Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. Michael Reynolds says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 05:57

   My suggestion for an Oscars troll. Winners should offer to give their Oscars to Trump.

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2. Kathy says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 07:19

   Adolf Muxk is throwing another tantrum (big surprise).

   The chief nazi is upset Europe’s largest ultra low cost airline, Ryanair, is not interested in putting Xtarlink WiFi on its large fleets. Its CEO, Michael O’Leary, explained adding it increases fuel burn 2% (between the added mass of the system, and added drag from the fairing on the aerial), and most of his customers won’t pay for WiFi, especially since Ryanair’s average flight is just over an hour long.

   I mislike ultra low cost airlines in principle. They’re responsible for the notions of tightly packing people in planes, fees for everything, buy on board everything, zero passenger entertainment, etc. Much of what makes modern air travel suck. Pitted against the nazi, though, I mislike Ryanair and O’Leary far less right now.

   Anyway, O’Leary called Adolf and idiot. More precisely he said, “I would pay no attention whatsoever to Elon (sic) Musk (sic). He’s an idiot. Very wealthy, but he’s still an idiot.” And: “I frankly wouldn’t pay any attention to anything that Elon (sic) Musk (sic) puts on that cesspit of his called X (sic) . He was the guy who advocated to getting Donald (sic) Trump (sic) elected.”

   Whereupon Adolf went on to prove O’Leary right: “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?”

   You know, because having a name similar to the company’s is both commonplace and the sole measure of business acumen. Adolf should get a legal name change to “TexlaXpaceSxAIXboring Adolf Muxk” in that case, no?

   I almost wish Adolf would go through and buy Ryanair. BTW, the piece mentions a 50% premium on Ryanair’s stock, and claims it would be only a small percentage of Adolf’s net worth. True, and irrelevant. He did not buy Xitter with his own money. he borrowed and brought suckers along.

   If he did buy Ryanair, we’d get an answer to the question How could flying possibly get any worse.

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3. Steven L. Taylor says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 07:55

   @Michael Reynolds: He might as well go for an EGOT while he is at it.

   5
4. CSK says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 08:21

   Yesterday I got fitted for a prosthetic leg and walked for the first time since July 11, 2025. I thought I’d forgotten how, but no.

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5. Gregory Lawrence Brown says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 08:37

   @CSK:
   Keep On Truckin’!

   3
6. becca says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 08:50

   The new upside down food pyramid the freakish RFK jr created was not written by impartial nutrition and health experts, but by the Cattleman Association and the American Dairy Industry.
   I really do hope maga embraces it. Keep chowing down on that beef tallow and bacon grease, maga. Eat your heart out. Literally.

   1
7. Sleeping Dog says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 09:37

   A close friend lives in a heavily immigrant neighborhood of Mpls. While it has been mostly quiet in his immediate area everyone is aware of the constant threat. We’ve been having an ongoing exchange, mostly in for form of laughing in the face of danger. A few of his thoughts.

   Acknowledging that his Honduran neighbors are terrorists (tongue in cheek) for example, 4 times last summer the kids booted their soccer ball into his garden and then had the temerity to knock on the door to ask if they could retrieve it.

   He wonders if the ICE storm troopers realize how much spit and how many cigarette butts they are eating with each meal.

   Some right wingers have planned an anti-immigrant, anti-muslim and pro ICE rally today, promising to march from downtown to the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood that is the center of the Somali community.

   Answered prayers (which, by the way, is a great book by Capote) Expecting wind chills as low as 10 below today. Wonderful irony is that if any of the visiting racists need emergency care for frostbite, they very likely will be admitted by an African immigrant.

   Note on the proposed stroll to Cedar-Riverside. The long way is up Washington Ave to Cedar, the direct way is along 5th or 6th streets over the RR bridge and through the canyons of high rises, where they’re sure to be showered with hundreds of snow and ice balls. Getting hit by one of those, thrown from 10 stories up will hurt.

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8. Michael Reynolds says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 10:28

   First ep of Starfleet Academy was fine, though I really hate the overwrought CGI sets that look like the worst of Las Vegas.

