Today -100: November 23, 1916: Of britannics, zitas, concessions, Londons, and diets

The Britannic, a White Star liner commandeered for use as a military hospital ship, sinks near Greece. The British are saying it was torpedoed, but it actually hit a mine. The Britannic was the largest British ship of any type, sister ship to the Titanic. 30 dead, 1,035 survivors. There were no patients onboard.

The new emperor of Austria-Hungary is Franz Joseph’s grand-nephew, 29, or as he’s now known, Karl I of Austria and Karl IV of Hungary. Two of the brothers of the new Empress Zita – Xavier and Sixtus – are fighting in the Belgian Army, which will make for an awkward Austrian Thanksgiving. Zita died in 1989 at 96, by the way, 67 years after Karl.

Charles Evans Hughes concedes.

Jack London dies. He was 40.

12 employees of the Chicago Health Department are taking part in an experiment to prove that you can eat perfectly adequately for 40¢ a day. They started with a breakfast of liver, bacon, an egg, muffins & butter, apples and coffee. That’s one meal, you understand, 13¢ worth.

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Today -100: November 22, 1916: So suck it, Victoria

Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I dies. He was 86 and had been on the throne since he was 18, a longer reign than Queen Victoria’s.

Here’s the London Daily Mail obit: “Emperor Francis Joseph had been politically defunct for two years. In the present war he played a very insignificant part and it is exceedingly doubtful whether had he been in vigorous health he would ever have consented to become the passive agent of a German plot.” Etc.

The Habsburg family tree in general and the line of succession in particular have been... subject to revision... over FJ’s lifetime. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of course, but also FJ’s only son Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide pact with his mistress at Mayerling in 1889, the execution of his brother Maximilian in Mexico, his wife’s assassination by an anarchist, one of his nephews lost at sea. Also his granddaughter Elisabeth Marie (Rudolf’s daughter) shot her husband’s actress mistress to death

If Germany does not intend to give up its Polish territory to the puppet Polish buffer state it and Austria announced, the German state of Prussia really doesn’t intend to give up anything. That land is “sacred and inviolable,” says Prussian Interior Minister Count Friedrich von Loebell. The Prussian Diet votes for no portion of Prussian Poland to be given to, um, the Poles. Though to head this off, Prussia might even give Poles some rights. 

Norway, which is not participating in the war (it has a note from its mum), will have to institute food rationing. And Britain orders a potato census.

The New York State Woman’s Suffrage Party plans to push for another women’s suffrage referendum in 1917, even though the 1915 referendum failed. This time it promises “No more pink teas, no more parlor meetings and abstract lectures for the suffrage cause.”

For the first time, the Philippines’ Senate has a full-blooded Moro, Hadji Butu. There are also two Moro – or, as the NYT puts it, “reclaimed savages” – in the lower house.

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APEC dress-up fail

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was held in Peru this year, and the traditional Make All the Leaders Dress Funny portion was just lame.



So lame.

Times past:

Ponchopallooza ‘04 in Chile:



Bar Girls in Hanoi, 2006:



Whatever the fuck this was supposed to be in Australia 2007:



Ponchopalooza ‘08 in Mexico:



Chinese Restaurant Waiters in Singapore 2009:




Here’s my post from the 2006 summit:

It’s so awkward when everyone shows up at work wearing the same thing.

Wow, that totally flatters his ass.


I am totally freeballing it under this thing.


Man, I coulda gone commando too.

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Today -100: November 21, 1916: Follow your Bliss

Eleftherios Venizelos says that he and his movement aren’t against the Greek crown, just the “system of despotism” around it. He says that after the war he’ll make sure there will be no more “forcing on the people against their will policies calculated to drive the country to national suicide.”

The Republicans are trying to figure out when to concede the presidential election. But the important news: the RNC’s treasurer is named Cornelius Newton Bliss, Jr. Cornelius Newton Bliss, Senior was McKinley’s secretary of the interior.

The American Federation of Labor recommends ignoring any injunction against strikes based on the dictum that labor is property. I don’t follow that, but the labor-is-property thing is central to an anti-union ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court earlier this year (see p. 181 here).

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Today -100: November 20, 1916: Hallmark does NOT make a card for that

The elections demonstrated that William Jennings Bryan’s influence over the Democratic Party in his home state of Nebraska is gone. So he seems to be leaving the state, moving his things to his other homes in Florida and North Carolina, and leaving the Democratic Party for the Prohibition Party.

At the beginning of the month, the Germans lobbed their one-thousandth shell at Rheims Cathedral. I’m picturing a monk sighing and then painstakingly illuminating a new hash mark on a manuscript.

