Word: meaninglessness
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...long-standing controversy of sea power v. air power was settled once and for all by the Hood-Bismarck affair and by the battle for Crete. The answer was not that air power had proved indisputably superior to sea power. The answer was rather that the whole controversy was meaningless. Any sea power worthy of the name must work with air power; air power over the sea is in fact sea power. The lessons of the Hood-Bismarck chase and of Crete, therefore, were lessons in the balance of these two powers as they team up to fight an opposing...
...speculation about its extent was futile. (An hour earlier, Admiral Stark had told reporters that U.S. patrols were operating 2,000 miles at sea. Fortnight ago Mayor LaGuardia, as U.S.-Canadian Joint Defense Commissioner, said they were operating 1,000 miles off the coast.) The President said estimates were meaningless, as they depended on where you were measuring from; he would extend the patrol to whatever limits he felt necessary for defense of the Western Hemisphere. He added significantly that, although the Neutrality Act barred merchant ships from the combat zone, U.S. warships were free to enter the forbidden waters...
Apparently told not to play her siren straight, Miss Dietrich is naturally at a loss. By nature so sirenish that she is already practically a satire of a siren, she can scarcely be expected to kid herself. Her pretty posturing, pouts, stunned, exotic stares are meaningless when she tries to do them once over lightly. Pretty to look at, they are wasted voltage in a picture that aims to be a gentle comedy of 19th-Century manners...
...Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu, of Hahnemann Medical College, who looks like Harold Lloyd and has nuisance value among anthropologists because of his irritating lectures, was in fine, irritating fettle. He shocked his colleagues by declaring the whole concept of race to be "utterly erroneous and meaningless." He declared that early naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon first tried to squeeze mankind into races according to complexion and other superficial traits, but anthropologists must now open their minds to the later discovery of genetic laws: Then the many differences among human groups will appear only as mutations within a single species. "Race...
...outside the Western Hemisphere, wherever that is. Many a mother-conscious Senator stood ready to vote for this. Constitutionally the President has absolute unchallenged power to send the Army or Navy wherever he pleases. But Administration strategists went to work on Ellender, finally persuaded him to accept an extravagantly meaningless substitute amendment: that nothing in the act should be construed to change existing law about the use of the Army or Navy. Even callous reporters gulped at that one; but without a blush Ellender then voted against his own amendment when it was reintroduced...