Hire The Muleskinner!

Richard Mulligan does an excellent job portraying an arrogant General Custer in the movie Little Big Man. He's approached by the title character, who is looking for a job as a scout. Instead of simply hiring the man based on his qualifications, he has to play a little mind game, claiming that he can tell a man's profession. In this case, however, he's dead wrong. The Little Big Man had never worked as a muleskinner, and lets the General know it in a very lighthearted manner.

Unwilling to accept his own fallibility, the General digs his heels in and lets it be known rather subtly that Little Big Man is not going to be hired as a scout unless he backs down and (falsely) acknowledges having been a muleskinner, which he finally does. It is at this point that the General -- with an arrogant and smug look on his face -- finally relents and tells his Lieutenant: "Hire the muleskinner!".

And things are pretty much the same today. People are being forced to prostitute themselves, just for a wage slave job. At every turn, they're forced to concede that the boss is "right" -- whether or not he is in fact correct. This is what happens when people get too much power -- they have a strong tendency to push other people around.

More Leftist Hypocrisy

Nice. One of the TV talking heads makes a major gaffe during a speech to graduating college students, and all traces of it are erased from the video and transcript. RTWT.

Now... what do you think would have happened had Ann Coulter made a similar mistake?

Yeah, thought so.

Vietnam Syndrome

(Hat tip to The Old Jarhead for making us aware of this.)

One of the reasons that the US lost the Vietnam was because it was being micro-managed by the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon. People thousands of miles from the action were dictating what those with their "boots on ground" were and were not allowed to do.

Quite some years ago, The Old Sarge was relating a conversation he had had with a fellow veteran while a student at Albuquerque's Technical-Vocational Institute. The other veteran was ex-Army and had served over in that hell-hole. He related how things were while standing guard on the perimeter of some military base in 'Nam. It seems that if anyone were detected attempting to violated the perimeter of the base, the guards were required to yell "Halt!" three times in both English and Vietnamese. If the offender did not stop, they had to radio the Command Post for permission to fire a warning shot. If permission were given, the guard must again yell "Halt!" three times in both English and Vietnamese. Only then could he firing a warning shot. The idiocy of such a policy is readily apparent to everyone except TPTB.

Fast-forward 45 years or so, and we get this bit of lunacy. No wonder our troops are dying over there.

What did Santayana say about those who fail to learn from history?

Percentage-wise

It's always amusing to watch people get the vapors over a stock market drop of a couple hundred points. One would think that there was something wrong. What adds to our amusement, though, is converting those raw numbers into percentages and seeing just how pitifully insignificant these drops are.

Take, for example, today's little hiccup. Market watchers would have you believe that 139 points amounts to something. Naturally, what they do not tell you is every bit as significant as what they do tell you. (Although, to be fair, they did slip that into this particular article.) In this instance, that 139-point "plunge" amounted to.... grab ahold of your seat.... a whopping 1.3% drop.

It's enough to make us take to our bed.

(And these hysterical cretins are supposed to be the "captains of industry", guiding our economic ship through fair weather and foul? Puh-lease.)