Seriously. We’ve all seen Coen Brothers movies.
I’m thinking of Of Mice and Men: “Tell me about the rape island again, George.”
How did we go from Steinbeck to Epstein in less than a century? And then from Epstein to these guys in half a decade?
Anyone else, I might agree with you but ‘cover stories’ is a beginner chess-level complexity maneuver. These guys were failing at checkers Tic-tac-toe
Makes me think of the 9/11 hijackers who attended various flight schools and only wanted to know how to cruise, not takeoff or land or talk on the radio or …
Hmmm.
I’m sure the homeless folks in DC could have used the laugh if someone had tried to recruit them.
Somehow, I don’t think it was sailing lessons that were the main attraction there for them.
ETA: Ninja’d by @Horatius, sigh.
I’m just wondering how these two got the idea of conquering a third world country in the first place.
Was it a case of one guy drunkenly suggesting “we should buy a bunch of guns and take over the Walmart” and the other guy drunkenly topping it with “Better yet, the whole strip mall” and things escalating from there?
“And we could shoot all the men and turn the chicks into our Mormon wives.”
“That’s illegal though, so we’d have to go to another country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.”
“What’s the closest one?”
“Siri, which country is closest to the US that doesn’t have an extradition treaty?”
And they actually found each other. I guess idiocy/lunacy has a gravity that I don’t quite understand. Well look and the US congress.
Well, they are both from suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Which is horrifying in its own way - it implies there’s an adequate density of sufficiently stupid, evil bozos in the area that the two of them could find each other and coordinate
Without more detailed knowledge of this pair of individuals I’d expect that ignorant violent morons tend to aggregate socially. By being shunned by everyone else.
After they became pals they hatched their plot. They were always destined to hatch some plot; which particular one is sorta random. Exactly how wacky impractical it was going to be is probably a matter of a bell curve centered on “stupid, but not incredibly stupid”. These folks just managed by luck to be 2 or 3 standard deviations off center in the “incredibly stupid” direction.
No, no, no - we just manaed by luck that they were 2-3 standard deviations to the left
There are plenty of accounts of serial killers with the same kinks finding each other. This Haitian exploit was pure fantasy and they would likely never have come close to attempting to execute it. They would have likely contented themselves with victimizing those in their own backyard. But if these wild conspiracy charges are what it takes to get them put away, so be it.
Looking at the island on Google Maps I can see there are numerous isolated small towns all around the island with nothing but a single road connecting to the others over rugged terrain. Perhaps they were going to pick one town and hold it. That would only take a small force. Trying to hold the entire island would take hundreds or thousands of soldiers.
And you can quickly see the island is in a large “C” shaped cove with Haiti only a few miles away in every direction except the west.
If these things called “cell phones” and “radios” did not exist, that might be a viable beginning of a plan
And then if they draw the right card they get bonus armies on their next turn.
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka come to mind. I read one article that suggested the psych assessment for Bernardo was a pscyho-sadistic-sexual personality. That checks.
The assessment for Homolka was more puzzling. It said that her tendencies were brought out by being with a psycho-sadistic sexual person, but if she did not meet up with such a person, her tendencies were less likely to come out.
Which is not meant to excuse her, just to respond to what can trigger such sadistic and violent impulses.
[Emphasis added.] Ahem.
Sorry 'bout that!
And ya said it better than me, too. 