$44 million worth of Tomahawks.

We launched 59 Tomahawk missiles onto a Syrian airbase last night.  Those missiles cost $750000 apiece last time I looked.  So that's $44 million, just for ordinance.   It appears to have taken effect.  Fox  News approves, the Russians haven't declared war, and we didn't loose any pilots.  All good things.
   We could have done an airstrike with 1000 pound smart bombs.  Plain iron bomb costs about $1000, the smart bomb guidance kit probably doubles that.  Jet fighter bombers cost about  $10000  an hour to operate.  Call it a four hour mission, and dispatch 30 aircraft, two smart bombs per plane.  Comes to $1,260,000 for the mission.  It does risk loosing pilots, which has a terrible political fallout.  
   Time will tell how things turn out in Syria.

How we ought to deal with Syrias gassing civilians

Step one.  Put a smart bomb thru Assad's bedroom window.
Step two.  Move one or more aircraft carriers into range of Syria.
Step three .  Land a strong armored force, a brigade or stronger, in Syria. Navy provides air superiority. Advance to the gas storage site[s].  Confiscate all stores of gas for destruction in our facilities. 
Step four.  Install our choice as new president of Syria.  

Income tax reform

Doing my taxes.  PITA.  I'm ready for tax reform.   Here what we ought to get in a tax reform.

  1.   Income is income, no matter where from.  Right now you gotta split your income up into ordinary income, interest, capital gains, foreign income, dividends, qualified dividends, rent, royalty, and who knows what else.  Income should be income, and it's all taxed the same way.
2.   No more crappy little work sheets in the 1040.  It's loaded with them.  They give 20-30 step instructions to calculate stuff.  By the time you reach the end of the 30 instructions you have no idea what you did, and what it means, or have any idea if you did it right.  IRS shall be required to state in ONE, English language sentence, how to calculate EACH box on the 1040.

Don't weep for the Senate Filibuster

Senate rules, most notably the filibuster, may get nuked this week.  Senators and newsies wax nostalgic over the looming loss of the good ole filibuster. 
   They shouldn't.  Senate rules, the filibuster foremost, have been used for ignoble purposes since before the Civil War.  Before the Civil War they were used by Democrats to defend slavery and block abolitionist legislation.  After WWII Democrats used the filibuster to block civil rights legislation.  Now they want to use it to block Republican judge appointments. 
   Weep not.  The republic will be in better shape without the Senate filibuster. 

Tweakhound.com

Just revisited good ole Tweakhound.  He has a whole up to date section on Windows 10, lists of RAM hogs and CPU hogs that can be shut down to make Win 10 more lively.  Also  Tweakhound has a good description of Microsoft's "telemetry", where by your computer reports all sorts of stuff back to Microsoft, and instructions for shutting much of it down.  Microsoft has sworn up and down that "telemetry" is only used for bug fixing, and all data is anonymous, and data will never be sold on the open market.  You can believe as much of that as you like.   I shut as much telemetry down as I dare, thinking to free up RAM and CPU cycles for my purposes rather than Microsoft's.
   I am not a gamer, I just use the machine for email, photo storage, web surfing, some writing, nothing demanding compared to games.  I find Win 10 slow.  Running on a fairly new HP laptop, WIN 10 is no faster, in fact somewhat slower, than XP running on my ancient desktop.   The new laptop has double the speed, both CPU and RAM, 8 gigs of RAM, and yet the software load of Win 10 slows it down to worse than a ten year old machine. 
   Out of the box, Win 10 was a good deal faster than Win 8 from which I upgraded the laptop.  And after a bit of tweaking here and there, it is now noticeably livelier than it was out of the box. 
   Some of the stuff Tweakhound recommends is pretty drastic.  He strongly recommends you do a full disk backup before proceeding.  I agree with him.  My laptop has some 60 Gigs of hard drive used, which would take  maybe 15 DVD's to back up, which is just too much work for me.  So,  I didn't do the drastic stuff, and stuck with the tamer stuff, going thru Settings, or Services.  No register editing, and no massive deleting of stuff.  Works for me. 

Wall St Journal calls Internet Privacy bill phoney panic

That was the title of a Saturday WSJ editorial.  I assume they were discussing a bill that has made the news in the last couple of days.  So I read the  editorial, hoping to understand just what the bill was and what it would do.  Especially what it would do to me. 
   No luck.  The Journal's standards are slipping.  The editorial was unreadable.  And it made at least one big whopper.  The Journal said " The crew pushing the rule say cable companies deserve scrutiny because it is easy to change websites but hard to change internet service providers.  The reality is the reverse:"  Many of us live out of town and we don't get a choice of ISPs.  Up here Time Warner is the ONLY ISP offering broadband.  It is not hard the change ISP, it's impossible, there is only Time Warner. 
   The rest of the editorial jumped around, issued blame, with out ever getting down to the real issue, how much privacy are we giving up and to who. 
   There isn't much privacy left.  I figure my browsing history, all my email, all my purchases on the net, all my facebook posts, every app installed on my laptop, and probably some other stuff, is on the net, and anyone (cops, political opponents, nosy snoopers, the Russians, anyone) can see it.  I only post harmless stuff, photos of local scenery, cat pictures, cute kid pictures.  I don't visit porn sites and I don't visit music share sites.  I don't do Internet banking, I pay the bills with paper checks.   Since I am retired, out of the job market, and the children are grown up, I don't worry much.  Those of you still in the job market and still raising children need to do the worrying. 

Hillary wearing black leather?

She was on TV, behind a podium, campaigning again.  They didn't say what she was campaigning for.  And she had given up on the brightly colored pants suits she wore in the presidential campaign.  Now she is wearing a slick black leather coat, not quite motorcycle leathers, but close.  I wonder what voters she thought might find leather attractive.  Her former colorful pants suits outfits at least fit in with who she is, a little dowdy, fully mature (let's not say old), lady politician.  Her choices are limited, she lacks the figure and the looks to do the Jackie Kennedy or Melania Trump fashion look.  She doesn't want to do the Barbara Bush grandmother look.  But the black leather look?  At her age?