There are so many Union victory timelines on this board

.Cut it out! We all know how implausible it is that the Union may ever suppress the separatist aspirations of the Confederate people, end of story!!! There are so many more interesting things to make timelines on! Half the'Union Wins' timelines are totally implausible, like if the great Stonewall Jackson were shot by accident

. Honestly, some people these days.
Well, Robert Sobel did write a pretty good story on this back in the '70s....."For Want of a Nail", I believe it was?
It was a fun read, but there were a few things that made me scratch my head, though:
One thing that I really didn't see coming was that cannabis, a totally harmless plant, was practically banned for all consumption in all the U.S. in 1938 ITTL. This had me a little stumped, as IOTL, your country was the only one in North America to ban the stuff nationwide, in 1898, and that was mainly thanks to the hardcore racism against Mexicans, Italians and indentured Blacks that was widespread at the time(and helped along with loads of planter money and intimidation, of course. Couldn't let that get in the way of tobacco and cotton profits, am I right?).
I mean, sure, there are a couple states here in the Union which had banned it outright, too, like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pa., Virginia, Utah, Idaho, and Oklahoma, but that was it(The statewide OK, VA, WI, and ID bans have been revoked, though VA still bans it on a county-by-county basis).
And then, there's the strange case of Japan. Yes, it's true that that country did indeed experience a resurgence during the Meiji era, but I still find it a little hard to believe that they could hold such huge chunks of eastern China on top of Taiwan & Korea, too; IOTL, the Japanese tried a brief venture into China but it failed miserably, and yet they succeed here, and with a slightly weaker navy & army? I'm also wondering how the "Liberal Democratic Party" could come to dominate the country for 20 odd years in a row. Crazy, man.
Australia's a bit more of a backwater than IOTL....a lot less populated, too. In 1976 IOTL, Australia had about 30 million people, including 7 million in Western Australia(1.4 million in Perthville, alone). In TTL's 1979, it had only half that. And the "White Australia" policy is quite eerily similar to South Africa's "A Whiter Land" efforts between 1946-1969(the South African economy was badly hampered by this.), in some ways, and not something you'd expect(IOTL, many Aussies rejected a similar bill put forth in 1949).
And then, what in the hell happened to Soviet Russia? I mean sure, OTL's Soviet Union wasn't a perfect place, but this Stalin fellow is a real fucked-up character; he reminds me a lot of both Brazil's "El Pepe", and Adolf Hitler, but without the purges & communism.
@Dan: Well, the Second Confederate Republic certainly is still pretty fucked up; ever since the the first one went under in 1948 when the slavery bubble finally burst(amongst other things), we're still dealing with the reprecussions. For example, You may remember the failed Communist revolt in Louisiana in 1949? Well, they blamed us for it, and they ended up sponsoring some of the nastier radical right terror cells during much of the 1950s, especially in the border states of Virginia, Kentucky, Mojave, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Mojave, as well as Missouri, West Virginia, Nevada, Idaho, Alaska, and Maryland.
You wanna know why there was no Red Scare until the late '70s? That's the reason.
OOC: BTW, TTL's Hitler isn't quite the maniac he was in our world. Still a bad guy, though.
(Also, sorry Dan, but I'll be ignoring the C.S.S.A. part as a Communist Confederacy is pretty much borderline ASBish under most circumstances, including this one in all likelihood.....though everything else is good, I think, unless Pericles objects.)