CAN THE DEATH OF A BABY OCELOT, RESCUED FROM THE JUNGLES OF HONDURAS, SAVE THE LIFE OF A SEVEN MONTH OLD BABY GIRL?

A True Story by Debbie Plowman

     1969

   We had been living in Honduras for three years – New Englanders who had come south to start a business and a new chapter of life. The jungle was never far from our door, and one day it brought us an unexpected visitor.

   A baby ocelot had been abandoned in the jungle.  We rescued him and brought him home, naming him Lancelot. He was tiny, with oversized paws and solemn eyes, but when the chickens scratched in the dirt nearby, they scattered in every direction. They new he was no ordinary kitten.

   One day when I was home alone, I noticed that Lancelot was lethargic and weak. His playful energy had vanished. Unsure of what to do, I placed him gently in a small box and took him to the local doctor.. After examining him, the doctor said he appeared to have dysentery-a common and dangerous illness, especially for babies and small children.

   He told me something that would stay with me forever: Dysentery could kill a baby within forty-eight hours. Many parents, too poor to seek medical help, believed the child would recover in a few days. Often, the doctor said, they were wrong.  Medical care was urgent – within 24 hours – or the child most likely would not survive.  Sadly, for Lancelot it was too late. He died shortly afterward.

   In Honduras it is the custom to have a maid, no matter how poor we were ourselves. We had a lovely young woman named Virginia, who had three adorable children. When her last baby was born, we were able to find an old crib for her, and let Virginia bring the baby to work each day.

   Our house had no glass windows, only wooden shutters, so we draped mosquito netting over the crib. The baby’s name was Ana Bessie. She had big brown eyes and a cheerful, peaceful nature. I grew fond of watching her from across the room as she lay beneath the netting.

   One mild October day, I noticed she seemed unwell. I asked Virgina what was wrong. She told me the baby had been having diarrhea for more than a day. I told her Ana Bessie needed to see a doctor. Virginia shook her head. She said the baby would be fine in a day or two – and she could not afford medical care.

   Suddenly, Lancelot came back to me. The doctor’s words echoed in my mind: Forty-eight hours. Twenty four hours to survive. Time was of the essence. I insisted we go immediately. We traveled to the public hospital in the capital city, only to find a long line of patients waiting.  

   And here is something I confess with embarrassment: as an American I went straight to the front of the line with Ana Bessie in my  arms. The staff took her in at once and began treatment.  She had dysentery. The doctor later told me that if we had waited even one more day, she would not have survived.

   Ana Bessie lived.

   I truly believe the lesson I learned from Lancelot saved her life. He came into our lives for only a short time – but he left behind something far greater than himself: a living, breathing baby girl.

   Lancelot did not survive the jungle or the sickness, but through him, Ana Bessie did.

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Pulse and Packet: Common Circuits in Synchronicity

 by our roving reporter, Shaun Lawton (written in his own words) 

    I feel we must be living up to our necks in an unprecedented era of misguided disinformation and disgusted suspension of disbelief.  It's not the time to duly note and disclose the nitpicker's reign, but rather, to acknowledge quite the opposite.  We've slid into an oil slick of proponents and supporters of disparate ideologies which, were they each to be examined under the proverbial microscope, would not so much fly apart at the seams, but reveal there are no seams in smoke and mirrors as much as distracting and dazzling displays of pure illusion. 

    There yet remain a plethora of natural phenomena that our modern minds have long been conditioned against even noticing anymore, much less deciphering.  And we can owe it to a peculiar and relatively recent development among human affairs the world over known as the internet. What got its innocuous start as a U.S. Department of Defense project in the late sixties intended to link a small number of military and university research computers into a secure, limited area network ended up becoming the one true proverbial "Genie in the  bottle," or if one prefers, a veritable Pandora's Box whose lid got blasted right off its hinges.

    It's because of the fact our military geniuses resorted to packet switching (breaking data into smaller, independent packets intended as backup to reroute information if parts of their network were damaged) so communication could be ensured during a crisis.  In a nutshell, this became the prototype which, after adopting common transmission control protocols, that system evolved into today's world wide web. 

    Please feel free to take a moment and let that information sink in to your own biological neural network that processes, transmits and stores electrochemical information.  Consider our situation from an objective position, if you can.  Think along the lines that indicate how the global internet connects each of us disparate individual human beings together, in a way.  Now consider how our own brains operate with their independent neural networks, and how they somehow manage to reach out to one another (across time and space whether within distant or intimate proximity of each other).

    It's enough to beg several questions competing for our attention.  First, I'd like to take this moment to ask you all to consider the irony of a worldwide network that routes, processes and stores digital information across interconnected systems, yet for reasons that may perhaps remain unfathomable to us, nevertheless appears to have failed to unify humankind towards alleviating our problems of poverty, disease and war, and in some most extreme cases (such as might be represented by our own nation here in the United States of America, currently) seems to have possibly even backfired, or achieved quite the opposite effect, resulting in a divisiveness that greedy politicians have taken advantage of the opportunity to seize the moment by the throat for their own political and personal gain, and that of their limited group of peers, rather than for all mankind. Some things seem to never change. 