   The second ep is unwatchable, an embarrassment, an idea-free cringe-fest. The creators: 52 year 0ld Alex Kurtzman, seeming 30-somethings Noga Landau and Gaia Violo, do not get Rule #1 of writing for a younger audience: don’t fucking pander to what you assume they want. The kids who want romance will go elsewhere, the kids open to sci fi are going to feel condescended to. Alex, Noga and Gaia? You’re not that smart and they’re not that dumb.

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9. charontwo says:
   Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 11:26

   @Sleeping Dog:

   Don Moynihan has a piece up describing the situation in Minneapolis:

   “Don Moynihan”

   From Don: This piece comes someone living and working in Minneapolis, which is experiencing a de facto military occupation right now. They wish to remain anonymous out of concern that their government might retaliate against them for reporting on what life is like there now. Please share this story so people can understand how bad things are on the ground.

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10. charontwo says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 11:36

    Why was Minneapolis picked as a messaging demonstration?

    Here is a long (seven part) explanation from Jason Egenberg. I will post parts II and VII as excerpts:

    “Jason Egenberg”

    CHAPTER II: WHY MINNEAPOLIS
    If you want to understand why Minneapolis, start with the simplest answer: because Minneapolis reads well on camera.

    It’s a city the country recognizes. It has a shorthand. It has a headline history. It has a built-in moral argument. And in 2026, that matters more than demographics. It matters more than spreadsheets. It matters more than the census.

    Political movements don’t pick targets the way engineers pick materials. They pick targets the way writers pick settings.

    Minneapolis is a setting with stakes.

    There is Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, a Democrat whose state is now being treated as a national referendum on the competence and decency of liberal government, whether he asked for that role or not.

    There is the visible tension between urban Minnesota and rural Minnesota, the familiar map: blue in the city, red outside it, and both sides convinced the other isn’t just wrong but illegitimate.

    And there is the fraud scandal, which doesn’t just land as a case number. It lands as a story. A story about who can be trusted. A story about who deserves what. A story about whether compassion is a virtue or a sucker’s bet.

    That is gasoline in an era when the fire is already lit.

    But Minneapolis isn’t just politically useful. It’s emotionally useful.

    George Floyd’s murder made the city a national symbol of police power, accountability, and justice, and it made Minneapolis a permanent Rorschach test. For one America, it became evidence of state violence. For another America, it became evidence of disorder.

    Either way, it became a symbol.

    And if you’re building an argument that the country can only be safe if it’s more policed, more patrolled, more controlled, you don’t choose a city no one’s ever fought over. You choose the city where everyone already knows what side they’re supposed to be on.

    Then you show up with force.

    Then you call the resistance what people always call resistance when they want to delegitimize it. Chaos. Lawlessness. An insurrection.

    And the word “insurrection” matters because it is not a description. It’s a tool. It’s the kind of word you use when you want to move from “policy disagreement” to “authority showdown.”

    So Minneapolis becomes the site of a national lesson.

    Not just of enforcement. Of dominance.

    Not just of immigration policy. Of who gets to decide what America is allowed to be.

    And here’s the part that should make your stomach drop:

    This confrontation does not need to be “won” in court to do its job. It only needs to be broadcast.

    Because when federal power is turned into a public display, the goal isn’t resolution.

    The goal is acclimation.

    ETA: Link does not seem to work well, no scroll bar,

    try just going to his site to find it:

    https://substack.com/@jasonegenberg

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11. charontwo says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 11:39

    So that was pretty long, here is Part VII:

    https://substack.com/@jasonegenberg

    Use above link instead.

    “Part VII”

    CHAPTER VII: THE ALTERNATIVE TO AMERICA
    Here’s the part that keeps getting sanitized into “politics” because calling it politics makes it feel survivable.

    This is not a disagreement about how many people should cross a border.

    This is a disagreement about what a country is.

    There’s an idea of America that says you don’t inherit belonging. You earn it. You earn it by buying into the deal: the Constitution, the rule of law, the imperfect but essential premise that we’re bound together by principles, not bloodlines. That idea is messy. It’s been betrayed a thousand times. It has been selectively applied. It has been weaponized by hypocrites who recite it with one hand and deny it with the other.

    But it is still the only idea of America compatible with a democracy.

    Then there’s the alternative.

