A revisitation to an earlier post...an earlier time: Sequester Monster and the attack of the sabre toothed locusts



Great Read

Not a lot on Fort Marcy Park, or

the Davidian Compound Massacre

or Cattle Futures Trading, or lost

supeonaed legal charges tabulation

and assignments, or corkscrewing

into Kosovo, or any of several
thousand other lies, felonies, or
self-indulgences to which any
person with real class would
never advantage herself.
But, what the heck...
"What differnce
does it make?"

     As a certifiable blowhard, El Gringo Viejo knows what another certifiable blowhard looks and sounds like.   Last night on O'Rielly we had a twopher, with both O'Reilly and Bob Beckell looking like a couple of Great Blues, swimming in an uncomfortably small swimming pool.  Poor Bob was easily tooled into a shoe box by O'Reilly, when Bob admitted that it is necessary to drag inner-city, "minority" females into the sunlight of reality concerning the issue of promiscuity, welfare dependency, birthing at 14 years of age with no high school diploma, etc.

 



     It all goes back to the pledge of solution by panacea.   Bob was touting how his union thug father admonished him to always vote Democrat because the Democrats cared about people, while the Republicans only cared about money.   He all but admitted that the concept of a "social safety net" has turned into a multi-generational quagmire of of dull dependency, and a self-defeating sense of automatic self-entitlement.   It has resulted in two generations, at least, of children born without souls....in such numbers so as to genuinely endanger they themselves and everyone around them for miles around.    Interestingly, it matters naught if the race or ethnic group is this, that, or the other.   The multi-generational curse of soulless children occurs among all races, all ethnic groups.

     We have to remember when the Democrat wing stood up and cheered when George W. Bush, during one of his State of the Union speeches, decried the fact that his attempt to salvage the stupid Social Security Ponzi Scheme by privatising a small portion of it had failed to gain approval in Congress.   The fact is, he was right, but would have been "righter" if he had fought for complete privatisation.   And for specific, numbered accounts where the assets within those accounts pertained only and exclusively to the holder.   And that those accounts would have an investment plan...one of four or five choices....that the account holder would be "allowed" (even El Gringo Viejo might be a closet Government meddler) to place the money on various initerest bearing instruments.   AND.....that the possession of said account would be considered part of the estate of the deceased, to be transferred according to will and testament.    But, of course, the control group marxists and elitists cannot stand this notion because, Who would be left to make their beds?   We cannot allow too many people into the Hamptons.    We simply cannot allow any more people to move into Taos, because they disturb Shirley Maclaine's seances.  we have to remember that she demanded that the entrance gate be closed after she moved into town there. 

     These people deal with their own focus groups and think that we are all stupid....all those insignificant people out there clinging to their Bibles and their guns and their outmoded, backwards ways.   Obama's conscientious effort to frighten us and menace us with the removal of HIS central government support and flood of ever-more-worthless greenback dollars, just will not work the magic of before.   El Gringo Viejo, as millions of others, would prefer to starve than to receive any unprepaid pittance from the central government. 

    

Airports to Janet Napolitano: You're wrong about delays

Officials of airports cited by Homeland Security

Secretary Janet Napolitano as examples of how

the sequester would delay airline travelers say

she's wrong — they're not delaying flights one bit.

It left Barry Soetoro in that unenviable position of either being stupider than a broken tennis raquet, or being a Solyndra Powered mountain of mendacity.....or even more probably, both.    Barry Soetoro and his ghoulish, really strange looking cabinet full of dolts, sasquatches, dumboes, liars, and nincompoops painted very specific pictures of what was going to be happening....nay! ....what had already happened.   The Humanity!!!   Head Start children were going to be set back....perhaps permanently.....little matter that the program is used primarily by slugs who like to lounge around in muumuus all day watching telenovelas and/or going to nail salons and/or "beauty" parlours.   It serves no purpose in terms of assimilation or preparation for regular school.

 

 

     Long lines at the airports....lie;   no vaccines for children......lie;   no space for illegal aliens with significant criminal histories....lie;   no coverage sufficient for the air traffick control  necessary for the air travel industry....lie;   insufficient coverage for the processing of meat and sea food under quality assurance certainties....lie;   layoffs at school districts throughout America, beginning in Ohio....lie.