    Now, I ask you all to simply do the one thing that our global internet, despite all of its sophistication and tangled up, re-routed and crisscrossed networks could never in a million years do.  I want you to consciously take in one big long slow deep breath, hold it for a second or two, and let it out in a steady exhalation for as long as you are able to.  Remember that with each breath you take, oxygen enters the blood to nourish the body, and carbon dioxide is reclaimed and carried out of your system to be expelled as a waste product, a cycle that has maintained our lives since the day we each were born. 

    I have made my point, for packed into this one thousand and one word article, every necessary bit of information required for each of us to put 2 + 2 together to equal 4 remains implicit.  Yet I don't mind reiterating it to spell it out for you nevertheless.  We make assumptions about not only the clothes we wear, or the room we happen to be in, and the buildings we travel between during the daily course of our lives, but we have a tendency to project these conjectures and expectations onto our neighborhood block, our city, county and state, and so on and so forth; but we don't stop there, we make these postulations and hypotheses about our own nation and every country on Earth, without ever really bothering to fact check anything.  And if it comes time for us to do so, well we can easily log onto the great world wide web, and be led directly to self-affirming sites that stroke our egos and reassure us that what we were positing can be readily corroborated by like minded individuals out there, after all. 

    It's not so much a dilemma as it remains a tricky situation.  When we begin to crouch down to examine the scintillating minutiae at the heart of it all, silently racing along information channels at microscopic levels shuttling to and from explosive information centers processing everything from daily stock exchanges to communal societal events ongoing periodically for anyone to participate in, we begin to notice that there yet remains a superabundance of high yield potential energy stored across our global networks that may yet kick into hyperkinetic overdrive at the drop of a hat, or clink of a dime.  For when disinformation gets accidentally misguided, it may backfire on its proponents. 

    Entropy may continue while our momentum pushes our lives forward, yet both mind and machine trace and reflect hidden harmonies in sync with one another.  Think about how networks of thought and ongoing circuits of data constantly converge into larger patterns that we can individually comprehend. One glance at our situation contains enough information to remind us that even against the apparent chaos of our online views of the world, the greater order of things in this life periodically regains equilibrium over time and settles into focus, while the trees continue to shine and the Sun grows older. 

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The Origins of Image

      Writing + photography / synthography = digital articulation by Shaun Lawton 

  

    The image above, to me, seems to represent perhaps some old, weathered piping deep underground, polished over time by running water beneath the topsoil, of what's left of some ancient ruins stemming from a subterranean Dwarven fortress.   Perhaps it's the locking mechanism from an ancient gateway that once separated the cavernous realm of Dol Guldur from the rest of middle-Earth.   Or maybe it's the remains of an old carburetor or the twisted wreckage of an ancient Aztec sculpture, it's difficult to pinpoint, exactly.   

   Now that we're deeply nesting within the continuum referred to as the 21st century, with its deep fake images receding into the darkest corners of a world wide web having taken on a life of its own, we are at least mentally equipped enough that we might recognize such an image as being itself fabricated from any variety of source images, rendering the final form of it in some manner to be counterfeit.  Yet is not that the very precinct of art itself?  If we assume that the word art may serve as the prefix for artifice and everything "artificial," then yes, but when we lean back and relax on the thought that beautiful artworks, from abstract sculptures carved out of marble to vivid paintings which reflect through light startling images to our eyes, we do get a sense of the inherit value in such contrivances.   The image above should hardly be thought of as counterfeit, considering there remains no real precedent to which it stays attached, at least not one which could effectively substitute it.  

    From a teaspoon of spilled water on a countertop to the above image, I am here to trace the random lineage of appearance and its endless forms of similitude.  Right off the bat I should introduce the above image as having resulted from my uploading a source image  (the photograph I snapped of our kitchen counter top with some water spilled on it you see at the very bottom of this post) into an online free photo editor  (befunky, my random choice of freely available and easy to use photo editors) and messing with the brightness / contrast / colors until achieving a darker and more interesting look.  Then I uploaded that resulting image  (a .jpg) into Deep Dream Generator and after pairing it with a separate image and making some minor adjustments, the image morphed into several different forms (see two of them below), made possible by my switching out some of the "style" images in DDG for experimentation, until it resulted in the top three iterations you see posted here.   

    

     How are these variants of the original photo so alluring and interesting looking?  My guess is that the source image must've been rich with visual cues and elements which lend themselves in highly volatile ways to the VQGAN + CLIP programs that enable AI algorithms to generate random iterations of two separate images fused together like this.  There must be a plethora of scintillating color cues embedded within the light captured in the original photo reflecting from the gleaming countertop and off the curved surface of the water spill itself to produce a myriad different combinations of possibilities, resulting in an incalculable number of potential iterations, when you consider that there's no limit to the style images you might choose to utilize in crafting these deep dream generative artworks.  

    I love this last one a lot. There's something about the feathered, scaly textures that evoke not just obsidian refractions, but some sea-shell like aspects, reminiscent of Mother of Pearl, with some interesting suggestive effects blending in, as if it were at the bottom of a cavernous river, or perhaps somehow reflected off volcanic glass in a rainforest lagoon.  These evocative hues and patterns which can be elicited from tweaking certain source images, taken with a smartphone, and then run through a basic online photo editor, before being paired with any given stylistic images, from analog to digital, to generate countless disparate iterations and variants, will continue to keep me occupied and inspired on my new mission to conjure as many of these Rorschachian portraits I can manage, which appear to reflect a cornucopia of pareidolia enhanced visual representations, that regardless of anyone else's opinions, I would nevertheless like to frame and call "art."   Doubtless to say, the future remains such a gallery.

