likethebeer

Ranking member US Rep. Adam Smith (WA-D), in his 14 min. opening statement for the Defense Budget for FY27:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE-dV4BtK6Q
Here's some of what he said:

I've heard you give speeches before about this, about how realism is our strategy, and I find that absurd given what we are doing. You can say a lot of things about the strategy but calling it realistic. We started a full-scale war in the Middle East against Iran to try to reshape the Middle East. Now, we can talk about that in a bunch of different ways, but it is the exact opposite of realism....
...
A week ago, Friday, the president announced that Iran had agreed to give up their nuclear program to give up their ballistic missile program, to stop support for terrorist groups to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The only problem with that is literally none of that was true. He was completely making it up. Iran hadn't even agreed to meet with us, as became embarrassingly clear as the day spun out and poor J.D. Vance had to keep going back and forth to the airport. We never even had a meeting. So, wish fulfillment is not really a strategy. I mean, maybe the president thinks he's doing some sort of Jedi mind trick, and he can tell Iran, you will give up your nuclear weapons, and they automatically will. But that's not working....
....
... [A]t the same time, we are doing all of this on our own as we increasingly push away all of our allies, sometimes just because we want to do what we want to do, we don't want to have to consult them, sometimes just gratuitously insulting them. I mean, in the middle of this war where we were asking NATO to come join us, the president took time out to insult President Macron and his wife. Okay, how is that helping us?...
....
... We're supposed to be the United States of America. I grew up on stories of the U.S. at the end of World War II, being the country that the Germans wanted to surrender to, not the Russians, because they knew they could trust our values. We don't seem to care about those values. “No rules of engagement. Give them no quarter.” All right. That is not who we are supposed to be.

I got the transcript from the website from the Democratic Members of the House Armed Services Committee: https://democrats-armedservices.house.gov/2026/4/ranking-member-adam-smith-opening-statement-for-full-committee-hearing-on-department-of-defense-fy27-budget-request

Gunsmoke: Ep. 241: "Brother Whelp"
Chester is reading something different than Westerns. It's struck him for the first time that you can actually read books and learn things.

Tessie's ex-, Stead, is gonna come back thinking everything's the same. Seems like Stead won't like that Tessie's married now... to Stead's brother! Well, I guess Stead's gonna be dead at the end of this episode. He'd left town 6 years before, his dad died, his brother's been saving the ranch and got married to Tessie.

Good thing that Marshall Dillon was there, b/c he made sure that Stead met... his NEPHEW!! Named Steadman (it was his dad's idea).
Who knew it - nobody died.

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, "The Fathom-Five Matter" (5, 15-min. episodes):
A guy has either been killed, committed suicide on a boat, or the boat just blew up. Mrs. Markey might be the murderer or her husband's employee might have killed him.

Right now, Johnny's talking to a used car salesman and the character is really funny. Seems to me that Johnny's actually trying to prove it's all an insurance scam that the couple, the Markey's, are trying to pull off.

Well, Mr. Markey got killed, and the kid who was convinced to help Mrs. Markey kill her husband also got killed. So, in the end, it was the bad dame doing it all for a $75,000 life insurance policy.

p.s.: it's called the "Fathom Five Matter" b/c the guy from the insurance company quotes a line from Shakespeare with that at the beginning. Mr. Markey's body has disappeared on the boat.

But the line quoted comes from a song in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

Never thought Johnny Dollar would teach me Shakespeare.

They go through Orban's loss in Turkey, why that happened, and things we can learn about with it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaJA8-70BVc

"Hungarian opposition ousts Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power
Péter Magyar’s Tisza party wins election as prime minister concedes defeat, in result likely to reshape ties with EU"

Hungary’s opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has won the election, bringing an end to Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, in a result that is likely to rattle the White House and reshape the country’s relationship with the EU.

Less than three hours after polls closed on Sunday, Orbán conceded defeat after what he described as a “painful but unambiguous” election result.

“I congratulated the victorious party,” the rightwing populist told supporters in Budapest. “We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition as well.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/12/viktor-orban-concedes-defeat-as-opposition-wins-hungarian-election

I hadn't written any of this down because I've been worried for weeks that Orban wouldn't concede. It's really nice to have those in favor of democracy win over an entrenched autocrat. Their party won "138 of the 199 seats in the country’s parliament," meaning 69% of the vote.

Really hope they can reverse a lot of things.

and I see these things and it makes me think that perhaps we will come out of this one day.

