BOHINEY
America’s Journal of Common Sense
Issue No. 30 | Saturday, September 6, 1947 | Washington, D.C. | Price: 15¢
Navy Launches Captured Nazi Rocket From Ship, Proves War Souvenirs Getting Out of Hand
USS Midway Fires V-2 Because Apparently We Couldn’t Think of Anything Better to Do With It
The USS Midway successfully launched a captured German V-2 rocket from its deck yesterday, marking the first time a large missile has been fired from a moving vessel. Military officials celebrated this achievement, apparently forgetting that the last time Germans launched V-2 rockets, they were aimed at London and killed thousands of civilians.
But that was then, this is now, and now we’re launching Nazi rockets from American ships because… science? Naval superiority? The certainty that if we don’t play with captured German weapons technology, the Soviets will?
The V-2 rocket represents German engineering at its most impressive and most terrible. It travels faster than sound, carries a ton of explosives, and arrives with no warning. During the war, Germany launched over 3,000 of them at Allied targets, primarily London and Antwerp. They killed approximately 9,000 people and accomplished nothing strategically except demonstrating that Germany could build expensive weapons that didn’t change the war’s outcome.
After the war, America and the Soviet Union raced to capture German rocket scientists and their technology. We got Wernher von Braun and most of his team. The Soviets got the rest. Both sides apparently decided that the men who built weapons for Hitler might be useful building weapons for us—a pragmatic decision that raises uncomfortable questions about forgiveness, utility, and whether expertise excuses prior employment.
Von Braun, for those keeping track, was an SS officer who used slave labor from concentration camps to build his rockets. Thousands of prisoners died in the underground factories where V-2s were manufactured. But he’s also one of the world’s leading rocket experts, and America needs rocket experts, so we’ve given him a new job and tried not to think too hard about the old one.
This is the moral complexity of the post-war world: yesterday’s war criminals become today’s valuable assets if they know enough. It’s pragmatic. It’s necessary. It’s also deeply unsettling. We’ve gone from “Never Again” to “Let’s See If We Can Make This Work From a Boat” in remarkably short time.
The Navy’s stated purpose is testing whether large rockets can be launched from ships, potentially creating mobile missile platforms. This makes strategic sense—ships can move, making them harder to target than fixed launch sites. It also creates a future where naval warfare involves launching rockets at targets hundreds of miles away, which seems both impressive and terrifying.
The unstated purpose is demonstrating to the Soviet Union that America has German rocket technology and knows how to use it. The Soviets are conducting similar tests with their captured V-2s and scientists. Both sides are essentially saying “we have Nazi rockets and Nazi rocket scientists, so don’t try anything.” This is deterrence through appropriated German engineering.
One wonders what the German scientists think about all this. They built rockets for Hitler to destroy Allied cities. Now they’re building rockets for the Allies to… what, exactly? Destroy Soviet cities if necessary? Create a peaceful space program? Both, probably. Technology is morally neutral; it’s the application that matters. But it’s still German engineers building American weapons using knowledge gained from building weapons for Nazis.
History moves quickly. Two years ago, V-2 rockets were falling on London. Today, we’re firing them from American ships. Ten years from now, we’ll probably be using them to deliver warheads powerful enough to destroy entire cities. Twenty years from now, if von Braun gets his way, we might use them to explore space.
The technology itself is remarkable. A rocket that can travel 200 miles, faster than sound, carrying a ton of payload—that’s genuinely impressive engineering. The fact that it was developed by a totalitarian regime using slave labor doesn’t diminish the technical achievement, though it should temper our enthusiasm.
America now possesses captured Nazi technology, captured Nazi scientists, and apparently no compunction about using either. This is practical. This is probably necessary given Soviet ambitions. This is also exactly the kind of moral compromise that wartime necessity produces and peacetime reflection finds troubling.
But we’re not in peacetime, not really. We’re in the Cold War, where yesterday’s enemies become today’s assets and tomorrow’s weapons are built using yesterday’s war crimes as foundation. It’s pragmatic, strategic, and morally ambiguous—which describes most of modern geopolitics.
The USS Midway’s launch was successful. The rocket flew, the test worked, and naval officers celebrated. One hopes they also paused to consider what they were celebrating: the successful Americanization of Nazi weapons technology, accomplished by Nazi scientists, tested on American ships, all in preparation for a potential war against our current enemy using weapons designed for the last one.
Progress, apparently, requires holding your nose while shaking hands with people you’d rather forget.