    The alternative says the country is not a civic project but a gated community. And the most important job of government is not to protect rights, but to police membership. The alternative says shared prosperity requires exclusion, exclusion requires force, and force requires a public trained to see force as normal.

    That’s what a crackdown is for.

    Not to solve immigration.

    To teach the country what the new America looks like.

    And Minneapolis is where this lesson becomes legible. Not because Minneapolis is uniquely dangerous, but because it is uniquely symbolic. A city that has already had to stare at state power on camera. A place that has already been turned into a national argument. A place where the civic myth was strong enough to be worth breaking.

    The lawsuit from Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul isn’t just a legal maneuver. It’s a statement that boundaries still exist, that there are still lines the federal government isn’t supposed to cross, that enforcement isn’t supposed to become occupation.

    The death of Renée Nicole Good isn’t just a tragedy. It’s an alarm bell, because when a U.S. citizen is killed in the center of a domestic crackdown and the nation’s answer is escalation, you are no longer watching a government that fears mistakes. You are watching a government that believes mistakes are acceptable collateral in the project of dominance.

    And the “insurrection” language isn’t just rhetoric. It’s preparation. It’s runway.

    So here’s the question, the only question that matters:

    What happens when the state gets used to winning arguments with uniforms?

    What happens when the public gets used to force deployed not as a last resort, but as a first impression?

    What happens when belonging becomes something you have to prove on demand?

    Because that’s the world on the other side of this moment.

    Not an abstract world. A practical one. A world made of small normalizations. A world where masked agents on residential streets stop feeling shocking. A world where tear gas becomes a tool of communication. A world where the federal government stops looking like an institution bound by law and starts looking like an authority bound by loyalty.

    A democracy doesn’t fall all at once. It doesn’t fall with a single speech. It falls when people stop insisting on the boring parts: transparency, restraint, due process, accountability. It falls when we accept the display and forget the principle.

    Minneapolis is not the whole story.

    But it is the message.

    And the message is simple.

    This is what the alternative to America looks like.

    Now decide if you want to live in it.

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12. gVOR10 says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 11:57

    “Having to stomach a standing army in their midst, observe the redcoats daily, pass by troops stationed on Boston Neck who occupied a guardhouse on land illegally taken it was said from the town, and having to receive challenges by sentries on the streets, their own streets, affronted a people accustomed to personal liberty, fired their tempers, and gnawed away at their honor,” writes the historian Robert Middlekauff in “The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763 to 1789.”

    Jamelle Bouie in NYT.

    2
13. Beth says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 12:21

    At the risk of picking at an open wound and starting a fight I almost certainly will walk away from, allow me to present, the single dumbest, concern troll-bigot fest from the Atlantic:

    It starts off promising:

    Transgender participation in women’s athletics is the single most difficult issue I’ve seen in 40 years of covering sports. It makes gambling*, performance-enhancing drugs, and regulation of collegiate athletics** look like tidy challenges.

    Ok, I’m guessing that even the people that disagree with me the most can agree that doping, gambling and NIL are way bigger, more important than the tiny amount of trans girls trying to participate in sport. Gambling alone has the money and power to completely destroy sports; trans women don’t even come close.

    Moving on:

    At the core of the matter is whether trans-women athletes have a lingering testosterone advantage—a question that remains scientifically disputed. Until that point is settled, a resolution to this painful issue is hard to envision.

    Here’s where we’re going to veer into disagreement. Because her framing obscures what the real “core” of this matter is: whether men are superior to women in all things, and whether trans women are actual men.

    For the state petitioners, half a dozen sports doctors submitted 90 academic papers asserting that “even before puberty,” males have denser, stronger, and longer bones, and can “throw faster and kick harder than women.” They wrote, “No amount of testosterone suppression” would “eliminate these male athletic advantages.” According to one of those reports, boys had more speed, limb strength, and power as early as age 3.

    Ok, initially, we’re told that lingering testosterone is at the core of the matter. But now we’re being told that, no, actually, people assigned male at birth are inherently stronger, faster, and more powerful than people assigned female at birth, regardless of whether or not they’ve gone through androgenic puberty. A short blast of testosterone produced by someone’s mother during fetal development is all it takes and blammo, men are better than women.

    Let me pause here to note, trans women are banned from chess because of this.