  Here's the original source image, the snapshot taken from my iPhone of our modern kitchen counter top, with some water spilled on it.  I remember intently focusing on the water spill from just the right angle, in order to capture the light from the ceiling in a certain way, so it would reflect off the misshapen puddle itself, to the point it somewhat resembled a dragon's head, as I imagined it after closely examining the snapshot.  Pleased with the results, little did I know then that this singular image would evolve into the even more interesting and mystifying synthographic images depicted above, all of which resulted from my introduction to the world of VQGAN + CLIP art.  The secret which makes this particular mundane photo so effective at having been decoded and rearranged, I would guess, lies in the very fact that it depicts  water  atop a bright, reflective counter top, with the added bonus of having light reflected off both the water and surface underneath.   Art may be seen through a variety of different perspectives and lenses.  It's been mentioned that it may be defined as shorthand for "artificial," but I've come to appreciate a better definition, that I learned from my brother, perhaps the most brilliant artist I've ever had the stunned pleasure to have known in my life. He told me that if art remains shorthand for anything, it should be articulation.  As far as I'm concerned, that's the perfect definition for it.

    This article was originally published in the blog EYESEAT, on February 8, 2022. 

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The Pathogen Nursery

 by Shaun Lawton     (written for the Oscillating Oculus in his own words, without AI). 

   Arthur Blair could not have foreseen the actual consequences of the world he seeded. Though instrumental in providing the necessary fertilizer for autocratic dynasties the world over to subsidize their ultimate power over a hapless humanity, Arthur was quite convinced he'd done a bit of good for the future of the world. 

   Mr. Blair was a writer, you see. He came from a lower-upper-middle class English family, raised in a British territory at the start of the twentieth century in an eastern state of India. The middle child sired in between two sisters, with five years in between them, Arthur dreamed of being a famous author someday. 

   As a child he wrote poetry after the fashion of his idol, William Blake. Little did he suspect the seething cauldron of infectious agents at work, suspended throughout every nodal point of the human race, germinating with potential at every crook and turn, during the time of his upbringing. 

   Had he anticipated this morass of fermentation and suspected how it would eventually come to fruition historically over the next few decades of his life, he may very well have seriously considered abandoning his little book project, and forthwith undertaken another profession altogether. 

   Alas, during this particular burgeoning moment of the human species, following in the footsteps of the likes of H.G. Wells was considered a noble endeavor by many. Young Arthur studiously wrote in his journal every day, intent on capturing the vision which danced behind his eyes. 

    How could the young Mr. Blair have considered the ultimate consequences of attempting to warn the world of the disheartening direction their legislature and internal affairs seemed to be working themselves toward? 

   At the time of the writing of his final and most famous novel, a period during the late forties which culminated his career as an author and put the golden capstone on his dream of becoming a famous writer, precious few individuals were in a position to contemplate the complete and adverse effects of such a critical work. 

   The human beings of Earth were embroiled in their second world war. Propaganda on all sides of the war effort was generated in pamphlets, newspapers, and on the radio.  The truth was that no one alive–much less the gifted and starry eyed Arthur–at that time in history could have possibly foreseen the long term consequences of any of their ongoing activities. 

   Such is the near sightedness of our species throughout our daily trials and tribulations. Whether we be professor or sergeant, doctor or critic, farmer or lawyer, working with our fingers stained dark brown by the land, or typing on matte black plastic keyboards with immaculately manicured hands, or middle-aged dropouts, philosophy students, retail clerks or gardeners. 

   What we're all in the process of engendering remains a far greater sum than its millions of remotely oblivious parts could ever dream.  But young Arthur dreamed harder than anyone around him.  He could see just where the machinery of the state was leading the human race.  It wasn't a pretty sight, and he'd be damned if he didn't write about it. 

   Or maybe, we'd be damned if he did.  

    

   

 

 

  

The Politics of Fear and the Erosion of Democracy

by roving reporter Shaun Lawton  (written with minimal AI support under reporter's direction)

Poster design by Indika Entertainment Advertising 

Fair use, wikipedia.org/w/index.php 

    What we are experiencing in the United States is not simply disagreement, nor even ordinary political polarization, but a systematic distortion of shared reality. In an environment shaped by algorithmic amplification—documented starkly in The Social Dilemma—fragments of information are stripped of context, magnified beyond proportion, and redistributed as symbolic proof of moral failure on the opposing side. 

    This process is driven less by ignorance than by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias: we do not evaluate facts neutrally, but select and exaggerate those that protect our identities. Cognitive dissonance then seals the lens in place, ensuring that contradiction is felt as attack rather than correction.

    The result is a form of epistemic tribalism in which truth itself fractures along group lines. Each political camp peers through a differently ground lens—one that sharpens threats, blurs nuance, and bends reality toward pre-chosen conclusions. 

     Context collapse ensures that a sentence, image, or headline can no longer be understood within its original frame; instead, it is refracted outward, acquiring new meaning as it passes through partisan filters. 

    What might once have been a point of debate becomes proof of existential danger, and disagreement hardens into affective polarization—an emotional divide rooted not in policy, but in mutual distrust.  And the standoff between the two camps, liberal and conservative, democrat and republican, becomes set and solidified.  

