Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, Fall of the Alamo, 1903, Texas State Archives.
March 6, 1836: Following a thirteen-day siege, more than 2000 Mexican troops launched a pre-dawn attack from all four sides on the fortress defended by 180 men. The Mexicans were repulsed twice, but a third assault gained the north wall and broke through the west wall. After fierce fighting, the defenders were killed to a man. The casualties included Colonel William Barret Travis, James Bowie, and former Congressman from Tennessee David Crockett.
A snake fell out of the sky and landed on a woman mowing her yard.
The bizarre incident didn’t stop there. Peggy Jones was then attacked by a hawk.
Jones was on her tractor mowing at her home in Silsbee, near Beaumont on Tuesday afternoon. She describes how suddenly a snake fell on her, wrapping around her arm.
“The snake was squeezing so hard, and I was waving my arms in the air. And then, this hawk was swooping down clawing at my arm over and over,” explains Peggy Jones. “I just kept saying, ‘Help me, Jesus, Help me, Jesus.’’
The hawk eventually ripped the snake off of her arm and flew away with it. Jones thinks the hawk came down on her at least four times trying to get the snake. She says blood was everywhere. Her husband heard the commotion and came running.
“I was yelling and screaming. He didn’t know what I was saying. I thought I was bit by a snake.”
Her husband took her to the emergency room where she was treated for cuts from the hawk and bruising from the snake squeezing on her arm.
There was no snake bite, but she was monitored for a bite just in case. Jones also discovered how close she really came to being bitten by the snake.
“I discovered the lens on my glasses was broken and there was snake venom on my glasses.”
Job posting: The Washington Post is looking for an enterprising reporter based in Texas to document life in red state America and develop a new beat mapping the culture, public policies and politics in a region shaped by conservative ideology.https://t.co/CJS99O8kg7
Last year, in Houston, several white liberals knelt and asked forgiveness of a group of blacks.
Tyler O’Neil, at PJM, has the best outrageous Leftism story of the week.
[P]arents in Dallas just got a wake-up call. The local Black Lives Matter group Dallas Justice Now launched a new campaign, urging white parents in wealthy Highland Park to sign a pledge to keep their children from applying to America’s top colleges — in the name of “equity.” The organization’s letter to parents lays the guilt on thick.
“We are writing to you because we understand you are white and live within the Highland Park Independent School District and thus benefit from the enormous privileges taken at the expense of communities of color,” Dallas Justice Now writes to parents in the area. “You live in the whitest and wealthiest neighborhood in Dallas. Whether you know it or not, you earned or inherited your money through oppressing people of color.”
“However, it is also our understanding that you are a Democrat and supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement which makes you one of our white allies and puts you in a position to help correct these cruel injustices,” the letter continues. “We need you to step up and back up your words with action and truly sacrifice to make our segregated city more just.”…
“We are asking you to pledge that your children will not apply or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School. If you do not have children under 18 then we ask you to pledge to hold your white privileged friends, family, and neighbors with children to this standard,” the letter demands. “These schools have afforded white families privilege for generations. Having your children attend these schools takes away spaces from students of color who really need the job opportunities, education and influence that these schools provide.”
“We know that this sounds like a tough commitment to make. But it is truly disheartening to see wealthy white folks sending charitable donations, posting #BlackLivesMatter on social media, or putting up yard signs as if to say that minimal effort is all they are prepared to do in the fight for racial justice,” the letter adds.
The pledge reads as follows:
As a white person with privilege both from my whiteness and my neighborhood I recognize the need to make sacrifices for the purpose of correcting hundreds of years of murder, slavery, discrimination, and lack of educational and economic opportunities perpetrated upon people of color. I understand that access to top schools is a key component in economic and social advancement. Therefore, I commit that my children will not apply to or attend any Ivy League School or US News & World Report Top 50 School so that position at that school is available for people of color to help correct historical wrongs. If I do not have children under 18 then I will commit to encouraging my white privileged friends, neighbors, and family members with children to sign the pledge and holding them accountable until they do so.
Update: This story has been denounced as a spoof by the liberal Dallas Observer. They are suspicious because efforts to locate “Dallas Justice” and its principals were not successful.
I think we’ll know more tomorrow. The Observer could be right, but the story is not really that implausible. Equally outrageous demands and proposals are advanced all the time these days.
John Hinderaker has a really spectacular horror story of official stupidity, petty tyranny, and self-importance.
This is the most infuriating news story I have read in a while, and it comes, surprisingly, from the New York Times. The protagonist is Dr. Hasan Gokal, a Houston physician. He had a limited quantity of the Moderna covid vaccine to distribute, and rather than throw some of it away, he found qualified patients to receive it. For that, he was fired from his job and criminally prosecuted.
The Texas doctor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened on this late December night, he had to find 10 eligible people for its remaining doses before the precious medicine expired. In six hours.
