#how about rust? Rust might need guidance with Captain's words!

[demon-blood-youths]

“Power without idea isn’t justice.“ (Captain Commando to... anyone of your choosing?)

Rust could look at Captian Commando processing his words,

"I have an idea and have the power, it doesn't matter what you call it. It's how you use it." Rust said seriously, flexing his metallic talons. Justice. It's a foreign word to the teen. He knows what it means. Sort of. The meaning of it is completely indifferent to him. Everyone let him down, well...except for his friends. So that's why he uses the power he was given he sees fit. @mxsecarnival

[kny111]

Apocalyptic novelist Max Brooks is something of an expert on planning for pandemics and other disasters. The author, whose books include World War Z, Germ Warfare and the forthcoming Devolution, has toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has reviewed government response plans related to various emergency situations — all in the course of research.

"We have a network in place that we as taxpayers have been funding to get us ready for something just like this," Brooks says of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, he adds, "we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from Day 1."

Brooks says the notion that the U.S. government was blindsided by the pandemic is "an onion of layered lies."

"What could have happened when this virus exploded — even when Wuhan was locked down — is we could have put the word out," he says. "The government could have put the word out to ramp up emergency supplies to get them ready and then have an information strategy in place."

Instead, Brooks says, President Trump was slow to acknowledge the virus as a real threat. And thus far, the president has resisted using the Defense Production Act to force private companies to manufacture masks, gloves and other essential supplies in the fight against the coronavirus. Many government task forces that plan for disasters have yet to be activated in this crisis.

White House Not Using Defense Powers To Boost Medical Supplies

"One of the biggest problems we're facing now is panic. You see it in the stock market. You see it in panic buying," he says. "All of this panic could have been prevented. ... If the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that."

Interview highlights

On the task forces that plan for situations like this

Max Brooks has researched disaster preparedness for his novels and has lectured on the subject at the U.S. Naval War College. He has also been a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His new book, Devolution, will be published May 2020. Michelle Kholos/Penguin Random House

I can tell you that the federal government has multiple layers of disaster preparedness who are always training, always planning, always preparing, regardless of how much their budget gets cut. I have toured the CDC, and I've seen all their plans. I have witnessed what was called a "vibrant response." This is the homeland nuclear attack scenario, which was a coordination of FEMA, the Army, the National Guard, state and local officials, all working together in a massive war game to prepare us for a nuke. I have also witnessed what was called a "hurricane rehearsal of concept drill," where not only did the same players come in, but also bringing in our allies from Canada and Mexico. So I have seen that we have countless dedicated professionals who think about this constantly and they're ready to go. And they have not been activated.

On why these task forces haven't been activated yet

There is no excuse not to mobilize the full forces of the federal government right now and to centralize the response.

This all has to come from the federal government. This is why we have big government. Politically, you can argue about the role of big government in everyday society, but this is not every day. This is an emergency. The entire reason that we have these networks is when the bells start ringing — and they have not been activated. I don't know. I'm not sitting in the White House. I don't know whether the president is being lied to, whether he is holding onto a political ideology. I honestly don't know. But there is no excuse not to mobilize the full forces of the federal government right now and to centralize the response.

On how the Defense Production Act works when mobilized properly

What is supposed to happen is the federal government has to activate the Defense Production Act immediately. Now, what Defense Production Act does is it allows the federal government to step in and aggressively force the private sector to produce what we need. And what is so critical in this is timing. Because you can't simply build factories from scratch; what you can do is identify a supply chain in order to make it work.

Novelist Max Brooks On Doomsday, Dyslexia And Growing Up With Hollywood Parents

For example, if New York needs rubber gloves, New York cannot simply build rubber glove factories overnight. However, there might be a rubber glove factory in Ohio that could produce it, but they might not have the latex. So therefore, the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to go to the condom factory in Missouri and say, "Listen, you have barrels of latex we need. We are requisitioning those. We are giving them to the rubber glove factory in Ohio. And then we are transporting the finished rubber gloves to New York." That's how it is supposed to work.

On how Trump warns about nationalizing private industry — but that's not how it works

President Trump is spinning some sort of tale about, I don't know, the federal government — black helicopters coming in and taking over factories. That's not how it works at all. What happens is the federal government has the network to identify where the production chain is and how to help the private sector work through this, because the private sector doesn't know.

And as an example, I have a World War II rifle made by the Smith Corona typewriter company. Smith Corona worked with the federal government to then partner up with the Winchester company, to then share resources and to share tools and talent to then produce the rifles that we needed. That's how it works. It's not some sort of KGB coming in and taking over everything. It is guidance and streamlining. And only the federal government has the experience to know how to do that.

