Thee Optimist

3 Fun Facts about Pam Bondi (besides the obvious)

2026-02-17T00:28:00.000-08:00

Pam Bondi is the Attorney General of the United States. Here, she is re-imagined as a stork-legged exotic bird. Whenever I see images of her, the first thing I think of is a bird of some kind. This doesn't really look like her face. It looks more like a beauty pageant runner-up from Colorado.

By now, most people are aware of the deranged, unhinged, screeching testimony Attorney General Pam Bondi gave on Capitol Hill the other day.

Here's a list of 15 questions she refused to answer during that testimony.

People hate Pam Bondi.

Personally, I wish she was President. Trump is no fun anymore, since he succumbed to senile dementia.

Read related article: Confabulator-in-Chief

Watching Pam implode on national TV every now and then would be a welcome respite from the steady drumbeat of bad news to which we've all become accustomed.

But that's not going to happen, so let's just talk smack about Pam for a few minutes, yeah?

Here are 3 Fun Facts About Pam Bondi:

Troubled Pam Bondi imagined as a stork.

1. She Delayed an Execution so she could attend a Fund-raiser

Marshall Lee Gore was a horrible person. During a spree of violence in 1988, he brutally murdered at least three women, raped one of them, raped at least one other woman, and kidnapped the ten-year-old son of one of his murder victims.

Bizarrely, he tried to pass off the boy as his own son.

Gore spent 25 years in prison, being tried, and re-tried, and having his sanity questioned.

Finally, the State of Florida decided to execute him in 2013. Governor Rick Scott scheduled the execution for September 10. The state Attorney General is normally available on Execution Day in case of any last-minute appeals.

Pam Bondi was the Florida Attorney General at the time. But September 10 wouldn't work for her. See, because she was running for re-election that year, and had a fund-raising dinner planned for that evening.

Scott re-scheduled the execution for October 1.

Bondi was a vocal supporter of the Florida "Timely Justice Act," which was designed to speed up executions.

When the reason for the re-schedulement came out, Bondi issued a public apology, promising to never do that again.

Capitol Hill (angry) Pam Bondi imagined as a pelican. Remember kids, ChatGPT can make mistakes.

2. She took what appeared to be a $25,000 bribe from Donald Trump, then tried to give it back

Surprisingly, Donald Trump seems to have bribed Bondi back in 2013, or attempted to.

And she seems to have attempted to accept the bribe. Then she attempted to give the check back.

Only one out of the three attempts failed, which I suppose is no surprise at all.

It happened when the Donald's famous scam Trump University was being sued for fraud by the State Attorney General of New York.

As Florida Attorney General, Bondi was considering joining the lawsuit. She then solicited a donation from Trump for a political action committee (PAC) called "And Justice for All," with which she was associated, and which was supporting her re-election campaign.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation sent And Justice for All a check for $25,000. It's against federal law for a nonprofit organization to give money to a PAC, but no one at either group seemed to understand this.

Trump sent a personal letter to accompany the check. On the letter, Pam's name was spelled "Pam Biondi."

Soon after, the Office of the Attorney General of Florida declined to join the lawsuit against Trump University, despite more than 20 fraud complaints they had received from Florida citizens.

After the donation controversy erupted into the public eye, And Justice for All sent a $25,000 check to the Trump Foundation, but the Foundation refused to accept it.

Trump was fined $2,500 by the IRS for the illegal political donation. In 2018, the Trump Foundation was dissolved after dozens of crimes and irregularities came to light.

Trump himself ended up paying more than $2 million in damages for illegal use of Trump Foundation funds.

In 2016, Trump agreed to a $25 million settlement to aggrieved parties in three Trump University fraud lawsuits - the one in New York, and two in California.

People in Florida got nothing.

This is Pam Biondi. It's what she actually looks like, present tense. Am I crazy, or do you see some resemblance to a bird here?

3. Her appearance keeps changing

We're all getting older, and as we do, the way we look changes.

That doesn't really explain what's happening to Pam Biondi, though.

She has changed a lot. Oh, she's not like the ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, who now appears to be wearing a rubber Kristi Noem Halloween mask on her face.

But Pam has changed.

At one point, she lost a lot of weight, apparently about 50 pounds. Good on her. There are a lot of benefits to losing weight, if you have too much.

