Can anybody guess what it was? The Arabic name?" Freddy/Billy knows: "Assassins." (It's from the word hashshashin, "hashish eaters.") Josh jokes, "Yeah, we don't call on him." As Sam wanders near him, Toby quietly asks him, "What's going on?" Sam says, "I'm supposed to be at a meeting at Treasury." Toby says he had a six o'clock on the Hill. "Now I'm stuck here, you know, talking to well-dressed children who can't vote." Someone asks Sam, "You know a lot about terrorism?" Sam says he dabbles. That seems a little glib given the national mood of recent weeks. He's eating Jelly Tots or something. The same person asks by what Sam is most struck, which doesn't seem like a very natural question for this kid to have asked, but you know...it's a VSE, and Sam needs an opening. I guess. Sam replies, "Its 100\% failure rate. Not only do terrorists always fail at what they're after, they pretty much always succeed in strengthening whatever it is they're against." I would argue this but I need to turn in this recap before, like, May. ["I'll just repeat what Glark observed on the boards, which is that history is written by the victors, and that successful acts of terrorism are generally known as 'revolutions.'" -- Wing Chun] Kid: "What about the IRA?" Sam, dismissively: "Brits are still there. Protestants are still there. Basque extremists have been staging terrorist attacks in Spain for decades with no result. Left Wing Red Brigades from the 60s and 70s, from the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, to the Weathermen in the U.S. have tried to overthrow capitalism. You tell me: how's capitalism doing?" Sam looks obnoxiously smug. ["It's his hair." -- Wing Chun] One kid asks, "What about non-violent protest?" Sam: "What about it?" The kid says, "Well, it worked for Gandhi." Sam says, "Yeah, it did. Who else did it work for?" Another kid: "The civil-rights movement." A girl asks, "Yeah, but...weren't we terrorists at the Boston Tea Party?" What's the point of dragging this into the discussion? As Sam points out, nobody got hurt at the Boston Tea Party. "The only people who got hurt were some fancy boys who didn't have anything to wash down their crumpets with." He claims that "never has a war been so courteously declared. It was on parchment with calligraphy and 'Your Highness, we beseech you on this day in Philadelphia to bite me, if you please....'" There's a murmur of polite amusement.