Nugatory

Top Gun I feel the need... the need for speed!
"I feel the need, the need for speed" chorus Top Guns Maverick and Goose. Me, I feel the need to post something on this here blog before I head over the hill to St. John's and the endless refurbishing project.

I don't read the New York Times or The Washington Post, they both want money. I get a daily newsletter from Forbes and sometimes I look at it and every once in a while I find something of interest. They have their own skewed view of the world and much of it is really off in the weeds, excuse me, somebody's profitable field. Their field, not mine. I don't visit any of the TV websites like ABC or CNN. They take forever to load, they start playing some obnoxious video automatically and they never impart any useful information. I will scan the posts from a couple of dozen blogs using Feedly. Many are repetitive rants, some are entertaining, a few might interest me. And some days, like today, nothing catches my eye, so I wonder over to RT, formerly known as Russia Today. It might be Putin's mouthpiece, but it often makes more sense than any of the bombastic crap originating in the USA.

Today I'm reading a story by John Wight about John Bolton, crazed warmongers and a brief overview of America's history of bloodlust wherein I find this line:

Cleary the objective of undertaking a significant withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan after an 18-year long US military presence that has achieved nugatory results, either strategically or militarily, does not sit comfortably with Trump’s national security advisor.

Ooo! A new word: nugatory. Is that even a real word? Sounds like something a 6th grader would conjure.

Then there was this line:

Trump, it should be recalled, was elected in 2016 on a platform of ending America’s propensity for regime change wars, conducted under previous Democratic and Republican administrations, and drawing down the expansive US military footprint across the globe.

Really? Could be, I didn't pay much attention to the election, I didn't want to hear all the bullshit. If it's true then Americans have more sense than I would have given them credit for.

I would love to see all the autocratic dictators taken down, but destroying them would be the easy part. The hard part would be building a new government that wasn't a complete disaster. Many of the people living in these rotten countries don't have the education, training or refinement necessary to construct a functioning government. Bringing them up to snuff would take a generation at least, and in some of the worst places it would take several generations.