For as much shit as I give them — and as much as they deserve it — I can forgive The Boomers quite a bit. In all previous history, having your entire world accommodate itself to your every whim was a privilege reserved for the more puissant monarchs of the bigger kingdoms. But starting about 1963, American life completely recalibrated itself around the passing fancies of ordinary suburban kids.
That has to mess with your head a bit.
In the same way, no previous generation had ever seen their youth commercialized and sold back to them in middle age, and that’s what messed with our heads. The passing fancies of those ordinary suburban kids in 1963 all involved sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. We — Gen X — wanted those things too, but since by definition nothing is lamer than your parents, we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it.
If you can grok the concept of a 45 year old telling you — with complete, almost heartbreaking sincerity — not to trust anyone over 30, you can grok the 1990s.
If you can’t, I don’t recommend trying. It’s like an anti-koan — if you solve it, you’ll achieve a lower consciousness. But if you’re determined to experience it, get really, really, really drunk and watch Forrest Gump a few times back to back. Really experience it as a work of art … because it is. It’s meticulously constructed. Forrest Gump is a mildly retarded man who stumbles, through dumb fucking luck, into fame and fortune through every significant event of the last half century. (He even has a huge dick, although that’s a detail from the source novel that got left on the cutting room floor).
Is there any more perfect metaphor for My G-G-Generation than that?
That’s what we grew up with. That whole generation was what some wag said about George Bush the First: Born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. And, of course, by merciless application of cold logic: that was also us. The only difference was that while the Boomers were congenitally incapable of seeing it, we were congenitally incapable of getting over it. So, you know, like, whatever.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
June 4, 2022
QotD: A smidgen of forgiveness for the Boomers
June 3, 2022
Chat Tanks #148 M548 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
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June 2, 2022
“Like many problems in American history, recycling began as a moral panic”
Jon Miltimore recounts the seminal event that kicked off the recycling pseudo-religion in North America:
The frenzy began in the spring of 1987 when a massive barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage — the Mobro 4000 — was turned away from a North Carolina port because rumor had it the barge was carrying toxic waste. (It wasn’t.)
“Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history,” Vice News reported in a feature published a quarter-century later, “a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.”
The Mobro was simply seeking a landfill to dump the garbage, but everywhere the barge went it was turned away. After North Carolina, the captain tried Louisiana. Nope. Then the Mobro tried Belize, then Mexico, then the Bahamas. No dice.
“The Mobro ended up spending six months at sea trying to find a place that would take its trash,” Kite & Key Media notes.
America became obsessed with the story. In 1987 there was no Netflix, smartphones, or Twitter, so apparently everyone just decided to watch this barge carrying tons of trash for entertainment. The Mobro became, in the words of Vice, “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.”
The Mobro also became perhaps the most consequential load of garbage in history.
“The Mobro had two big and related effects,” Kite & Key Media explains. “First, the media reporting around it convinced Americans that we were running out of landfill space to dispose of our trash. Second, it convinced them the solution was recycling.”
Neither claim, however, was true.
The idea that the US was running out of landfill space is a myth. The urban legend likely stems from the consolidation of landfills in the 1980s, which saw many waste depots retired because they were small and inefficient, not because of a national shortage. In fact, researchers estimate that if you take just the land the US uses for grazing in the Great Plains region, and use one-tenth of one percent of it, you’d have enough space for America’s garbage for the next thousand years. (This is not to say that regional problems do not exist, Slate points out.
The widespread imposition of recycling mandates across North America was probably an inevitable reaction to the voyage of the Mobro. For many people, this was the end of the story, as things that were previously just buried in landfill sites would now be safely and efficiently put back into the economy as re-used, re-purposed, or actual recycled products. Win-win, right?
Sadly, the economic case for recycling many items is weak to non-existant. The demand for recycled materials was lower than predicted and often only maintained through subsidies and hidden incentives that couldn’t last forever. Once the incentives went away, so did much of the created demand. Worse, the way a lot of the stream of recyclable materials was handled was by shipping it off to China or certain developing nations — in effect, paying them to take the problem off the hands of western governments. This resulted in even more problems:
Americans who’ve spent the last few decades recycling might think their hands are clean. Alas, they are not. As the Sierra Club noted in 2019, for decades Americans’ recycling bins have held “a dirty secret”.
“Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” journalist Edward Humes wrote. “There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution.”