Argentina Grants Women Right to Vote, Perón Discovers Half the Population Might Like Him
Eva’s Husband Signs Law While 100,000 Cheer, Wonder Why This Took So Long
President Juan Perón stood on the balcony of Argentina’s Presidential Palace yesterday and signed legislation granting women the right to vote, while 100,000 citizens cheered below. This represents either a triumph for democracy or a calculated political move to double Perón’s potential voter base—possibly both, which is how politics usually works.
Argentina becomes the latest South American nation to discover that women, despite lacking Y chromosomes, are capable of marking ballots without causing civilization’s collapse. Chile granted women’s suffrage in 1934. Brazil did it in 1932. Ecuador in 1929. Argentina, apparently needing extra time to consider whether half its population deserved political representation, has finally joined them.
The law’s passage owes much to Eva Perón, the President’s wife, who has spent months campaigning for women’s suffrage. Eva, a former actress who married Perón and became Argentina’s most influential woman, understands what many male politicians still don’t: women remember who grants them rights and vote accordingly.
Cynics note that Eva is enormously popular with working-class women, who view her as their advocate against Argentina’s traditional elite. Granting these women the vote essentially creates millions of new Perón supporters. Giving voting rights to people who already want you to succeed is good politics disguised as social progress—though to be fair, the progress is real regardless of the politician’s motivations.
The legislation passed despite opposition from conservative elements who apparently believed that women voting would lead to social chaos. What chaos they feared isn’t entirely clear—presumably they imagined women voting to abolish neckties or make shopping a full-time occupation. The reality will likely be far more mundane: women will vote mostly like men, for candidates they believe will govern well, except now politicians must actually consider women’s concerns instead of ignoring half the population.
Argentina’s suffrage movement has been fighting for decades, organizing rallies, publishing manifestos, and generally doing what democratic movements do: demanding rights that should be obvious but somehow require extensive campaigns to achieve. One would think “people who pay taxes should vote” would be uncontroversial. One would be wrong.
The interesting question is what happens next. Argentine women will vote in their first national election in 1951. If they support Perón as expected, he’ll win by landslides. If they don’t, his gamble will have failed spectacularly. Either way, Argentine politics will never be the same—politicians now must appeal to both sexes, which means actually considering issues like education, health care, and social welfare instead of just arguing about tariffs and military budgets.
American observers should note that our own women’s suffrage came only 27 years ago, in 1920. We’re hardly in a position to lecture Argentina about tardiness. Britain granted women full voting rights only 19 years ago. Switzerland still hasn’t done it at the federal level. Apparently, recognizing that women are people takes most countries somewhere between 50 and 5,000 years, depending on how quickly their politicians figure out the obvious.
The crowd of 100,000 who gathered to witness the signing suggests that Argentine women understand the significance of this moment. They’ve fought for it, demanded it, and finally received it—partly because it’s just, partly because Eva pushed for it, partly because Perón is politically astute enough to recognize opportunity when he sees it.
Motives don’t ultimately matter as much as results. Argentine women can now vote. They can run for office. They can participate fully in their country’s democracy instead of watching from the sidelines. That’s progress, even if it came from a populist president who calculated it would benefit him politically.
Democracy expands not because politicians are noble, but because extending rights to more people creates political advantages that outweigh the cost of change. Perón isn’t an idealist—he’s a pragmatist who recognized that giving women the vote would strengthen his political position while also being, coincidentally, the right thing to do.
Eva Perón, watching from beside her husband as he signed the law, probably understands this better than anyone. She climbed from poverty to power through charm, intelligence, and understanding how politics works. She advocated for women’s suffrage not just because it’s just, but because she knew it would benefit the Peronist movement. Good politics and good policy occasionally align.
So congratulations to Argentine women. May you use your new right wisely, vote your conscience, and discover what women everywhere eventually learn: that having the vote doesn’t solve everything, but it beats the alternative of having no voice at all.
The Tyranny of Thank-You Notes
Why Society Demands Written Gratitude for Gifts You Didn’t Want
Civilization has created many pointless obligations, but few match the thank-you note for sheer unnecessary tedium. You receive a gift—often something you neither wanted nor need—and society demands you write a letter expressing gratitude you may not feel for an object you’ll probably donate to charity within six months.
The logic supposedly goes like this: someone spent time and money selecting a gift, therefore you owe them written acknowledgment of that effort. But thanking them in person apparently doesn’t count. Thanking them by telephone isn’t sufficient. You must write it down, address an envelope, find a stamp, and mail formal gratitude because anything less is considered rude.
