The Latest Generation

Patrick Bowman
  • 3.3 (3)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED DAILY

The Latest Generation is a discussion on how different generations influence current events, culture, and history.

  1. 4D AGO

    Redux - Gen X Job Seeker - The Last

    Five years at my job, five years since I was trying to find work in the middle of a pandemic.  This is short and simple but the advice it has isn't half bad, still.      Notes from the original: Eventually you have to make it through to the end. This is, as it says, the last Gen X Job Seeker episode, because....the search is over. Going to blame having a job again for not having more to say this month, but working on a more consistent release schedule soon.   https://www.realdefen.se https://www.iolo.com Good luck to everyone out there still seeking.

    7 min

  2. 4D AGO

    Redux - Ukraine, Continued

    The continuation is from the previous episode, The Sebastapol Sketches, about the 1850s Crimean War and the Tolstoy stories set there.  Because so much has been happening, it's a ramblling look at a lot of possibilities and how the generational model might make sense of it all. As such, there's not a lot here for further investigation besides the previous podcast episodes and a few tweets of mine.... On the other hand, it is an an unusually long episode, so be ready for that. Previously these were in the episode notes, but they aren't linking now. I'll try to delete them if I can't figure out why...   https://x.com/generationalize/status/1496006671851986948?s=20 https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1496139226659840018?s=21   https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1496016572112158724?s=21 https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1496006671851986948?s=21 https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1495223269225484290?s=21 https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1492255773237284864?s=21

    43 min

  3. 4D AGO

    Redux - Sebastopol Sketches

    On the four year anniversary of start of "Special Military Operation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, I thought I'd repost a couple of my relevant episodes from back then.  A look at Leo Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches, and what we can learn from them about recent activity in Crimea and Ukraine. Can't say for certain that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has a lot to do with this, but it is recent enough to raise the question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church_of_Ukraine And the Wall Street Journal does just that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-orthodox-church-and-ukraine-christianization-greek-catholic-prince-vladimir-great-empire-invasion-11643296236 Text of The Sevastopol Sketches https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47197/47197-h/47197-h.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-catherine-great-invaded-crimea-and-put-rest-world-edge-180949969/

    17 min

  4. 5D AGO

    Redux - Unforced Errors

    Originally intended to point out what a Crisis looks like, in the futile hope that maybe people in the USA would recognize when they were making them. Alas, this was not the case, and so we have a real peak Crisis happening.        Can we tell the start of a Fourth Turning by noticing the frequency and intensity of nation-level unforced errors? A look at the Soviet Union during the 1980s, when in retrospect the nation was clearly falling apart, and the unforced errors during that decade that might have been good indicators of what was happening.     https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-notorious-flight-of-mathias-rust-7101888/ "At about this time, Soviet investigators would later tell Rust, radar controllers realized something was terribly wrong, but it was too late for them to act."   In the 1980s, the Reagan administration released a publication called "Soviet Military Power" which was frankly intended to make the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics look more powerful than it was. In 1989, someone FINALLY put out a response to it, called Soviet Military Power, Annotated" which pointed out that it was frankly a propaganda document. Unfortunately, the annotations were also frankly propaganda. At one point it alludes to Rust's flight as having a lot of lucky coincidences that just happened to embarrass the Soviet Union on Border Guard day. It implies, that is, that Mathias Rust's flight sure looked like an intentional propaganda stunt that must have had direct help from someone who wanted to embarrass the USSR> Anyway, if it was the case that this was anything else, I'm rather confident that Rust would have been "disappeared" a while ago.     Googling us intelligence tracking Mathias Rust leads to a "Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War" - nothing there, really, that I used here, but it was interesting reading. (Okay, it no longer seems to lead there, but you can search for it directly, and there are some links that are evidently to the book itself.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Solidarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Round_Table_Agreement   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severomorsk_Disaster https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/11/world/soviet-naval-blast-called-crippling.html   Listing them here for additional clarity and impact.   1979 - Afghanistan 1980 - Solidarity 1983 - KAL 007 1985 - Chernenko dies 1986 - Chernobyl 1987 - Mathias Rust 1989 - Berlin Wall Falls 1991 - August Coup   HBO's miniseries on Chernobyl influenced my views of the Chernobyl disaster by making the causes clear enough to be enthralling cinema. It's a good intro to the disaster, although parts of it are fictionalized. I could not find the cosmonaut cartoon, but saw it at work every day in 1985-1987. There was another cartoon I remember but also couldn't find about Solidarity: Polish &  Soviet leaders discuss the labor union, and assume that it was engineered by reactionary forces in the West. It then shows a small group of people reading from The Communist Manifest: Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! That sixth Star Trek film is The Undiscovered Country, released in December 1991, only a few weeks before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102975/

    18 min

  5. JAN 31

    Redux - Countdown - Complete

    Because the Countdown episodes were short and were 5 years ago, they likely aren't showing up in most podcast services. Here they all are at once...again. A consolidation of the half-dozen Countdown episodes from 2020, starting in October and ending on Election Day, with an epilogue from Inauguration Day, 2021. There was a lot happening in those couple of weeks.  The observations range from the implications of voting, to the elevation of Justice Barrett, the shockingly low number of school shootings that year, and whatever is next.  There's about a five second gap between most of the episodes, but because each episode ends with a few seconds of lead-out too, it can be a 10-20 second gap.  Total time is not quite an hour.