It’s almost too hard to believe. We paid China to take our recycled trash. China used some and dumped the rest. All that washing, rinsing, and packaging of recyclables Americans were doing for decades — and much of it was simply being thrown into the water instead of into the ground.
The gig was up in 2017 when China announced they were done taking the world’s garbage through its oddly-named program, Operation National Sword. This made recycling much more expensive, which is why hundreds of cities began to scrap and scale back operations.
June 1, 2022
How To Kill A U-Boat – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 31 May 2022How to kill a U-Boat? The threat of the illusive and nearly undetectable submarines had been on the mind of every Allied naval planner since the Great War. As the Kriegsmarine once more unleashed its wolfpacks to the high seas, it became a race against time to find a way to stop the deadly stalkers from beneath the surface.
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May 31, 2022
Conspiracy theorists, like the deeply paranoid, aren’t always wrong
Chris Bray responds to a common response he’s encountered from people who are worried that everything we’re seeing is somehow part of a deep-laid, nefarious plan to … do something. Something evil, something terrible, something … undefined but wrong:
If all of our problems are caused by a secret cabal who are having a new Wannsee Conference [Wiki]— twelve assholes sitting around a table and carefully planning our destruction — then we could solve that problem in half an hour with a dozen lampposts. We just need some names and an address: problem solved.
I think it’s much harder if there’s no they and no plan behind an event like the Uvalde school shooting. You can kill a few plotters, but how do you fix a broadly distributed collapse of courage, honor, decency, competence, knowledge, skill, morality and … a bunch of other things, but that list is a good start. If identifiable actors are tearing things apart, you can know where to put your hands to stop them; you can act. If we’re just trapped in a miasma of vicious mediocrity and weakness, where are the levers that change our course? What’s the solution to widespread societal degradation, to a suicidal loss of shared values and ordinary ability?
Facing an endless string of metastasizing and coalescing implosions — the lockdown-induced mental health crisis among children, appalling growth in energy prices, severe fertilizer shortages, supply chain collapse, unacknowledged vaccine injuries, vaccines that make illness more likely, military failure and the madness of the Afghanistan debacle, an emerging food shortage that’s starting to look really disturbing — the easiest way to deal with it is to say that it’s all one crisis planned and implemented by one set of people. If that’s true, the solution doesn’t even require a full box of ammunition, and we could wake up tomorrow morning in a world that we’ve repaired.
But the problem is that I mostly don’t think it’s true. I think it’s all one interwoven societal crisis, but that it’s connected by the uselessness of overcredentialed weak people. As for the view that they’re planning all of this, I increasingly think that our bullshit elites, our highly compliant social climbers in positions of power, mostly couldn’t plan a plate of toast.
Now, this is important: This doesn’t mean that I don’t think any of it is ever true. Of course there’s fake news. There are false flags, there are staged ops, and there are crisis actors. (The Ghost Of Kyiv, Ukraine’s boldest fighter pilot, agrees with me.) It seems pretty clear at this point that the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, that terrifying thing, was some socially awkward dorks being urgently and persistently goaded by FBI provocateurs. And it’s no longer possible to pretend that the Capitol Police didn’t just open the doors on January 6 to the “mob” that “broke in”.
But the transition from “some things are fake” to it’s all a lie and a plan every step of the way is a bigger claim — he says, carefully — and one that doesn’t make that much sense. With regard to Uvalde and the cops who wouldn’t act, for example, cowardice and incompetence work just fine as an explanation, because we have examples to compare the moment to. Peacetime militaries build an officer corps around rules-focused behavior, around the ability to comply and to operate within a hierarchy; then wartime militaries go through a period of officer purges, as they work to find high-functioning leaders who can tolerate the chaos and pain of battle. Confronted with a high level of brutality and danger, some people just can’t do it. This strikes me as an unremarkable fact, and one that doesn’t require extraordinary explanations. The school district police chief, a bureaucrat for decades, pushing paper and going to meetings, was confronted with sudden shock and horror on an extraordinarily harrowing scale, and he lacked the ability to respond. McClellan also couldn’t bring himself to attack Richmond.
May 30, 2022
The Deadliest Job in World War Two – WAH 062 – May 29, 1943
World War Two
Published 29 May 2022Arthur Harris and the RAF set another record in bombing Germany, and the outnumbered Yugoslav Partisans show the Axis that numbers mean little when you’re clever.
