The originals vs the establishment - and the originals are losing
I was reading it and I realized the reason why they're being booted off. The original dream of these Trump campaign staffers is to work in the West Wing. The problem is that there was not enough jobs to go around so they got assigned to "beach head" teams in the various executive agencies. Their goal is to ensure ensure that the agencies meet Trump's goals. The problem was that they were given temporary appointments - 90-120 days in most cases. And the department heads would want their own people, not someone who could be a spy for higher headquarters. You also have the following issues:
1. Are they competent at the position they're holding?  Also a side note - the Senior Executive Service (SES) positions are the only ones that I am aware off that serves at the President's pleasure and can considered to be  political appointments. There's not enough of those go around, and even they you have to be competent at the position being appointed. Otherwise the agency would rubber wall the appointee off. If you want the danger of appointing a political hack appointed to a position he has no knowledge of expertise of, consider this guy.
2. Can they work with other people?  - Well, consider the EPA. If you're placing a Trump appointee there with the goal of decimating the agency, you won't be welcomed with open arms.
3. Trump placed a hiring freeze on federal hiring. So their appointments can't be converted to permanent ones. Can it be waived? Yes, but you can see the headlines now.
So these guys should had realized what they were getting into.Too bad no one from the Trump team warned them.
 
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

It's April 28.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

I wanted to be the first person to suggest the creation of a snap-together-block model of the current President's Florida club. Alas, Jeryl Bier beat me to it.

there a Mar-A-Lego?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/steve-bann ... -1.4056578

No press release or tweet from the White House about this yet. However, it's in the Federal Register, and that makes it official.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Does anyone have any idea how to stat up Pouka's Alter ability in GURPS 4e?
Thanks,

Mike
Michael R. Smith (lastfreehuman@gmail.com)
GURPS IST Aleph Wordpress (http://istaleph.wordpress.com/)
GURPS IST Aleph Twitter (http://twitter.com/IstAleph/)
Trek This! Wordpress (http://dthiller.wordpress.com/)
My Blog (http://lastfreehuman.wordpress.com/)

All I can say about it is it sure looks pretty, as unlike the release of 2199 & Celestial Ark, there's no subtitles - English or Japanese. Which means that I need to brush up on how to inject subtitles to a bluray stream, I've done it before for the Macross Frontier movies. Not sure if naming a UNCS DD the Saratoga counts as bullying Sky or not.

Okay, so let me start off first by saying that I'm sorry for dropping out of Fenspace.  It left a lot for you guys to carry, with Roughriders and everything associated with them (BAT, HARDES, Roughnecks, and the Angels) being as big of a thing as they were.
Secondly, I'm thinking about easing back into things by doing some Infinities vignettes and other supplementary materials.

Trouble is, I'm a little unsure of where to start.

Help?

And yet more, found on an old harddrive

With apologies to Brian Schul. A Roughrider gets an unwanted assignment.....

----

The Russians called the Foxhound the 'Air Battleship' in reference to the massive missile armament the original carried. In polite company, both of them would earn the nickname Grey Lady. But everyone knew them as the Bitch. Bitch to Fly. Bitch to Maintain. Bitch to Take-Off. Bitch to Land. Everyone's Bitch in a wargame. Ugly. Brutal. But Hard. She did two things well. The Bitch came with the first IDAR set fitted to a mobile platform, and could outrun bad news if given half a chance.

I was the first to fly one.

I signed up to fly the Sled. The worst moment in any Sled Driver's life is to be told it's time to move on to another jet. Those HABU - all caps - just have a way of getting their teeth into you, and you never want to fly another jet again. She slices through the sky, stretched forward, going a million miles an hour while sitting, leaking on the hangar. But all good things come to an end.

We'd ordered two Foxhounds from a small-time friend of Bens. Officially, the reason we were told it was because the Fox had a new type of interwave sensor that could detect drive fields. Unofficially, the scuttlebut said it was just a thing between friends - a little helping hand. So can imagine how I felt getting my orders to transfer. It felt like being asked to give up a limb.

But orders is orders. So, I hopped a ferry out to Frigga to be the first Roughrider to meet the Foxhound. My first inkling that this wasn't to be the usual assignment was meeting the mousy woman due to be my backseater on the flight out - Rico. I knew three things about her. She worked in intelligence. She had absolutely zero flight hours - not even a callsign. And even if she wasn't in command, she was the whole reason the jet existed in the first place.

