Bye bye Five Eyes

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Donald Trump’s nominations for his cabinet and other high offices are looking like a twisted joke, but there is one case where the nomination itself is not the punchline. He has named Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the top intelligence official in the United States. Whatever her qualifications may be, or may not be, she is not the problem. If he names someone else, anyone else, they will not be the problem. The problem is Donald Trump himself.

Sharing intelligence helps everyone. The recent arrest of Iranians planning to assassinate Trump himself is a good example of the type of results that intelligence sharing can provide. Although no officials have said how the US became aware of the plotters, it is exactly the type of information that the US relies on to keep us safe and secure.

The US has had reasonably good relations with foreign intelligence agencies. Probably the oldest and closest relationship is within the anglosphere, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US, the Five Eyes. That relationship started before the US entered World War 2, and has continued ever since. No one outside the secure walls of the intelligence community can know how valuable such cooperation has been, but we occasionally see the results in things like the arrest of potential terrorists. To say that the source of the information that leads to such results is carefully protected in an understatement. If sources were disclosed, sources will likely dry up and lives could be at risk.

Trump has a history of mishandling US classified material while in office, including disclosing intelligence information to Russia, as well as to other foreign officials and to uncleared civilians. Then, of course, there is the matter of stealing classed material, storing it in his bathroom, and showing it to unknown people. No one knows what has been disclosed or to whom, during his presidency or after.

Once Trump takes office, no foreign or domestic intelligence agency can assume that its highly sensitive intelligence information will remain secure. If US intelligence officials are doing their jobs, they have to assume that anything reported up the chain of command will be compromised. US agencies will probably have no choice but to give such information to Trump loyalists in high positions, and thus to Trump himself. Foreign agencies will have a choice, and if they are doing their jobs, they will have to vet any information extremely carefully before they choose to share it with US intelligence agencies.

Thus it is likely that once Trump takes office, US intelligence agencies will be crippled, and the US will be less safe from foreign nations and individuals who wish to do us harm. And there is nothing that any DNI can do to change that.

Well, that was exciting

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Looks like I may need a new mower.

As you can probably tell, my mower is overdone toast. A smoldering wreck. A shadow of its former self. Only a short time earlier the mower had a nice green hood over the engine, a steering wheel, a yellow seat, and tires.

My original plan had been to scalp the lawn in our front yard, to get rid of the tall, dead blades to prepare for new growth. I brought out the riding mower and proceeded. The grass was so tall that it made mounds of dry grass with each swath. I was plowing through the dry grass, pushing running over and pushing aside the piles.

After several trips down the length of the yard, I felt a lot of heat on my legs. I looked down, and flames were shooting up on either side of the mower.

I jumped off and ran with my creaky knees up the yard and around to the back of the house, where I store our hose. I dragged it down as far as it would reach, and quickly realized it was not far enough. I ran back up to the house and dialed 911. The fire truck arrived within minutes, and the fire fighters began spraying. They brought it under control pretty quickly.

You can see the fire fighter spraying into the edge of the woods around the yard. The fire was spreading pretty quickly through the grass up the slope of our yard, but, fortunately, only barely edging into the woods around the yard. I think we have had enough rain lately that even despite a few warm, sunny days, the leaf and pine needle litter in the woods was damp.

The burned area reached about halfway up to the house. I could probably have kept the fire from reaching the house using our garden hose, but it would have been risky. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

One of the fire fighters said they would normally not drive their truck, all 40,000+ pounds of it, up our driveway, but they wanted to make sure they could protect the house. I told him I would not complain if they cracked our driveway.

And then they drove up to the top of the driveway, turned around, and were on their way.

It was an exciting afternoon. Leah was worried, almost to the point of “sick.” Our big dog, Zoe, apparently went crazy in the house. I didn’t have time to worry or go crazy. My hands still show some black from helping move the fire fighter’s hose around in the yard, despite washing several times, and my knees are a little more stiff and sore than normal, but aside from that, we all seem OK. We have had a little rain tonight, probably just enough to keep any stray embers from igniting. The grass will probably look better in the burned area, but we may lose some pine trees. If you notice in the first photo, the trunk of one pine is charred up quite high. That shows how high the flames from the mower were.

Way back when I was trying to decide what to plant in the front yard, I chose Zoysia because although it is normally mowed quite short, it can also be allowed to grow. If it grows without cutting, it makes a thick, lush lawn that dogs love to lie in. The down side is that cutting all that growth in the winter produces huge quantities of dead, dry grass that piles up as you mow. Now I’m having to rethink the whole concept of infrequent mowing. I’m afraid it will mean mowing about every two weeks, possibly more often, to keep the grass short enough to make the winter scalping safe. And that means a new mower.

Walking through summer

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As both of my long-time readers know, I take my dogs for a walk down Fouche Gap Road almost every day. As I walked along the road one day in September, while it was still summer, I felt transported to my summertime youth. This was a typical walk down a typical country road on a typical summer day. Listen to the cicadas; this is the sound of summer as I remember it. These are annual cicadas rather than the more famous periodic cicadas.

For some reason I have not been able to insert the video the way I normally do, so I have to insert a link here. Click on the link, then, when you are finished, hit the “back” button on your browser.

http://www.caniconfidimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/summer.mp4

Not that many days later I took the dogs for another walk, and this time the sounds were different.

http://www.caniconfidimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/fall.mp4

If you listen carefully, you can hear acorns falling out of the trees. You may also hear a pileated woodpecker in the background. Of course every time I started recording, it seemed like the acorns stopped falling, and when I stopped recording, they started falling again. Shy oak trees, I guess.