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May 29, 2022
We’ve evolved to the point that you don’t even need to turn the page for Gell-Mann Amnesia to kick in
Chris Bray has an almost unbelievable example of Gell-Mann Amnesia … literally on the same page of the site, two stories show how un-self-aware — and reflexively critical of non-progressives — the media can be:
Take exactly the same argument about exactly the same event and wedge it into two very different frames. Watch the result.
Here’s Politico, today, attending the NRA convention in Texas in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a school …
… and finding that NRA members are still gun-addled idiots who deflect concerns about guns by inventing a stupid fantasy argument — a conspiracy theory! — about mental illness:
Here, amid acres of guns and tactical gear inside a cavernous convention hall, the proximate cause of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was not a rifle, but mental illness, shadowy forces of evil or, as one man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt put it, the “destruction of our children” by the teachings of the left.
These idiots, can you believe that? They were actually dumb enough to argue that the rifle didn’t cause the shooting, and instead they blamed — wait for it, because OMFG — mental illness. What morons! Imagine being so caught up in stupid far-right conspiracy theories that you’d blame a school shooting on mental illness.
Okay, now. Watch this.
On the very same day, Politico posted this story, right underneath the NRA story on the front page:
And this is what Politico says those professors found:
POLITICO: Can you take us through the profile of mass shooters that emerged from your research?
Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.
The professors go on to say that the start of the solution to the crisis of school shootings is to improve the quality of childhood mental health services: “We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health.”
Same publication, same day, same page.
Black May, Nazi Subs Defeated – WW2 – 196 – May 28, 1943
World War Two
Published 28 May 2021German Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz orders the U-Boats to leave the Atlantic this week; the losses lately have just been too great for their patrols to continue there. There is active fighting in China, the Aleutians, and the Kuban, and there are special weapons tests in the skies over Germany.
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Approaching the “Chekhov’s gun” denouement in the Random Penguin-Simon & Schuster play
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte updates us on the state of play in the long-running drama in the publishing world:
SHuSH readers know that back in November 2020, the fattest of the world’s five big publishing companies, Penguin Random House, outbid the second fattest, Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, to acquire a listless third member of that group, Simon & Schuster.
Regulators in the UK, Canada, and the USA immediately began studying the $2.1-billion cash deal to determine if it would result in too much concentration of ownership and not enough competitiveness in the big leagues of book publishing. Last November, the US department of justice decided it would and sued to block it. A trial is expected this summer. Penguin Random House has until November to close the deal or it expires (with PRH owing S&S a dead-deal fee of $200-million).
For those of you who think in literary terms, the deal is Chekhov’s gun, and we’re coming in hard on the third act. Either S&S gets shot (acquired) or the play ends in an anticlimax (although whoever has been stewarding the deal at PRH may get shot by its parent company, Bertelsmann.)
If the deal fails, we’re in for a sequel because the current owner of S&S, Paramount (formerly ViacomCBS) won’t want it back. It is a motion picture/television company in the process of selling everything it owns not directly related to screen entertainment. It hopes to cement its status as a fourth-rate streaming service. S&S no longer fits, if it ever did.
Our view of the PRH-S&S deal is that the department of justice suit will fail to block the merger and S&S will be swallowed whole. It will be difficult to present the merger as the end of competition in the book industry when there are still four large publishers operating in the US, and a shitload of mid-size and smaller publishers. Combined, PRH&S&S may amount to less than a third of the American trade book market, and as little as 20 per cent, depending on how you do the math. That’s a long way from monopoly.
The DOJ, moreover, has chosen to fight its battle on low ground. It’s saying that the deal is bad for competition in books generally, but it is particularly concerned that the merger will result in less competition for the services of writers of anticipated top-selling books, loosely defined as authors commanding huge advances. You read that right: the DOJ is seeking justice for the .001% of the literary world. We argued all this at length, and destroyed the government’s case back in SHuSH 123.
May 28, 2022
Scott Alexander on the “Hearing Voices Movement”
I’d never heard of the Hearing Voices Movement, but I don’t read the [spit] New York Times [spit]. Scott Alexander almost certainly also avoids reading the NYT, but he responds to a recent article there on the phenomenon that some of his psychiatric patients have reported:
The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement — ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses:
I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts:
2:
Plenty of people hear voices. Some of these people are your typical homeless schizophrenic, but many aren’t. One of my patients was a successful computer programmer who had near-daily auditory hallucinations. He realized they weren’t real, did his best to ignore them, and got on with his successful life — just like he had been doing for the past twenty years. He was seeing me for unrelated depression.