Scrambling, the doctor made house calls and directed people to his home outside Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bed-bound nonagenarian. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child who uses a ventilator.
After midnight, and with just minutes before the vaccine became unusable, the doctor, Hasan Gokal, gave the last dose to his wife, who has a pulmonary disease that leaves her short of breath.
For his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his government job and then charged with stealing 10 vaccine doses worth a total of $135 — a shun-worthy misdemeanor that sent his name and mug shot rocketing around the globe.
Dr. Gokal was charged by a Democratic Party prosecutor in Houston. The charge was so absurd that it was dismissed by a disbelieving judge, but the prosecutor “vowed to present the matter to a grand jury.”
You should read the whole story, if you can get past the Times paywall. (Protip: clear your cache of Times cookies.) This is another sign of the times:
The officials maintained that he had violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown them away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of “equity” among those he had vaccinated.
“Equity” doesn’t mean what you probably think it does. “Evil” is a pretty good shorthand translation.
“Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was told.
In today’s fallen world, being fired and charged with a crime is by no means the end of the ordeal:
On Jan. 21, about two weeks after the doctor’s termination, a friend called to say that a local reporter had just tweeted about him. At that very moment, one of his three children answered the door to bright lights and a thrust microphone. Shaken, the 16-year-old boy closed the door and said, “Dad, there are people out there with cameras.”
This was how Dr. Gokal learned that he had been charged with stealing vaccine doses.
Harris County’s district attorney, Kim Ogg, had just issued a news release that afternoon with the headline: “Fired Harris County Health Doctor Charged With Stealing Vial Of Covid-19 Vaccine.”
The next person who needs to be fired is Harris County’s District Attorney.
Andrea Widburg passes along an interesting Instagram video by a black conservative from Texas.
[The] truth.. about the Black Lives Matter movement is perfectly highlighted in a video that Damani Felder, a black conservative in Texas, posted to Instagram on Monday. Felder was dining with friends at an outdoor venue next to an open plaza in Dallas, Texas. As he repeatedly pans the dining area with his camera, you can see that the diners are a mix of races and ages.
The film begins immediately after a group of about 20 or 25 Black Lives Matter protesters arrayed themselves in an ankle-deep fountain running the length of the dining area. The protesters are, by a pretty clear margin, young, white, and female. In other words, they perfectly match the demographics in American colleges, which are also mostly young, white, and female.
These are the good little girls who have always worked hard in school, diligently imbibing everything their hard-left Democrat teachers and professors have taught them. These “educators†have played on their sense of self-worth, guilt, and credulity to turn themselves into the foot soldiers of anarchy.
Felder knows what’s going on with these young people:
The majority-white people in the crowd that want to feel good about themselves. Look at this. They want to feel good about themselves, so they’re here ruining an otherwise peaceful evening with their B.S.
[snip]
Look at this. Majority-white people, out here acting the fool because they want to feel like they are important.
Look at this. Look at the racial make-up of this. Think about what the purpose of this would be. Remember that Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors are the founders of this organization, and they are admitting on camera that they are trained Marxists. All they care about is anarchy and social unrest.
Look at this. Look at this. Again, majority-white crowd because they want to feel that they belong to something.
What’s unique about the video, in addition to Felder’s astute insights, is that we can watch how the protesters transform in real-time from being loud and vulgar to being so violent that the police bring tear gas and pepper spray to stop them (but not before the protesters throw things, breaking windows and possibly doing other damage). The bewildered diners, who had been hoping these human mosquitoes would spontaneously depart, end up scattering, their lovely evening completely spoiled.
Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, Fall of the Alamo, 1903, Texas State Archives.
March 6, 1836: Following a thirteen-day siege, more than 2000 Mexican troops launched a pre-dawn attack from all four sides on the fortress defended by 180 men. The Mexicans were repulsed twice, but a third assault gained the north wall and broke through the west wall. After fierce fighting, the defenders were killed to a man. The casualties included Colonel William Barret Travis, James Bowie, and former Congressman from Tennessee David Crockett.
The West Freeway Church of Christ videos and streams its services. The camera caught the moment when a hooded man stood up, pulled a shotgun and opened fire this morning.
Watch the man in black stand up at the top of the frame.
[T]his is a textbook version of a good guy with a gun taking down a bad guy with a shotgun. Even though we’ve been told by all the smartest people that the whole good guy thing is a myth.
Two people have reportedly been killed, including the shooter, and one person is in critical condition. But had the church not had armed individuals in the congregation and ready to respond, this could have been a far worse situation than it already was.
For that reason — because an armed individual used a firearm to stop a threat — look for this story to get far less intense or ongoing media attention than it otherwise would have.
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The Tarrant county sheriff at press conference noted:
“Today evil walked boldly among us, let me remind you, good people raised up and stopped it before it got worse.â€