Wedding gifts particularly require thank-you notes. You receive 150 gifts ranging from useful to baffling. You must write 150 individual notes, each expressing unique gratitude for items ranging from fine china you’ll use twice to decorative objects that will spend eternity in closets. The notes must be personalized—nobody wants to receive “Thank you for the lovely gift” because that suggests you couldn’t be bothered to remember what they gave you, even though you probably can’t.
Birthday gifts from relatives present similar challenges. Aunt Martha sends you socks—again—because apparently she believes you have no socks despite sending you socks every year since 1932. You must write thanking her for the thoughtful gift, pretending that this year’s socks were exactly what you wanted and definitely not identical to last year’s socks which are still in their original packaging.
Children learn this obligation early. “Write Grandma a thank-you note,” parents demand, forcing children to perform gratitude they don’t yet understand for gifts they’ve already forgotten. The result is notes saying “Thank you for the present. It was nice. Love, Bobby”—perfunctory gratitude that satisfies nobody but fulfills the social requirement.
The real issue is that we’ve created elaborate rituals around expressing gratitude we’re supposed to feel for gifts we often didn’t want. Honest communication would be simpler: “Thank you for thinking of me, though I’ll never use a decorative egg holder shaped like a chicken.” But honesty violates social norms. You must pretend delight regardless of actual feelings, then document that false delight in writing.
Some argue that thank-you notes demonstrate good breeding and proper etiquette. Perhaps. They also demonstrate that you have enough free time to write unnecessary letters and sufficient adherence to social norms to do things simply because society expects them. Neither quality particularly impresses this columnist.
The thank-you note industry perpetuates this nonsense. Stationery stores sell special cards designed specifically for expressing gratitude. Department stores offer thank-you note sets as gifts, creating a recursive gift cycle: someone gives you thank-you notes, you must write them a thank-you note, presumably on different thank-you notes, creating an eternal loop of gratitude documentation.
Modern efficiency suggests alternatives. Thank-you telephone calls are faster. Thank-you telegrams are briefer. Simply saying “thank you” when receiving the gift should suffice. But tradition demands written notes because… well, because that’s how we’ve always done it, which is the worst possible justification for any social custom.
The obligation falls particularly hard on women, who bear primary responsibility for maintaining family correspondence. A married couple receives a gift, and the wife writes the note—this is simply understood. She didn’t choose this responsibility; it came with marriage like cooking, cleaning, and pretending her husband’s jokes are funny. Adding “gratitude documentation specialist” to her unpaid job description seems excessive.
Some people genuinely enjoy writing thank-you notes, finding pleasure in expressing appreciation. These people are either lying or possessing personalities incomprehensible to normal humans. Writing the same “thank you for your thoughtfulness” message 150 times with slight variations isn’t enjoyable—it’s tedious busywork masquerading as social grace.
The solution isn’t abolishing gratitude—genuine appreciation should be expressed. The solution is proportional response. Expensive gifts might merit written notes. Thoughtful gifts deserve genuine thanks. But mandatory written gratitude for every gift, regardless of value or utility, is excessive. We’ve turned gratitude into paperwork.
This columnist proposes a radical alternative: say thank you when you receive a gift. Mean it. Then move on with your life. If the giver feels slighted by the absence of a written note, that’s their problem, not yours. Gratitude should be sincere, not bureaucratic.
But this won’t happen. Thank-you notes are too embedded in social expectations. Grandmothers will continue demanding them. Etiquette books will continue prescribing them. And people will continue writing them while resenting every minute, then feeling guilty about the resentment because you’re supposed to be grateful for gifts, not annoyed about documentation requirements.
So we’ll continue this charade: giving gifts that require written gratitude, receiving written gratitude we don’t really need, and pretending this system makes sense. It’s civilization’s way—taking something simple like saying “thank you” and making it complicated enough to require stationery stores.
The Inexplicable Logic of Garage Sales
Why People Pay Money for Other People’s Junk They’re Trying to Throw Away
Every Saturday morning, Americans engage in a peculiar ritual: they display their unwanted possessions on their lawns, attach price tags, and wait for neighbors to purchase items they themselves considered worthless enough to discard. This is called a garage sale, and it makes no economic sense whatsoever.
Consider the logic. You own a lamp. The lamp is ugly, outdated, or simply taking up space. You decide to get rid of it. Reasonable options include: throwing it away, donating it to charity, or giving it to someone who needs a lamp. Instead, you spend Saturday morning sitting in your driveway hoping someone will pay seventy-five cents for it.
The buyer’s logic is equally questionable. They wake Saturday morning, see a “Garage Sale” sign, and think: “Perhaps someone is selling exactly what I need, despite having no idea what they’re selling!” They stop, browse through strangers’ discarded possessions, and purchase items they didn’t know existed ten minutes earlier and certainly didn’t need.