   

      BUT NOT JUST WRONG...PLEASE.   LIES, willfully posed and passed into the compliant Obsolete Press....lies so obvious that the new social and blog media had already exposed the mendacities to the extent that the Obsolete Media almost had to capitulate.   Various of the  elements of the Obsolete Media even had to suggest, even if timidly, that the Warning of the Three Witches, roiling their cauldron, of the coming horrors was better aimed at Obama and his own, and not MacBeth and not the Tea Party reactionaries and not the Conservatives..

It was as if, perhaps, three witches were reciting that ancient spell of times past.....Perhaps the Bard of the Globe can tell the story best, that great storyteller of Stratford-on-Avon hath built the trew actors for this scene.....towards a cold and withdrawn Castle, but not in Scotland....this one being located at 1600 Pennsylvania.....

      (Enter the three Witches)

 

1 WITCH. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
2 WITCH. Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.
3 WITCH. Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time!
1 WITCH. Round about the caldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches' mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg'd i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

 

Grab your children all.   Paint the sill with lamb's blood. These people are driven to enslave you and yours.   But don't worry.  They will make the millionaires and billionaires pay for it.

Even if the White House is closed due to the Sequester.

 

El Gringo Viejo

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Trolley Bus? Trolebus? Tomayto, Tomahto.

What is this business about trolley busses and so forth?   Below the OROG finds a bit of an explanation.   As brief as El Gringo Viejo can make it.



The CATHEDRAL OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
also known as the Cathedral of the Diocese of Tampico.
 One can note the famous "piso de swastikas", which
long pre-dates the National Socialist movement
in Germany.  This emblem, known both in Europe
and pre-Colombian MesoAmerica is associated
with mystical concepts of cosmic harmony
and such things.  It was employed by
Christian denominations in medieval
Europe, among Buddhist monks
and their monasteries, and
even among the Southwest
Nations of Indians in
America, such as the
Zuni, Navajo,and
Pueblo nations.

 

Several hundred years ago, El Gringo Viejo was running very nice excursions into various destinations in Mexico.   Every area had its many strong points and various drawbacks.  It is a marvelous theatre for life, and it must be confessed that my experiences were essentially 99.9% positive and the rest, forgettable.  There were cutesy, quirky things that will remain with me through the rest of my shortening days.

Adolf Schicklegruber
Another in a long line of socialist
utopian engineers who passed for
"sane people" until the wheels fell
off the volks  wagen.

The rather elegant Palacio
Municipal de Tampco
Serves as the City/County
Administration and Judicial
Building

     Among those things was an outdoor juice bar on the main plaza of Tampico....a tropically worn, heavily-trafficked cornucopia of sociology in the centre of a metroplex that now, with the cities of Tampico, Madero, and Altamira all being adjacent,  totals about 1,500,000 souls.   Back in the good old days, it was about two-thirds that number.   To be more precise, there were two juice bars; one on the northwest corner of the Plaza de Armas facing the huge, Greek Revival Palacio Municipal and Courts building to the west side and then the Catedral Metropolitana, a very nice church on the north angle.   The Cathedral was famous for having the "tiled swaztika floor", which always fascinated my tourists....but the floor had been lain even before Adolf Schicklegruber had been born.   So that gave people something to talk about during the very pleasant welcome cocktail and happy hour at the Hotel Inglaterra, also on the Plaza de Armas but on the opposite side.    We spent many marvelous evenings there talking to ships' captains from around the world, and enjoying really excellent seafood in various venues, both at the hotel and any number of restaurants of varying degrees of poshness, elegance, or basic functionality.

Gazebo of the Plaza de Armas
Tampico, Tamaulipas

     In any regard, El Gringo Viejo would try to go over to the juice bar...actually it was more like a sidewalk restaurant...after checking everyone in, moving luggage, sending the Touring Coach to the showers, arranging breakfast for the morning (always included), wake-up calls, and so forth.  Normally, the stay would be until the Touring Coach would come back, and park in the very front of the Hotel Inglaterra....in the space provided ....because the owner liked to have the fancy busses from our group especially...glistening clean and showing off that his establishment was the place of preference for the foreign visitors.   It really was a splendid place and time.
     The little, open air, but "entechado" (covered or roofed), place was always busy.  Young lovers, pretty girls, little old ladies, businessmen, school children and collegiates, harbour workers and oil refinery workers, and Gringoes, when visiting, would find comfort and good eats there.   One of the main things that the little place specialised in was the "trolebus, coktel de frutas"  or the "trolebus, coktel de mariscos".   The word "trolebus, of course, the equivalent of trolleybus.   As an edible it meant, that like the trolleybus, it came with a generous serving of everything.   So the trolebus de frutas would be a big scoop of vanilla ice cream (unless another flavour was specified), along with cantaloupe, grapes, dates, papaya, watermelon, freshly squeezed orange juice, strawberries, and anything else that might fit into a one-liter parfait glass.   The saucer under the glass would usually be mounted up with jicama slices (look like uncooked french fries), sprinkled with chile powder and/or paprika.  Jicama is a peculiar root plant that has bright white "meat" and tastes like a very, very mild radish.    For vegetablistic people it was a meal.   For carnivors it was a delightful way to start an evening of serious eating.