We have lots of oaks on the mountain, and this year was a particularly good one for acorns, a mast year. They accumulated almost in drifts at the side of the road.

Zoe likes acorns, but she can’t figure out what to do with them once she picks them up.

Goodbye Annie

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My friends in Denver had to put down their little Scottie named Annie on Saturday.

Windblown Annie in the window

Annie was 15, a good, round number for a dog’s life, but not long enough. My friends and everyone else who knew Annie will miss her.

I have had too much experience losing dogs, as have my friends. It’s never easy. I always feel guilty, not just in the cases where I had a vet end a dog’s life, but in every case. We are completely responsible for our pets’ live, and when their lives end, I feel like I haven’t done enough; I have failed them.

On the night back in 2000 when my father died, I felt as if I could step back and look at his life from beginning to end, a perfectly contained living history, separate from his current state and from me. His life was like a pearl on a necklace, and like a spherical pearl, it had no beginning and no end — a little bubble of existence floating away from us.

I can’t accept that my father, my mother, and my brother no longer exist. I don’t believe in god or in an afterlife, but I am incapable of accepting not that they are dead, but that their existence is gone. I feel like they must be back “there’, somewhere in the past, still existing as I remember them, and they would be there if I could somehow go into the past.

I feel that way about the dogs I have lost, and I feel that way about little Annie. She’s still back there, out of reach for us, but still sticking her head out the window to see the sights and catch the scents

Goodbye, little Annie. Hope to see you on the other side.

Jello in a spirit level

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I decided that rather than try to describe what my vision has been and currently is, I would post some images. You may find this hard to beliee, but these images are not from a biology textbook; I drew them myself.

First, this is what normal vision (sort of) looks like:

Each of your eyes see its own image of this odd-looking dog with the odd-looking gait. They are slightly different, but your brain seamlessly merges them into one coherent image. You are normally not aware that there are two separate images in the overlapping area, but the differences in the images are what allows you to perceive the different distances to various objects that you see.

After my surgery, the vitreous in my right eye was replaced with sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). The optical properties of SF6 are different from that of the vitreous, and the eye can’t focus an image through it. That means that my right eye’s image was blurry, and objects in my field of view seemed to be in a different place from what my left eye was reporting. This yielded an image kind of like this:

Imagine that I was looking at a table. My left eye saw it clearly, while my right eye saw a blurry, displaced images. My brain couldn’t figure out how to merge these images, so it basically didn’t. It just gave me two different images at the same time. This made it essentially impossible to read or to drive. Since I spent Thursday afternoon after the surgery through Sunday with my head down, reading was about all I could do. I solved this problem by closing my right eye.

As the body absorbed the SF6, the bubble shrank. For several days, this is what I saw with my right eye:

The very top of my visual field was clear, while all of the rest was blurry. There was not enough clear vision to allow my eye to focus at normal distances, so I still had to close my right eye to read, and I couldn’t drive.

Eventually, the bubble shrank to the point that it was beneath almost everything I needed to see, leaving something like this:

This image is from what I imagine driving though the foothills of the Sierras would look like.

And this is what my vision is like as I write this on Saturday night. I can look up where I’m writing and can see the mess of objects on our dining table, and, most importantly, i can tell where they are. I can reach out and touch the salt shaker without making several tries. Unfortunately, if I look down, I am looking through the bubble and I have no depth perception. A Walmart employee had to help me put my credit card in the reader tonight because I kept missing the slot

If I look straight down, I can see the entire bubble as a circle filling maybe 80 percent of the entire field of view. The bubble jiggles when I shake my head, like a bowl of Jello. When I look up, the bubble reminds me of the bubble in a spirit level, finding its own level as I move my head around.

But, you are wondering, if this is a gas bubble within an eyeball otherwise filled with fluid, why is it floating at the bottom of my eye rather than the top? That’s an astute question, and I’m glad you asked. I wondered about that myself for a while, and then I remembered that the image the eye’s lens projects on the back of the eye is inverted; it’s upside down. The brain perceives it as right-side-up. Since the bubble is at the top of an upside down image, the brain thinks the bubble is actually at the bottom of my eye, thus fooling both itself and me.

Since I am still recuperating, I continue to spend a lot of time reading on my phone. Looking down still moves my bubble up (actually, down) into my field of view, so it’s still a real distraction. My solution now is to put blue masking tape on the right lens of a cheap pair of reading glasses.

I can still see the bubble in my right eye; in fact, in a lighted room, I can see the bubble with both eyes closed. But I can do a pretty good job of ignoring it. Right now there is a ghost image of the bubble covering about the bottom third of my laptop’s screen. It’s somewhat distracting, but much less than it would be without masking tape on my glasses.

There is one discouraging development. At my post-op appointment, while waiting for the doctor to come into the examination room, I discovered that I could focus on an object very close to my eye. I put a medical alert bracelet I was wearing up close and could read the fine print. It seemed to me that the blind spot and distortion I had been experiencing were gone. That made me very happy. Unfortunately, I have since determined that I still have a blind spot and distortion at my fovea. If I look at a straight line, I see something like this:

The images is blurred and distorted, and whatever is at the very center of the fovea is not visible. If I look directly at a small object, it disappears and is replaced by whatever surrounds it in my visual field. A small stone on a concrete surface disappears, and where it should be looks like more concrete. The effect might not be quite as bad as before my surgery, but it’s still there.

I have read that one’s vision after a vitrectomy can continue to improve for up to six months, so maybe it will get better. If it doesn’t, I suppose, and hope, that my brain will accomodate that deficiency and begin to ignore the blurring and distortion, replacing it with the better image from my left eye.