I mean, I'd gone from Sled Driver, to Bus Driver. That's an insult! Okay, so maybe I hadn't met top marks for my flying skills but I still more than made the grade.

We met our jet on Frigga, and I must say, first impressions of the girl weren't good. She stood there, creaking, steaming and somehow managing to look twenty years old despite supposedly being brand new - my first thoughts were of all those old Eastern European cars rattling and banging and smoking their way around the Soviet Union. Most of all, however, she seemed Huge, more like something that battered the sky out of its way, rather than slice through it. Those big intakes reached up over my head.

Almost like she was reaching up after something.

I remember how the original MiG had been built to chase the Blackbird and think that I've been doomed to play second fiddle. I walked around her, taking stock of the welds on her steel skin, the rivets not ground down flush with the skin. She's crude, brutal and built to a budget.... I'm almost appalled at the idea of spending three times the cost of a new Sled on her. The smell of ammonia and jet fuel linger, making the eyes water. In every jet there's usually something you can bond over, something interesting or intriguing that makes you just that bit curious to get inside.

The Foxhound offered nothing. Even our markings looked just a little bit funny on the tail... more like a captured enemy jet than something built to wear them.

Jet - the builder - assured us they were both brand new, before handing me the flight manual. Twice the size of a Sled, and then some. In guest quarters I finally get an inkling of why I'd been paired up with the Foxhound. You've got a hundred pages on how to fly the jet, then another two hundred on properly managing the engines to maintain top speed without melting an inducer or shedding blades. And I'd always had an engineer's mind - it's what I did daneside before getting away from it all.

Rico earned her callsign - Chatterbox - by not shutting up about all the cool sensor gear she'd just been handed. Of course she objected - but that's the whole point of a first callsign, isn't it? You hate it, you moan about it, then your squadron thinks of something worse.

My first impressions of the Bitch. A finnicky, overstressed propulsion system inside a solid-steel spaceframe buldging with a sensor set from a starship four or five times it size.

The cockpit comes from 1984. Wireframe graphics on glass monitors packed into a sea of steam-gauges. It's tight, smaller than Piper-cub, with steel framing closing in around. Even the smell is decades old - a mixture of amine, engine oil, kerosene and ammonia. At least the flight suit's easy enough to lock into place. Just sit-and-latch and ready to go. But it's all solid, more like the cockpit was machined from a billet of steel than pressed and painted. Controls are tight. Switches 'thunk' and 'latch' positively. She likes to be touched, and rewards iumble and inquisitive fingers.

The flightsuit is light, tight and better suited to Chatterbox than your's truly but I can deal with that. We suit up for the ferry flight home while I grumble to myself outloud about why I couldn't have been given an F-37 ferry instead - those things are some sweet single-seaters.

The engines are given the traditional christening with the bottle of Jeremiah Weed before being fired up for the first time. Our relationship gets off to a great start when she kills her own batteries cranking, and they have to fetch a start-cart to crank the turbines. When they finally blast into life, it isn't the gutty roar of a J-58, but something sharper, shriller and harsher, more like the turbine blades aren't quite seated right and rattling loose. Ducts and bypass doors rattle and whisper.

Both engines cough and bang as they're pushed to take-off power, see-sawing between too-rich, too-lean and just right before finally settling down to something just a little rough and smokey.

Chatterbox is getting giddy as she works over the switches, while I'm trying to nudge it forward on brakes that have exactly two settings - on, and off.

I pilot it on out up to where the outer-marker should've been before Chatterbox locks in the autopilot and programs our course and speed for Atalante and I'm reduced to keeping the engines in tune.

I honestly begin to wonder who I pissed off to deserve the assignment.

---

HABU come with a mind - a personality. You have the Speeders, you have the Suicide Girls. You've got the mysterious Femme Fatales and the Blabbermouths. You get the odd grouch or gossip. It took a month of training sorties to really start to understand the Bitch. At first, I put her down as a bit of a hard bitch. Stern, abrupt and intolerant, above all, she was a cranky bird who didn't like being mishandled. Every flight had it's glitches and grumbles - stuck doors, engine surges or just plain taking too long to get into her stride and run.

I finally had my epiphany on a training exercise where we'd been tasked to run an intercept of two older Sled when she woke up and bared her teeth for the first time since I met her. She found her stride early and pushed harder and harder for the entire mission.

