April Notes
- The sale of Ayers Rock is a fairly obvious joke; there isn't really much material there that can't be found elsewhere.
- The LN fishing conference is driven by the realisation of what was done to the great white shark and the megalodon and applying the logic of expunging a species elsewhere, leading to a bit more attention being given to overfishing and its potentially disastrous consequences
- Charlie Chaplin's slightly different situation, being viewed as a lecher and rake more than a Red. Chaplin's postwar figurative trials began in @ with the issues of infidelity, moral turpitude and the Mann Act then later shifted to the Red sympathy accusations after Monsieur Verdoux was released. The former were driven by Hoover's suspicions as to Chaplin's political leanings. Here, the earlier moral issues are sufficient to cause such a scandal (a la Fatty Arbuckle) as to drive him back across the Atlantic to Europe. A slight difference, but one driven by the different social mores of DE
- Arab dalliances with Moscow could have a political element behind them in some cases; being monarchies under an overall confederacy, they aren't very likely to jump fully into bed with the Reds as Iraq and Syria did in @. I would also note the absence of Egypt from any discussion of Arab states. This is because of its relative separation, with the British and Israel lying in between them, and a different course of Egyptian nationalism post WW1, where Pharaonism has had more protracted success. @ Pan Arabism died early and died hard with the crushing of the revolutions of 1956, in concert with many of its more influential exponents from @ dying in WW2 meatgrinders and the regional balance being much more reminiscent of the 1920s; in its place, a different Pan Arabism has grown, without the same socialist/Nasserite character. As to the weapons themselves, but Soviet arms don't really have the same @ reputation and cachet after Korea and Vietnam, similar to some shifts away from them after the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War in @. The only thing going for them is they are nominally cheap, but come with associated political tendrils. Overall, the Soviets don't have their Indian market, nor have they made any major inroads into Africa, given the asterisk next to the independence of former British and French colonies. It is almost as if this policy were informed from insights from another world...
- Beginning of the RCAF's efforts to replace the Arrow (and other mid-late 1950s aircraft), with the likely candidate being...a further development/next generation evolution of the Arrow. They are also going to go big for missile defence, complicating the Soviet task of penetrating North America
- RFK drops out of the Democratic race, sensing that this will be a change election and that the likelihood of America voting for a Kennedy 4 elections in a row is pretty small. He's hoping to keep his powder dry for 1976. The remaining frontrunners are Jackson and Hubert Humphrey
- The British power picture is distinctly different, with coal falling a lot earlier and oil never really coming to the fore. This has a bit of a political impact, lessening the relative power of coal mining unions, but isn't driven by that; rather, the march of technology here is swifter and plans are very ambitious, as they should be in a world where fusion power has been achieved and economically harnessed. By 1980, nuclear will be even further ahead, with fusion starting to play an even bigger role. In any event, there will be more of a shift to nuclear/fusion by the USA, British Commonwealth, Europe, the USSR, China and Japan over the next decade that will further reduce the largest source of greenhouse gasses in @. In @, the percentages of causes of greenhouse gasses were power generation (25.9%), industry (20%), deforestation (17.4%), agriculture (13.5%), transport (13.1%) and residential and commercial buildings (7.9%), whereas in Dark Earth, Power Generation and Deforestation might be 7% and 2.4% by 1984, transport at 9-10%, Industry at 12%, Agriculture at 10% and Residential/Commercial at 3%. Roughly speaking, it will be ~45% of the @ levels and falling. The last sentence of April 7, mentioning cybernetics, indicates that Britain under Barton and Labour is dallying with a much more successful version of Project Cybersyn
- Sanctuary Hills on April 8 is a reference to the initial community/player home in
Fallout 4, with some DE touches such as two storey houses (which make up 65% of new suburban house construction), libraries and churches being essential parts of small towns and the subtler mention of the ongoing strength of the old fashioned general store
- Air America's anti-drug aerial campaign will have some interesting effects. The agents being used are specially bred/developed ones rather than simply Agent Orange, designed to attack particular species with quite devastating effect. It is driven by anti-drugs efforts, as there is no need to supplement budgets; roughly speaking, the US intelligence budget of 1972 is about 250% of the @ 2022 figure (which equates to $12.85 in 1972 value), or 32 billion. That is but a small fraction of the overall US defence budget.
