Into the Cincoverse - The Cinco de Mayo EU Thread and Wikibox Repository
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I stumbled across something today - apparently the Super Collider meant for Texas (but cancelled and now CERN fills that niche) was at one point considered for Oregon. Where else could such a thing be built, considering the Cincoverse? Oregon is an interesting idea, maybe California or Missouri somewhere?
We got Fermilab here in Chicagoland. Been there since the 1960s. There's already a particle accelerator there tho - odds are they don't need another one.
The answer, as it almost always is with these projects is "the home district/state of the Rep/Senator with the most clout during the appropriation process."
Lol, very true.
Not coincidentally, this proposed Oregon accelerator was bandied about when both Hatfield and Packwood were at the peak of their seniority in the Senate… go figure!
If you are looking for large empty land that could also double over as ranchland, why not somewhere in Montana? Brian Schweitzer is slated to be POTUS in the 21st Century, maybe he can get the ball rolling on something when he's in the Senate or Governor of Montana?
That’s a thought, too. Or CO/WY since that’s close to several major Mountain West universities.
Speaking of, I do plan to add more info on present day US politics and have a clusterfuck US House elections ‘22 wikibox ready to go but I want to flesh out Senators as of present day a bit more before I get there. More to come
Would certainly help reinforce the "Rocky Mountain Research Triangle" vibe you mentioned establishing a while back if the accelerator is somewhere north/east of Fort Collins, for example. There's plenty of empty land east of the Front Range
Looking forward to it! Curious to see what the outstanding issues facing the modern USA are.
That’s a great point - what exactly is next to Greeley or Cheyenne, anyways?! 🤷♂️
Speaking of things in the that part of the middle of nowhere... Mount Rushmore was starting in 1927 iOTL. Note, the idea of Mount Rushmore came from the creation at Stone Mountain Georgia commemorating the Generals of the Confederacy in the 1910s. iTTL, either the Confederacy (or private groups) build at Stone Mountain before the war, or it probably won't be done until the 1940s.
True, but considering the state of the confederacy. I don't think prohibition is the No 1 priority for the political elite in the moment.
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Which like a particle accelerator is largely underground!
Yeah I don’t see Rushmore happening ITTl
Perhaps
Also very fair
There probably WILL be a Presidential Monument to Hughes and Hearst, both - though (Hughes, because he's the one who won the war against the Confederacy. Hearst because ... well, no Dem is going to let Hughes get a monument without the great modern Democratic president, William Randolph Hearts, getting one as well. Least of all, William Randolph Heart himself
I somehow see Heart actually going around and raising money for his own memorial himself! ).For that matter, I suspect there's a monument to Custer, in his own state of Michigan, if nowhere else - especially if his status as the "earlier, more problematic, Kennedy" in the popular culture continuess to hold into the 20th century; which you have indicated it does to an extent. And there's absolutely no way that Libby is going to her deathbed without a proper memorial to her late husband.
(speaking of the Custers and the Kennedy analogy, it suddenly strikes me that Thomas and Boston would still be alive in this TL, war heroes in their own right and now possesssing the magic name. Which means, there are likely a fair few number of Custers running around Michigan and it wouldn't be unlikely that they held political office in Michigan and neighboring states. Considering their family legacy as military heroes and the patriotism surrounding the GAW, a number of second or third generation Custers would have served in the military and won some reknown. So, it wouldn't be entirely unlikely that a George Armstrong Custer III is going to be seeing in Congress or the Michigan governor's mansion sometime fairly soon. Especially as we are moving into some years which are very friendly to Democrats)
Latin Leader - 1/25/2024
What now for Javo?
- January 25, 2024
The third weekend of January is, to most Chileans, almost a sacred holiday - every two years, it is the day they hold elections, and since the reforms of 1989-90 that ended the chokehold of the Socialist Party on the organs of state and reintroduced electoral democracy, it is the day on which elections, and thus their voice, matters. Unlike other Latin states like Argentina or Paraguay that have had functional democracies for the past century, this is a huge distinction.
With certification of last Saturday's midterm election results due tomorrow, it can be credibly said that Chile's much-vaunted "return to leftism" has probably run aground, as President Juan Antonio Velasquez Osorio's [1] People's Front (FP) that surged in the last several years and displaced the Socialists as the chief party of the left was decisively defeated by a coalition of centrist and right-wing parties over the weekend and which saw the moribund Socialists show life once again, rendering the man who just six years ago looked ready to reorder Chilean politics and daily life a lame duck for the last two years of his term.