You can see it in Comicsands:
https://www.comicsands.com/artemis-full-house-spoof

The NASA crew is now on day six of their intergalactic travels from Earth to the Moon, and to celebrate the moment of almost reaching a week in space, they decided to introduce themselves to the general public, set to song.

Hansen, Koch, Glover, and Wiseman created an introductory video of their crew that was reminiscent of the most popular '80s and '90s sitcoms in which the characters would be in the middle of an activity, and they would stop, look to the camera, and smile in a pose, before going back to what they were doing.

The video, set to the Full House theme song, pans from one crew member to the next.

The first crew member captured is commander Reid Wiseman, who reads from a packet and removes his glasses before turning to smile and wave at the camera.

The next is pilot Victor Glover, who dramatically looks down at the camera below and removes his hood before smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

Mission specialist Christina Koch is next, in the middle of programming in a small chamber while her brown, curly hair floats in the air. She then turns and smiles brightly at the camera and waves before returning to her project.

The team even features Rise, the zero-gravity indictor, whose adorable little cartoon face smiles at the camera.

Last but not least, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen is caught on camera, working on a project, but he's too busy to look at the camera.

An essay on the things Trump is likely to do:
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-coup-attempt

sigh.

I'm ashamed to say that I just realized it's the "Strait of Hormuz" not the "Straight of Hormuz"
...
and that Hormuz doesn't have an "e".

"Conference Coverage: Neuromodulation for Myelin Repair"
By Rachel Reiff Ellis
Medically Reviewed by Melinda Ratini, MS, DO on October 21, 2025

Neuromodulation is a technique that uses electrical or chemical signals on specific nerve pathways in your body to change the way they carry information. Researchers are exploring a type of neuromodulation called vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) as a way to repair nerve damage in multiple sclerosis (MS).

The defining marker of MS is that it causes damage to myelin, the protective sheath that covers your brain and spinal cord nerves. Without myelin, your nerves can’t transmit messages to and from your body correctly. This can cause issues with your vision, movement, and ability to feel things that come in contact with your body (sensation).

At the 2025 Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) Forum in late February, Cristin Welle, PhD, professor of neurosurgery, physiology and biophysics and vice chair for research in neurosurgery at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, presented research that suggests there may be a way to repair myelin and get back some of its function with VNS....

Results of Animal Studies

The research started with mice whose DNA had been altered to express a fluorescent protein in the cells that make myelin (oligodendrocytes). By removing a piece of the mice’s skulls and putting a glass window in its place, the researchers could watch what happens over time with these cells as they stimulate the vagus nerve.

For three weeks they fed the mice a toxin that specifically kills oligodendrocytes while imaging their brains every two to three days to see which cells die. Then they stop the toxin.

Welle says the brain already has oligodendrocyte stem cells (precursor cells) that form new cells when the old ones die, but the process doesn’t go far on its own.

“There's a capacity to regenerate oligodendrocytes and myelin, but for whatever reason, both in mice and in humans, after an injury like this, the repair process is not complete, meaning that you only recover about 50% of the oligodendrocytes that you started with,” says Welle.

The team then had the mice learn a new motor task (reaching for food pellets) for seven days. This task by itself encouraged about 15%-20% more oligodendrocyte recovery than in mice that didn’t do the motor task. But in a separate group, mice learned this motor task while having vagus nerve stimulation with every successful reach (called “paired” stimulation). The result:

“They recovered considerably more oligodendrocytes — close to full recovery,” says Welle. “It's strange that you would stimulate the periphery and see this robust effect on myelin recovery in the brain. But that is what we found.”...

https://www.webmd.com/multiple-sclerosis/features/cm/rms-neuromodulation

I should go looking to see what's up with that.

ALTHOUGH: Because of the details on what experiments they're doing on mice to figure this out, it makes me sad for those little guys.

posted also on LJ

Is there ever any doubt that I'd spend my time that way?

I'm trying to write the intro to the long anticipated book about Taliesin that people have told me to write for, oh, 20 years. I want to write about why "The Valley" in Wisconsin was so important to Wright & I brought up how the Valley & his Lloyd Jones relatives in the Valley helped him at the difficult emotional time in his teenage years when his parents' marriage was breaking up.

It just struck me that when my mother was growing up (as she told us one time) they were sent to their aunts or uncles farm during the summer. She thought it was maybe their way to get them out of the house where her father beat them all. And she never had a deep love of that place. She didn't completely write it out of her life, because we often went there in the summer (at least while we were little). But mom didn't have much love for it.