     The Oscillating Oculus exists to examine this distortion, at the point where perception becomes belief. If we are to repair a shared civic reality, we must first recognize the lenses through which we look—how they are shaped, who profits from their curvature, and why we so rarely question the clarity of our own view. 

     Until we do, we will continue to mistake magnified fragments for the whole picture, arguing not over what is true, but over which version of reality is permitted to exist. That's not the USA any of us signed up for.   

     We don't need to ask our parents about this.  All we need to do is ask ourselves.  Do we really want to sit back behind the safety of our screens while our great, diversified country gets ripped apart, while the rest of the world begins hedging their bets?  Perhaps we should ask ourselves, just what percentage of American voters do We, the Online, actually represent? 

      One thing remains clear, despite the gross distortion of our reality we get from viewing things from being on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, etc.  And that's the fact that our nonvoting contingency grew to roughly 36% in 2024 (from about 34% in 2020).  In 2016, it was at the unacceptably high rate of at least 40%.  

     We at this digital daily digest urge every American to not just vote, but to cut through the thickening cynicism and get as many other young people to exercise their civic duty and vote, as well.  This great, unyielding LENS through which many of us are filtering our information from here online cannot care one way or the other.  

     It's up to us, human beings, the people of this country, to bring that nonvoting contingency to below 30% in an effort to bring our country back, where we can continue setting aside our differences and governing without fear for the wide variety of people we have sworn in to being our fellow American citizens.  

     Remember the warning FDR gave us, all those years ago, after we got out of the Great Depression: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Fear is now being weaponized to excuse lawlessness. Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned in 1933 that fear itself was the enemy, and his response was pragmatic reform—not socialism. That reality is now denied by much of the modern conservative and MAGA movement.

     As true and loyal patriotic Americans, what are we going to do now to ensure our administration follows the rule of law to keep every American safe, and resume running things in solidarity with all our allied nations in the world?  It's time we sat down with ourselves and our loved ones and reexamine our individual roles in living up to our civic duty.  And  #VOTE. 

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The Pathogen Nursery

a flash faction tale

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Pneuma Onus Paroxysm

by  Shaun Lawton (roving reporter for the Oscillating Oculus). 

  *This article was written expressly without the use of AI, and in the author's own chosen words.

  It's a new year and everything's so messed up, it seems as if there's no way to even begin to convey the amplitude of it all. Allow me to give it a shot, anyhow.  It's on a scale overwhelming our ability to register how much we'd have to invest in preparing for it.  I mean, let's face it, we're still dealing with the fallout from our former lives, which in my case, spilled over here out west of the Mississippi twenty-five years ago, when I rebooted my life after my first marriage fell apart, and I decided to follow a calling to head out west, to Salt Lake City, in the year 2000.

   Now here we all are during a time when the technolarity (I've decided to call it) is well into it's nth iteration, and I'd like to note the reality of it has nothing to do with any other scenario ever conceived by any human alive today.  It's beyond our grasp in a way that very few among us could even consider preparing for it in a manner that would seem sound, considering the implications hidden from our understanding in the quantum realm, and everything else going on in our daily lives we're forced to confront and process.  Yet isn't that the game we relish, the ultimate whodunit, poring over the clues to our existence?  Well, at least speaking for myself, it doesn't exactly keep me up at night, but it keeps me going. 

     One of the great mysteries we all face concerns itself over the peculiar and often overlooked fact that assigning blame to anyone for something they've done against us may ultimately amount to folly, and here's why I say this.  We fail to consider the platform upon which we all play our roles, including those we feel are the ones to blame for any given circumstance which affects us negatively. For example, if a boss were to fire you, and it was true they did it to railroad you off the team in order to replace you with someone they could pay less, for example, yes that would appear to be sufficient cause on their behalf by which you could justifiably blame them.  But what if I were to suggest that it may not be so simple as that? 

   Let me try to explain what I mean. The world isn't new, and no matter how much of the latest ceramic and cable facades may have been recently manufactured and layered underneath us, in the forms of our new homes and streets and grocery stores and shopping malls, the primeval earthmatter yet lies underneath, and all around; a vast proto-magnetic generator of forces that remain quite beyond our comprehension. Suffice it to say, the channeling power of our planet tranceives seismic voltages and vibrations tremoring throughout its core and crust, sending waves across Poseidon's kingdom and flashing networks of lightning into a new dawn of this terribly advanced age of techno-sorcery.  

   The truth isn't just limited to the fact that there may be other, greater parties responsible for factors which influence our bosses to summarily dismiss us, or whatever the case may be; no, not at all.  There's a greater perspective and observation of nature itself which shifts our point of view.  It's not the lion's quality alone that drives it to prey upon the zebras and gazelles, it includes a set of greater factors that play into the scenario, an incomprehensible backdrop far from those stray, individual mammals grazing and preying along the tundra, under our brilliant shining star, still dazzling through the mantle of the sky overhead.  There remains a vast system, so inexplicable and cauldronic in scope and organization, of such a supramagnetic and hyperelectric gravitational structure that the very intricacy of its interwoven and counter-shifting parts interpenetrating in unexpected domino effects that operate like intermeshing zippers, in a constant evolution, adapting to shifting conditions which change form while interlacing components morph into different shapes.  