Known as Javo, the former Olympic silver-medalist boxer burst onto the political scene in the early 2010s by announcing himself a radical and denouncing the ruling Christian Democratic Party (PDC) which, at that time, was on its fourth Presidency since 1990 and had been the largest party in Congress since that same year, decrying them as vapid, corrupt, and unwilling to push back on rising right-wing forces that had taken over the National Party and were pushing the Catholic Popular Union further towards integralist republicanism. His Vimeo channel, once used for amateur sparring lessons, pivoted instead to political polemics he filmed from the same working-class apartment in Valparaiso where he grew up, with bearded, balding and bulky boxer hunched in front of his laptop jabbing his finger at the screen and, metaphorically, Chile's PDC elites like then-President Jaime Ravinet in accusation.
A sharp decline in global copper prices, a four-year drought that ravaged Chile's agricultural industries and spiking costs of rent in Santiago as the Ravinet government revoked rent control and raised tuition caps at universities sparked, despite Chile's remarkable economic growth during the 2010s (especially in the technology sector in so-called "SiliCondes"), massive social upheaval and Javo's productions became both more radical and better produced, culminating in his decision in 2017 to run for President as head of a new party called People's Front. Leading rallies of thousands of people, Javo shocked the world by making it into the runoff with PDC nominee Ximena Rincon, and only lost to her in the end by eight points in the February 2018 runoff; a new populist force had paved the way.
On the force of this personality, Javo was elected four years later, now with Chile recovering from the rough early 2020s recession that hit South America disproportionately hard, and since then things have been rocky, culminating in Saturday's drubbing. Javo did not have a majority in either house of Congress but in alliance with the Socialists and Radicals came close enough to piece together a rough coalition that has, to be sure, made some important strides in lowering education costs, building social housing that is rent controlled, and reforming labor laws for nurses, home health practitioners and physical therapists. As only the second leftist President of Chile since 1990, Javo has both reinvigorated left-wing student and labor organizations and toned down his revolutionary zeal for constitutional reform, wealth distribution or re-nationalization of industries that were the mainstay of his rhetoric during his rise to power.
To dismayed activists, this disappointing moderated turn may explain part of his party's decline - that and tariffs that have raised prices and inflation in Chile to levels unseen since the disastrous mid-1990s economic crisis that the voters who powered Javo to power consider more formative than the transition to electoral democracy. The other part, though, was Javo's decision this past October to provide moral and rhetorical support to the Bolivian government when it launched air strikes against Argentinean lithium mines and infrastructure in the Andean crisis. Javo's gamble was that Bolivia's cause was perhaps more just and that Chileans dislike Argentines immensely; this may have been true once upon a time, but while Chileans may not care for Argentines much, they absolutely loathe Bolivians, and Javo coming out emphatically on La Paz's side in the brief war with Argentina places Chile in favor of the ethnocacerist alliance that is emerging as the decade's chief foreign policy worry.
Is this month's election results thus a referendum on Javo, whose approval numbers are low and who seems to be increasingly adrift from the electorate? Perhaps not, or at least not entirely. The center-left Radicals and left-wing Socialists did well; while about half of races for the House of Deputies and Senate will face runoffs in four weeks, so final results are not entirely clear, the Socialists had their best midterm performance since 1996, at the height of economic discontent and backlash to then-President Arturo Alessandri Besa, and their leader Paulina Vodavonic looks like a potent potential Presidential candidate in two years' time, something Socialists have not credibly had in two decades. The Christian Democrats seem to have halted their post-2016 slide, while the center-right National Party did better than the two smaller parties to its right (including the Catholic Popular Union) on aggregate for the first time since 2010. The four parties of Chile's broad center are thus doing pretty well, and the EcoPoli, a green party, will for sure have representation in the Deputies for the first time ever. Coverage of the elections as portending a right-wing backlash to Javo seem, at least for now, overstated.
It also should be pointed out that the People's Front is and always has been a personalist vehicle for Javo. At the height of 2017-18 protests it might not have been, and institution-building during Javo's frenetic Presidency may have served it better. High inflation, rising crime, high youth unemployment and an affordability crisis in Santiago are all deep challenges that angry Vimeo screeds cannot solve, but Chile's pragmatic political culture suggests an incoming Congressional majority that wants to make things work; the first half of Javo's term has been uneven, but the back half of it does not have to be, and there is no doubt that in just two years, and in the six since he burst onto the political scene as a force, Javo has already shifted that art of the possible in Chile in ways many could not have foreseen.