On what the U.S. military would do in a pandemic

I can tell you that the military has a vast transportation network here in the United States that is ready to go. We don't have to put truck drivers or private individuals at risk, because the military is already trained to do this. And I've watched them do this. The military spent years working out the legal framework of how to transport goods from one place to another around this country, because it's not like Afghanistan, where the army builds a road and then they own the road. The army has had to go through a tremendous amount of training and adaptation to work within state and local governments to make sure everything is done legally and safe without infringing on our rights. And they have done this. The Army's logistics corps can deliver anything that we need anywhere in this country within a matter of hours or days.

When it comes to sheer massive might, getting stuff done, getting stuff produced and getting stuff moved from Point A to Point B, there is no greater organ in the world than the United States military. We did it in World War II. We've done it all over the world. We can do this now. This is the thing the military is good at, and we need to let them do that.

On how the pandemic is revealing flaws in our social structure

I think there are massive gaps in our systems that are being exposed right now, which, by the way, this is not news to the experts. Anybody who works in these fields could have told you years ago that we were vulnerable to this. It's going to rip through our prisons. It's going to rip through our homeless population. God willing, it doesn't rip through our nursing homes. But what no one is talking about, what terrifies me, what keeps me up at night are the secondary casualties that will occur because of hospital overflow. What I mean is we're only talking about now how many people are going to die if the coronavirus really rips through our country. What is not being talked about enough or what needs to be talked about are the people who are still going to die of cancer, of accidents, of other diseases, because they simply can't get into the hospitals because the hospitals are choked with coronavirus patients.

On how we share some of the blame for this mismanagement as voters in a democracy

In China, every single death will be laid directly at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party. They have all the power; therefore, they take all the responsibility. When we look back at this, we — all of us individual citizens — are going to have to take a measure of personal responsibility, because we are the government. If we don't like our leaders, we shouldn't have put them there. And as much as we would love to blame this historically incompetent captain of our ship of state, we have allowed the ship to rust underneath us. It's not just President Trump's fault that institutions like the CDC have been defunded for years. It's not just President Trump's fault that we have allowed anti-vaxxers to spread misinformation throughout this country. It's not just President Trump's fault that we are continuing to build a society in support of a tech world that is based on comfort and not on resilience. We as voters and we as taxpayers must accept our share of the blame.

There is a massive amount of blame that will be laid at the feet of Donald Trump and his enablers. And when this is all over, when the dead are buried and the sick are healed, there will be a reckoning. But there were systemic issues way before Donald Trump. When Donald Trump was a carnival barker on a reality show, we as a people, as a nation, were dismantling the systems that were put in place to keep us safe. And we need to look at that damage, because the one thing we don't want to do is assume that when Donald Trump goes away, that the problems will go with him.

On the difference between panic and preparation

Panic never helps. Panic implies that you lose your mind, and that in a war — even a war against a microscopic enemy — gives aid and comfort to the enemy. When you panic, you don't think rationally, and in times of crisis, rational thought is the greatest weapon you could possibly have. So preparing, No. 1, means clearing your mind and thinking about what you have to do. It means making a list of what you need to buy, prioritizing what needs to come first, thinking about how you're going to take care of the people around you. That is preparing. Panicking is freaking out and getting in a fistfight in the grocery store over bottled water when you don't even need the water, when the tap is already running. That's panic.

I think right now we have to be so careful about who we listen to, because panic can spread much faster than a virus. And I think in addition to social distancing, we have to practice good fact hygiene. What I mean is we have to be careful what we listen to, what we take in — just as if it were a virus. And we have to be careful also what we put back out, as if we were spreading the virus. So we cannot pass along rumors. We cannot pass along misinformation. We must be critically careful not to scare people into doing irrational and dangerous things. So we need to listen to experts, the CDC, Dr. Fauci [director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], the World Health Organization, our local public health officials. These are the front-line soldiers that are doing everything to keep us safe and are literally putting their lives on the line. These are the people we need to listen to. What we cannot listen to is random facts on the Internet supposedly, things that people are passing along to us, conspiracy theories. And I'm very sorry to say this, but I think that everything our president says at this point must be fact-checked.

[dottiechan]

Finders Keepers Pt. 2 (A SWTOR Imperial Agent story)

Part 1 / Part 2

Wordcount: 1882

Summary: Havoc learns of the survival of SIS agent Dorathine Garza, now classified rogue due to her treasonous acts against the Republic. Months of futile investigation lead Aric Jorgan to finally stumble upon a strange clue.