This guy kept his condition secret from his friends and co-workers. I don’t blame him for this choice at all. But when everybody who can hide it does, we only hear about the people who can’t keep it hidden, who are usually worst-case scenarios. Also (as a bunch of 1980s gay people can tell you) keeping a basic fact about yourself hidden from everyone you know sucks.
I recommended Hearing Voices Movement to this guy. I can’t remember whether he took me up on it or not. But I thought it would be helpful for him to have people he could talk to about his situation who wouldn’t think he was crazy, or try to get him locked up.
3:
People hate admitting that some cases are mild, and others are severe. Especially the kind of people who work at the New York Times
I talked about this a while back in the context of the autism rights movement. Many autistic people live great lives, enjoy the beneficial parts of their condition, and find it annoying or oppressive when psychiatrists keep trying to medicate them. Many other autistic people can’t live outside of institutions and constantly try to chew off their own body parts. A reasonable conclusion might be “the first group seem mild and should be left alone, the second group seem severe and probably need intensive treatment”, but it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this.
Calling some cases “mild” sounds trivializing. Calling other cases “severe” sounds stigmatizing. Whatever your criteria for a mild case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria, but says the condition ruined their life and you are dismissing their pain. Whatever your criteria for a severe case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria but is thriving and living their best life and accuses you of wanting to imprison them in a hospital 24-7.
And that’s just the activists! We psychiatrists have the same problem from a different direction: we have seen some crazy @#!$. No matter how mild your case is, we’ve seen some case that looked like that at first glance, then slowly descended into a horror movie premise. Our instinct is naturally to round off the person who uses Xanax once a month to the lifetime drug abuser, the mildly depressed housewife to the gory suicide victim, and the occasional voice-hearer to the guy who needs to be in a straitjacket.
Still, some cases are mild and others are severe. People with mild psychosis — like my patient the programmer — probably don’t need to be on really strong medications with severe side effects. They probably just need support. In a perfect world, expert psychiatrists would have a major role in providing that support. In the real world, a lot of these patients expect their psychiatrist to freak out, overmedicate them, and maybe even commit them to a hospital. This being the real world, many of those patients are right. So they look elsewhere.
Morality is Dead. Hollywood Killed It.
Foundation for Economic Education
Published 27 May 2022What’s with all the nihilistic, amoral, dark anti-hero leads in movies and shows? Are we supposed to treat horrible characters as pinnacles of human behavior now?
The bleak content that’s crept its way mainstream over the last 10 years should concern us all. The stories we tell matter, for they influence what we believe and what values we adopt.
Fortunately, a renewed appreciation for natural rights and individualism could be the antidote to the immense darkness that’s blanketed American culture as of late. That’s what we’ll get down to on this feature episode of Out of Frame.
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CREDITS:
Written by Sean W. Malone
Produced by Sean W. Malone
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Asst. Edited by Abby Richardson
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tactical air power
The first function aircraft were put to in WWI was reconnaissance. In 1914, that might mean locating the enemy in a fast-moving battlefield, but as soon as the trench stalemate set in, reconnaissance mostly meant identifying enemy buildups along the line and – still more importantly – serving as spotters for artillery. It wasn’t a huge cognitive leap to go from having aircraft which identified targets for the artillery to thinking that the aircraft could be the artillery. But as with tanks, the technical limitations of the platforms in use meant that actually meaningful close air support was still two decades away when the war ended. The rapid development of aircraft in these early days means that there is a truly bewildering array of aircraft designs in use during the war, but the Farman F.50 is a good sample for what the most advanced bombers in common use looked like towards the war’s end. It carried a maximum of eight 44kg (totalling 352kg) bombs under the wings, which were dropped unguided. With a maximum speed of less than 100mph and a service ceiling under 5000m, it was also an extremely vulnerable platform: fragile, slow and with a relatively low flight ceiling. The French mainly used bombers at night for this reason.