     The trolebus de mariscos was similar but different, of course.   It would have the little platter of jicama basing the parfait glass, but it would be filled with a tart catsup, lime, and cilantro sauce, and then filled with oysters, medium shrimp, crab, and at times anemone or whatever else wasn't moving anymore  in the kitchen....such as boiled perch filet.  These "cocktails" were actually very large meals, and for the equivalent of 2.00 USD, they were a bargain, even back then. 


Jicama, whole above, and
in "french fry" form below.
Normally eaten raw, but
can be used in salads, grilled
a bit with paprika, or in any
number ...scores....of excellent
deployments.  Use imagination!

      The show was everything, the meal was everything, the paper-boys with the afternoon edition, the shoeshine by the official "union label" shoeshiner (excellent, serious work), the oddities....like the two obviously wealthy, well-presented older ladies coming by, and one of them leaving her purse with one of the several usual "shoe-shine men" with some instructions.  She took her wallet, leaving considerable values behind, and the shoeshine man stitched a repair where the shoulder strap has separated from the body of the purse, saddle-soaped, and then polished the Leon quality leather purse up to new lustre.   That was five pesos  (about $0.40 USD back then).  In short, everything was everything.   A pleasant unorganised jumble of free will, co-ordinating with itself....and making a bit of progress each day.

      There was also the "changing of the guard", so named because of the manner by which the traffick police and foot patrol police would deploy for the late afternoon rush-hour and evening downtown gathering.   They would march out in two by two columns, about 100 strong with ten or twelve buglers and drummers, very military, and the new shift would drop off, while the old shift would join the column, until after about 15 minutes all had been deployed and all had been relieved throughout about twelve square blocks.   It held up traffick a bit, but no one ever seemed to mind.

     Ooops...there are some of my people;  I can see them getting off the elevator in the lobby.   They're coming down for the happy hour- welcome cocktail, I'd better get back to the lobby.
Thanks for listening to the explanation about Trolleybus = Trolebus....so named because it is always overstuffed and has quite a bit of everything inside.
El Gringo Viejo

A trolleybus of information and observations

There were several infeeds of information and commentworthy material during the past twenty four hours.   Each was equally important.  The first, perhaps, is having to be minded and disciplined by ones own daughter....a person knows what geezer means....who writes in with edits and corrections to the text, spelling, and arrangements of the blog and web pages.  Perhaps there is no greater complement for a father.   The corrections were necessary and had been overlooked because of a certain relatively cumbersome edit procedure that is required for the blog's sidebar, but that bespeaks more to the laziness of El Gringo Viejo than anything.    It is rather much like the practice we have tried to avoid...successfully in recent years....of buying a dozen or so serrano peppers to make a decent salsa ranchera, and then never gettting around to making it...until one day the serranos are discovered, blackened and useless in the vegetable tender of the refrigerator.

 

 

      Then there is my cryptic son, El Gringo Viejo, Jr. , who knows that the front page of the Old Grey Lady will never darken the door of this humble cave.  But, he cares naught and fears less.    He reads that inceasingly irrelevant part of the obsolete media and passes along salient stuff on frequent occasion.   Once again, it is a humbling thing to have a daughter and a son both helping the old geezer along with his hobby....like being given a nice walking stick or cane that belonged to Whistler's Mother, or the like.   But it is certainly a point of pride for an egotistical old fool to have such accomplished children investing their time in such matters.   The son forwarded these observations from the pages of the New York Times, concerning the passing of another of Be'elzebub's nephews:

      El Gringo Viejo, Jr. writes in response to the attached posting the day before,

 

     " I was reading an article in the Old Grey Lady, that pretty much attests to the rightness of your posting through first hand accounts. Here is a concluding excerpt from the article:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"...I experienced the power of his performance firsthand in 2007 when, as The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, I appeared on his weekly show, “Alo Presidente,” in an episode held on a beach. Invited to ask a question, I asked whether abolishing term limits risked authoritarianism.

