Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! As today is the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the “New World,” I thought it appropriate to examine his impact on the Old World—specifically on the part of the Old World controlled by Muslim powers in 1492.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
Interesting point about tax farming and the corrosive effect on society’s long term health. I am just old enough to remember when the Harvard Business Review came out with its classic article, Managing our Way to Economic Decline, that detected the now well established change in American business culture that favored short term bonanzas over long term health. When I look at what this has done to American Science I get absolutely despondent, and now you zap me with a suggestion that maybe we never will recover fully.
So, history is not zzzzzzzzzz but AWESOME!!!!!11!
And as an aside, brother in law is from Valencia where they speak the local dialect (incomprehensible to my ear) in the home and they really don’t care for those @ssholes up in Castile. You’d think that after six hundred years they might get along better, a fact which does not bode well for the Treason in Defense of Slavery crowd getting with the program and joining up with the rest of the Union.