USS Arizona heads into New York Harbor, December 25, 1916

The USS Arizona heads into New York Harbor following sea trials.

Brother Albert Chmielowski dies on this day at age 71.

Albert Chmielowski, a Polish painter whose concern for the poor lead him to become a Franciscan monk died at age 71.

Chmielowski was born to a wealthy family and studied agriculture in order to step into the role of managing his family's estates.  Drawn to politics he joined in the Polish uprising of 1863 in which he lost a leg.  Following the Polish defeat he relocated to Belgium where he developed an interest in painting.  In 1874 he returned to Kraków, Poland where his interest in politics and the poor ultimately lead him into the Franciscan order in 1887.  By that time his identification with the poor had already lead him to a voluntary life of poverty.  He founded the Brothers of the Third Order of Saint Francis, Servants of the Poor in 1891.

Lex Anteinternet: The Hornet's Nest: TheRussian Bear in Syria is st...

Lex Anteinternet: The Hornet's Nest: TheRussian Bear in Syria is st...:  American Committee for Relief in the Near East poster from World War One.  The tragedy of the Middle East just keeps going on and on. ...

One thing that I haven't clarified on this is that the attacker in Germany turns out to be Tunisian. The poor Pakistani guy who was arrested just happened to be there.  Talk about a nightmare for him.

The Tunisian attacker seems to have spent most of his time in Europe in Italy, where he was a troublemaker but not an Islamic troublemaker. This shows, perhaps, the propensity for extreme causes to attack the messed up, sort of like the SA attracted thugs who gave their allegiance to Nazism, but who were thugs first.

This also stands out as an item of both curious reporting and good Italian police reaction.  In reporting, the US news seemed baffled about how the attacker could travel "so far" across "so many borders". Really? The EU has open borders amongst members so that should be no more difficult than traveling across state lines. And for that matter, Milan isn't really all that far from Berlin.  Sort of like driving from Denver to Oklahoma City. 

Italian police stopped him and when it went badly they came out on top in a gun battle. That speaks favorably for their reaction abilities and marksmanship.

Lex Anteinternet: Coal and Oil stabalizing, maybe, but does it help?...

Lex Anteinternet: Coal and Oil stabalizing, maybe, but does it help?...: I haven't been reporting on the price of coal and oil for awhile as in some ways not much has been going on.  But enough has been to at ...

Maybe it does, or maybe something else is going on.  According to the Tribune, local retailers are finishing the year out with a really strong finish.  Better, apparently, than even Black Friday.

The Mexican American Commission actually comes to an agreement.

On this day the commission, which had seemed to have reached an agreement back in November, actually reached one.

They agreement provided that the US would leave Mexico within forty days.

This agreement would not be signed by Carranza, but it didn't need to be.

Coal and Oil stabalizing, maybe, but does it help?

I haven't been reporting on the price of coal and oil for awhile as in some ways not much has been going on.  But enough has been to at least put in a little.

On coal, the price of coking coal, it has been noted, is up, which generally reflects increased industrial output.  That's been noted in reports on local coal but Wyoming's coal isn't of the coking grade so that likely doesn't mean much.  On the other hand coal producers are coming back out of bankruptcy and the situation at least appears relatively stable.

A report in the Tribune today states that its unlikely that oil shall exceed  $55/bbl in 2017, which if true means not much will be going on in terms of new exploration in the US.  It needs to rise above that for anything to really happen. 

On other combined news its reported that Wyoming's unemployment rate has improved but that the state's population dropped last year.  Those are really part of the same story.

The Cheyenne State Leader for December 23, 1916: Stock Raising Homestead Act passed

While it only merited a single paragraph, it did make the front page.  The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 had passed.

This was a major change in the homesteading laws in that it was the first of two homestead acts that recognized the stock raising and arid nature of the West. Rather than grant 40 acres, as the original Homestead Act had, it allowed for 640, an entire section.  It would be signed into law by President Wilson on December 29.

While we do not associate this period with homesteading it was actually the height, and close to the finish, of it.  A large number of entries were being taken out, and soon a large number would fail in the post World War One agricultural crash and drought.

The Wyoming Tribune for December 23, 1916: Carranza loses cities.

The Wyoming Tribune reported that Carranza was losing cities, suggesting he was losing the civil war in Mexico.  At the same time, the paper reported that people were being generous to Pershing's command in Mexico.

Fred Sawkins - December 23, 1916

The Massive Decline in Violence (shout out to 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit)

The purpose of this blog has been, and remains, to explore all things, technology, culture, society, etc, of the approximate 1890 to 1920, more or less (adding, probably, something like 50 years on either side of that).  I stray from that a lot, as any reader very well knows, but I tend to come back to it.

