The responses of Pres. Wilson and former Pres. Roosevelt to the German u-boat attack on the oil tanker Gulflight illustrate their respective characters.
It’s just like Obama and McCain, isn’t it?
The London Morning Post reports that France is ready to respond to German poison gas attacks with its own gas, which supposedly doesn’t kill, just paralyzes temporarily. Britain is also considering using poison gas. It points out that a week before Germany launched its first gas attack, it falsely accused Britain of using asphyxiating gases, as a pretext.
It is believed that the decision of Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel not to attend the unveiling ceremony for a monument to Garibaldi indicates that Italy will not enter the war quite yet. An uprising in recently colonized Libya might also have contributed to a decision not to attack Austria. Yet.
The Japanese are complaining about the “tone” with which China rejected its polite demands to surrender much of its sovereignty. It is likely to re-express those demands in the form of an ultimatum, to make China realize that Japan “is determined upon the acceptance of its program for solidifying the peace of the Orient.” There’s a lot of this Orwellian shit from Japan just now, with the Japan Times calling for Japan to occupy several Chinese provinces, saying it would not be a violation of Chinese sovereignty “since its sole aim would be to insure the integrity of the country,” adding “You’re welcome,” probably.
A German airplane sinks a British submarine.
There’s an ad in the NYT (p.9) from Columbia Records for the complete opera Aida on 17 records at 75¢ each. It fails to say who the singers, conductor or orchestra are, only that they are “renowned Italian artists.”
It is leaked that a while ago the Allies offered Greece 140,000 square kilometers of Asia Minor if it entered the war on their side. The king refused and the prime minister, who wanted to take the deal, resigned.
Fog of War (Rumors, Propaganda and Just Plain Bullshit) of the Day -100: Antwerp journalists were supposedly summoned to German occupation hq and told to prepare Belgian public opinion for an announcement of annexation by Germany. Since then, German troops failed to achieve a breakthrough at Ypres and the annexation plans are shelved, for now.
John Lawson, head of the United Mine Workers in Colorado, is convicted for the murder of a deputy sheriff during the Colorado coal strike. A general strike is being considered in response to a verdict which is largely considered to be, to use a legal term, bullshit.
Pres. Wilson refuses to give the Federal Industrial Relations Commission investigating the coal strike his correspondence with Colo. Gov. Ammons about it.
Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes “wholly disapproves the use of his name in connection with the Presidential campaign. ... He is not a candidate in any sense”.
German tailors are having to rename the English words they use for some of the products of their trade, such as ulster, cutaway, reglan, smoking, and knickerbockers. So will German prostitutes, who use the exact same terms for some of the products of their trade, probably. The new terms for smoking, ulster and raglan will be abendjacke, wettermantel and haengemantel, which you’ll no doubt be surprised to notice are longer words with more syllables.
The Lawson verdict will be overturned in June of 1917 by the Colorado supreme court. In 1903, Lawson and four other union organizers had their homes dynamited a week before Christmas. He would later be a vice-president and director of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Co, the second largest coal producer in Colorado. In case you are wondering, he didn't sell out. Rocky Mountain Fuel Co was owned by a Josephine Roche, who inherited the company from her father. She was pro-union and invited the UMW to staff the mine, making her a pariah among mine owners who had successfully busted the unions in 1914. Her miners were the most productive in the land.
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