Words of the Weasel Part 50

"Exit strategy" is a weasel phrase with a true meaning of "cut and run".  
The only decent exit strategy in any war engaged in for the United States is victory.  If we are unwilling to expend the necessary blood and treasure to obtain victory, we should stay out of it.
   The best sort of victory is to defeat the enemy's armed forces, occupy their land and capital, do regime change upon them.  We achieved this after WWII and turned two deadly enemies into friends and powerful allies.  And it has lasted for 70 years. 
   There are lesser forms of victory, such as the Korean War.  We didn't occupy the North, and there was plenty of criticism about that back in the day.  But 60 years later South Korean is a major economy, able to export new cars to North America, something few countries manage, where as North Korean is a pesthole. 
   And there is defeat, most notably in the Viet Nam war.  We had an exit strategy, involving fleeing by helicopter from the roof the our embassy in Saigon. 
   And now we have Syria.  We could produce victory there.  It would require landing a sizable armored force in Syria, driving to Baghdad,  catching Bashar Assad and executing him as a war criminal, establishing a new Syrian constitution and government, cleaning out ISIS, enforcing the peace, creating a trustworthy Syrian army.  All this might take 10 years and a LOT of money. 
   And at best it would get us a low speed and flaky Middle East ally, not worth very much. But it would ease the destabilizing flow of refugees into Europe. 

Words of the Weasel Part 49

"Weapons of Mass Destruction"  or "Chemical Weapons".   That sounds nicer than "poison gas".   I haven't heard a newsie use the phrase "poison gas" in connection with the Syrian incident.  They stick with the innocuous sounding weasel words.

$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.