Recently I've been running 1916 is century delayed real time so often that a person could be excused for thinking it was the 1916 day by day blog, or something like that, but it isn't.  I've been doing that do the centennial of the Punitive Expedition.  Once that story basically concludes the near day by day entries will slow down as well, to the likely relief of everyone who stops in here, but some of the newly added features that are basically slice of life type entries will likely keep on keeping on, maybe.

Anyhow, in keeping with this, I've found that there are a couple of other sites that run 1916 in delayed real time, one of which is Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit.  I like it, and I post quite a few of the entries here that are posted on the centennial of their happening as links there.  But I read those entries over there was well.

Recently one of the moderators of that Subreddit posted an end of the year item noting that the murder rate in 1916 in the US was 145% of today's.

145%.

Now, this shouldn't surprise the readers here, but I still wonder to what degree we fail to appreciate that violence has really declined.  Massively, in fact.

We have run a lot of items on this before, including, Violent society? andPeculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.  So this should not  be a surprise to readers here.  But what an impressive statistic.

And how interesting in terms of how we look at the world we live in. In terms of violence, in spite of spectacular examples to the contrary, this is about the best era there is to live in, unless of course you are a victim, in which case, no doubt, that's no comfort at all.

Wind Power approaches maturity.

Coincident to my posting this:

Lex Anteinternet: Today In Wyoming's History: December 19: A Very B...: Today In Wyoming's History: December 19 : 2016  A recorded gust of wind reached 88 mph on the base of Casper Mountain, a new record 14...

the Tribune reports that wind power is now the cheapest form of electrical generation in some regions now.

The cost per kilowatt of generating electricity from wind has long been one of the main points of its critics. But, as tends to be the rule, costs go down as a technology advances.  That's now happened with wind which in turn means that wind generation has joined hydroelectric, coal, gas and nuclear as viable means of generating electricity on an industrial basis.  Wind, therefore, will not be going away in the power generation field.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 19: A Very Blustery Day

Today In Wyoming's History: December 19:

2016  A recorded gust of wind reached 88 mph on the base of Casper Mountain, a new record 14 mph higher than any previously recorded gust in that location.  Clark Wyoming reported a blast of 108 mph.  It was a very blustery day.

The Casper Weekly Press for December 22, 1916: Wars everywhere

The Casper Weekly Press issued on December 22, 1916 warned that "Uncle Fears War". The papers were full of war warnings which, looking back, not only proved accurate but also can't help to call to mind that Woodrow Wilson had just been elected for keeping us out of war and yet the news was headed rapidly, and accurately, in the other direction.

In terms of other wars, the Casper paper reported that Villistas had killed 50 Constitutionalist soliders, hardly a large number by European standards but a scary one for a nation that had been worried about the direction the war in Mexico was taking for months.

In other grim news, two died in a refinery fire in Casper.  There is at least one famous refinery fire in Casper's history but it's not this one.  I can't find any details about it.

Finally the American Automobile Association, which I didn't even know existed that long ago, came out in support of a concrete highway across Wyoming. Such an improved highway remained quite a few years in the state's future at that time, but it's interesting to note how people were already pondering it.

First flight of the Sopwith Camel, this day in 1916

The Cheyenne State Leader for December 21, 1916: Mexican raid into Arizona threatened.

The terrible fire at the Inter-Ocean was still very much in the news, but we also learned that there was concern over a potential raid into Arizona by some Mexican bands.  Of course, the Wyoming Tribune had reported on this yesterday.

President Wilson's peacemaking efforts also hit the news.

The Irish Canadian Rangers sail for Europe.

The Irish Canadian Rangers set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on this day in 1916.

 

 

The unit had been formed from and sponsored by Montreal's Irish Canadian community (of which my ancestors were part).  It was centered around the Montreal Polo Club to some extent.  In spite of diligent efforts it was never up to strength and additional recruiting efforts would take place in Ireland itself to attempt to bring it up to its full allotment.

 

The unit would note end up being deployed in France as a unit, but instead would ultimately be used to provide replacements to other units.

Mid Week at Work: Big Metal Bird: Episode 5 – Aircraft Heavy Maintenance

The Hornet's Nest: TheRussian Bear in Syria is stung in Turkey, and an Islamic radical strike in Berlin

 American Committee for Relief in the Near East poster from World War One.  The tragedy of the Middle East just keeps going on and on.

Yesterday brought us two terrible news stories that relate to the ongoing disaster in the Middle East.

The first of them was the assassination of the Turkish Ambassador to Turkey by a Turkish policeman.  Before he was shot down himself he claimed his act to be an act of vengeance for Aleppo and Syria in general.