Warnings: death, mentions of drinking/alcohol

Aric stalks across the ship like a ghost, starting from the ramp and arriving in the armoury without saying a word. Not a single member of Havoc squad dares ask him how his rendezvous with the SIS went – even the usually chipper and socially unaware Forex can sense the tension Jorgan’s arrival has generated, so he lets Yuun run his usual diagnostic scans on him in silence. The last time the war bot did a patriotic speech about destroying the Republic’s enemies, their commander almost put a blaster bolt between the droid’s mechanical eyes. Had it not been for Elara’s and Yuun’s joined effort to hold him back, Aric is pretty sure he would have dropped the clanker then and there. Commander Jorgan knows that it’s not that simple. It’s not the fight of light versus dark. Good versus evil. It’s a fight between one half of the Galaxy and the other, with both good and bad on both sides. And when he’s not seeing red, he knows that Forex’s simplistic patriotic programming could never understand that.

But he can’t help it. Every time Dee’s involved, he loses it.

Even now, he’s not fully himself as he inspects their weaponry that he knows he’ll find in pristine condition. Aric would like to blame it all on having to spend – and thus argue – an entire day with SIS agent Jonas Balkar, but it��s not that simple. The topic was Dee. More specifically the accusations the Republic has been pinning on her for months, now crowned with a sizeable bounty and the authorisation of lethal force should she resist arrest. “Who in their right minds wouldn’t though?” he argued back to Balkar. “Especially if said person is innocent.”

There’s undoubtedly blood on her hands now. Fifty, sixty military personnel and civvies. It’s reason enough to demand her apprehension, Aric agrees with that. But Dee cannot be doing it willingly – she must have been tortured, beaten into submission, controlled by fear. There’s got to be a reason, because the soldier he helped advance, the young woman he shaped to become who she is cannot with good conscience commit war crimes so remorselessly. Aric taught her discipline, morals, enjoying the fruit of hard labour. He never concerned himself with the wild streak in the girl, because she continuously delivered what she promised. Then one intelligence op that went a little too well, and the blasted SIS swooped in to claim her like a shyrack grabbing prey. He cannot truly vouch for who she is now, but it doesn’t lessen his responsibility – he gave her the foundations of being a loyal soldier, a military asset. If she failed, she failed because his teachings didn’t take root in her. And that is something the Cathar refuses to face. That, and the fact that he would have given her all the stars in the Galaxy had she ever thought to ask. But she never did. She never asked him for a damned thing.

Admitting that he might not have known her as well as he thought is another recognition that causes pressure right behind his eyes, and he can feel two ways this strictly ordered R&R night can go for him – either he takes a speeder to the Coruscanti army base and wrecks as many training dummies as he can, or he knocks back the rest of the booze he secretly stashes in his footlocker underneath his cot in the commander’s quarters and passes out. What he wouldn’t give for an Imperial spymaster to sink his claws into now! Maybe then this constant buzzing in his mind would finally stop. It has to. He’s been stretched out too thin lately, chasing an enemy of the Republic that seemingly does not want to be found. And he’s wearing down Havoc in the process, he knows. Quiet Elara is more elusive than ever, always locked in her coffin-sized quarters listening to medical lectures and holojournals. Yuun busies himself with the ship, and the droid. Blast, even Forex is quiet now when he enters. Only Tanno Vik seems to be taking it well, but Jorgan never liked the man. Then again, he doesn’t really trust his judgement when it comes to people anymore.

The whirring static of the holotable draws him away from his thoughts and he abandons the blasters to investigate. It’s soon plain to him – despite being quite the layman when it comes to technological equipment – that someone is trying to slice into their comm channel. Aric wants to call for Elara, but by the time he remembers she’s left not ten minutes ago, it’s too late.

She’s luminescent, blue, static and fraying. Audio a little distorted. But it’s her.

“You really need to up the security of your ship, LT.”

“It’s captain now, actually.”

“I heard. It’s just difficult to let go of old habits.”

“And what should I call you?” he asks cautiously, arms crossed over his chest, pacing up and down like a caged nexu. “Dee? Agent? Traitor?”

“I didn’t call you to trade names.”

“Then why are we talking? Surely you’re not interested in my wellbeing all of a sudden?”

“You’d be surprised... But no. I’m calling because this has to stop. Because you need to stop coming after me like that. I had a clear shot at you on Kashyyyk, but since you and I go way back, I thought I’d give you a warning first.”

...

“Are you listening, Sergeant?”

“Yes, LT. Hanging on every word.”