    Additionally, while there are plenty of links in the piece, there are no links to any of the studies linked by the states. Probably because most of them were provided by virulently anti-trans bigots like the Alliance Defending Freedom. We’re also told that the states provided “90 academic papers”, while in the next paragraph, we’re lead to believe that the Petitioners only supplied about 4.

    Why is this? Likely because Becky Pepper-Jackson, the 15 year old plaintiff in the West Virginia case (and also the only person that is currently effected by this law in WV) has never gone through androgenic puberty.

    Now, if the issue really was androgenic puberty, there might be some agreement between me and some of you. Personally, while I don’t believe any trans person needs to medically transition, I’m ok with HRT and testosterones suppression for some post-high school athletics. There are exceptions to this (think chess, darts, or disk golf). I would guess that most trans people would accept sport specific requirements based on inclusion and good science***. None of this is currently possible, because places like the Atlantic continue to platform bigots and concern trolls.

    The rest of the article can be summed up with this quote:

    Where the respondents’ lawyers faltered the most was in addressing the potential harm to cisgender athletes.

    It’s all the lawyers fault, somehow. They were evasive. They didn’t wrestle enough with “legacy testosterone advantage”. Remember, BPJ has never gone through androgenic puberty. What she is saying is that BPJ is a boy, and boys are inherently better than women.

    Also, what exactly is the potential harm to cisgender women athletes? Remember, these bans are very broad (again, chess) and will likely require genital inspections of children and chromosome testing of other athletes. Chromosome testing alone is going to end more women’s athletic careers than trans women. Plenty of cisgender women “fail” both chromosome testing and testosterone testing. Should cisgender women with naturally elevated levels of testosterone be categorically excluded? Would cisgender men? Riley Gaines would have still placed 5th if Lia Thomas wasn’t there. What are we going to do about parents attempting to disqualify their daughter’s competitors by forcing them to go through genital exams. In a world full of Larry Nassers, Jim Jordans and Joe Paternos, do you want your daughters to be subject to that?

    The real purpose behind these trans sports bans is not to protect women’s sports. It’s to drive trans people from public life and to use us to dismantle women’s rights generally. When you buy into the framing that trans women are a fundamental threat to women’s sports, you are buying into a right-wing outrage machine designed to benefit them and harm women, both trans and cis.

    “[These] bans are gaining steam for the same reason that election audits and [critical race theory] bans have been popular over the past year,” says Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who has been critical of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. “They are PR campaigns masquerading as legislation, designed to keep culture wars at the center of the conversation.”

    The idea of trans girls and women competing against cisgender female athletes tends to trigger emotional responses, playing on stereotypes about gender and biology. The issue acts as “sort of a gateway drug for people into the larger debate around gender and who gets to call themselves a woman,” says a conservative who works on Title IX issues, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the rise in legislation.

    If this was about testosterone advantage, and not about disgust at trans women and, more broadly, to control all women, then BPJ should win hands down. It should be an easy call right? We all know that’s not what’s going to happen.

    *

    This issue — point-shaving in games involving non-elite programs — is going to be one of the toughest problems created by the near-ubiquitous legalization of sports gambling to address. Most of the players aren’t going to be paid much or have any serious pro prospects, it’s easier to convince players to help manipulate the score than to throw games outright, and it’s not easy to tell the difference between intentional and unintentional bad shots. I frankly don’t know what a viable solution would be.

    ** See also:

    As part of the House v. NCAA settlement, schools are allowed to share athletic department revenues with their student athletes beginning on July 1, 2025. We estimate that NCAA Division I athletes will receive over $ 2.3 billion in total NIL and Revenue Sharing compensation during the current 2025-26 academic year

    *** there has been and is a prevalent belief in medical science that women are nothing more that smaller, slower, dumber men. The lack of knowledge of cis women’s bodies is a yawning chasm.

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14. Gustopher says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 14:16

    @Beth:

    At the risk of picking at an open wound and starting a fight I almost certainly will walk away from, allow me to present

    This is, by the way, the very best type of fight to start.

    What are we going to do about parents attempting to disqualify their daughter’s competitors by forcing them to go through genital exams.