The original Foxhound had been built as a fighter, to chase the original blackbirds. Now, she'd been saddled with tons of reconnaissance equipment and asked to do a mission she'd never really be intended for, something that maybe lessened what she thought she was supposed to be.

Realising that became something of a bonding moment. Friendship through shared pain is something of a military tradition. The more I understood her, the more I could manage to keep ahead of her issues, to keep the whole machine in tune and running happy.

The cockpit dynamic in the Bitch is unlike anything we normally fly. Most of my time is spent working as a propulsion specialist, rather than pilot, managing the big Mig's big engines. The jet's driven from the back seat by the Information System Officer - who plots the route into the nav computer and let's the autopilot handle the directing..

Once takeoff and landing are done and she's locked into her autopilot, it's time to push her up to cruising speed, keeping the main engines in tune the entire way up balancing brute force against core inlet temperatures, all while juggling the neutron injectors, bypass doors and shock-ramps, then manually making the turn to keep the big jet on the black line because the star tracker got washed out by the sun again.

Holding it steady at .18 is constant, mind-numbing work. You're head's constantly inside the cockpit, hemmed in by four steel walls and tektite, with no time to look around because as soon as you do the Bitch turns around a bites. An engine unstarts, overheats, or a generator CSD goes out - anything to grab your attention. Hey, buddy, eyes down here please.

And then when you've mastered you realise that the reason it's been wandering around the sky so much is that the SAS failed on take-off and you didn't notice. You start to realise that you and the jet, you're getting along. Both of you need to work together the make shit happen. You find out what she likes and doesn't like, then run from there. It's a sort of mutual respect.

---

Chatterbox calls her the Grey Lady. Chatterbox still hates to be called Chatterbox. Chatterbox loves hacking things on the fly or haywiring up enemy air defenses, even on exercise. She doesn't shut up telling me exactly what she's doing either. So imagine my joy when we get called up to take on an actual combat mission with her the the Bitch. Normally, it's a specialist job, but we've had a maintenance failure so we're backup.

It's a real Wild Weasel run on a thionite waystation. She doesn't understand why the answer I gave Ben was 'You gotta be shitting me'

The Bitch doesn't carry a heavy combat load. It's not really supposed to be that kind of jet. You can get missiles on sure and Chatterbox spent the entire night rewritting the software with Red Rider to make it work with the anti-radiation missile we had in stock, but really, it just feels like an alround bad idea to intentionally take one of these things into a threat area. Meanwhile, I spent the day with the crew chief going through all the preparations such a comple and highly tuned machine needs to ake her go. Even the uprated engines get check-runs to make sure the heat rejection issue's been fixed.

Satisfied that all's well, I grab some shuteye before the big day.

Immediately on takeoff, it's clear she's a sick bird and not happy to be flying. Burning more fuel than she needs to, sluggish on the throttle and steering like a pig. Refuelling gets interrupted by a bounce off the tanker halfway thrugh and I'm holding her on a single afterburner and full right rudder just to take gas, then accelerate out to some godforsaken black rock that'd been kicked out of the solar system. I'm seriously questioning the spacecraft's ability to take the mission after an unstart sends me head-first into the canopy rail.

But we press on. The strike force is on its way and somebody needs to knock down the missiles before they knock down our friends.

She comes alive 2AU out from the target when the first probes reach us. We are not stealthy. At full burn, we can be seen clear across the solar system.

Chatterbox starts to sweat, calling out each and every new threat as it awakens to our presence. New drive signatures. New sensors. She battles each and every one of them, splitting us up first into an entire squadron, generating ghost craft circling wide, or braking missile longs by pulling their range gate. Missile after missile reaches up to say hello. They hit nothing but ghosts.

We've a good line on the enemy, but we're still an AU out of range of our own weapons.

The hardest thing in the world is not to just jam the throttles full forward. She'll blow her engines at this speed and temperature. Easing her up, I watch the speed and temperature indicators climb and I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she wants to get us killed. I reach for the coolant injectors to accelerate her to maximum speed over the target, and something remarkable happens.

Immediately, she perks up. She finds her stride and she gains another percentage point of speed as she hikes her skirt up and the engines blast her forward. The first enemy fighters are coming to intercept but we're so goddamned fast we don't even see them. A few shots chase out wake but we're outrunning even missiles, chasing a little green spot on my HUD.