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Today -100: November 19, 1916: Of civilian fighters, energetic mouths, and Manx cats

The Entente objects to the Central Powers’ declaration of a Polish state on Russian Polish territory, saying that military occupation during war does not give the occupier the legal right to dispose of territory.

Romania denies German claims that its civilians are fighting the German invading army. Don’t know if it’s true, but it does sound like Germany is pre-justifying any massacres of civilians, using the same excuse no one believed in Belgium.

Germany denies that its plans to conscript people into civilian war work will include housemaids. You have to draw the line somewhere.

The NYT Sunday Magazine has an article about Jeanette Rankin. You can tell it’s written by a university professor and not a Times reporter by the fact that it doesn’t mention her hair color and “energetic mouth” until the 5th paragraph.

Rankin’s Democratic opponent Harry Mitchell says he won’t challenge Rankin’s election (some are threatening to do so on the grounds that women can’t be members of Congress) and he will refuse to take the seat if her election is overturned.

Headline of the Day -100:

A Mr. Wilberforce Wiggins, a merchant in Liverpool, was late to lunch with some friends. As a joke he explained that he had received an order from the Indian Government for 1,000 Manx cats at £5 each, to be used as presents for native princes, as wasn’t the custom. He was overheard by hotel staff who immediately got into the Manx cat business and before you know it there were 1,200 cats at the docks, many of whom escaped, and Wiggins felt it expedient to leave the country for New York. And I don’t believe a word of it.

“Wilberforce Wiggins,” indeed.

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Oh bother

Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel? That's the wackiest idea I've heard all day, and I've heard about plans for a Winnie the Pooh live-action movie. But then again, it's Trump we're talking about, so it could wind up that Winnie the Pooh gets named ambassador and Huckabee will get his head stuck in a honey pot.

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What Alabama has wrought

Looking back over posts from 2000, I’m reminded that Trump has many more options for government positions than Bush did in 2000 before the Republican Hegemony. For example, with the balance in the Senate close then as now, Republican senators from states with Democratic governors were unavailable, so, to quote myself, “no Dick Lugar in DOD, no Richard Shelby at CIA and, thank God, no Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as Attorney General.”

Does anyone know who called Sessions a white-supremacist Keebler’s elf? Because I’m planning to steal that.

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Pryor convictions

Well, the nice thing about having an old blog is that if Republican shits are going to keep resurfacing, I can just reprint old posts.

William Pryor, 11th Circuit judge, recess-appointed by GeeDubya, is showing up as a contender for the Supreme Court. Here’s what I wrote about him in 2003:

Bush’s judicial appointees are getting wackier. For example, William Pryor, Alabama’s attorney general, nominated to the 11th Circuit. Pryor thinks Roe v Wade is "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history." He indicted Barnes & Noble for selling art books (which he considered child pornography). He says he became a lawyer so he could fight the ACLU. He is against the separation of church & state, supports prayer in public schools and has said “God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time and this place for all Christians ... to save our country and save our courts.” He supported Ala.’s ban on sex toys and practice of tying prisoners to “hitching posts,” supports executing the retarded, endorsed a bill to let anti-abortion lawyers represent the state against minors trying to get judicial overrides of parental notification.

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Today -100: November 18, 1916: Of co-regents, legions, silver, and munitions of life

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph will name his heir apparent, Archduke Karl, as co-regent next month on the 68th anniversary of his reign, if Frank Joey lives that long, which he won’t.

Huh, it seems there’s a little catch to the Teutonic promise to create a new Polish state on Russian territory: there have to be sufficient volunteers for the Polish Legion (who have to swear allegiance to Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Franz Joseph). If there aren’t enough volunteers, there will be conscription. If there is resistance to conscription, or the soldiers prove “unsatisfactory,” the promise of independence will be null and void.

Headline of the Day -100:

Belgium is in a panic over German orders for all men over 17 to report for inspection. They suspect that hundreds of thousands will be deported to Germany. The city officials of Tournai refuse to give the Germans a list of male inhabitants and the city is fined, and will be fined every day until they comply.

The Dutch parliament votes to allow women to be elected to it.

Carranza orders that taxes be paid in silver, so the state will get some of the silver that people have been hoarding, and everybody else will be stuck with crappy Mexican paper money.

Winston Churchill predicts that before the war is over, the British government will take over all shipping, conscript everyone for universal service, and ration food while setting prices. “We need a great organization for producing munitions of life just as we do for munitions of death.”

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Today -100: November 17, 1916: Of Cubist patriotism

Germany gives legal recognition to Judaism in Poland.