    Obviously we need to start with genital exams on the challenging student, along with genetic testing to make sure they aren’t one of the rarer XXY or whatever. Table stakes, and all that, to ensure that the accuser even has standing to challenge the competitor.

    And we should probably check the parents as well.

    3
15. Kathy says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 14:19

    @Beth:

    As to using trans women to attack cis women, we saw that during the olympics with the two boxers from Algeria and Taiwan. But it’s been going on longer, as per the multiple obstructions and conflicts faced by Caster Semenya.

    Nuances between sex and gender aside, fact is and has always been biology is messy, and there are far more than two neat and precise categories. And there always will be.

    3
16. Gustopher says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 15:07

    @Michael Reynolds: It’s a lot better than the previews suggested, and most of the adults are fine.

    Not good, but better than the previews. Kind of mediocre?

    The pilot episode left me wondering where the rest of the adult crew was, and why they were incapacitated and not solving the problem. It’s not like the adults were unaware that their ship was being attacked, and we’ve seen in every Star Trek series that Starfleet officers are amazingly competent.

    I suspect this will be an ongoing problem given the concept of the show — either the stakes have to be low, the adults have to be incapacitated, or we are watching neglect, or it breaks suspension of disbelief. Prodigy handled this by just not having adults.

    The second episode just broke suspension of disbelief, while having low immediate stakes. Apparently major decisions that will affect the entire quadrant politically are decided by a kid saying “daddy, can we rejoin the federation?” There was more, but it just left no impression on me. Not even cringe, just kind of there.

    The cadets don’t have personalities yet as much as a single trait each. Maybe once they establish the roles they will get better, but it’s kind of impressive how well Holly Hunter inhabits her role compared to everyone else.

    One of the various YouTube reviewers I follow and generally agree with has seen the first six episodes and said that it gets better and that episode 5 is excellent. I suspect this will be one of the times I disagree with her.

    1
17. Mimai says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 18:05

    @Beth:
    Thanks for posting about this. I don’t regularly read The Atlantic, so I probably wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.

    The article is paywalled, so I had to use a work-around to read it. For anyone who wants to read the piece itself, it’s available here.

    Given the circumstances, I’m not inclined to engage extensively on this topic. I’ll just note one point.

    I may be misreading you, but it sounded to me like you were suggesting that it’s self-evidently absurd to treat this issue as uniquely difficult relative to gambling, NIL, or doping. I actually find myself more in alignment with the author on this.

    Gambling and doping are enormous problems, but they’re comparatively “easy” in one important sense. They mostly reduce to a single core value – integrity of competition.

    And they lend themselves to relatively clear policy rules, eg, athletes can’t bet on their own leagues, doping bans apply across the board, etc. Implementing those rules isn’t easy, but the underlying values tradeoffs are comparatively straightforward.

    Sport participation feels hard in a different way. As you note, it involves a very small number of people – Real People – for whom the stakes are extremely high.*

    What makes it difficult, at least to me, is that it involves genuine tension among values many of us hold at the same time – fairness, inclusion, and equal treatment. That’s the kind of problem that’s hard precisely because no single value cleanly resolves it.

    That’s all I wanted to say.

    *Which isn’t to suggest that the stakes are low for others.

    1
18. becca says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 20:01

    The latest tariff tantrum is a doozy. The EU is pissed!
    Boycotts of anything remotely American are being called for all over. The World Cup is a prime target. There was already a move afoot to boycott the games, but from the comments at the FT and others, that boycott just got juiced.
    There are red maga hats showing up, but maga means “Make America Go Away”.
    Maybe JohnSF can fill in sentiment on the ground. Lots of chatter on the UK rejoining the EU.
    Hellzapoppin’

    1
19. Jay L. Gischer says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 21:13

    @Beth: You know, I played football at my very small school from 7th grade through 11th grade. As a junior, the writing was on the wall, though. Everyone else had grown and I hadn’t (I’m 5’6″, in those days 145 pounds). I played 3 downs that year, and broke my hand during that time.

    In all those years, nobody ever said, “We have to protect Jay from all those big guys”.

    These days, well, my senior sensei was a woman, and a badass. She has spent her whole life challenging gender stereotypes (as a cis woman). So has her husband. They are fine with trans folk.