The host paused and glowered before casting the impertinence out to sea and making it a pretext to lambaste European hypocrisy, media, monarchy, the Royal Navy, slavery, genocide and colonialism.

“In the name of the Latin American people I demand that the British government return the Malvinas Islands to the Argentine people,” he exclaimed. Then, after another riff on colonialism: “It is better to die fighting than to be a slave!”

On and on it went. Christopher Columbus. Queen Elizabeth. George Bush. In vain I responded that I was Irish and republican, and that European monarchy was irrelevant to my question, which he had dodged. This provoked another tirade.

It was theater. As the cameras were packed away, and we all prepared to return to Caracas, the president shook my hand, shrugged and smiled. I had been a useful fall guy. No hard feelings. It was just a show....".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     This is from the pen of an NYTimes reporter who had had the occasion to interview Hugo Chavez.   He could just as well have been interviewing Barry Soetoro.

ooo000OOO000ooo

 

     Then, attention was turned to Mr. A.S. Haley, the author of one of my top three landing sites, The Anglican Curmudgeon....and the fact that the Curmudgeon himself, while trying to be on a bit of a vacation (holiday, for my Brit OROGs) urged his large flock to distract themselves for a bit by tuning in to A Gringo in Rural Mexico, and to read the Gringo Viejo's notes about certain aspects of the personalities and events swirling around the conflict of 6 March 1836.   As one might imagine we had a considerable avalanche of visitors.   Both our front counter and back counter almost overheated.

     We could barely believe the entry in his blog, The Anglican Curmudgeon -  acurmudgeon.blogspot.com  - and were overwhelmed by a true sense of humility and unworthiness by said recommendation, but one must receive any gift offered according to Southern and Texian traditions.   It was one of my high honours in this life.

       If the OROGs will forgive a bit of unabashed ball spiking in the end-zone, they can visit this blog entry of the Anglican Curmudgeon A Whale of a Good Read on the Alamo Anniversary .   The entry pertains as well to issues related to the rapacious assault upon the Diocese of South Carolina by the now nearly completely popularised and secularised Protestant Episcopal Church of America (ECUSA).    Another case in San Joaquin, California has enjoyed a very recent positive ruling interior to a case of Diocesan rights and discretion in a dispute with the Episcopal Church, USA.   As an aside, as though manna still falls from the hands of angels, judges on two separate coasts of the American Union have given hope in the recognition that Episcopal Dioceses are free standing, joining and leaving any greater subdivision of the Anglican Communion at the collective will of the parishioners throughout the various Bishoporic divisions.   There is hope for tradition and local control....there are embers beneath the ashes.

ooo000OOO000ooo



AND THEN FINALLY,

     In our description of aforementioned events and personalities pertaining to The Alamo, a commentress wrote in with a compliment and a pointed question.   She wanted to know how it could be that we would refer to William Barret Travis as an aristocrat...or having been aristocratic should have been the way it would have been better expressed by me.   My response was lengthy, and attempted to show that we had some level of academic familiarity with the personality of Travis, and we attempted to colour him in the finest hues available. 

     Most real Texians know that Travis was....not a perfect man.  Most real Texians also do not bear any rancour against the common Mexican in the Centralist Armies brought up by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, for instance.   None of the soldiers were saints, but many were decent men, several of the ranking officers were known and respected by their enemies as honourable soldiers.   Only one general officer was Satanic in the truest sense.   But, Travis?

     Travis was not a perfect man.    I tried to be gentle with my response because the lady had indicated that she was a descendant of one of the Travis lines....he had nine brothers and sisters, and he had two wives, one of whom he abandoned along with his two children by her, in Alabama when he went on the lamb to avoid problems with various debts....and other issues.    Some of these issues could be reviewed in a diary that he kept, written in correct Spanish, of his various "encounters" with women of all types and stripes and social stations.  Suffice to say, the diary had many pages, and some of the "ladies" were almost certainly from the privileged classes.