The pricing strategy is particularly fascinating. A toaster that cost fifteen dollars new gets priced at fifty cents at a garage sale. This seems like a bargain until you remember the seller considered it worthless and the buyer has no idea if it actually works. It probably doesn’t—that’s likely why it’s being sold. But for fifty cents, it seems worth the gamble.
Garage sales attract specific personality types. First, the Professional Bargain Hunter, who arrives at dawn, scrutinizes every item, and negotiates aggressively over already-low prices. “Would you take a quarter for this lamp marked fifty cents?” they ask, as if the twenty-five cent difference matters to either party.
Second, the Nostalgic Browser, who examines everything, remembering similar items from childhood. They don’t buy anything—they’re just visiting a museum of 1930s domestic life, staffed by tired homeowners who wish they’d just thrown everything away.
Third, the Reseller, who buys cheap items to sell for slightly less cheap prices at their own garage sale next month. This creates a garage sale ecosystem where objects circulate endlessly between sales, never actually being used, just continuously resold at diminishing prices until they’re either donated or thrown away.
Preparation for garage sales is remarkably labor-intensive. You must sort through possessions, price everything, advertise, set up tables, and spend hours waiting for customers. Most people would earn more money working those hours at any job whatsoever. But somehow, making forty-seven dollars selling accumulated junk feels more satisfying than forty-seven dollars earned normally.
The advertising is optimistic bordering on delusional. “Huge Sale! Everything Must Go!” the signs proclaim, suggesting amazing bargains await. In reality, “everything” means “various items I couldn’t throw away because they’re not quite worthless enough to feel good about discarding.” And “must go” means “I’ll donate whatever doesn’t sell to charity, which is what I should have done initially.”
Books are garage sale staples. People buy books, read them once, then sell them for a nickel apiece. Other people buy these books, read them once, then sell them at their own garage sales. The books circulate endlessly, generating nickels at each transaction, like a very slow, very inefficient lending library that requires payment.
Children’s clothes represent garage sale economy at its most logical. Children outgrow clothes faster than clothes wear out, creating surplus clothing in good condition. Selling outgrown clothes to buy larger sizes makes economic sense—it’s genuine recycling with mutual benefit. Of course, you could achieve the same result by giving the clothes to charity and buying the larger sizes anyway, but where’s the satisfaction in that?
Furniture at garage sales is particularly optimistic. Someone selling a worn sofa prices it at twenty dollars, apparently believing someone wants furniture that’s been used enough that its original owner doesn’t want it anymore. Occasionally someone actually buys it—usually newlyweds too poor for standards or college students who view furniture primarily as a platform for sitting.
The real question is why we don’t simply donate everything to charity instead of conducting garage sales. The answer involves some combination of capitalism, stubbornness, and the belief that if we once paid money for something, we should receive money when discarding it, even if that money barely covers the cost of the advertising signs.
There’s also satisfaction in knowing your possessions found new homes rather than being thrown away. That chipped teapot might be useless to you, but perhaps someone else will treasure it. More likely they’ll sell it at their garage sale next year, but the possibility of usefulness provides comfort.
Garage sales will continue because Americans love both accumulating possessions and occasionally purging them. We’ll keep pricing worn-out items at optimistic prices, negotiating over quarters, and pretending this represents sound economic behavior. Both parties leave feeling they’ve gotten a good deal, which is the real magic—mutual satisfaction in a transaction neither party needed.
Next Saturday, drive past any garage sale and observe: people selling junk they don’t want, people buying junk they don’t need, both parties satisfied with the exchange. It’s capitalism at its most absurd and most American.
In Defense of Procrastination
Why Putting Things Off Until Tomorrow Makes Perfect Sense Today
Procrastination has gotten a bad reputation it doesn’t entirely deserve. We’re told to do things immediately, complete tasks promptly, and never delay what can be done today. This is terrible advice that ignores human nature, practical reality, and the possibility that many tasks don’t actually need doing at all.
Consider what happens when you procrastinate. You delay a task, it sits there undone, and often one of three things occurs: the task becomes unnecessary and disappears; the task resolves itself without your involvement; or someone else does it. In any of these cases, your procrastination was the correct strategy. You saved effort by waiting.
The fourth possibility is that the task still needs doing eventually. But by then, you might have more information, better tools, or clearer understanding of what actually needs accomplishing. Immediate action often means acting with incomplete information. Delay provides wisdom.
