drnormalvision: America First

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Language Follies 24 (First, The Good News)

The Silver Lining

Russia is leader in prosthetic limbs thanks to Ukraine war, says Kremlin official

On the Other Hand, a Shame about the P.R. Letdown

(Nazi criminal Alfred Rosenberg)

Mixing Up the Clans

The Smithsonian is ethnically challenged:

“Mafiosi, foremost among them Meyer Lansky"

How to Be Right 100% of the Time

[Hanson W. Baldwin in The Times 1944]: There are three possible outcomes to the invasion: Complete defeat, complete success, or something in between.

You Really Believed Us?

“T.W.A. is not responsible for errors or omissions in this fare table which is printed for information only.”

The police chief, Elise Chard, has said the department was notified by federal officials that [Jon Luke] Evans was legally permitted to work in the country, and that the town submitted information via the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s E-Verify program before Evans’s employment. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of homeland security, then accused the town of “reckless reliance” on the department’s E-Verify program. (1)

Subversion?

“America First, a society composed of enemies of the people.”

The New Yorker, July 28, 1945

Up is Down

North River (Dutch: Noort Rivier) is an alternative name for the southernmost portion of the Hudson River in the vicinity of New York City

Two Items About Money

Schools in those states stayed closed far longer than those in Republican ones, causing students to fall behind and reducing their future earnings potential.

The Economist, Aug 21st 2025

(Some people can’t avoid judging everything by money.)

In 2001 the Czech arm of Philip Morris, a cigarette manufacturer, argued that smokers save the state money by dying younger, thus relieving the public purse of the need to pay the pensions, health care, and housing of those killed off early.

(The report, titled Public Finance Balance of Smoking in the Czech Republic, was prepared by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little International.)

Yum

Classic Chicken Breast: Chicken Breast Fillets with Rib Meat, Water, Seasoning (Salt, Oat Bran, Monosodium Glutamate, Oat Fiber, Sugar, Yeast Extract, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Spices [including Celery Seed], Natural Flavors, Chicken Broth, Chicken Fat, Citric Acid, Cooked Chicken, Grill Flavor [from Sunflower Oil]), Sodium Phosphates. Battered and Breaded with: Wheat Flour, Water, Modified Food Starch, Salt, Contains 2% or Less of: Extractives of Turmeric, Garlic Powder, Lactic Acid, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Monosodium Glutamate, Natural Flavors, Onion Powder, Spice, Wheat Gluten. Breading Set in Vegetable Oil. Cooked In Vegetable Oil (Soybean, Canola, Corn and/or Cottonseed), Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Dimethylpolysiloxane (To Reduce Foaming).

A Couple of Products for You

The “Towel Skirt”

Most Capable Boat in the

World

No need for docks and marinas. Launch

your boat from your home.

Iguana Yachts

(What good would the boat do me landing on the New Jersey Turnpike?)

Jingle Bells

I hope that the above product references are handy, though it is not even the middle of September. But Target reminds us that there are only 105 shopping days until Christmas.

***

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/19/maine-police-officer-immigration-ice

Friday, June 29, 2018

Spirits of St. Louis

In the year 1927 the two most illustrious figures in the United States were almost certainly Babe Ruth, who hit 60 home runs during the baseball season—a record that would stand until 1961—and Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” the pilot of Spirit of St. Louis, who was the first person to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean.

Ruth’s fame continues to this day. Lindbergh’s flame blew out in December 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the Second World War.

Before the sneak attack, Lindbergh had become the face and major mouthpiece of the America First Committee, “the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.”(1)

In one notorious speech, Lindbergh singled out the “British and the Jewish races” as the major forces who “wish to involve us in the war.” And it was “for reasons which are not American.”

We can accept that the British “race,” as a sovereign nation, would pursue its own national interest, which might not always coincide with that of the United States. But the Jewish “race”? By asserting that the Jews—as a “race”— pursue their own interests, driven by “reasons which are not American,” Lindbergh openly demonstrated a vicious strain of anti-semitism. What Lindbergh was proclaiming, Susan Dunn points out, was that “[t]he nation's enemy was an internal one, a Jewish one.”

[T]hroughout the [presidential] campaign, Trump also promised to put America first, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a disturbing phrase; think pieces on the slogan’s history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.
In fact, “America first” has a much longer and darker history than that, one deeply entangled with the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia. Gradually, the complex and often terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – but kept alive by underground fascist movements. “America first” is, to put it plainly, a dog whistle.(2)

---

Nearly ever present by the President's side, perhaps no one is more responsible for the Trump agenda than Stephen Miller.(3)

Miller, the Trump whisperer, has been a major—perhaps the major architect of the President’s malignant immigration policy. Although Miller is only 32 years old, his xenophobic nastiness goes back to his teen-age years. One is not surprised, therefore, that with that history Miller would shed few tears over the forced separation of parents and children.

What did surprise me—indeed, shock me—the other day was to learn that young Mr. Miller was Jewish.(4) Perhaps naively, I have always believed that all Jews would be cognizant of their own history of persecution, exclusion, and expulsion and, therefore, would be foremost in the defense of the oppressed and downtrodden.

Apparently, young Mr. Miller has never heard the story of the SS St. Louis, which in 1939 left Germany with 900 Jews aboard.

They were anticipating an escape from the Nazis to a new home and freedom from oppression:

They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US - but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.(5)

I wonder who Miller would empathize with: the 1939 equivalents of ICE agents, barring the door to safety, or his fellow Jews, refugees in deadly danger of extermination?

This past Tuesday brought news of a happier sort. The Hockey Hall of Fame selected its class of 2018 inductees. Among the chosen was Martin St. Louis, a French Canadian, who was born in Laval, Quebec. A somewhat undersized forward, St. Louis did not have a smooth journey to on-ice greatness. But eventually through determination and hard work he became a star in the league. He won numerous major trophies and scoring titles—and in 2004 the Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the team that gave him his chance to excel.