Time will tell if he was part of a larger movement, or merely enraged to extreme violence by the  Russian participation in the war.  Anyway you look at it, and saying something that you are not supposed to, this was pretty predictable.

Here on this blog, from the very onset of the war in Syria, I've taken the position that getting involved in the Syrian mess would be a huge mistake.  I've thought that we should take on ISIL, but I have also thought all along that people who thought that there was a nice way in and out of Syria were delusional.  Recognizing that I would have simply stepped back from there except to take on the specter of ISIL which grew as time went on.

Russia, lead by neo-Tsar Vladimir Putin, took the opposite course and in so doing reverted to a heavy handed type of warfare the world has not really seen since World War Two.  Nations simply do not bomb cities into oblivion anymore.  It isn't done, as it isn't right.  A person can (and quite a few do) go back and debate the morality of what occurred in the Second World War, but everyone accords that this is not allowable now.

Russia's mere presence in Syria is an odd thing, quite frankly, and in some ways we can take a little of the blame for that.  Delusional in our own right, we supplied arms to factions that we knew little about and which had (as I noted here all along) no chance of winning. But even poor combatants can lengthen a war and make it worse.  That may well be what we achieved and as that occurred the forces we really opposed grew in strength there.  In the end a Syrian government that was always fascistic but which looked somewhat to the West turned to the only friends it could find, Russia and Iran, and Russia took the role in that civil war that Germany did in the Spanish one, with similar results.

Well, he would live by the sword will die by it, and now inflicting violence on Syria has been revisited on a Russian diplomat in Turkey.  The Russians will react badly, but this won't end there.  Putin is one of those characters who can read the signs in his own times, but can't seem to read history accurately.

 

In terms of not reading history accurately, President Obama, while he played out the combat in this region masterfully (and contrary to the way I would have gone about it) may deserve a bit of blame as well for drawing lines in the sand he wasn't prepared to enforce.  It would have been better to draw no lines at all, but perhaps that was not possible.  At least one commentator has noted that drawing "red lines" and then doing nothing about them probably taught Putin that he could steal cyber secrets and nothing would happen to him.  I suspect that was a lesson badly learned, as something will likely happen now.

In a lot of ways, quite frankly, Russia is a paper tiger.  It's a mere shadow of the USSR with large scale suppressed internal opposition and an involvement in two internal wars. The USSR could not endure an arms race with the West and Russia can't either.  I don't know what the US will do to counter Russia (and with Trump coming in its really difficult to tell, to say the least) but mounting a counter electronic attack would likely be pointless.  They have a lot of hackers, but we depend on computers a lot more than they do.  

But they do depend on oil for their economy.  They are vulnerable there. The US domestic oil industry has been crying for assistance in the wake of the crashed prices and that same phenomenon has hurt Russia.  Closing Russian oil experts would devastate Russia, and it wouldn't hurt us a bit.  It would hurt Europe however.  Still, there may be an avenue there, if cooperation for the effort could be amassed.

Beyond that, a nation involved in two smouldering wars can't really afford to have their opposition really supplied.  Getting into Syria now would be an error for us, but backing the Ukraine to a much greater degree may not be.  Even simply training and supplying a good Ukrainian army is a problem for Russia.

Of course we'll see what actually occurs.

What did occur also yesterday  is that another Islamic attack occurred in Europe, this time in Berlin.  The suspect in the bus assault is Pakistani, so he falls outside of the region, for Europe, that we'd expect this to occur, but that may show the power of Islamic extremism to attract the Islamic dispossessed everywhere.  The sad fact is that this is not going to be the last of this.

On a more positive note, however, while the story has been barely noted, exposure to European culture and an open society is corroding Islamic adherence amongst the refugee population at large at the same time its attracting some to violence.  Priests in Germany and France have noted that in some places their pews are now full. . .with Arab refugees who have converted or are converting to Christian faiths.  A faithful people, in the free market of ideas, that faith is going away from Islam.  And even here in the US a couple of weeks ago a nominally Islamic Washington Post reporter announced that he was being baptized a Catholic, as was the former Miss USA who was the first Muslim to obtain that title.  

Changes in the wind.

Stabbed In The Back. . . . a self deluding thesis

First of all let me note the following.

Russia is not our friend (Romney, who was widely derided when he was the Presidential candidate for noting that, was close to correct, to a degree).  

And the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails, their attempt to do so on the Republican ones, and their general behavior in these regards is so abominable that it must be addressed.  Indeed, while I haven't researched it, I wonder if it technically amounts to a causi belli, although it will not come to that.

Anyhow, some history.

By the fall of 1918 the German war effort was shot. They were incapable of winning the war.