The Pam Biondi weight-loss journey was covered closely in tabloid newspapers, as I'm sure you can well imagine.

But since then, other changes have taken place, which are not as easy to explain.

She's been on a weight-loss journey, but it might be time to turn back.

Some people think she's lost too much weight. Stress will do that to you. Supporting the Teflon Donald is one of the most stressful things you can do.

You end up tanking hard, and he goes right along doing that thing that he does.

Others think Pam has had plastic surgery.

If she has, it's starting to look like the plastic is melting under the harsh glare of the lighting in Congress.

The Harpy, a creature from Greek and Roman mythology. With the body of a bird and the face of a woman, Harpies were originally thought to be greedy and steal food, and to embody the destructive nature of wind. Later, they were depicted as guardians of the Underworld.

Words of Wisdom

"Bird-bodied, girl-faced things they (Harpies) are; abominable their droppings, their hands are talons, their faces haggard with hunger insatiable."

- Virgil

That Time Jimmy Z Puked on the Ceiling (Gross but Funny)

2026-02-13T01:20:00.000-08:00

Poor, poor Jimmy Z.

When your pal Thee Optimist was in college, he had a friend named Jimmy Z.

Jimmy Z was a big drinker. When he drank, he was also a big puker. The biggest, most copious puker anybody ever saw.

One night, Jimmy Z puked on the ceiling.

I (meaning Thee) lived in a house off campus. I didn’t have a car, and the house was five miles away from the school. So a lot of times, I hitchhiked to school, or took the bus, or even walked.

Sometimes I got stuck on campus and slept in the dorm rooms of people I knew. Jimmy Z was one of those people.

Jimmy Z and I went out drinking one night at various dorm room parties. We got drunk. Jimmy Z got very drunk. I went back to his room with him.

His roommate was home and trying to sleep. The roommate admonished us about the light, and the noise. Exams were coming, or something along those lines. Jimmy Z’s roommate is a doctor now.

Jimmy Z and his roommate had bunk beds, roomie in the bottom bunk, Jimmy Z on top. Jimmy Z climbed up there. He had some trouble managing it, so I gave him a push on the ass for a boost.

There wasn’t much room on the top bunk. It was tight like a crawl space under a house, or like a drawer at the morgue.

Yes. Very similar to Jimmy Z's sleeping arrangement.

I turned out the light, and lay down on the floor to wait for morning. I had to work in the morning. I was a cafeteria worker.

A few quiet, dark moments passed.

“Thee?” Jimmy Z said. There was sudden urgency in his voice.

“Yes.”

“I think I’m gonna puke.”

“Okay.”

“I mean right now.”

I didn’t answer, so he went on: “I need you to get me something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. Something to puke into.”

It sounded like he wasn’t going to make it to the bathroom down the hall. I stood, and started pawing around the room. There wasn’t much. Books, pens, paper. Clothes strewn everywhere.

Finally I found a plastic cup. It was a small beer cup, meant for keg parties. It would probably hold about eight ounces of fluid. Not enough. I handed it up to him.

“It’s too small,” he said.

“I know. Hold onto it for now. I’m still looking.”

But it was too late to keep looking. A sound came, like a fast-moving freight train from the depths of Jimmy Z’s nether reaches.

It rumbled up through his throat and out into the room. It was a horrible sound, like Satan speaking through Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

Jimmy Z puked into the cup. He aimed it perfectly, expertly, like a man diving from a high place into a bucket of water. Not a drop of the puke went anywhere but exactly into the cup.

The only problem was he had filled up about seven ounces of the originally allotted eight. The cup was almost at capacity.

He was crouched over it, holding it in one hand, just inches from his face. He spoke into it like it was a microphone.

“Jesus, you gotta get me another cup.”

“Okay, just hang on.”

“I can’t hang on!”

The sound came again, worse than before.

I stood frozen, my mouth an O of horror. The sound was so terrible, it was almost beyond the range of human hearing. All but the splash at the end.

There was this splash, like the sound of somebody big cannon-balling into the pool on a hot summer day. The force of it drove the puke out of the tiny cup in a fan shape, spraying vertically into Jimmy Z’s face, spraying past his face, up into the air, up, up, up, but there was nowhere for it to go.

It hit the ceiling.

“Omigod,” he said. “Oh my God!”

The sound came again.

And again.

And again, but now with diminishing force.