    I regularly did jujitsu with people much bigger than me and with women who if not much shorter, had a lot less muscle mass. We figured it out.

    I think we can make this work, but it will be a tough, tough slog. Like the piece said, the sports thing is a gateway drug to transphobia. Also an opportunity to unravel 50 years of feminist progress, such as it is.
20. JohnSF says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 21:44

    @becca:
    The general UK opinion on this seems to be “pissed off”
    Even Farage, who can generally be expected to toady to Trump, is responding to public opinion:

    “We don’t always agree with the US government and in this case we certainly don’t. These tariffs will hurt us. If Greenland is vulnerable to malign influences, then have another look at Diego Garcia”

    Rejoining the EU is still off the table (various reasons, long story) but UK/EU defence alignment is going to be accelerated, or you can paint me green and call me a gherkin.

    Basic response is along the lines of:
    “Who the f@ck do you think you are talking to? Venezuela we ain’t. Sod off, fatboy.”

    Trump is coming perilously close to totally collapsing not just the Atlantic Alliance, but the entire US/European economic realtionship as well.

    This is stomach-churningly dangerous for all parties concerned.
    But if Trump and his acolytes expect that to make the British, and other Europeans, abandon all sense of honour and solidarity, they are making a very serious mistake.

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21. becca says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 22:20

    @JohnSF: thanks for replying.
    Now, if only the Supreme Court clips the self-described Tariff King’s wings, maybe we can head off a collapse of the world economy.

    1
22. Michael Reynolds says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 22:29

    @Gustopher:

    The pilot episode left me wondering where the rest of the adult crew was, and why they were incapacitated and not solving the problem.

    The showrunners don’t understand the basic mechanics of writing YA: the parents need to go away. Disney has always understood this, which is why just about every Disney protagonist is an orphan. But when talking about Gone with Hollywood types it was obvious that they didn’t get it. I was asked, literally, whether there was a Will Smith kind of role. No, dumbass, because kids with an adult is a story about the adult managing the kids. School of Rock is not about the kids, it’s about Jack Black. Dead Poet Society? It’s about Robin Williams.

    Having a bunch of kids in an adult situation is never going to work. You either have to make the adults into morons or the kids into super-powered Mary Sues. Adults only work as villains or buffoons: see just about every adult in Harry Potter. Writers don’t get this because they cannot step outside of their roles as parents, teachers or cool older siblings. They can’t get their heads around adults as obstacles. They don’t accept the reverse hierarchy. If you’re writing for kids they have the power, they decide if your show or movie or book is going to work, and you, the adult, are their dancing monkey.

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23. JohnSF says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 22:30

    @becca:
    As I said on other thread:
    “If Congress had any sanity and integrity, Trump would be impeached tomorrow.”
    Well, OK it’s the weekend.
    So Monday will be fine.
    So, whatcha gonna go, Thune and Johnson?
    Step up, or let this probably collapse the Atlantic alliances. and possibly end up with a shooting war between the US and European-NATO?

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24. JohnSF says:
    Saturday, 17 January 2026 at 23:06

    @Michael Reynolds:

    “… the parents need to go away.”

    Now that’s an intersting observation.
    Thinking about it, almost every YA fantasy/sf work that I can think of has the parents sidelined from the outset.
    Perhaps one exception being “The Dark Is Rising”, but even there the parents are pretty much absent from the plot.

    “Adults only work as villains or buffoons: see just about every adult in Harry Potter”

    Well, until you get to the last couple of stories, perhaps?
    The Snape plotline is really quite good, imho.

    1
25. Michael Reynolds says:
    Sunday, 18 January 2026 at 01:22

    @JohnSF:
    Of course Snape played the villain almost until the end.

    Kids want to be the heroes, not observe the heroes. Treasure Island is ostensibly the story of the kid, but for every person who remembers Jim Hawkins there are ten who remember Long John Silver. There are exceptions like Percy Jackson where some of the gods are okay but the dominant relationship between adults and kids is antagonistic. In Animorphs for the core 5 characters we started down two dead mothers, one kid abandoned by parents, and sidelined the rest.

    In Gone I allowed one adult into the dome late in the series, and promptly had one of the villains eat his arm and reduce him to terrified servility. His name happened to be an acronym of a guy I was very angry with at the time.

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