   These forces affect every dynamic we can think of, including the wind and sea-spray and the global configuration of intermixed wildflower pollens, mycelial networks feeding on the decomposition of forest loam and the constant exchange of chemicals and energy going on within our biodome, to name a mere fraction of the slightest percentage representing the thriving ecological diversity of life on Earth, a continuum wholly linked in a succession of fractalized gears which creates side effects still rippling from forces that way down here on this section of the evolutionary chain, we consider to be physical laws we don't as of yet fully understand, like gravity and time and outer space, and many more interrelated concepts such as these we yet remain uninformed about, including the ones partly responsible for the things that might go wrong in our lives, and cause us, in a moment of reactionary weakness, to point the blame at individuals which appear to be responsible, when in reality, there could just as easily be a greater combination of forces at work, unbeknownst to us, which for all we know,  render events to fall apart for everyone, (including that boss that let you go), a significant difference remaining, that we each exist in our own respective micromoments of time, separate from one another in a way we can barely begin to imagine, by microinstants which due to their temporarily having lined up into synchronicity, invariably trick us into assuming we're occupying the same exact place & time, when we're in point of fact separated by worlds apart, across the vast face of time itself, and in reality only briefly exchanging our mutual presence with one another, while the whole universe continues on its grand, counterintuitively orderly scale of time that as far as we've been able to determine, eventually expires in galactic  periodicities tantamount to our own, and that of every one else alive here caught up in this grand continuum along with us, somewhere adjacent to our wake, just ahead, beside, or before us, as we all fly on together, each separately, and out into the parallel chevrons of disintegrating memory that represent the avatars of our existence.  

  This is only my way of saying that maybe, just perhaps, when we think to ourselves and our situation, and are being honest when we tell others about the misfortune that befell us, how we lost our job when everything was going so well, for so long, I am beginning to think we tend to forget that every train will have run its course.  This metaphor doesn't work because of the train, it's the train that works because of the metaphor.  We didn't just lose our job because so-and-so simply had it out for us, or since they were your boss meaning it's their fault, not at all. It shouldn't be relegated to that simplistic interpretation, which remains at heart a selfish one.  There's always a greater picture we aren't factoring all variables into.  For example, perhaps someone higher up had ordered your boss to let you go; see what I mean?  It's not worth taking even a tame guess as to what motivated anyone to do anything, because when you get right down to it, people are acting in a manner quite beyond their control, when you think about it long enough. Perhaps this begins to explain why it's been said to not judge, lest we be judged. 

   Why do we wake up each new morning and start yet another day all over again? The moral of this lesson remains simple and straightforward enough.  Since this life we're all born into brings about calamity for everyone on occasion, every now and again, rendering each of us just waiting to see when our turn comes back up, the true test that lies before us yet, is how will each one of us deal with it? That's all that really matters when you get down to it, because since everything seems to revolve around the timing (and the timing of the timing, mind you) we can only feel a sort of terrified gratitude when it's our turn, to have the matter at hand having run its course, or as Tom Waits once alluded to, after our having loved something until the wheels fell off, as they must do and will do for every last one of us.  

   The subject of this essay has had very little to do with death, which itself remains another subject we're all bound to, altogether.  No; in this case I am referring to and writing about life. It's life itself which exists as a much greater accumulation of the totality of eternity's essence, now coming back around again in a cumulative approach, for yet another spin along the circuit breaker of existence, which keeps the current moment going, on its celestial light-ride into and beyond infinity, for all we know.  In other words, if there's anyone to blame whatsoever, I think it would behoove each and every individual one of us to realize that it should be relegated strictly to ourselves, who are the ones that often falter and fail to initiate the necessary action to pick ourselves up and out of the ditch we were knocked into, and accomplish the particular tasks and goals needed to get back up on our feet and carry on.  It seems to me that the only ones in the world who qualify to receive any proper blame (if blame were to be handed out) should be every human being born into it, for not picking themselves back up and getting on with it.  We've all stepped or rolled into this arena together, the global stage. The main difference being that we have done so, each and every last person in existence, at a different and unique sliver of time buried in the echelons of microsections discretely growing into macrocosms, eventually to reverberate with the fading echo of their song, our song, a symphony of echoes that diminishes forever until it may be faintly heard to rise again, in another time and place, increasing in volume by such gradual degrees that a sufficient passage of the eons of time again reach a crescendo of instrumental fury, and so on and so forth. 

   This has been my treatise on personal accountability, to take responsibility for ourselves as individuals and quit pointing the fingers at others we think are to blame for doing us wrong. There's a whole teeming, wild world burgeoning out there, chock full of natural disasters and chain lightning sparking wildfires, brimming and overflowing with predatory packs of wolves and men, both scheming to no end to do what it takes to feed themselves and their own families. We should take the time to think how lucky we are that we made it this far. That we survived a global pandemic just five years ago, and that just one of the things we all share in common, remains the fact that we're all currently alive during this supernatural moment in time, amid a grandiose universe we can barely begin to wrap our minds around, much less comprehend.  That one common denominator I shouldn't have to remind anyone about remains the fact we are each and every single last one of us, defined as survivors. 

   If you made it this far, in life I mean, not just this article you're reading, it's because you are in control enough to have done so, and that can only mean one thing.  It's up to us to take full responsibility for getting our lives back on track, instead of choosing to wallow in the depths of despair after blaming anyone else for getting us there. Each new day that allows the sun to rise up in the morning heralds another opportunity coming our way.  Let's do our best to forgive those who wronged us, and take advantage of the time we still have, while we can, I always say.  And may your road forward lead you into the unexpected surprises this miracle of a life has yet in store for all of us.  

