In my alternate history timeline:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Involving Israel and Palestine, I've actually developed my alternate timeline version of a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine, and I'm curious what people here would make of it as a hypothetical treaty.
( cut for length and FLs )

Likewise, with Palestine forfeiting the Right of Return, recognizing that Israel not only is a legitimate state but its boundaries are legitimate and that at least some of the settlements will remain intact, and any claim to a full-scale army with heavy, offensive equipment, the expanded Palestinian National Authority Self-Defense Forces expanded and improved by the Civil War in Palestine are the basis of the new Palestinian Army, but are not expanded for the first years of adherence to the ATL's Treaty of Paris of 2004. Thus, this is *a* variant of a peace treaty between the two states, intended to lead to the existence of Palestine by 2008.

What do you guys think of this idea? Would it be workable? Obviously this is not what either side is offering in real life, this is not for the discussion of historical realities and failures of agreements, such as the PLO's refusal to accept terms in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, or the failure of the Oslo Accords. That is a discussion worth having elsewhere. This is about the scenario in the Alternate history timeline. This is a very important disclaimer and I politely ask any commenters to adhere to it.

Geritopia

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Just finished yet another book that gives me that Our Future Is Soooo Fucked feeling, Andrew Blechman's Leisureville, a more in-depth look into America's planned retirement communities than, surprisingly, anyone has yet undertaken. These places are hardly new; Ben Schleifer developed the first ironically named Youngtown in 1954 by simply buying an old dude ranch, gussying up the barracks and transforming them to a community center, parking mobile homes on lots and paving the roads to them. Add water, sewer and power, price the units low enough that people could pay for a lot with their meager Social Security allotment and pensions, and open for business. Youngtown's initial open house caused a traffic jam three hours long when ten times the ten thousand expected to turnout jammed the narrow county road north of Phoenix, then just a sleepy burg itself.

What Schleifer started has been copied again and again; but now certain copies have metastasized into engines of social change, ( sadly probably not for the better. )