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  1. WI: Lovecraft Gets a Job

    I've been reading L. Sprague de Camp's biography of H. P. Lovecraft, and I've reached his marriage to Sonia Greene and stay in New York City. During this time, he made enormous, but mostly fruitless, efforts to find more regular employment than his ghost-writing and short stories, but was badly...

  2. The Fall of the Roman Republic: Alternatives to the Empire

    I've recently started to get interested in Roman history. I've only just started my reading, so I'm sure I've got a bunch of stuff wrong, but fortunately we have plenty of people here who can correct me. :) The impression I get is that, unlike the fall of the Roman Empire, there really isn't...

  3. WI: Timothy Leary joins the Process Church

    I'm reading a book about the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a cult of the '60s and '70s. They were best known for allegedly being Satanists and allegedly inspiring Charlie Manson; the first was only sort of true - they were big into "unification of opposites", and worshiped Jehovah...

  4. WI: Biological Chernobyl

    What I mean by the title is: what if the Soviet Union in the '70s or '80s suffers a massive accidental release of a biowarfare agent, which kills thousands and cannot practically be covered up? Something one to two orders of magnitude worse than Sverdlovsk.

  5. WI: Rhodesia Caught Using Anthrax

    I've been doing some reading on bioweapons lately, and ran across the interesting question of just what exactly went down in Zimbabwe in the late '70s. I'm getting this from sources whose reliability I'm uncertain of, but in brief, there's some evidence that the Rhodesian government attacked...

  6. How Bad Could the Satanic Panic Have Gotten?

    So, for the younger forum members, the Satanic Panic was a social phenomenon in the US during the 1980s and early '90s. The whole thing was kicked off by the book Michelle Remembers, which is a chronicle of repressed memories recovered by a young woman who had been born into a Satanic cult...

  7. An AwesomeBad Idea: The Atomic Dreadnought

    So, I know this is a bad idea; I'm only posting this to exorcise it from my brain. Time frame: late '40s/early '50s, before guided anti-ship missiles were common. Start with a battleship. We want this thing to be heavily-armored enough to resist near-misses from a nuclear weapon, direct...

  8. WI: Aum Shinrikyo Attack(s) Much Worse

    In January 1995, a Japanese newspaper revealed that a sarin compound had been found in an Aum Shinrikyo facility in Kamikuishiki. The cult leadership panicked and ordered the destruction of their stockpile of chemical weapons and precursors, because they thought they were going to be raided by...

  9. WI: Operation AJAX Fails Catastrophically

    I'm currently reading Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA. As you can probably guess from the title, the author definitely has a point of view, so I'm not entirely sure he's really reliable. But he presents Operation AJAX is actually a pretty near-run thing, that came very close to...

  10. WI: Nietzsche Doesn't Go Mad

    Reading a biography of Nietzsche, and it got me thinking. We don't really know what caused Nietzsche's madness in 1889, but syphilis and brain cancer are both candidates. Let's assume it's one or the other, and that Nietzsche doesn't contract it, and remains sane. What would the...

  11. WI/AHC: Spenglerism as a Major Ideology

    So, Oswald Spengler. I recently read The Decline of the West, and that led me to read a brief bio of him (Prophet of Decline). Something I found very interesting is that he apparently tried to get into politics in the 1920's - evidently he was involved in discussions between right-wing...

  12. AHC: The Cult of Reason Survives

    As it says on the title. The Cult of Reason doesn't have to take over as the majority religion of France or anything, but it has to survive to the present as a visible, organized entity.

  13. So Why DID the Western Roman Empire Collapse?

    I know this is sort of an unanswerable question, but I'd like to hear people's opinions as part of the preparation of a reading list. (Any suggestions for titles would be much appreciated, too.) I'm particularly interested in whether the collapse should primarily be attributed to a social or...

  14. WI: The Soviets Beat the US to the H-Bomb

    The US detonated IVY MIKE, the first hydrogen bomb, in November of 1952. The Soviet Union detonated RDS-6, their first hydrogen bomb, in August of 1953, nine months later. That's close enough that maybe we can get the Soviets to test their hydrogen bomb before the US. Delaying IVY MIKE is...

  15. Why Was PYE WACKET Canceled?

    Even without the B-70 to put it on, the wikipedia article makes it sound like PYE WACKET was way ahead of the state-of-the-art of defensive missile technology in the early '60s. Why didn't they keep working on it for other platforms? I assume there was a good reason, but I'm a nukes and math...

  16. What's the Latest the Western Roman Empire Could Still Be Saved?

    I've just gotten to the part where the Western Roman Empire finally completely disintegrates in Gibbon, and it's got me wondering: what's the latest PoD that could save the Western Roman Empire? For the purpose of this thread, having the East retake the West doesn't count.

  17. WI: Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles in the '80s

    So the Chinese are allegedly working on these things, at least if you believe the Pentagon. But the idea goes back to the '70s. I recently read a monograph on alleged Soviet efforts to detect submarines using satellites. I'm mostly skeptical of the author's claims, but she does mention some...

  18. WI: The Jonestown Siege

    On the afternoon of November 18th, 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan, fourteen Jonestown defectors, and eighteen aids and representatives were attacked at the Port Kaituma airstrip while getting ready to leave. Five were killed, including Congressman Ryan, but the rest managed to get into the air and...

  19. Environmental Impact of Nerve Gas?

    This is just something I'm curious about, and haven't seen discussed before. We've discussed nerve agent use in World War II, World War III, various other conflicts, but I can't recall any discussion of the long-term environmental consequences, if any, of large-scale nerve gas deployment...

  20. How Bad Could McCarthyism Get?

    As it says on the tin. Just how bad could McCarthyism get in the US? I can think of easy ways to whip up Even More paranoia - for example, have some radical leftists, who have no actual connections to Moscow, bomb something prominent or assassinate somebody important; nobody will believe...
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