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The Politics of Fear and the Erosion of Democracy

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Oscillating Oculus 

a digital daily digest

Take A Good Hard Look In The Mirror

 by  Shaun Lawton  (a gonzo op-ed for today, written without the use of AI). 

         (photo provided courtesy of The Telegraph) 

 

    Rest in peace, Renee Nicole Good. American politics is just a big old reality TV game show to our current elected president, as if he doesn’t realize that politics is the only game in life where the stakes remain our livelihoods and very lives. The livelihood of the American people, and our lives ARE NOT A GAME to be played on a demented whim as if you were on some gambling binge in a dirty casino in Las Vegas.

   But his supporters don’t seem to understand that. They’re like a pack of rabid howler monkeys, screaming from the peanut gallery, throwing popcorn and having the time of their lives, wearing 32 ounce plastic mugs on their heads as if they’re at the Superbowl.
If the rest of us don’t manage to get together on a drastic level and do something about it soon, this little game our forefathers started two-and-a-half centuries ago they called the United States of America will be OVER, . 

     

    This administration lied today, again. The current administration always lies. Our CEO appears to lie all the time. Pam Bondi lies. Straight through her teeth. 47 lied throughout his first term, and he's doubling down on lies here in his second one. Kristi Noem lied today, defending the rogue ICE agent who shot an innocent woman three times dead in her car, without compunction. 

   Kristi Noem had the audacity to state Renee Good's actions in her vehicle were regarded as being "an act of domestic terrorism." This now appears to be fascism plain and simple, first it gets started by several phases, then it gains real traction and comes on quick. If she wasn't lying, then she was mistaken, and the next few days should clear this up. Meanwhile, our questionably elected leader still lies every day. This guy does not seem to care about you. He does not appear to care about me. 

   From what I can see, Trump remains a distinct threat to the best interests of this country.  A lot of it has to do with incompetence.  I'm just here to learn as much as I can. So please, enlighten me.  Why can’t you supporters of his see what we're seeing, and hear what we're saying? Cutting through all the bull, how can you be led to believe in this apparently deranged wannabe president? 

   Look at the plain evidence and get a sense of the big picture. Everyone's got issues but, this is crazy, it's gone too far. Chalk it off to our Social Dilemma, whatnot, with all the various closed-circuit media news outlets proliferating across the nation, and the hundreds of dumbfounded idiots swallowing it hook, line and sinker.   >.< 

    If you don’t stand in solidarity with Minneapolis and Chicago along with me and the majority of American citizens who are shocked and outraged at how cavalier this administration's representatives and constituents are being while taking the news of Renee Nicole Good having been summarily executed by an ICE immigrations and customs enforcement agent this morning, then what’s taking you so long to come to your senses? What’s it like to live in fear of immigrants, sworn in already or otherwise? 

   Every person out there represents one of us.  Governor Tim Walz — a real man with more courage and integrity than all MAGA-hats put together — who served and still serves our country with honor and decency — takes action today against the fascist takeover of our once free country.  

   Now is the time for all hard working and decent, freedom loving real Americans to stand up and take our country back from this senile, demented old witless Russian asset, and just steer it back to standing tall once again with our allies around the globe, just when the world needs it most.

 

     If you're still rallying for this president, can you please explain it, in dummy language so we can understand, or don’t you even comprehend what the United States of America is really all about? Have you ever read the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, or our Declaration of Independence? Oh wait, you don’t like to read, or you can't, I forgot which. 

   Why don’t y'all download the audiobooks from the public library, or something? I’ll wait. Can't stop thinking about those Liars. Lies, lies, lies. The president, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, all of 'em, liars propping up a faux-legacy whose expiration date was up five years ago, and he's really startin' to stink up the fridge, now. 

    There’s a reason we have well-trained officers in blue. There’s a reason our police serve to protect our communities without masks.  And that reason has nothing to do with our current administration’s illegal purging of our population. 

   And those of you sitting behind the safety of your screens cheering them on, I pity you from the bottom of my heart. Without even realizing it, you are encouraging lawless bandits while they do their dirty work because you must live by, and for, nothing but fear.  

   Franklin D. Roosevelt famously stated "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," back in March of 1933, urging the American public to overcome their fear from the Great Depression, and that's what introduced good old fashioned democratic socialism into our nation, which could more accurately be described as  progressive reform with strong federal involvement in economic recovery and social welfare.  But try to tell a certain demographic of uninformed Americans that, today, in particular conservatives and Republicans and MAGA supporters, all somehow roped in to the whole televangelical mess.   

    If you're reading this, and are a gung-ho, MAGA hat wearing American, you are the craven, and represent everything this country is against. You're a hypocrite, plain and simple. Or you've been unwittingly led into a cult, and deserve to either be rescued, or find your way out of it, like quick. Otherwise, y'all come across hard like some uneducated, uninformed, selfish narrowminded hypocrites. 

   Or you're too old, out of touch, or don't know any better, or know too much, while having been fed on a diet of false news and lies through WHATEVER TV, or wherever it is you get your information from, in whatever manner, in this corporate sponsored oligarchy growing more out of control every day while we live and breathe.

