~~   Conquistadores

On June 7, 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, divvying up such of the world as was not already under Christian rule between them.  Though blessed by a Pope after the fact, the other European powers, not having signed it, ignored it, as did the indigenous people whose lands and persons were subject to seizure, occupation and foreign rule as a result of the treaty.  This, of course, led to an explosion of "exploration", "discovery", claims on and theft of lands and all their resources, and to the enslavement, murder, torture and mistreatment of the residents of those lands, and not just by Portugal and Spain, but by England and France, and, eventually, all of Europe's many "states".  But it was all legal, and holy, and good, and even, eventually, enshrined in the US Constitution.

The Treaty of Tordesillas and the subsequent Treaty of Zaragosa were preceded, accompanied, clarified, modified, adjusted, justified and all else by a lot of papal bullshit, crown proclamations and pronunciamentos, rulings and declarations by governors and viceroys and, eventually, as must come to pass regarding all things, jurists.  (Diderot has some pithy wisdom regarding Kings and Priests, but somehow overlooked Jurists.)  In short, out of the wealth of amoral sociopathic self-centered egotism and ism surrounding that awful treaty arose The Doctrine of Discovery.

Per the doctrine of discovery, as interpreted, no human anywhere has or ever has had any right to occupy or reside in or on any land or to use any of its resources of to govern themselves until their land has been "discovered" by somebody competent to do so (some Christian, or, at least an agent thereof, to be specific).  At that point, according to no less a person than Chief Justice John Marshal, ownership of lands lay with the government whose subjects traveled to, discovered, and occupied lands inhabited by persons not subject to rule by a Christian Monarch or the government by whose authority such discovery and occupation was made.  In the case of the US, that would've been Merrie Engelonde, from which the individual states and the United Estates inherited title. (Johnson v. M'Intosh, 1823.)  In making this decision, Marshall, who had large real estate holdings and a clear conflict of interest either lied or "misspoke" and claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery, an unmitigated evil in its own right, was International law universally relied upon and accepted by all of the nation states of Europe (and nobody else mattered, right?) as the sole basis for claiming and owning land.  Certainly, for US purposes, nobody else mattered whatsoever, for this was a Supreme Court Decision.

I submit that:

Article VI 
Clause 2
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

And, further, that Supreme Court Decisions such as Johnson v M'Intosh (supra) are the final arbiter of exactly what the laws of the US are, because Chief Justice John Marshall said so in Marbury  v Madison.

Finally, this does not constitute the passage of an ex post facto law nor a law respecting an establishment of religion because it is not the passage of a law by Congress, but a mere interpretation of the Constitution and of International Law as of the inception and formation of the USA.  In short, this has always been the law of the land and the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence is a steaming pile off manure;  we do not now and never have held it to be self evident that all persons are created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, only colonists and Christians ever were or are, in fact, so entitled.  That's the law of the land, and it and many a host of evils goes back to June 7, 1494 and the Treaty of Tordesillas.

By The Way a cache of glass trade beads, probably Venetian, have turned up about 110 miles above the Arctic Circle at a site in Alaska. They were found in close association with some twine made from plant fiber. which, along with some carbon from a nearby hearth was carbon dated to between 1443 and 1488. Put another way, these artifacts were deposited in north central Alaska between 1443 and 1488, long before Columbus set sail.  (As discussed in phillybluesfan's June 3 OT: "Christopher Who?"  https://caucus99percent.com/content/thursday-open-thread-archaeology-edi... )

Can we be certain that the trader or carrier was not a Christian from Venice, and that they did not, out of pure reflex, claim the Americas on behalf of Venice?  Shouldn't those pressing claims under the doctrine of discovery be forced to prove said discovery when there is evidence that they were not the first outsiders to visit a place? 

On this day in history:

1099 – First Crusade's Siege of Jerusalem began, leading to the massacre of thousands of Muslims and Jews.

1494 – Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the "New World "between them

1628 – The Petition of Right, a major English constitutional document, was granted the Royal Assent by Charles I and became law

1776 – Richard Henry Lee presented the "Lee Resolution" to the Continental Congress.

1862 – The US and the UK agreed in the Lyons–Seward Treaty to suppress the African slave trade. in the Atlantic

1892 – Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the "whites-only" car of a train; he lost the resulting Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson,  which gave us the separate but equal doctrine. Said doctrine is still very much alive, see all the "domestic partnership" laws and the arguments supporting them, for example.

1899 – Carrie Nation began her rampage by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.

1929 – The Lateran Treaty was ratified, bringing Vatican City into existence.

1946 – The BBC returned to broadcasting its television service
1962 – The OAS set fire to the University of Algiers library building, destroying about 500,000 books.

1965 – The Supremes barred states from criminalizing the use of contraception by married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut.

1971 – The Supremes overturned the conviction of Paul Cohen, holding, in essence,  that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment

1981 – An Israeli Air Force sneak attack destroyed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor and killed several persons without justification

1991 – Mount Pinatubo erupted, generating an ash column 7 kilometres high and enormous volumes of hot air from Rush Limbaugh.

2000 – The UN laughably defined the Blue Line as the border between Israel and Lebanon.

Born this day in:

“Art is either revolution or plagiarism”

~~    Paul Gauguin

1761 – John Rennie the Elder,  engineer
1811 – James Young Simpson, obstetrician
1831 – Amelia Edwards,  journalist and author
1848 – Paul Gauguin, painter and sculptor
1879 – Knud Rasmussen, anthropologist and explorer
1883 – Sylvanus Morley, archaeologist and scholar
1886 – Henri Coanda, engineer, designed the Coanda-1910 
1899 – Elizabeth Bowen,  author and critic
1906 – Glen Gray, saxophonist and bandleader
1909 – Virginia Apgar, anesthesiologist and pediatrician, developed the Apgar test
1912 – Jacques Hélian, bandleader
1917 – Dean Martin, singer, actor, and producer
1935 – Harry Crews, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist
1939 – Yuli Turovsky, cellist, conductor and educator
1940 – Tom Jones, singer and actor
1944 – Clarence White, guitarist and singer
1954 – Louise Erdrich, novelist and poet
1958 – Prince, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and actor

Died this day in:

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

~~  Dorothy Parker

1826 – Joseph von Fraunhofer, optician, physicist, and astronomer
1859 – David Cox, painter
1866 – Chief Seattle, tribal chief
1942 – Alan Blumlein, engineer
1945 – Kitaro Nishida, philosopher and academic
1954 – Alan Turing, mathematician and computer scientist
1966 – Jean Arp, sculptor, painter, and poet
1967 – Anatoly Maltsev, mathematician and academic
1967 – Dorothy Parker, poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist
1970 – E. M. Forster, novelist, short story writer, essayist
1980 – Henry Miller, novelist and essayist

Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:

June Bug Day
VCR Day
National Chocolate Ice Cream Day

Music goes here, iirc, well, With apologies

Treaty of Tordesillas:

Glen Grey

Dean Martin

Tom Jones

Clarence White

Prince

It's an open thread, so do your thing, got it? Below this point this is a public forum, your forum, nothing is off topic, so go for it

Edit: cleaned up assorted typos, punctuation errors and duplicate words