[1] Fictional - as promised, we'll eventually land at a 60/40 real to fictional split, or thereabouts
- January 25, 2024
The third weekend of January is, to most Chileans, almost a sacred holiday - every two years, it is the day they hold elections, and since the reforms of 1989-90 that ended the chokehold of the Socialist Party on the organs of state and reintroduced electoral democracy, it is the day on which elections, and thus their voice, matters. Unlike other Latin states like Argentina or Paraguay that have had functional democracies for the past century, this is a huge distinction.
With certification of last Saturday's midterm election results due tomorrow, it can be credibly said that Chile's much-vaunted "return to leftism" has probably run aground, as President Juan Antonio Velasquez Osorio's [1] People's Front (FP) that surged in the last several years and displaced the Socialists as the chief party of the left was decisively defeated by a coalition of centrist and right-wing parties over the weekend and which saw the moribund Socialists show life once again, rendering the man who just six years ago looked ready to reorder Chilean politics and daily life a lame duck for the last two years of his term.
Known as Javo, the former Olympic silver-medalist boxer burst onto the political scene in the early 2010s by announcing himself a radical and denouncing the ruling Christian Democratic Party (PDC) which, at that time, was on its fourth Presidency since 1990 and had been the largest party in Congress since that same year, decrying them as vapid, corrupt, and unwilling to push back on rising right-wing forces that had taken over the National Party and were pushing the Catholic Popular Union further towards integralist republicanism. His Vimeo channel, once used for amateur sparring lessons, pivoted instead to political polemics he filmed from the same working-class apartment in Valparaiso where he grew up, with bearded, balding and bulky boxer hunched in front of his laptop jabbing his finger at the screen and, metaphorically, Chile's PDC elites like then-President Jaime Ravinet in accusation.
A sharp decline in global copper prices, a four-year drought that ravaged Chile's agricultural industries and spiking costs of rent in Santiago as the Ravinet government revoked rent control and raised tuition caps at universities sparked, despite Chile's remarkable economic growth during the 2010s (especially in the technology sector in so-called "SiliCondes"), massive social upheaval and Javo's productions became both more radical and better produced, culminating in his decision in 2017 to run for President as head of a new party called People's Front. Leading rallies of thousands of people, Javo shocked the world by making it into the runoff with PDC nominee Ximena Rincon, and only lost to her in the end by eight points in the February 2018 runoff; a new populist force had paved the way.
On the force of this personality, Javo was elected four years later, now with Chile recovering from the rough early 2020s recession that hit South America disproportionately hard, and since then things have been rocky, culminating in Saturday's drubbing. Javo did not have a majority in either house of Congress but in alliance with the Socialists and Radicals came close enough to piece together a rough coalition that has, to be sure, made some important strides in lowering education costs, building social housing that is rent controlled, and reforming labor laws for nurses, home health practitioners and physical therapists. As only the second leftist President of Chile since 1990, Javo has both reinvigorated left-wing student and labor organizations and toned down his revolutionary zeal for constitutional reform, wealth distribution or re-nationalization of industries that were the mainstay of his rhetoric during his rise to power.
To dismayed activists, this disappointing moderated turn may explain part of his party's decline - that and tariffs that have raised prices and inflation in Chile to levels unseen since the disastrous mid-1990s economic crisis that the voters who powered Javo to power consider more formative than the transition to electoral democracy. The other part, though, was Javo's decision this past October to provide moral and rhetorical support to the Bolivian government when it launched air strikes against Argentinean lithium mines and infrastructure in the Andean crisis. Javo's gamble was that Bolivia's cause was perhaps more just and that Chileans dislike Argentines immensely; this may have been true once upon a time, but while Chileans may not care for Argentines much, they absolutely loathe Bolivians, and Javo coming out emphatically on La Paz's side in the brief war with Argentina places Chile in favor of the ethnocacerist alliance that is emerging as the decade's chief foreign policy worry.
Is this month's election results thus a referendum on Javo, whose approval numbers are low and who seems to be increasingly adrift from the electorate? Perhaps not, or at least not entirely. The center-left Radicals and left-wing Socialists did well; while about half of races for the House of Deputies and Senate will face runoffs in four weeks, so final results are not entirely clear, the Socialists had their best midterm performance since 1996, at the height of economic discontent and backlash to then-President Arturo Alessandri Besa, and their leader Paulina Vodavonic looks like a potent potential Presidential candidate in two years' time, something Socialists have not credibly had in two decades. The Christian Democrats seem to have halted their post-2016 slide, while the center-right National Party did better than the two smaller parties to its right (including the Catholic Popular Union) on aggregate for the first time since 2010. The four parties of Chile's broad center are thus doing pretty well, and the EcoPoli, a green party, will for sure have representation in the Deputies for the first time ever. Coverage of the elections as portending a right-wing backlash to Javo seem, at least for now, overstated.
