "discovered" was the Bahamas archipelago and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America.
He never got close to what is now called the United States.

He only landed in Central America, after trying to escape a Hurricane, on his fourth and final voyage and returned home after not finding a route through, as well as being decimated by the locals.
It's rumored that Ponce de Leon was a member of the 2nd voyage of Columbus, where he heard about the GOLD. Which prompted Ponce de Leon to get the sponsorship of the same King as Columbus, for his own expedition.

Leif Erickson landed on Newfoundland about 400 years before Columbus. John Cabot also landed in Newfoundland and claimed it for England in 1497, and coasted down the Atlantic seaboard to Chesapeake Bay in 1498.
So three explorers, Columbus, Cabot and de Leon, all explored the same region in the same decade, but only two actually set foot on American soil.

So why does the United States celebrate the guy who thought he found a nifty new route to Asia and the lands described by Marco Polo?
This is because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain.

John Cabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Caboto, another Italian) "discovered" Newfoundland in England's name around 1497 and paved the way for England's colonization of most of North America.

So the American colonialists instead turned to Columbus as their hero, not England's Cabot.
Hence we have the capital, Washington, D.C. — that's District of Columbia, not District of Cabot.
http://www.livescience.com/16468-christopher-columbus-myths-flat-earth-discovered-americas.html

OH, and we're not going to discuss why they renamed Good Friday to.............Spring Holiday?

DON'T BE BLUE

In the wake of Facebook's News Feeds, we have this! AND IT'S AN OLD STORY.

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR NEWS?
From Business Insider's Pamela Engle, Oct 21 2014.
News outlets like CNN and ABC News might have the biggest audiences, but they're not the most trusted across-the-board in America.

The most trusted news outlets in America, according to a new study from Pew Research Center, are actually British.

BBC and The Economist top the list of outlets that are trusted by every ideological group, while BuzzFeed and The Rush Limbaugh Show are at the bottom.

Conservative-leaning news outlets seem to be the least trusted among those with a mixed political ideology. Liberal-leaning outlets like Mother Jones and ThinkProgress also rank lower than major media players like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The news outlets that are considered trustworthy by every ideological group don't equate to the most popular outlets, however.
Americans say they get most of their political news from local TV, Facebook, and major networks like CNN and Fox News.
CNN and Fox News both had a high trust rating overall, but there is more of a dispute between ideological groups about whether they're trustworthy. For example, 88% of consistent conservatives said they trust Fox News, but only 14% said they trust CNN.
For the study, Pew surveyed a representative sample of randomly selected Americans.


DON'T BE BLUE