Everything the Germans had calculated on, and gambled on, had failed.  The United Kingdom did not collapse due to a submarine blockade before the United States effectively fielded an army in Europe.  The Micheal Offensive did not break the Allied lines and take Paris, throwing France out of the war.  The introduction of poisonous gas had not proved to be a battlefield tide turner, or even particularly effective.  The surrender of the Russians under Lenin did not turn out to release a flood of men and supplies as German avarice required the deployment of German assets to keep on at nearly full strength.  Backing the Communists in Russia had helped turn the tide in the East but then had gone right to the German navy yards were it was having the same effect as it had in Russian ones.

They had lost.

They still hoped to secure a satisfactory diplomatic resolution, and in fact they actually did, but it wasn't the one they hoped for.

And soon, psychologically, they refused to accept it.

Which is just what the Democrats are doing about the 2016 election right now.

What German society did is well known.  By November 1918 they had no choice at all but to accept Allied terms. Those terms, in spite of the way they have been repeatedly portrayed, were not really all that harsh. A big part of this is that Germany had slid into a revolution at home, which strangely gets underplayed in the English language histories.  Just as in Revolutionary Russia, in Revolutionary Germany idle sailors betrayed their employers and became an unruly dangerous uniformed mob. As things disintegrated at home the Germans had to deploy its army on its own territory against its own people, a situation which would keep on keeping on after the war with the Allies ended.

By the late 1920s, however, they'd convinced themselves they hadn't actually lost the war at all, and certainly not through their own actions.  It was somebody else's fault. And that somebody became, in their imaginations, the Jews, a fairly absurd proposition anyway you look at it. But an absurd proposition that was used to launch the political career of a figure who emphasized the very worst elements of German culture and who attacked the best elements of it.

What does that have to do with the Democrats?

Well, the Democrats lost this election through their own ineptness, just as the Germans lost the Great War through their own fault and miscalculations.  I would have thought they would have won, but not because of their great campaign, but because Trump seemed to be incapable of winning. The Democrats, as we've explored already, ran a person well out of her own time, who wasn't likeable, emphasizing, where they emphasized anything, failed positions, while insulting some of their base.

Now, and here's where the stab in the back comes from, we know about some of those insults due to leaks.

It is now known that the Russians penetrated the Democratic National Committee and swiped their emails.  That's a criminal act, but we also know that t he Russians tried the same with the Republicans and failed as the Republican firewall worked. Why didn't the Democratic one work? 

And the Russian release of information, it's worth noting, did not release anything that wasn't true.  It's hard to complain, or should be hard to complain, about the truth of your own views being released.  If DNC operatives detested the Catholic Church, for example, they detested us.  The Russians letting us know that doesn't mean it isn't true. Rather, they were embarrassed by the truth.

But not so much, apparently, that they now feel they need to change at all. They don't.  They've propped up the same old, same old for their leaders and they, or at least those organs that support them, are crying about the Russians. "Stabbed in the back".  Donna Brazile and Leon Panetta were both on over the weekend  on the news shows addressing the email situation and neither of them would acknowledge that the problem, for their campaign, wasn't that emails were stolen, but what the stolen emails said.  Brazile went so far as to claim the emails were "weaponized" but if they were weapons, they were handgrenades with the pins pulled out before they were tossed out the cyber window. The real problem with them is that they let voters see how the Clintonites actually thought.

I think that its time to put Putin and his cronies in a corner.  We can't pretend that it isn't a crime, and frankly it creeps up on being nearly an act of war. 

But that doesn't mean it actually influenced the election.  I highly doubt that, to say the least.  At most they tended to confirm what the confirmed already thought.  That doesn't excuse it, but nor will there be any excuse for the Democrats to run repeat elections in 2018 and 2020, which right now is exactly where they are headed.

The Wyoming Tribune for December 20, 1916: Troops Rush to Forestall Border Raid (and a truly bizarre comparison made in the case of a Mexican American militia)

A story of a near raid in the Yuma era with a rather bizarre comparison between a claimed Mexican American militia and the KKK.   Apparently the authors there had taken their history from D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation rather than reality.

It's rather difficult, to say the least, to grasp a comparison between a Mexican militia of any kind and the KKK which wouldn't exactly be in the category of people sympathetic to Mexican Americans.  And it's even more difficult to see the KKK used as a favorable comparison.  Cheyenne had a not insignificant African American, Hispanic, and otherwise ethic population associated with the Union Pacific railroad and I imagine they weren't thrilled when they saw that article.

Apparently the "war babies" referred to in the headline were stocks that were associated with Great War production, which logically fell following the recent exchange of notes on peace. As we saw yesterday, the Allies weren't receptive to them, so I'd imagine they those stocks rose again.