   It appears you will never come around to understanding how much more power and strength there is in love, tolerance and forgiveness, which is sort of ironic, I shouldn’t have to tell you. Yet here we are. Maybe you should sit down with yourselves and take a good, hard look in the mirror. Or don’t. It’s your own life, do what thou will. But don’t get all surprised when you’re denied forgiveness, there’s only so much we can take.  

   It's okay, after I take a few deep breaths and calm myself down, I realize your unadulterated sheer state of being uninformed ain't nothin' to really shake a stick at.  My lion's heart softens while I begin to consider pitying you all. Y'all with your big trucks and your bumper stickers and feverish hypocritical defense of the Second Amendment despite us now having fast forwarded civilization two hundred and thirty five years since we established it into the future, where things just aren't the same. Unless they suit your personal taste to the exclusion of your perceived enemies, the baby eaters.  Who's eating babies now? Whatever.  

   We all have guns now, so now what? If that's not the issue, here, really, then what is it, in a nation that only seems to love how divided it is, in order to accomplish what, exactly?  To offset our mutual disdain for one another? Of course the 2nd Amendment remains an issue, and it's not the only one.  I am trying to remain as neutral and impartial as I can, amid this rising storm. 

    And for some reason, I'm not even that worried about Civil War, thinking it’ll go over like an expired pack of Ladyfingers purchased in the Clearance isle at Kroger’s, to go off like proverbial duds on a rainy Fourth of July that’s been cancelled anyhow. It’ll discharge like a few wet farts in a kid’s dirty diaper that gets tossed into a dirty dumpster outside a strip mall in Louisiana, it’ll make Hurricane Katrina look like the Battle of Alcatraz, Hell—I’m willing to bet that if it began tonight (haha, right) sparked off by the murderous halfwit employed by ICE in Minnesota today, and drag on for eight-and-a-half months let's say, 98% of the suburban neighborhoods across America won’t even notice, in particular on the 4th of July, when disaffected families make more of a ruckus with their illegal fireworks purchased over the border than the few bedraggled goons all fired up for Trump could muster. 

   I’m not trying to make light of it, I’m just saying this president’s support is not real — it’s a feigned shit-show 3-Ring Circus Clown Act of real life villains out of a Batman cartoon, and they’re running their train on absent rails, sailing over a cliff like out of a Warner Bros cartoon, caricatures of convicts in their striped prison pajamas, trying to run off with all our money and the thing I find rather funny is no one seems to care.  

     There was once upon a time when your average, every day American seemed to understand one simple tenet of our life under this red, white and blue flag which represents freedom for all, united under a government with a rule by law and operated for the people, by the people, who have all been sworn in from every disparate nation on Earth.  Granted, not all—that’s why we have a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement department—but there’s a right way of conducting their important work, and a wrong way. And this administration is clearly allowing them and even urging them on toward doing it the wrong way, which itself should be considered both criminal and treasonous to the diversified population of American people!  

   The plain idea our country should remain centered on exemplifies everything our forefathers fought and died for; that their children and grandchildren and all the generations since then, who did the same in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, who shed their blood and gave their lives, as the rightwing love to say, and bravely died for our country, so you and I can enjoy the freedom that our Constitution and Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights protects, with equality for every one, even those displaced, tired, and poor; along with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and the wretched refuse washed up to our teeming shore; where we once pledged as good Samaritans to take them all in, and welcome the homeless, the tempest-tossed, to us, here in the USA, the land of the free, where we would all lift our lamps beside our golden door, embracing one and all to join us.  

   The tenet I refer to was the idea that if these once near unanimously agreed upon values weren't applicable to a single individual, they would then be quite lost to all of us.  I can remember.  I remember that time clearly, in my head, when we still had enough integrity to uphold our values in service of one single individual human being.  I can't recall offhand what the saying was. If we can't reach out to help one person, or bother to think about saving them, what can we in truth be expected to do for others? While there's always something we can do for ourselves. Let's remember one person. 

    Let that one single person be Renee Nicole Good.  Why not let us commemorate her memory on this day, when her life was needlessly taken away, for no reason at all but to serve this crass and unnecessary crusade established on a whim by a charlatan who does not represent the interests of our expansive and diversified population of good, hard working true blue collar citizens who believe in nothing less than being innocent until proven guilty.  

   Let her be remembered and let justice be served in the following days.  It's time for the majority of our able citizens to flood our congressmen and women's phone calls and emails demanding they stop supporting this unhinged administration from doing any more damage to our reputation as a once well respected and trusted country among our allies throughout the world.  Let's rise up with a unified voice and just make the madness stop.  Otherwise I need a deeper and broader context, to have things made a bit more clear for me, and for the greater majority of us.  

    You may never know how deep it can get, or how long its been buried. Things have a way of surprising us, and from where I sit these days, it's so hard to tell since I'm trapped in my own closed-circuit version of Hell, what often seems all too close to becoming my home. Oh no, say it ain't so.  Little game over, so overblown.  Only of our potential can nothing be known,  for it remains ever  yet to be reached, by definition.  

   We can agree to disagree on a single condition. Freedom. Let us sing, let freedom ring!  It’ll be alright. There are no differences to set aside, just enjoy the ride, if you can, I say, and if you can just stay tuned to what’s really going on here, maybe just enough of us, on both sides of this political divide, can set aside our perceived differences and fix things so we can all get along for the ride.  This is, after all, still the United States of America. 🇺🇸

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JANUARY 6. NEVER FORGET.

