Private Mars Rocket II

The other day, I wrote a post about how Spartans Were Losers and in it I noted my source article claimed that Spartan logistics were lacking. I linked that to another country with bad logistics - the Confederacy. While doing something else over the weekend, I had some deeper thoughts which I will now share with you.

Why Slave-holding Societies Are Bad at Logistics

Reason #1 - It's Hard
Getting logistics right requires a lot of hard work, and said work is not glamorous. We remember General Grant, but don't remember his chief logistics guy. Slave societies do not reward hard work - that's what slaves do, not the slaveowners.

Reason #2 - Value of Labor
Good logistics focuses in part on reducing labor. In modern settings, that's by putting cargo on pallets and into containers as opposed to getting a bunch of guys with strong backs to shlep it around. Slave societies and those which do not value labor (modern-day Russia) aren't interested in reducing labor hours. There's always a slave or a conscript around to shlep stuff.

Reason #3 - Corruption
Slave societies tend to be much more tolerant of corruption. The whole edifice of a slave society is that the slave-holding class is more deserving of rewards than other classes. So if they take something, well, they deserve it. Again, the parallel to modern-day Russia and their oligarch infestation should be obvious.

Comes news today (actually yesterday, but who's counting) that the NRA is run by a collection of flim-flam men. The linked article is an excellent summary, but basically the NRA went from a $25 million surplus in 2015 to a $36 million deficit in 2018. It appears that most or all of that nearly $64 million delta went into the pockets of the executive leadership of the organization. The Attorney General of New York State has filed suit on behalf of the organization against it's leadership and is also suing to dissolve the organization.

I have thoughts:

1) The American Right has become overrun with flim-flam men (and women) in leadership positions, from the President on down. These flim-flammers prosper because there is a large group in the American Right who just wants their leaders to "own the libs." Getting anything done is not even secondary.
2) As a member of the NRA, I'm not generally in favor of shutting down the organization. It is clear, however, that the entire executive leadership needs to be out of office if not in jail. Somehow I doubt Trump will be leading "lock them up" chants against the NRA leaders anytime soon. Game recognizes game, as they say.
3) Every organization or political entity is composed of people. Bad people can wreck the most noble of institutions simply by behaving badly.

Over at Talking Points Memo, they have a nice run-down of the state of play between Jerry Falwell Jr., his pool boy, and Donald Trump. The article is short, but the gist of it is that it appears that:

1) Falwell and/or his wife got caught with their pants down (literally) by the pool boy.
2) Michael Cohen, Trump's Fixer of Pants Malfunctions, fixed the problem by arranging for Falwell, a humble Christian minister, to toss money at Pool Boy. (Remind me, since when do Christian ministers get personally rich?)

Then, suddenly, Falwell endorses Trump. Trump, a man who wouldn't know a Bible if it fell on his head. Suspicious, anybody? The whole thing looks like something out of a bad soap opera. The fact that people seem to want to follow Falwell is another example of the American Right following a flim-flam man.

So where do the foreign despots tie in? We keep wondering why Trump is so friendly with Putin. Marshall suspects that Putin has something on Trump. Given Trump's lack of shame, I doubt that.

No, I suspect Trump fancies himself as another Putin. In this case, Trump (via Cohen) appears to have done something Putin would do - use blackmail to get somebody (Falwell) to endorse him. And thus a group of people get doubly fleeced by a flim-flam man: first in donating to Falwell and then in voting for Trump.

Lost in the hoopla about the Mueller report is another report on (alleged) malfeasance at another conservative institution. In the New Yorker there's a long article about organized looting at the NRA. I am a member of that organization.

Basically, the article alleges that various officers of the organization are also getting paid by the NRA's media relations firm, Ackerman McQueen. For example, Oliver North, current NRA President, is also reported to be receiving a million dollars a year from Ackerman McQueen. This company alone receives 40 million dollars from the NRA per year. It's also alleged that the owners of Ackerman McQueen have created other shell companies to funnel money out of the NRA. It's gotten bad enough that the board of the NRA or a part thereof is suing NRATV, an Ackerman-created entity, just to get contracts so they can figure out how badly they are being looted.

I've written before of the tendency of the American Right to follow obvious flim-flam men. Herewith I present another example, although in this case it appears that the rot has been going on for a while. This rot is also enabled because the NRA no longer spends money on gun safety, it's original mission. 90% of my dues are going to various media and political activities such as NRATV.

This scam is in part coming to light because, as in all games of musical chairs, the music eventually stops. The election of Trump has greatly reduced cash flowing into the NRA, and now that money's tight (coffee is no longer free at NRA headquarters) people are asking where did it go. As Lincoln said, "you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."