Chatterbox arms our missiles. She selects our target. 4 missiles. 4 SAM sites. Handy that. I push the trigger

The jet rocks as all four depart, immediately trailing behind us. We're faster than our our ammunition.

Chatterbox switches from ECM, to ECCM, guiding the missiles in even as the SAM sites try to jam. But they can't beat the Bitch's sensors - or Chatterbox pushing the buttons. She's been training with Red Rider.

We're long gone from the threat are by the time the missiles find their target. 100/100. Boom. Enemy fighters recede behind, unable to do nothing but watch. It's marvelous. Only then do I have the time to actually look down at my instruments.

Engine temperatures, hot but good. Door positions, full shut. Speed...... Holy shit.

I swear to the gods of speed the number I saw on that gauge started with a 2. Nobody fucking believes me, despite the track logs. Maybe it was just an error caused by our own information but I'm sticking to my story. And Chatterbox, bless her, she'll stick to it with me.

I'll be goddamned if she didn't go right back to being grumbly and sick as soon as we'd left the threat area, but she'd done exactly what she'd needed to do. Even the HABU were impressed.

The Grey Lady becomes her official nickname, and our practice missions change to line up with our new official role.

Suppression of Enemy Air Defences.

I think the Bitch likes that.

--

We're the unloved bastards. The dissapointment when we show up is palpable. Everyone wants to see the HABU. Sending us along to your local airshow is tantamoment to telling someone they aren't good enough to get a Blackbird. Whether it's intended or not, that's how it comes across to every small-holder out there in the belt. So, there's that subtle hostility ready to greet us, even behind the smile. Thanks for coming, but why no Blackbirds? We want the fast jets? Not that rustbucket.

But we do our best to put on a good show for the kids.

Never forget that when you're the one out there who has to inspire the next generation to take up the Roughrider Cause.

So you prep. You work. Chatterbox sits in the back with nothing to do but wave and take vide while I try to fly.

Now, the HABU show is perfectly choreographed and run to a tee. It's there to make you believe you can be the pilot of such a fantastic machine. It slices through the sky above your head, slow and elegant as a black lady, before roaring over fast and loud. Always graceful, always precise, like a razor cutting through the sky. Sleek. Elegant, graceful. The might do a quick flash on the cans, or occasionally a simulated engine-out takeoff, but rarely go full bore. Always like they're afraid to break the jet.

We tried doing the HABU flight once and nobody liked it. Even we hated it.

So, this next time up we came up behind the Valkyries - the Rockhounds one since this was a Greenwood station..

We promptly did the exact same run - the jet parts anyway.. In a craft that weighed three times as much.

Sure it lurched around the sky and we took a lot of the turns far-wider or faster, or on full flaps with the cans burning because we were so low on energy where the Valkyrie had been cruising. It was hot, sweaty and tough. You really feel how heavy she is when she gets slow. And when we'd shown up Greenwood, we just beat that airfield to shit blasting the crowd with the cans, backfiring and making high-speed passes before finishing with slow speed, low-altitude full burner pass.

Now, we came into the maneuver with far too much energy, so we have to spill it all while turning to slow it down, almost like a combat-landing and go-around. I've my head out of the cockpit watching the flightline to make sure we don't impinge on the crowd and she just starts to judder and drop. She's on the edge stalling off her wings without the power to keep herself aloft. She'll hold there at a high alpha thanks to the wing extensions and there's enough roll authority from both stabilators and ailerons to keep her level. Full-flaps, drop the nose, rock the wings - let people think we'd gotten it badly wrong. Bad things were about to happen.

Oh god, they're about to crash. Part of them wants to see it.

All according to the plan.

We're maybe a hundred feet away from the crowd and I jam the throttles from near idle into full burner, opening the coolant taps at the same time. Both turbines howl. She backfires on a surge as the bypass doors open, clears her throat and roars. You could feel the engines all the way on the other side of the asteroid. You'd never do it with a HABU - it's just not graceful. It doesn't fit the image, the brand, but we've no image to protect.

Flaps-up. She digs in and blasts off, roaring down the runway before escaping into a vertical climb.

They think you saved the plane. Maybe they never in believed you'd crash it - but part of them thought you would still makes them cheer. But goddamned does it make people cheer.