      We also pointed out to our correspondent that Travis was well-educated, at academy, and was a school-master at the age of 19.   He became a barrister,  was appointed adjutant of a formal Alabama militia regiment at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and was a 32nd degree Scottish Rite Mason.   His father was a respected person and had businesses as well as significant farming holdings with numerous well-fed slaves, and William himself owned three slaves, which in and of itself was a considerable investment and fortune.

     The problem with William is that a man was measured in the South by the way he cared for his property (including slaves).   Jefferson Davis and his brother, for instance, promoted a slave to overall superintendent of their properties....outranking whites, free Negroes, and slaves and empowered with the pen and ink of contract with any and all.   Mark Travis, William's father was known to be a fair and honest man.   But William had problems with general husbandry of assets.  Caring about and providing for Wife, children, slaves, property, animals, crops, office duties, providing true legal counsel without taking advantage of privileged information.....those were problems for William.   These are things real Texians know.

     In any regard, we avoided the hundreds of pages available about the Alabama past of William.   We even disregarded William's propensity to turn any disagreement into a confrontation.  We did not mention his particular hatred for an Anglo Mexican, Col. Juan Bradburn whose major defect was that he was loyal to his orders and was a reasonably unreasonable military authority for the Mexican Centralist government.

      When we responded carefully to this very civil and well-spoken lady, she then returned with the following:

 

(name withheld by El Gringo Viejo in deference to the writer)

 

"Your blog on The Alamo was very good and much appreciated.

I think history may have been very kind to Col. Travis and probably because of his stubborn and heroic defense of the fort and his eloquent and patriotic inspirational "Letter from The Alamo".

(Which I just now heard Sen. Cruz read on the floor of the Senate)

 

His reputation among my branch of the family was as a man who abandoned his family, ran from creditors, of shady character who defrauded many with smooth words and 'get-rich-quick' schemes, who, if not for dying at The Alamo, would probably have been killed over debts, a woman, or a drunken fight.

 

Several yrs ago when visiting the Alamo, I picked up a copy of his Family Tree, which gave his father's name as "Mark", and you say "Tom". Neither matches my research, and I also read another, which doesn't' match any. Makes me wonder if every Travis family wants to claim him because of the nature of the history associated with him. I don't have much confidence in any

My family's relationship with him would have been very distant, but not something they wanted to brag about."

 

      The difficulties Travis had with Bowie, Seguin, and the Latin principal office holders in San Antonio pointed to other problems he had, possibly associated with a sense of birthright superiority.  He apparently could not understand that the Latins were as much enemies of Lopez de Santa Anna and his Centralist, dictatorial disposition....perhaps moreso....than the Anglo resisters to that horrid ogre.    It was known among all Texians of all stripes at that time that Lopez de Santa Anna had essentially exterminated from 12,000 to as many as 30,000 Constitucion de 1824 supporters, military AND civilian, in Zacatecas only two and a half months before his arrival in San Antonio.

 

ooo000OOO000000

Now, we are done.   We appreciate the time and patience invested by the OROG in our submission to all this morning.

El Gringo Viejo

San Antonio de Valero de Bexar, 6 March 1836

It is done, the Alamo is lost

During these hours the fires ordered by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had consumed the remains of the Defenders of the Mission of San Antonio de Valero....known to the locals as..."la capilla de los Alamos....the chapel of the Cottonwoods.

Col. James Bowie

Only one of the defenders was not thrown onto the common pyre. Juan Jose Esparza was the only person to be granted permission to be buried in Holy Ground, under Christian Rites. All the others were immolated. Including David Crockett. Esparza was a close friend of James Bowie, the co-commander of the outpost. Esparza essentially snuck into the compound through a window, bringing his wife and children with him. That evening or the next day, he took to the defense of his very ill friend, Col. Bowie and bolstered him in the continuing arguments that he had with the childish and arrogant, 28 year old William Barrett Travis.

Travis was Southern aristrocracy. He also carried the rank of Lt. Colonel. He looked down his nose at the sometimes sober Bowie, who was famous as an alligator wrestler, dueler, gambler, and adventurer. Travis was cold, spoiled, arrogant, and as we say in the South, 'full of himself'. James Bowie was a man of Eastern Tennessee with considerable life experience in and around Southern Louisiana, especially New Orleans. He spoke Cherokee, and could read, speak, and write English, Spanish, and French, making him comfortable in any environment...low or high. All who knew him thought him given to flights of extreme chance in business, and perhaps being fascinated with risk. People say he invented the Bowie Knife, but that honor actually belonged to his brother Rezin Bowie.

