As story of the Alamo heads to its bloody and legendary climax on March 6, 1836, commenter Michael West filed another update on what transpired on yesterday’s date, March 1, but corresponding to today, because 1936 was a Leap Year. Michael’s running account is indispensable, and I am so grateful for it. He writes,

March 1, 1836: The Alamo defenders are down to their last 5 full days.

The “Mina Volunteers” — a militia unit from Bastrop, Texas—departs for the rendezvous in Gonzales. Captain Joseph Lynch begins recruiting up and down the Brazos River to form a company and march to Gonzales. Captain Phil Coe does the same up and down the Colorado River. Captain Robert McNutt and his 2nd in Command Gibson Kuykendall activate a company in San Felipe (west of what would eventually be Houston).

These are just a handful of the many companies gathering across Texas as rapidly as they could to make their way in answer to Colonel Travis’s plea for aid, all while the civil drama plays out in Washington-on-the-Brazos. Texas’s Declaration of Independence, to be officially declared the next day, was finalized by George Childress.

Behind enemy lines, south of Urrea’s “Coastal Column” a somewhat interesting character, Dr. Grant, and the fledgling remains of his wild mission to raise a rebellion in Matamoros continues to wander north, soon to meet its fate in a far less spectacular end that Grant probably had envisioned for himself. Meanwhile, at the Alamo, the truce apparently has come to an end as Santa Ana noted the Texans fired a cannon, ending the truce and apparently cancelling any offer of amnesty he had made. In further Alamo lore involving  a fact that seemed too perfect to be true, the shot from one the cannons fired that day actually struck the house that the dictator was occupying.

Santa Ana’s army was still not at full strength, and was not expected until the 3rd of March.

The most distant  Texan reinforcements were about 150 miles from the Alamo, the rest closer. At a rate of about 30 miles per day on horseback, the farthest reinforcements could reach the Alamo in five days. As the men rushed westward with all their zeal, they would have been quietly reminded that they were each groups of 15 to 45 men charging headlong out of wooded terrain and into open prairies, towards a Mexican army of several thousand.

Now in more mundane and present day ethics matters;

1. Now THIS is hubris! Talk about not knowing your lane…Dr. Bruce Glavovic, 61, a professor at Massey University in New Zealand, has joined two colleagues in the field of environmental research to declare, in an academic journal, that climate scientists should stage a mass walkout and stop their research until nations take action on global warming. Continue reading →

“So on this night, in our 245^th year as a nation, I have come to report on the State of the Union.  And my report is this: the State of the Union is strong—because you, the American people, are strong.  We are stronger today than we were a year ago.”

—President Joe Biden in his State of the Union speech before Congress last night, talking nonsense.

I mentioned yesterday that I would have gained respect for Joe Biden if he had the integrity to say last night, as Gerald Ford did in 1975, “The State of the Union is not good.” I did not expect him to do so, because Biden has no integrity, as the rest of his speech proved.

Unlike most SOTU messages, Biden waited until the very end to give the report to Congress that is supposedly the justification for the whole useless, increasingly embarrassing ritual. Doing so, he might as well have said, “Everything I’ve said before this is calculated dishonesty, just like this false assessment of our nation’s state. But what else am I supposed to do?” One astute wag wrote that the unspoken message of Biden’s speech was perfectly embodied in this immortal “Animal House” clip:

Who, including Biden, could possibly believe that the State of the Union is anything other than in deep, deep trouble, or that—this is even more ridiculous—that it is “stronger today than we were a year ago”? By what measure could that be true?

Consider: Continue reading →

I know I’ve run this SNL clip on other March Firsts, but a) it always makes me laugh and I need a laugh today, and 2) it always provokes ethics reflections.

For example, I think about how much healthier the nation’s culture was when its primary weekly source of current events satire was devoted to making all Americans laugh rather than pursuing a one-sided ideological agenda, as it does now. Then there is the brilliant John Belushi, who robbed himself of a career of almost unlimited potential and his nation of the many joys that career would have generated by deliberately violating drug laws that would have kept him alive, if he hadn’t been persuaded by a drug-loving culture that insisted that recreational drugs were cool. Now, of course, our laws send completely muddled messages that ensure that more talented Americans meet Belushi’s sad end than fewer.

In the U.S., ethics came in like a lion, and is going out like a blind shrew rat…

1. Unethical Quote the New Month: President Biden. (I should probably highlight this with a full post, but there is too much political news on the ethics horizon today, so I’m trying to lessen the load.) During a Black History Month event as the White House, the President who promised to heal divisions in society and bridge the partisan divide, said,

“We’re protecting our country’s threshold liberty, the sacred right to vote, which I’ve never seen as under such attack.You know, it’s always made it harder for blacks to vote but this is trying to be able to figure out how to keep the black vote, when it occurs, from even counting.”

Trying to prevent the black vote from counting! No misinformation there! Restricting unlimited mail-in ballots, banning vote harvesting, limiting early voting  and drop-boxes, and requiring photo IDs at polls constitutes an “attack” on the sacred right to vote, says the President of the United States.

He’s not only lying, he’s an asshole. Continue reading →