It also should be pointed out that the People's Front is and always has been a personalist vehicle for Javo. At the height of 2017-18 protests it might not have been, and institution-building during Javo's frenetic Presidency may have served it better. High inflation, rising crime, high youth unemployment and an affordability crisis in Santiago are all deep challenges that angry Vimeo screeds cannot solve, but Chile's pragmatic political culture suggests an incoming Congressional majority that wants to make things work; the first half of Javo's term has been uneven, but the back half of it does not have to be, and there is no doubt that in just two years, and in the six since he burst onto the political scene as a force, Javo has already shifted that art of the possible in Chile in ways many could not have foreseen.
[1] Fictional - as promised, we'll eventually land at a 60/40 real to fictional split, or thereabouts
The eight finalists for the SSC's location were Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, New York, Illinois, Texas, Tennessee and North Carolina
TX, TN, and NC are of course, out owing to them not being in the US, so that leaves: AZ, CO, MI, NY, IL
Of those, I think it's probably gonna be in one of NY/IL.
Site selection for the project effectively came down to a bidding war, and I don't see Colorado or Arizona having the throw weight in Fairmount to get it. There were a couple of proposals in New York, the Rochester site withdrew consideration, but there was another proposal that straddled the NY/Quebec border that was rejected by the Reagan Admin early on for nationalistic reasons but probably gets a much closer look here (though depending on Canadian stability it might still get scuttled)
The Illinois location was of course, FermiLabs which fell apart over possible NIMBY resistance to it's construction in the Chicago Suburbs despite the presence of the Tevatron. There's an excellent 3 hour deep dive into the project on youtube, and the Energy Departments files on the project, including site selection are available online.
Edit: Images of the proposed CO and IL sites, from the linked doc
I think you’d have way more local monuments, but, yes, Monroe Michigan itself would definitely have a giant Custer monument of some kindThere probably WILL be a Presidential Monument to Hughes and Hearst, both - though (Hughes, because he's the one who won the war against the Confederacy. Hearst because ... well, no Dem is going to let Hughes get a monument without the great modern Democratic president, William Randolph Hearts, getting one as well. Least of all, William Randolph Heart himself
For that matter, I suspect there's a monument to Custer, in his own state of Michigan, if nowhere else - especially if his status as the "earlier, more problematic, Kennedy" in the popular culture continuess to hold into the 20th century; which you have indicated it does to an extent. And there's absolutely no way that Libby is going to her deathbed without a proper memorial to her late husband.
(speaking of the Custers and the Kennedy analogy, it suddenly strikes me that Thomas and Boston would still be alive in this TL, war heroes in their own right and now possesssing the magic name. Which means, there are likely a fair few number of Custers running around Michigan and it wouldn't be unlikely that they held political office in Michigan and neighboring states. Considering their family legacy as military heroes and the patriotism surrounding the GAW, a number of second or third generation Custers would have served in the military and won some reknown. So, it wouldn't be entirely unlikely that a George Armstrong Custer III is going to be seeing in Congress or the Michigan governor's mansion sometime fairly soon. Especially as we are moving into some years which are very friendly to Democrats)
Interesting! The Colorado siting makes more sense there than Fort Collins, to be sure, and Illinois the FermiLab connection is obvious.
Since Upstate New York is a major research/tech hub ITTL I could see Rochester or Syracuse getting a boost, too.
You know, I wonder if we will see a situation where Cola - if it even develops - is seen as a Southron/Confederate drink, dominant within the CSA but seen as a niche drink eleswhere throughout the world (though maybe due to trade routes and sympathy, Cola also takes off in Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Mexico.) Meanwhile, the most popular drinks in the Union would be Moxie, Birch Beer, Iron Brew and Rootbeer.
Poor Chile, lurching from crisis to crisis. The late stage of the Socialist Republic must have been a disaster for voters to prefer the current arrangement. Feels like Chile is the USSR/Russia of this timeline - socialism completely failed and in its place we have some sort of messy democracy. Seems like Chile did transition better than the USSR/Russia - there doesn't appear to have been any shock therapy here at least.
No doubt named after Arturo Alessandri Palma.