Antonio Lopez de
Santa Anna c. 1869

When Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ordered the Defenders burned in a commom pyre like dogs, finally even deciding to throw Bowie in with the rest, Juan Jose Esparza's brother, Francisco, a middle ranking officer in the Mexican force under the command of General Filisola, asked the Supreme Commander for permission to take Esparza's remains to be buried. That was the only one who received such permission. There were 17 known Latin Defenders, although there is a probability that some of Captain Juan Seguin's men were never rostered....meaning there may have been as many as 35 to 60 Latins....known as Tejanos. Impromptu volunteers would not have been out of the question because Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was extremely disliked by the people of Coahuila and Texas, Latin and non-Latin alike.

Lt.Col. William Barret Travis

Bowie, however, is an interesting element among the Texian Forces. Some think he was afflicted with tuberculosis, others say he was fighting the residual effects of a bout with typhoid. Others say that he was struck hard by the death of his fiancee' in Mississippi some years before....and then after a very successfull marriage ...which had financial and emotional depth into a pre-eminent San Antonio - Monclova - Saltillo based Spanish/Mexican family it all happened again. A cholera epidemic swept through Texas in 1832, so Bowie sent his wife, children, and several of his in-laws to Monclova to wait out the plague in the healthier, drier, and higher air. They all died when the cholera broke out there.
So, there is reasonable speculation that Bowie, although relatively young and very accomplished, decided that he had a better place to be than on this Earth. From the time after the death of his family, he had taken to drink and, while still gregarious and friendly and popular among the people in and around San Antonio, he was obviously a man with a wounded heart and soul. He would not be the kind of man one would want in charge of a military garrison.
So you have Bowie, the Mexicanized fighter for the Constitution of 1824, and Travis who really did not like the Latins and their peculiar brand of Christianity. Bowie has a Latin friend who essentially comes into the Alamo to die with and for his Anglo friend. Then we have Travis turning to Captain Juan Seguin, a brilliant Mexican army officer who hated Lopez de Santa Anna to ride out for re-enforcements, because Seguin was the only one who knew enough about the lay of the land and the populations to be trusted with the job.

Capt. Juan Nepumecino Seguin

Imagine Captain Juan Seguin riding to find Col. Fannin in order to bring him and his 350 men to the Alamo's defense. He finds that Fannin's group has been annihilated at Victoria, near the coast, and all were lost. General Urrea has riden back from a forward scouting to find that lesser officers have ordered the execution of all the prisoners, some 300 men, according to the orders of Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana. Urrea is furious, because he knows well the rule of "if we do it, then they will do it ten times over". But, the damage is done, Seguin rides back to San Antonio to find that upon his arrival, the Alamo is fallen, all is lost.
He continues then to the east, looking for Burleson or Houston or Austin or anyone. He finds Mrs. Dickenson and her baby and Man James. He arrives to meet with Samuel Houston and to confirm that Fannin, Bowie, Travis, and Crockett are all gone. Along with almost 500 regular and irregular militia. Although he is a trained artilleryist, Seguin goes on to command the Texian cavalry at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, where he and the Texian forces destroy Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's headquarters command of some 1,800 men, through a Washington-like attack on a Holy Day...a Sunday...21 April 1836.
Lopez de Santa Anna had brilliantly conducted an Army and Navy attack, 1,000 miles away from his point of origin, moving three large corps of combined military force, cavalry, infantry, and artillery over deserts, mountains, cold, snow, and rain, encountering the enemy on frequent occasion and winning a succession of 24 straight engagements. In every engagement the Texians had been beaten badly. And then he camped with his main force on a swampy peninsula, surrounded by water, with no exit. The carelessness of arrogance.

Finally consider the Yucatecan Infantry, earlier this morning before sunrise. They were put at the front of the attack group, attached to the 2nd Batallon de Zapadores, Ingenieros de Combate. To them it was a form of punishment as Yucatecos, because that province had declared itself allied with the forces supporting the Constitution of 1824. Lorenzo de Zavala had written that Constitution and Lopez de Santa Anna knew de Zavala was taking refuge in Texas. So, the Yucatecan soldiers lay in the heavy wet snow that morning before sunrise, then became exasperated with their suffering, finally rose up and began the attack before the bugle call, that would leave 182 - 225 Defenders dead within the next 2 hours, and a minimum of 400 Mexican soldiers dead, and as many as 225 more dying of their wounds over the next two months.
All of this defense and offense over a place that was neither worth defending nor assailing in military terms. The brother-in-law of Lopez de Santa Anna, Gen. Perfecto de Cos declared, "Con una victoria mas como el este, perdieremos no solo la guerra, pero quizas el pais. (With another victory like this, we should lose not only the war, but perhaps even the country).

