Recent content by Doug M.

I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned the Japanese knee mortar. They weren't mortars and they had nothing to do with knees. They were the Imperial Japanese Army's standard grenade launcher. And they were one of the great unsung weapons systems of World War Two. Light, cheap, simple, easy to...

Amphetamines might have just a slightly different set of social and cultural side effects effect from LSD. Doug M.

So, amphetamines. OTL they were discovered in the 1880s... but then, bizarrely, they just sat around for the next 40 years, a laboratory curiosity with no known use. Their pharmacological significance wasn't appreciated until the 1920s! Now, once this /was/ understood, America's young...

Oh, good one! I did not know that Robinson wanted to be on the Court, though. Do you have a cite for that? Doug M.

OTL you had the "Four Horsemen" opposed by the "Three Musketeers", with Roberts and Hughes as two swing votes but voting more consistently conservative after 1934. However, of the three, Stone and Cardozo were both occasionally shaky, so there were a number of 7-2 decisions against New Deal...

Well... a couple of thoughts. -- Insulin treatment gets developed around 1910 or so. OTL, the discovery that this crucial substance was identical across all mammals had huge knock-on effects on biology. TTL that happens earlier. -- Amphetamines may arrive on the scene early enough to be...

There were young (<40 yo) Supreme Court judges back in the 19th century, but I don't think there were any in the post-Civil War era. In fact, if you look at the Wilson, Coolidge and Hoover appointees, they were all guys in their 50s and early 60s. The Supreme Court saw noticeably more "churn"...

Um, I said that. It's the second sentence of my post. Doug M.

Birthrates have been falling all over most of the world -- including Africa. Places like Zambia and Senegal have seen the average number of children per woman drop from six or eight to four or five... still high, but the trend is pretty clear. There are a lot of reasons for this, but female...

POD: he last two Bourbon kings of France, Louis XVIII and Charles X, are not complete tools. Now, you could argue with a straight face that Louis was not, in fact, a tool. He wasn't very bright, nor did he have any talent for politics. But he accepted most of the social changes wrought by the...

Is there a plausible POD to save the classic "floppy" comic book? you know, 32 pages, glossy cover, three staples? Yes, they still exist, but they've dwindled down to a niche product found only in an ever-shrinking number of specialty stores. Is there any way to keep them a mass-market...

POD: leaving the world no poorer, US Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds dies in a simple slip-and-fall accident. It's the summer of 1933, and Franklin Roosevelt has been president for less than six months. Now what? (No, I'm not being unpleasant. McReynolds was arguably the...

So David Bowie. Bowie has had an intermittent career as an actor. And, you know, he's not bad. Not bad at all. Oh, he's not brilliant. He'll never be an Olivier. But he's a solid midlist character actor with a fine command of body language and expression. So, POD: the childhood...

OTL the development of chemistry proceeded at a pretty smooth pace throughout the 19th century. There were individual flashes of inspiration, like the benzene ring, but overall it was the work of thousands of chemists and researchers across Western Europe. Could it have gone faster? I think...

Jean-Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem. President of the Republic of South Vietnam from his "election" in 1955 to his assassination in the back of an APC in early November 1963. Hard-working, meticulous, energetic. Celibate, passionately patriotic, an ardent Catholic. Ferociously anti-Communist...