Headline of the Day -100:

Pres. Wilson orders 6,000 national guards withdrawn from the Mexican border.

Headline of the Day -100:  

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Today -100: November 16, 1916: Of eight hours, progressives, controlled food, and dictated labor

Railroad companies, acting in collusion as was the custom, file identical lawsuits in various federal courts to stop the Adamson Eight-Hour Act from going into effect.

The Progressive Party in the Russian Duma withdraws from the majority coalition.

Britain will get  a Food Controller. “Boil that some more, it still has some taste” is a thing he’ll say, probably.

Germany, which already had a food dictator, will now also get a labor dictator, Maj. Gen. Wilhelm Groener. He’ll be able to draft civilians into jobs, though only male civilians (physically unfit for the military, too old for the military).

Germany is also getting Polish workers, sent by the puppet Polish National Provisional Government, because nothing says Polish independence like slave labor in Germany.

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Today -100: November 15, 1916: Of censuses and middlemen

The German occupation authorities in Belgium are taking a census of all unemployed people, presumably in preparation for forcibly removing them to Germany to work.

Woodrow Wilson blames high food prices on middlemen.

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Today -100: November 14, 1916: Put that bloody cigarette out!

The author H.H. Munro (Saki) is shot dead by a German sniper. I’ve been reading his short stories lately. Clever and amusing use of language; his character “Reginald” is like the bastard son of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest by Saki’s fellow homosexualist Oscar Wilde. Munro’s last words were reportedly “Put that bloody cigarette out!”, addressed, rather too late, to a fellow soldier who was attracting the attention of the sniper. Munro was 45, and yes he was above the age limit to have volunteered for the trenches, but volunteer he did.

The Russian Duma reopens. Alexander Kerensky calls the government “cowards” and “hired assassins” under the control of “the contemptible Grishka Rasputin” and demands that they be removed. Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party leader Pavel Milyukov lists many failures of the government, asking over and over “Is this stupidity or treason?” Boris Stürmer and the rest of the government walk out (I’m not sure at what point in the proceedings they did so). Milyukov then sensibly retreats to the British Embassy to hide out until the February Revolution. The the government starts censoring Duma speeches.

Margaret Sanger reopens her birth control clinic.

Dr. Percival Lowell, the astronomer who proved that there is life on Mars, dies of mysterious ray-gun wounds a stroke.

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Today -100: November 13, 1916: I won’t discuss pipe dreams

Theodore Roosevelt refuses to answer questions about running for president in 1920: “I won’t discuss pipe dreams.”

The American Union Against Militarism attributes Wilson’s reelection to “the fighting pacifist sentiment in the United States.”

Under Allied pressure, Greek King Constantine agrees to let military officers and government officials resign and join Venizelos’s self-declared provisional government.

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Today -100: November 12, 1916: A blessing both for the workers and the nation

Headline of the Day -100:

Headline/Douchebag of the Day -100:  

“I have ordered measures to encourage the voluntary going of unemployed Belgian laborers to Germany and to evacuate the congenitally idle who refuse suitable work at good wages,” says the governor-general who’s been systematically looting Belgium’s raw materials and factories for two years now while diverting its power supplies and railroads but who seems to think unemployment is entirely the fault of the British because everything is always entirely the fault of the British. He says the deportations are “a blessing both for the workers and the nation.”

The German kaiser and the nearly dead Austro-Hungarian emperor issue a proclamation to the Poles of the occupied Polish bits of Russia saying they’re totally a country although for the time being we’ll “keep the administration of your new State still in our hands,” but bit by bit we’ll give you new institutions. “Of these the Polish Army is the most important.” Of course it is.

It’s almost like this whole “restoration of Poland” thing is a ploy to get Poles to fight for Germany and Austria. They’ve already set up a “Polish Legion.”

Herman Bernstein, editor of The American Hebrew worries about the treatment of the 3 million Jews in a new Poland, as well he might.

Speaking of shiny new nation-states, the Arabs – well, some Arabs – declare a Kingdom of Arabia. They’ve asked for US recognition, but the US has no idea who they are or how to get in touch with them.

For the first time, the Electoral College will include women, three of them, all from California.

An anti-war meeting in Cardiff, Wales, at which future prime minister Ramsay MacDonald is one of the principal speakers, is broken up by some pro-war types including another Labour MP, Charles Butt Stanton, the jackass elected to Keir Hardie’s seat after he died. When questions are asked in Parliament,  Stanton says that “they threaten us in Merthyr with another of their pro-German meetings, and... we will not tolerate it, whatever the consequences”. The home secretary will say that Cardiff’s constable asked him to ban the meeting under the Defence of the Realm Acts, but he declined to do so.