From an event that lasted for a little less than a month, that involved directly less than 3,000 men, there are a million stories and angles, points of view, and tidbits that will continued to the analysed, talked about, studied, and frequently misunderstood for the next one thousand years.....or more. To be sure, we shall, and our progeny shall, Remember the Alamo.

Thanks for your attention. Remember the 6th of March 1836.

El Gringo Viejo

When people compare the bad of Bush and Cheney to the good of Obama and Biden

This is a reprint of a comment we made earlier about the evils of Bush and Cheney.   This is an original Gringo Viejo response to one of the effete marxist one-worlder, global warming pyschoes who zombie out the bilge about Bush and Cheney.   We lost our temper a bit.  The person to whom we were responding also had the same grind about Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, et al.    The commentator to whom El Gringo Viejo was responding was asking "Do you remember ....and then would follow some false, but stereotypical presentation about some thing the dastardly Republicans had done or said...supposedly...which was actually not a true fact.   For instance, "Sarah Palin is so stupid that she said she was qualified to be vice-president because she could see Russia from her front porch."   That means that Tina Fey is Sarah Palin, but why bother with the truth? 

     Remember Mitt? Yes. Remember the Death Panels? Yes. Remember WMD? Yes. Remember Saddam and al Qaeda? Yes Remember Cheney? Yes Remember Bush? Yes. And NEVER FORGET IT! Okay. Mitt is a nice guy and a much better specimen of humanity than a duplicitous, mendacious marxist who presently holds the office of President of the USA. Death Panels are included in the Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative, as Sarah Palin said they would be and as they are in all socialised medicine countries. WMDs were used throughout the Iran - Iraq War by Saddam Hussein, and he also used them on at least three large scale cases against his own people with resultant casualties numbering between 30,000 and 40,000. He also blew the wells and he also drained the domain of the Swamp Arabs who had farmed on floating gardens, producing some of the finest vegetables and other fine produce for over 2,500 years on complicated floating plots. And al Qaeda explains itself, because it will kill anyone, especially Muslims, who disagree with their dogma. And Bush and Cheney revealed their medical records, school transcripts, and have unamended passports. They also won two wars without pridefulness and it was a shame that Obama has done everything possible to lose what had been gained. Petty, petty little mendacious, marxist, Manchurian delinquent.

 

 

This is placed here as a public service for any OROG who wants a quick response to anyone droning forth about the evils of Conservatives and Republicans.  Fight back.

El Gringo Viejo

The Way of all Marxists and leftist demagogues

News from Venezuela

Link

Analyst estimates Chávez’s family fortune at around $2 billion

Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, estimated in a recent report that the Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has “amassed a fortune” similar to that of the Castro brothers in Cuba.

According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion.”

“The Chávez Frías family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999,” said Brewer in an analysis published in their website.

Brewer said that Cuba is receiving about $5 billion per year from the Venezuelan treasury and in oil shipments and other resources.

“We believe that organized bolivarian criminal groups within the Chávez administration have subtracted around $100 billion out of the nearly $1 trillion in oil income made by PDVSA since 1999.

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And, of course, Salvador Allende of Chile only managed to send 24,000,000 USD to his private accounts in Spain, and to buy an old mansion on the Caribbean side of the eastern sections of Cuba in the short time that he had to sack to Chilean treasury.   Like Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat, Peron, Luis Echeverria, Lopez Portillo and every other leftist piece of leftover athlete's foot fungus in the universe.

     The more that people posture as heroes and defenders of the poor, the more it should be taken for granted that boatloads of shekels are headed to Switzerland, Spain, France, Brussels, and other convenient places.   Chavez went to Cuba for treatment because he feared assassination among the medical workers in Venezuela.   Pitiful.   The world is briefly better.   Let us hope that those low-intellectual power and low-information citizens of Venezuela ....at least enough to forge a new and reasonable majority....can arrive at some sort of epiphany or another....some road to Damascus moment....but that is for Providence to sort out.

 

El Gringo Viejo