But how much airpower does it take to really move a division out of position? In 1944, at the start of Operation Cobra as part of the Normandy breakout, it was necessary for US forces to move the powerful armored division Panzer Lehr out of its prepared positions outside of St. Lo. Over the course of an hour and a half, the U.S. Eighth Air Force hit Panzer Lehr with approximately three thousand aircraft, including 1,800 heavy bombers (each of which might have had bomb-loads of c. 2-3,500kg; the attack would have been the equivalent of about 13,000 Farman F.50s (of which only a hundred or so were built!)). By this point, even medium bombers carried bomb loads in the thousands of pounds, like the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, with a bomb load of 3000lbs (1360kg). This was followed by a hurricane artillery barrage! Despite this almost absurdly awesome amount of firepower (which, to be clear, inflicted tremendous damage; by the end of Operation Cobra, Panzer Lehr – the heaviest and most powerful Panzer division in the west – had effectively ceased to exist), Panzer Lehr, badly weakened was still very capable of resisting and had to be pushed out of position by ground attack over the next three days.
Needless to say, nothing on offer in 1918 or for a decade or more after, was prepared to offer that kind of offensive potential from the air. That kind of assault would have required many thousands of aircraft with capabilities far exceeding what even the best late-war WWI bombers could do. Once again, while close air support doctrine was developed with one eye on the trench stalemate and the role airpower could play in facilitating a breakthrough and restoring maneuver (either by blasting the breakthrough or – as in Soviet Deep Battle doctrine – engaging enemy rear echelon units to bog down reinforcements). But the technology wasn’t anywhere near the decisive point by 1918. Instead, the most important thing aircraft could do was spot for the artillery, which is mostly what aircraft continued to do, even in late 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
May 27, 2022
Minoru Yamasaki and the Pruitt–Igoe urban housing project
Joseph Kast recounts the story of a post-war government scheme to demolish slums, re-house the slum-dwellers in a massive public housing project and the architect whose career was forever blighted by the failure of the design:

An undated overview of some of the 33 buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki and built in the early 1950s. All had been demolished by 1976.
Uncredited photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Can society be designed? Can an expert engineer alleviate people’s pains and struggles with a good-enough central plan and blueprint?
Minoru Yamasaki thought so.
Yamasaki was one of America’s most well-respected architects in the 20th century and was a member of the school of thought that people’s human nature could be improved (whether those people needed or wanted improving) by a properly planned building surrounding them.
Yamasaki got to test his theory by designing the public housing complex that promised to be a template for all public housing going forward. The complex, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, was made possible by post-war New Deal housing and urban development programs. And like many New Deal initiatives, Pruitt-Igoe was guided by the idea that good intentions, centralized planning, and strong government power would progress society more than protecting people’s rights or personal choices.
Pruitt-Igoe and Yamasaki’s designs were sold as the solution to poverty, crime, and housing in America’s major cities, but within just a few years, the complex would show the dangerous consequences when government planners take away people’s liberties and homes.
As with so many vast schemes to use the government’s power to reshape people’s lives, the hopes of the central planners quickly fell afoul of economic and social realities that the plan never took into account.
St. Louis quickly realized that Pruitt-Igoe was a problem. But it was unclear who, if anyone, could fix it. The federal government, the St. Louis Housing Authority, the state, and the City of St. Louis itself all shared responsibility for the complex. When a problem belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
Within five years of its launch, Yamasaki was regularly apologizing for his role in the project. Though the final design of the complex differed from his original vision, he came to question the core assumption behind the project: that people’s lives could be effectively engineered through urban design. He expressed regret for his “deplorable mistakes” with Pruitt-Igoe. By the late 1950s, he was giving eloquent speeches about the “tragedy of housing thousands in exactly look alike cells,” which “certainly does not foster our ideals of human dignity and individualism.”
To the Detroit Free Press, he put it more simply: “Social ills can’t be cured by nice buildings.”
By the early 1970s, the 33 concrete tombstones lining St. Louis’ skyline were a cautionary tale for utopian housing schemes. It was a den of crime and misery, rather than anything anyone could call home. When the decision came to demolish the complex, occupancy was only 10 percent.
The day the demolitions began at Pruitt-Igoe, architectural historian Charles Jencks declared the death of high modernist architecture and its grand assumptions: “It was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”
Three towers were demolished in 1972. The last tower finally came down in 1976, leaving nothing of Pruitt-Igoe behind.