We head home, tanking gas. By the time we make it back to Atalante, the video footage as already outrun us. Chatterbox has been spreading her own cockpit video through the the Bitch's own interwave connection, while upvoting everything that came off that asteroid. The HABU are bubbling.

We land.

Crew chief walks up.

"The Commander wants to see you."

Ah shit.

Well, at least we'll never have to worry about being display pilots again.

Ben waits for us in his office, doing the Commander Ikari thing that warns you that you've really fucked up. The hands drop, revealing his true expression.

"You two...." he says with a smile. "That was one hell of a buzz-job."

Neither of us know what to say.

---

So yeah, I'm a bus driver. I fly the Bitch.

Maybe that makes me a son of a bitch.

But, in its own weird way she's started to grow on me. It's a jet that takes time to master, to get to know. It's a relationship built in moments, not all at once at first sight. Sure she's a bitch. But never once have either of them really dropped a crew in it. She'll have her breakdowns and keep flying. Her engines with bang and pop and rattle, then find their voice just when you need it. You start to think she'll always pull you through. People look down on us both, but we show them up nonetheless. Let her off the leash and she'll play with the best of them. blasting around like a dancing rhino.

Maybe its true what they say a bitching soldier is a happy soldier.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

In which Lun corrupts the wide-eyed innocent youth of America.

And I practiced dialogue heavy stuff.

---
"Look ma'am, I don't want to be dealing with a murder so late in my shift. For your own safety, I suggest you give it a rest for the night."

The officer made his point clear in a polite and respectful manner. Lun couldn't help but notice that his right hand was held comfortably close to his pistol holster, while his left had was open, offering her the chance to move on.

"Thank you for your concern, officer,"

Lun, offered him the same measured politeness he'd offered her. Arguing with the police was a good way to get a beating, in anyone's country.

"Have a good night, ma'am."

"And yourself."

After hours preparing her finest dress, polishing her brass until it shone like a golden constallation against the rusted brick cityscape, then a single hour on that street corner, she made her way back through the city on foot - having forgotten to bring enough money for a cab. There where only so many times one could take being called a Commie Bitch in one night, anyway. Time to head back to the ship. Tomorrow was mission day, and while the other ship-AI's scoffed, Lun would swear blind a few hours sleep every night made a difference for her.

Detroit in October was desolate city, filled with the rusting hulks of decades-past dreams and the faded glamour of industry. In a way, it felt like home. Even with the supposed economic rejuvenation, the dockside warehouses were still mostly empty, the few unbroken windows turned opaque by age and rain. Some of them were being used as squats. Most lay derelict.

Lun hurried to her berth. While she could handle herself in a fight if it came to it, it was still better not to get into a fight in the first place.

She turned a corner, finding a boy in a red jacket crying on the kerb. She considered just walking past him, but this wasn't exactly a safe place for a child.

"Are you lost?"

"Stranger! Danger!" The boy yelled. "Stranger! Danger!" His voice was like a siren, wailing for attention.

The few people around were starting to watch. Lun stepped back, keenly aware of how it might look to an outsider. She crouched on one knee, offering an open hand and a kind smile.

"I am Lieutanant Navigator Lun Alexeeva of the Navy of the Soviet Union"

The boy went quiet, studying her for a moment after wiping his yes.

"Andrew. Andrew Freeman ma'am."

"Well. Now that we are not strangers, where are your parents?"

She tried to sound kind, even if the boy had been raised on generations of propeganda to hear her accent.

"My mom's at work. Daddy's gone."

"I don't think she'd be pleased to know you were in a part of town like this."

The boy frowned "She lied to me. Said she had the afternoon off so we could see a movie, but then got a phonecall in the morning and she had to go to Walmart and they said they'd fire her if she didn't show. So I ran away..." "But now I don't know the way home."

"I can call the police.."

"No cops. Mom says cops are bad for kids like me... they'll take me away."

Lun sighed. "Alright. You can come to my ship. We will call your mother from there. She can pick you up."

The boy hesistated. "I shouldn't go with strangers.."

"I am not a stranger. I am an officer of the Soviet Navy."

"Are you a Communist?"

"Yes."

His brow furrowed. "You don't look the same as everyone?"

"What do you mean?"

"That's what they told me in school.... that Communism was all the same."

"That's the simple explanation. But I can tell you're a smart boy, would you like to know more?"

"Yes," he said, after a moment.

"We can talk as we walk," Lun answered.

The boy nodded, following her after a moment.