Japan and Brazil come to a trade arrangement which will include settling 5,000 Japanese a year in Brazil to work on the coffee plantations (and elsewhere, but mostly coffee). Many thousands of Japanese will emigrate to Brazil and Peru and be treated as second-class citizens for decades to come. Fun fact: during World War II the US got Peru to forcibly send many of its Japanese citizens to the US where they were interned alongside Japanese-Americans (and pressured Brazil to establish its own internment program). When the US compensated former internees in the 1980s, it excluded this group because they were “illegal aliens.” 

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Today -100: November 11, 1916: Benedict Arnold or Judas Iscariot? Make up your mind

There will be no Nobel peace prize this year. Can’t think why.

Congresswoman-elect Jeannette Rankin says “I knew the women would stand by me.” The NYT informs us that “Miss Rankin makes her own clothes and hats, and she is also an excellent cook.”

As a war measure, evening dress is now banned from Paris opera houses.

While Charles Evans Hughes isn’t ready to concede the election, he is telling his supporters to stop making accusations of election fraud.

The LAT continues to blame Governor/Senator-elect Hiram Johnson for Hughes’ defeat in California, suggesting that since Johnson won his election by 200,000 votes and “his political machine has elected enough of its mercenaries to assure the control of the next Legislature,” it isn’t possible for a fellow Republican to lose for president in the state without some sort of ballot fraud, and there should be a recount. The paper thinks that the deal that “regular” Republicans made to support Johnson if Progressives supported Hughes was somehow binding on the electorate. It also claims that the Johnson machine used RNC money to support Wilson, as recounted in this article.

I especially like the little “Iscariot.”

The LAT also has an editorial.

They’re sure the indignation over this treachery will rebound on Johnson at some point.

Hiram Johnson will continue as US senator from California until his death in 1945.

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Today -100: November 10, 1916: Politics has not been purified

The NYT says that Wilson has won California, North Dakota and New Mexico, and therefore the presidency. By their count, if he hadn’t done so well in San Francisco, with a very strong female and Progressive vote, he would have lost the election. And if Hughes had just gone to shake Hiram Johnson’s hand when they were in the same damn hotel... The LA Times says Wilson got the women’s vote because he “kept us out of war,” although the LAT being the LAT...

Mrs. Arthur Dodge, president of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, says that the election results prove that sex solidarity is a myth. “The woman in politics and the woman trying to get into politics have contributed nothing to politics, but increased election costs, more expensive and spectacular stunts, more bitter partisanship and bigger bluffs than the men have made. The dignity, power, and status of woman in public life have not been elevated. Politics has not been purified.”

It is certainly true that suffrage states, largely in the West, went for Wilson rather than Hughes, even though the suffrage organizations mostly supported Hughes.

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg tells the Reichstag that after the war Germany would accept an international league to enforce the peace. By which he means an organization to prevent “aggressive coalitions” aimed at Germany.

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I dunno

I stop blogging about current events and look what you people do.

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Today -100: November 9, 1916: That’s the Chicago way

The presidential election results are not in. Wilson goes golfing, Hughes goes driving. People are still placing bets.

After all that fuss about which candidate the German-American “hyphenate” vote was supporting, and all the accusations of pandering back and forth, it seems that the German vote was pretty evenly divided.

The feds arrested a bunch of people in Chicago on election day for selling their votes, but are now releasing them because evidently that’s not illegal.

Canada makes it illegal for anyone to have a copy of one of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, which have not been friendly to the Allies and have said embarrassing things about British rule in Ireland. The papers have already been banned from using the mails and telegraph cables in Britain and France.

Belgium protests what it says is Germany’s forcible deportation last month of 15,000 Belgian men to work in Germany. In cattle cars, no less. France is also protesting about the removal of civilians from cities in occupied northern France for forced farm labor. Because this happened in April, Germany says that France is only protesting now to stir up hatred for the Germans. Way to grab the moral high ground, Germany. It also puts the blame, as always, on the British blockade, which necessitated slave labor, obvs.

It’ll take a while to make the papers, but there is a massive explosion today at the Russian port of Archangel, the main entry of Allied military supplies to Russia. Several ships are destroyed as well as much of the port and a couple of barracks, killing upwards of 650 men. The Germans will claim to have accomplished this by a u-boat hitting the steamer Baron Driesen, while the commercial attaché of the Russian Embassy in the US will claim that it was a bomb placed on a ship in New York to cover up thefts on the docks, but you don’t really need to look for sinister explanations for munitions ships blowing up.

Well, you don’t need to, but it is good clean fun.

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