power to the people

Works for me.

Good thing I have a viable alibi....

Thus when the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria made landfall in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, Columbus naturally assumed he had hit Asia. Sure, he saw no sign of the silk and pepper he was looking for, but he did find some people to call “Indians,” with a small (but still worth it) amount of gold to steal. In 1493 his patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, sent Columbus back across the ocean. He was given a sweet new title, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and instructed to rob the place—wherever it was—blind. The admiral was then to serve as governor of whatever was left. This is where an understandable mistake turns into bullheaded stupidity. On the four return expeditions from 1493 to 1502, it gradually dawned on everyone but Columbus that the land they were exploring wasn’t the East Indies. This suspicion was supported by a whole bunch of evidence, including the testimony of natives who insisted, again and again, that they’d never heard of China, Japan, India, silk, pepper, elephants, or any of that nonsense.

 Amerigo Vespucci, dispatched in 1499 by the king of Portugal as quality control, wrote in his first report that “these regions…may rightly be called a new world,” and was later honored by having his name stamped on the place. But Columbus scoffed at his colleague. He dismissed the locals as “bestial men who believe the whole world is an island,” and forced his crew, under threat of corporal punishment, to sign an affidavit declaring they’d discovered Asia. Obstinate till the very end, Columbus died in 1506, still believing he was right.  

 Geography wasn’t the only subject Columbus failed at: he was also a terrible governor. In fact, he was so bad that Ferdinand and Isabella called him back to Spain in chains in 1503 to answer charges of corruption and brutality. In 1546, the Dominican monk Bartolomé de las Casas wrote:  On the island of Hispaniola, of the above three million souls that we once saw, today there be no more than two hundred of those native peoples remaining…The Spaniards have shown not the slightest consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there from the outset) not as brute animals—indeed, I prayed to God that they might treat them as well as animals—so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road.  The monarchs found Columbus not guilty (raping and pillaging had kind of been the whole point), but ordered him into retirement.

The Mental Floss History of the United States: The (Almost) Complete and (Entirely) Entertaining Story of America

By Erik Sass, Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur

Power to the people only when it suits causes you back.  Otherwise it is STFU right?

Wonder how "the people" will react when someone they don't agree with takes the law into their own hands?

So true.  

Lawless behavior is okay as long as you can justify it somehow with one of your preferred narratives.

Classic liberal logic.