"So, what have you been told of communism."

"They said it was bad because the people weren't free."

"That's not entirely true. Have they taught you what the Soviet Union was in school yet?"

"Uhuh," the boy nodded. "They were our friends in a war, and then they became our enemies because they were communist."

"America and the Soviet Union both began with a revolution. In your America, you overthrew the English king. In the Soviet Union, we overthrew the Tsar of Russia. And like your America, we created a democracy where every body would be equal. Do you know what that means? To be equal"

"Everybody is the same," the kid smiled

"More than that?"

"Um.... we don't have any Slaves. Mom said we used to be..."

She nodded. "That's important. You have no slaves."

"Everybody can vote once."

She nodded a game. "Yes."

"Nobody is above the law."

"You are a smart boy. There is one more place people are equal in America."

"In America, anybody can um...." he churned his mind. "Everycone can be rich?"

"Yes. that's it. Everybody has the small chance to make a success of themselves and to be Noah Scott. You know who this is?"

"That fat old dude in a Space station?"

"Yes, that's him!" she grinned, allowing a small chuckle to escape. "But the American idea of equal, and the Soviet idea of equal are different"

"But if everybody's the same, how can they be different?"

A good question.

"Think of America as your classroom. How do you sit in your classroom?"

"At a desk, duh?"

"How is your class arranged. How are the desks in the classroom laid out."

"They're all in rows," said the boy, looking up at her.

"So some people sit at the front of the class, closer to teacher, and some sit at the back. Now where is the rubbish bin.... the wastebasket you call it."

"At the top of the class, beside the door."

"Now imagine one day that your teacher comes into class and hands each student a small rubber ball. And she tells the entire class, that all they have to do to get an A for the year, is to throw the rubber ball into the bin while sitting at their desk. To make everyone equal, everyone has one chance at making the shot. And only one chance. Would you say this is fair?"

"Well if everyone gets one shot, then yeah. It's fair," answered the boy,

"Do you think the people sitting at the back would think so? What if you were sitting at the very back of the class, what would you think?"

"That it's harder for me to make the shot?"

"Exactly?"

"Would that be fair for you, for the people up front to make an easier shot than you?"

"Of course not?" He looked to her to confirm.

She answered with a smile. "That is American equality. Everyone gets the same shot. Everyone can still succeed But some people have an easier shot than others. Now, does that seem fair to you?"

"Not really?"

"So how would you make it fairer?"

"You could give the people at the back an extra shot?"

"You could," she agreed. "But then the people at the front would complain about it being unfair, because the other people have two chances, compared to their one." "

"Damn," sighed the boy.

"But, there is one way for everyone to have an equal shot at the bin. What do you think it is?"

"If everyone was the same distance away from the bin."

"Exactly! You re-arrange the seats in the classroom, so that everyone sits in a circle around the bin. Everyone gets their one shot, and everyone gets the same shot. And that was the dream of the Soviet Union. That was real Communism."

Her eyes sparked with zeal.

"So what happened in Russia?"

Lun sighed. "A man named Stalin ruined it all. And Instead of re-arranging the classroom like we'd hoped, what he did was just move the students at the front to the back, and if any of them complained, shot them and their parents for speaking out."

"So, they ddn't have the second amendment?"

"First," Lun corrected. "They did. But since anyone had to be mad for speaking out against the government, so anyone who spoke out against the government was sent to an insane asylum,"

"That's not very free, then...."

"No," Lun shook her head. "Stalin murdered his comrades who had once supported him. Kruschev, who came after him, sent those who disagreed with him to an asylum. Brezhnev, who came after Kruschev, grew fat on prestige while the state crumbled...They ran the country for their own benefit, rather than the people's."

"But...." the boy's thoughts trailed off. "You couldn't vote against them?"

"They wouldn't let us." She offered him a wan smile. "I think you can see that the problem was not communism, but something else."

"The people in charge?" asked the boy.

"You are a smart child," said Lun, placing a hand on the boy's shoulder.

---

"Hello, yes. Ms Freeman. My name is Lun. I have your son. I can tell you he is safe and unharmed...." A loud clatter from behind sent a shudder through her body. "....For the time being."

The scream on the phone nearly burst her eardrum.

Oops.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Freeman's Mind 2 begins. On April 1st. Honest.

http://www.accursedfarms.com/freemans-mind-2-episode-1/