Urgent things are rarely important. Truly important things are rarely urgent. This distinction eludes most people, who respond to urgency as if it indicates importance. They scramble to complete “urgent” tasks that, six months later, nobody remembers. Meanwhile, genuinely important tasks—the ones with no deadline—get perpetually postponed.
Procrastination is a highly effective filter separating truly important tasks from things that merely seem urgent. If a task is genuinely important, it remains important after delay. If it isn’t, it vanishes. Let time separate wheat from chaff rather than treating every task as equally vital.
The anti-procrastination crowd loves lists: write down everything you need to do, prioritize it, then work through it systematically. This creates an illusion of productivity while actually making you less efficient. You spend time managing lists instead of thinking about what actually matters. You complete small, easy tasks to feel accomplished while avoiding difficult, important work.
Procrastinators, by contrast, ignore the small tasks entirely. They put off everything until forced to act, at which point they tackle only what’s truly necessary. This looks like laziness but functions as ruthless prioritization. Why clean your desk if it’ll be messy again tomorrow? Why organize files if you can find things anyway? Why do any task that isn’t absolutely necessary?
The counterargument is that procrastination creates stress. Tasks pile up, deadlines approach, and eventually you’re overwhelmed. This is true—for people who procrastinate wrong. Proper procrastination means accurately judging which tasks actually require completion and doing only those, at the last responsible moment. Poor procrastination means ignoring everything until panic forces action on things that should have been done earlier or not at all.
Students understand this instinctively. The student who starts a paper a month before it’s due spends a month anxiously working on it. The student who starts the night before spends one night frantically working on it. Both submit papers of roughly equal quality. The difference is that the procrastinator spent a month not worrying about the paper, which seems like the superior strategy.
Deadlines exist because without them, nothing would get done. This tells you something important: most tasks aren’t worth doing until external pressure forces action. If something were truly important, you’d do it without a deadline. The deadline proves it’s not inherently important—it’s only important because someone arbitrary decided it needs completing by a specific date.
The modern workplace particularly misunderstands procrastination. Managers want things done immediately, treating speed as virtue. But speed often produces poor results. Better to think through a problem thoroughly than solve it quickly and incorrectly. Yet employees who work slowly and carefully are viewed as inefficient, while employees who work quickly and sloppily are considered productive.
Creative work especially benefits from procrastination. Writers, artists, and inventors need time for ideas to develop. Forcing immediate production creates mediocre results. But allowing time—what looks like procrastination—lets subconscious processes work. The best ideas often come when you’re not actively trying to generate them.
There’s also the matter of energy management. You have limited energy daily. Spending it on tasks that don’t matter means lacking energy for tasks that do. Procrastination conserves energy for truly important work by ignoring everything else. This looks lazy but functions as strategic resource allocation.
The solution isn’t eliminating procrastination—it’s procrastinating wisely. Delay everything possible. Let time prove what’s actually necessary. When something reveals itself as genuinely important, do it well. Until then, put it off and do something enjoyable instead.
This approach requires courage. You must resist the urge to seem busy. You must ignore urgent-but-unimportant demands. You must accept that others will view you as lazy, irresponsible, or both. But you’ll accomplish what actually matters while avoiding wasted effort on everything else.
So procrastinate boldly. Put things off. Delay decisions. Wait until absolutely necessary before acting. You’ll discover that most things you delay never needed doing anyway, and the few that did become obvious through time’s passage.
Just don’t procrastinate reading this article. You’ve already finished it, so you’re fine. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.
The Conspiracy of Matching Silverware
Why Your Forks Need to Look Identical or You’ve Failed at Life
Somewhere along the way, civilization decided that all your silverware must match. Not approximately match, not generally coordinate—match exactly, as if the meal will be ruined by forks from different patterns. This is nonsense, but it’s expensive nonsense, so the silverware industry perpetuates it enthusiastically.
Visit any department store and observe the silverware displays. Complete sets: twelve dinner forks, twelve salad forks, twelve soup spoons, twelve teaspoons, twelve dinner knives, all matching perfectly. This is presented as essential for proper entertaining, as if guests will flee in horror upon discovering your salad fork doesn’t precisely match your dinner fork.
The reality of most households is different. You inherit silverware from relatives. You receive pieces as gifts. You purchase replacements when things get lost or damaged. Over time, you accumulate a drawer full of mismatched utensils that function perfectly well despite aesthetic disharmony. This is called “being normal,” but the silverware industry calls it “an opportunity for a complete set.”
Matching silverware serves no functional purpose. A fork from 1935 works identically to a fork from 1947. Mixing patterns doesn’t affect food quality, eating efficiency,