re: Facts To Ruin A Hippie’s Day
Gormogon operative B.D. writes in to offer an amplification of a point ‘Puter made in this post. B.D. states it so well, there’s no need for ‘Puter to waste time summarizing.
“Members of the 82nd Airborne are heading to Haiti, along with thousands of Marines, to provide security as needed.”
It does not detract from your excellent post to note that the Marines (and probably the Airborne) are not just there as muscle. The embarked brigade has a battalion of service troops: engineers, truckdrivers, supply dudes, cooks, doctors etc. Also important is the command and control the brigade can bring ashore: being able to coordinate the rest of the aid workers is sometimes overlooked tool.
And of course the grunts can motor around and shoot people: we’ve done it before in Haiti and this won’t be the last time, I’m sure.
I saw this (without the grunts) in Bangladesh in 1991. Devastating cyclone, masses of humanity without food or water, host country infrastructure devastated.* By day 3 there were enough aid workers running around but they lacked coordination. You’d have more aidworkers than victims in one village, a few clicks away people dying watching helos fly overhead.
4th MEB landed, established a headquarters and coms and got things organized. Then they landed the engineers and doctors and etc.
* In addition to the usual cyclone damage every single helicopter except two the Bangladeshis owned was destroyed. Some general pickedthe wrong airport to stage them at: whoops.
Exactly right, B.D. It’s not just sinew and lead that our military brings to Haiti. It is years and years of hard-won expertise in logistics. In the case of a natural disaster such as the Haiti earthquake, good command and control could save thousands of lives.
Semper fidelis, B.D.
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.