It’s late at night, but she’s being loaned temporarily for an intel mission in a week and Aric wastes no time to prepare one of the finest troops he had the honour of training. Such raw talent and potential, paired with such an attitude – if only she could tone it down. But she’s young, and reckless, and not broken in properly yet. The years will do that job for him, Jorgan knows. They’ll teach her what words cannot.

“Good. Then name the key infiltration points of the listening outpost.”

She lists them effortlessly, though the slight hesitation in her voice here and there gives him cause to believe that she’s guessing more than telling. He’s had to learn how to weed out the untrustworthy, deceitful candidates in the army, so he knows what it sound like when someone lies to him.

“Educated guess, but it shows your lack of preparation.”

“Did I get them right though, sir?”

She’s smirking now, leaning back, hands moving to the back of her neck to support the weight of her head. If she wasn’t wearing 30 kg of Republic issue reinforced plastoid armour, she’d look like a senator’s daughter enjoying a round of Sabacc at the Star Cluster Casino on Nar Shaddaa.

“That... is beside the point. You can’t always rely on quick wit to save you.”

“That’s why I always bring a big gun and a few thermal detonators with me.”

“I’m hoping to still be around when you realise weapons aren’t everything. That being a soldier is much more than just aiming and pulling the trigger.”

“Oh, you’ll be around, LT. Just not sure I’ll be too.”

That smirk forms on her lips again, head lolling lazily to one side. Aric feels tightness in his chest – concern over her words, and quickened heartbeat due to corners of her mouth being tugged up into a smile that is enough to make him completely unbalanced. He says a silent prayer to the GAR for keeping Dee mostly on the right path. Stars know what this young woman would turn into if she didn’t have the moral guidance of the military life. She’d waste her potential on something lowly, his rational mind tells Aric. But there’s an even bigger, more suppressed fear in the back of his head – he’s afraid she’d turn into someone he couldn’t like anymore. Someone he couldn’t respect. Someone he couldn’t love.

“Nonsense. Your mother would court martial me if I ever let anything happen to you.”

He regrets the joke as soon as it’s out, because it wipes the smile right off her face. “Or she’d give you a medal. There’s a fifty-fifty chance, if you’re brave enough to take it. Now, where were we, sir? Not five minutes ago you were like a broken reg manual spouting your military wisdom on repeat, and now somehow we’re analysing my relationship with my mother.”

“Dee... If you ever needed someone to talk to... It couldn’t have been easy, growing up in her shadow...” Aric starts cautiously, pained voice trailing off. It’s his turn to hesitate, and hers to pick it up and scorn.

“I hear the Crater is still open at this time of the night. If you want to talk family, I’ll need an optimal level of alcohol first.”

Greedy. Exploitative. Unprofessional.

Jorgan scolds himself as he agrees before they walk across the now quiet Fort Garnik, saluting the troopers on guard duty as they head over the small, dirty watering hole in the camp.

But he just cannot feel bad about it when it all feels so good.

...

The cot feels smaller and colder than usual. This solitary life is no stranger to the man, but to hear her voice again after so long is enough to make his body inject itself with more adrenalin than what it could handle. He has already submitted his request for leave – it shouldn’t surprise the higher ups, especially General Garza, that he needs some time away after learning of the GAR approved, SIS issued bounty placed on Dee’s head. By his calculations, they will accept it effective immediately, leaving him just enough time to take a shuttle to Nar Shaddaa, shed his armour and slip into something less conspicuous before heading to the rendezvous point as agreed. She knows how to pick a good spot – it’s where they ended a massive organ harvesting ring back in the days. Now, it’s nothing more than an abandoned warehouse rusting away in the slums of the Hutt-controlled world. But to them, it’s the peak of what they could achieve if they worked together.

He wants to believe that they can restore that state. That whatever it is the Empire has on her to keep her obedient can be broken by him somehow.

Just as he’s about to shift and turn onto his other side on the mattress, his datapad blinks in the dark. He reaches out and turns it on, yellow eyes skimming through the formalities of Garza’s message to get to the bottom of it. As anticipated, he is granted a leave of four days starting tomorrow. Aric switches the lights on, stretches, and abandons the datapad on the bed in favour of getting dressed. He knows he would never be able to sleep in such an ecstatic state that he finds himself in now, so he prepares, stocks up his personal supplies. He then studies the holomap of the Nar Shaddaa district while chewing on a ration bar absentmindedly. Like a soldier prepping for a battle.

To anyone else, this might sound like a brewing confrontation. But no, not to Aric. To him, it’s an extraction mission. One where he’ll use words rather than guns in the heat of the battle. One that should have happened a long time ago.