- The salient feature of the Qir earthquake update is that the Persian wine industry is still very strong
- Lord Lucan's kidnapping and his different fate comes from Britain's different relative position, which involves certain overseas interests/companies not having been nationalised in 1946. The type of aristocrat who went into the City and then professional gambling in @ is the same type of chap who would go into various overseas commerce or colonial business interests, so the option leapt out at me as an opportunity to use a familiar name
- Mr. Jagger's report on magi-tech on the BBC provides a bit of a window into the (near) future
- Skyshield XXII is similar in effect to Sky Shield II, but coming from a different direction. It has become an annual exercise pitting the best of BC and SAC against ADC as a means of constant testing and maintaining readiness; contrast this with the downgrading of fighter and missile defences during the 1960s and early 1970s in @ with the decreasing Soviet bomber threat. Here, the ICBM is a serious threat, but the 1950s anti-air posture remains alongside it, with some new SAMs having a limited ABM capacity (based on the earlier developmental history of the Patriot, which saw those capacities deliberately downgraded) in addition to the dedicated ABM forces of Nike Zeus, Spartan/Sprint and Excalibur
- As Japan rearmed in @, they fairly quickly moved to building its own warships and licensed production of US aircraft. Here, it has its own thriving shipbuilding capacity (as in @) and its own domestic aircraft companies building their own jet designs and a budget unrestricted by its own limitations, not to mention Prime Minister Yukio Mishima. The reason for the British purchases is that Japan is hitting the outer edges of its own productive capacity in certain niche areas and the US is currently flat out replacing its WW2 cruiser missile conversions
- April 15th's reference to Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin are a tribute to the late David McCallum
- Panda diplomacy occurs even under Imperial China, albeit with talking pandas
- Sudan is being used as a bit of a carrot to turn Egypt's attention south rather than east
- Project Stormtracker is designed to save lives, property, money and opportunity
- The sabotage of the Odessa bombs on April 20 was intervention by a (non state) intelligence group, but the traffic snarls just come down to French, Italian and Spanish drivers
- The events of Freaky Friday have a generally similar outcome, with the chance of some future developments
- Lucan's rescue suggests that the Argentine authorities have an interest in eliminating 'rebels' who could talk...
- Robert House Sr. will have a son eventually, in a new Vegas
- Death of a legend in the passing of Field Marshal Blackadder, hero of two world wars. He does have sons and grandsons, though, including one who will pop up soon
- Reagan is the clear frontrunner for 1972. After 12 years of Democrat rule, there is going to be a lot of natural appetite for change, along with some rumblings over Universal Healthcare and relatively minor inflation. In the absence of (Chief Justice) Nixon, the obvious leading Republican candidate is Ronald Reagan. At 61, he is younger, which has a natural impact on what type of character a man is. The general Reagan position here (detailed on March 21) is to be very strong on defence and foreign policy, but to oppose further growth of the state and implement some of the Reaganomics of @; there is less of an inflation problem and none of the stagflation issue, so not all of the 1980s solutions will be in place
- April 26th's Thuggee cult is a reference to 1965's
Help!, replete with a few Beatles quotes
- Al Bundy from Married with Children gets his chance to be a professional gridiron football player, similar to the actor who played him
- The IKAF is still a very firm and good US customer for arms and military aircraft. In general, the guaranteed/close to guaranteed US markets are in Asia (Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Philippines, Thailand and South Vietnam), South America (Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay and Ecuador) and Central America (onduras, Santo Domingo, El Salvador, Haiti, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Los Altos and Yucatan). There are many states that still buy a lot of 'Made in the USA' arms/aircraft whilst having their own niches, such as Germany and Turkey, whilst the British have the Commonwealth, the Middle East and Persia, the Balkans (Byzantine Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia), the Benelux Union, Portugal and Scandinavia as the markets where they dominate; Argentina, Brazil and Chile still buy mainly British, but are trying to develop their own arms industries with varying degrees of success
- A different Burundi crisis for starters, but the reaction is the noteworthy element, with a relatively fast alert of forces who are airlifted into action in early May
- Biggles retires as Britain's leading ace of both World Wars and stuck around to score a few kills in Korea and over Egypt. He is very youthful for his age (similar to a lot of DE figures, he seems 20 years younger in appearance and capacity) and is likely to get involved with the Special Air Police, an independent international group devoted to law, investigation and daring-do