In remembrance of eight American citizens who lost their lives
as a result of the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack:

  

Brian D. Sicknick — U.S. Capitol Police Officer
Died on January 7, 2021, the day after responding to the Capitol attack. He collapsed after engaging with rioters and later died following multiple strokes. His death was officially ruled natural causes, but authorities and major news organizations have consistently linked it to his actions during the attack.

Howard Charles Liebengood — U.S. Capitol Police Officer
A veteran officer who responded to the January 6 attack and died by suicide on January 9, 2021. His family and department cited the trauma of the events as a contributing factor.

Jeffrey L. Smith — Metropolitan Police Department Officer
Responded to the Capitol attack and suffered injuries during confrontations with rioters. He died by suicide on January 15, 2021. A later ruling determined his death was directly caused by injuries sustained during the attack.

Kyle Hendrik DeFreytag — Metropolitan Police Department Officer
Responded to the January 6 attack and died by suicide in July 2021. His death has been publicly linked by colleagues and family to the trauma of that day.

Gunther Paul Hashida — Metropolitan Police Department Officer
Responded to the January 6 attack and died by suicide in July 2021. His death has been widely reported as connected to the psychological toll of the events. 

Ashli Babbitt — Civilian
Fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer while attempting to breach a barricaded doorway inside the Capitol during the attack.

Rosanne Boyland — Civilian
Collapsed and died during the riot near the Capitol. The District of Columbia medical examiner ruled her death an accidental overdose.

Kevin Greeson — Civilian
Died of a heart attack on Capitol grounds during the January 6 attack.

Benjamin Phillips — Civilian
Died of coronary artery disease during the events at the Capitol on January 6.

U.S. flag at half-mast over the U.S. Capitol; public domain (via Wikimedia Commons). 

Image reflects official mourning at the Capitol following the death of Officer Brian Sicknick.  

Source Note:
The names and descriptions above are based on contemporaneous and archival reporting by Reuters and the Associated Press, as well as official statements from the U.S. Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department, and the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. 

When Canada Steps Up, and the World Watches

 by roving reporter Shaun Lawton (written with AI support under reporter’s direction)

 

   Some shifts happen with headlines and sirens, while some happen quietly, in budget lines and pledges. Canada’s latest move is the second kind — but its echo is loud.

   In June 2025, Canada announced it would hit NATO’s 2 % defense spending target this year — years ahead of schedule — and then go further, embracing a new alliance investment pledge pushing military and infrastructure spending even higher by 2035. (reuters.com)

   For a country long criticized as a laggard in NATO budgets, the move is startling. For allies living in global unease, it is reassuring. For others — perhaps Washington — it is quietly pointed.

   The official story is familiar: the world is more dangerous. Russia’s war in Ukraine drags on. NATO’s eastern flank remains tense. The Arctic is no longer a thought exercise; it is a theater. Cyberattacks, undersea cables, and satellites now define modern deterrence. Canada, with vast territory and an embedded stake in NATO, cannot ignore any of it. (pm.gc.ca)

   All true. Yet incomplete.

   Because timing matters. And tone matters. And Canada’s timing — this leap forward — lands amid what many perceive as a gap in NATO leadership. The United States has offered mixed signals: affirmations of commitment punctuated with talk of cost, domestic priorities, and transactional alliances. Allies hear the nuance; they feel the wobble. (reuters.com)

   Canada heard differently. Canada decided: we will lead where someone else hesitates.

   The decision is concrete:

• 2 % GDP in defense spending this year — a leap from previous projections that wouldn’t reach it until 2032. (torontotoday.ca)

• Broader NATO investment pledge: pushing core defense and infrastructure spending toward 5 % by 2035. (nato.int)

• Leadership on the ground in Latvia and support for Ukrainian forces. (pm.gc.ca)

   This is not mere arithmetic. This is credibility, broadcast in dollars and policy.

   And here is the unspoken message: if the United States wavers, Canada will hold the line. It is not stepping away from the alliance. It is stepping in. Leading, in a moment when leadership is suddenly optional elsewhere.

   Yes, critics will note that defense spending competes with healthcare, housing, climate resilience. Debate should be had. A democracy thrives on such questions. But Canada’s move is not fear-mongering or posturing. It is responsibility — the quiet, expensive kind.

   Deterrence, after all, is a long game. Alliances do not fail because enemies strike. They fail when members doubt each other more than they fear the threat. And when smaller allies find themselves leading, history shows they do so because bigger ones have begun to hesitate.

   Canada’s decision is a message to the world and a warning to America: alliances cannot endure on wishful thinking. Peace costs something — attention, investment, resolve. Canada is paying that cost. Whether others will follow, or let doubt grow, is the question of the moment.

   Sometimes the most revealing acts of power are not demonstrations of force, but demonstrations of will. Canada just drew a line. The world, and especially Washington, would be wise to notice.

              Click below to read the next article  

 

 JANUARY 6.     NEVER FORGET.

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Sources

• Reuters: Canada ramps up defense spending, meets NATO 2% early ➤ link

• Government of Canada: Canada joins NATO Defence Investment Pledge ➤ link

• NATO: Funding commitments overview ➤ link

• Toronto Today: Canada meets NATO 2% pledge ahead of schedule ➤ link

• Reuters: NATO summit statement on spending ➤ link