    1 hr

  6. JAN 31

    Redux - The Gunner's Dream

    Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" was similar to "Forty Years" in that it was a look back at how the goals of World War II had worked out. Which means it's been on my mind in a similar way, so I felt like redoing it as well.  But the bit about  "...you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears And what's more No-one ever disappears  You never hear their standard issue Kicking in your door" That seemed to me, always, an exaggeration of what happened in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.....until Minneapolis, until Portland and, yes, until Los Angeles.  But now, it's too real. It's just what The Gunner,  - "in a corner of some foreign field," one that is forever England - just what he would have been fighting against. What he was fighting against.  If you can't find it on your streaming service, then in addition to the conceptual video linked below, you can also hear a simple acoustic version by Roger Waters on Youtube.  It's from about the same time as this episode.  https://youtu.be/aC9rY4HeN6A?si=nUo_mcl-bh2BcYTn My Countdown series was pretty well done, I think, so if you like it you can listen to more of them...around...if you look for it.  =============================================================== What is your dream for what the world looks like, after all this?     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(album) "A place to stay, enough to eat, somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears And what's more   No-one ever disappears  You never hear their standard issue Kicking in your door You can relax On both sides of the tracks And maniacs  don't blow holes In bandsman by remote control And everyone has recourse to the law And no-one kills the children anymore."   Turns out a video was made for it, but let me recommend listening to the song on its own, if not the album, at least the first time or two. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSE7qdjy3Q0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

    4 min

  7. JAN 31

    Redux - Ep. 18 - Forty Years

    Redoing this one because it's the forty year anniversary of the recording of the song Forty Years.  A quick note from Joe Jackson's website - where, incidentally, you can't listen to his music any more. (You could when I first published this podcast episode, and I wanted to include the notes that were here before, but that particular one isn't true any more. Or at least, not right now.) http://joejackson.com/release?page=release&album_id=36852 "I want to clear up two myths about this record which still crop up all the time.  Myth 1:  During the live recording of the album, the audience was forbidden to applaud. Fact: There was plenty of applause. We were just playing a lot of unfamiliar material, and recording it for an album, so the audience were asked to hold it until they were sure a song was finished. They understood this and there was no problem. Myth 2:  It's a double album with a side missing. Fact: This was my first album to be released on CD, where the running time was not an issue. I was having a hard time deciding what to leave out for the LP, though, and I suggested making a 3-sided one, and selling it for the price of a regular album. Much to my surprise, the record company said yes. So rather than a side missing, you got an extra side. Critics, of course, hadn't had to pay for it."   And as long as I'm mentioning John Brown below, I'll note my personal belief that he saw the Carrington Event  (really, he couldn't have misssed it) but also that he may have seen the red sky as a good omen for the raid on Harper's Ferry.  In any case, Forty Years was recorded 40 years ago, in January 1986. That turned out to be a notable year, in particular with the Chernobyl nuclear incident which was one of the turning points that led to the end of the Soviet Union. The song mentions Berlin, D.C., and "where I come from" (England/United Kingdom), but not Moscow.  The Soviet Union would be gone 7 years after the song was recorded.    --------------   Starting from a 1986 song about how attitudes had changed in the time since World War II, a look at the passage of time, and how it affects the way people think about history.   You can listen to Big World on Joe Jackson's site - "Forty Years" is track 9: http://joejackson.com/music&album_id=36852 Information about the album, including recording date (January 1986) and release date (March 1986) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_World    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._John_Brown Charlestown, Va. 2nd December, 1859. I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860 Evidently in the mid-19th century, it was not common for candidates to campaign.  They sent out activists but mostly stayed home themselves, with Stephen Douglas being the one breaking tradition in 1860. https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections https://www.sethkaller.com/item/1583-23646-Lincoln-Tops-the-Field-in-1860-Presidential-Election-Currier-&-Ives This essay from Locke is dated 1690…so nearly fifty years after Gallileo's death, 60 after his trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei I had to look up how long Elizabeth and Victoria reigned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethan_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria

    16 min

  8. 12/31/2025

    Ep. 71 - Puzzles

    A look at the last year, starting from jigsaw puzzles.

    12 min
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The Latest Generation is a discussion on how different generations influence current events, culture, and history.

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