There was puke all over the ceiling. It hung down in thick, gooey stalactites. A smell started to come from inside that dank space – Jimmy Z’s upper bunk. It was almost enough to make me puke. I took a step back.

The roommate, the future doctor, rolled out of bed, took his pillow and blanket, and without a word, left the room.

Jimmy Z looked at me. There was puke all over his face. It was a sad, sad face.

“The cup was too small,” he said.

Thick, gooey stalactites.

Words of Wisdom

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."

- Ernest Hemingway

3 Reasons Human Space Travel is a LARP (Will Not Happen)

2026-02-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

Here's an awesome place where we are not going. Mars. Read on to find out why.

If you've been following the news lately (which I do not recommend), you might have missed Elon Musk quietly announcing (for him it was like he was whispering in church) that his company SpaceX no longer plans to go to Mars.

Musk began talking about his plan to colonize Mars back in 2001. He launched SpaceX in 2002, with a hare-brained scheme to use Russian rockets to send a greenhouse to Mars, an idea he called "Mars-Oasis."

I'm dead.

Elon Musk must be the most successful con artist in human history. Good on him.

In 2011, he announced he would send a human to Mars within ten or twelve years.

In 2016, he said it would be more like 2024.

In 2018, he launched an unoccupied Tesla Roadster into orbit past Mars, which is a fun way to make more space junk, and space junk is something we need.

For more than two decades, deadlines came and went, and Elon Musk steadfastly did not send anyone, or so much as an unmanned rocket, to Mars.

So... yeah. Musk isn't going to Mars. Now he's going to the moon instead. He's going to build a city there.

Hmmm. Maybe he will.

More likely, twenty years and billions in funding from now, he'll dial back his plans and tell us he's going to Staten Island.

Tesla Roadster flying around in space. No, it's not a real astronaut driving it.

What's a LARP?

Thee Optimist is nothing if not right up to the minute.

The word LARP comes from a more analog era. Technically, a LARP is a "live action role playing" game, like Dungeons and Dragons, say, except people dress up in real life (with swords and helmets and period costumes), and pretend the fantasy is actually happening.

In modern slang that the hip kids use, a LARP is when you pretend you're something that you're not, or you pretend a thing is something that it isn't.

Examples? Sure.

For two decades, Elon Musk LARPed as someone who could, and soon would, send people to Mars.

Western civilization LARPs as a meritocracy, when in fact the people at the top are mostly degenerates, morons, and one-trick ponies.

In recent decades, members of the degenerate ruling class were the ones most responsible for pushing the idea that space travel was right around the corner.

An image of French commoners parading the decapitated heads of aristocrats on pikes during the French Revolution, specifically during the Reign of Terror. This sort of thing comes around once in a while, when people have had enough.

Why Can't We Travel in Space?

Right. Good question. Thanks for asking.

We've been doing this whole space travel LARP for a long time - Soviet and American scientists were fascinated by the idea at least by the 1950s.

If you really chew on it, and strip away all the hype, not much has happened since then.

It seems like maybe we sent some people to the moon. The Soviets definitely sent a bunch of unmanned ships to Venus - and discovered that it was a very inhospitable place, nowhere we want to go.

We sent robots to Mars, which has been a spectacular success. And we sent the unmanned ships Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into deep space nearly half a century ago. Incredibly, they still work, and Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object from Earth, almost 16 million miles away.

But there are no people on those ships.

Although we probably won't put the fantasy of human space travel to rest anytime soon, it might be good to try.

Reason 1 - Everything is too far away.

The distances in space are immense. With current technology, Mars is a seven- to ten-month journey, one way.

At one point, SpaceX estimated they could cut that time to six months, but then SpaceX also...

Yes.

In addition, Earth and Mars only come into alignment every 26 months, so if an intrepid crew of fearless space travelers actually arrived on Mars, they would then have to wait a little over two years there before returning to Earth.

A quick round-trip to Mars is therefore probably a three-and-a-half year ordeal.

But forget about Mars (Elon did).

Let's think big. Let's go to the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.25 light year trip. That's 50 trillion miles. At current speeds, it would take around half a million years just to get there.

Human civilization has only been around 10,000 years or so, and we're already in a whale of a mess. I don't know if we have 500,000 years left.

Anyway, I don't want to be stuck on a spaceship that long.

Reason 2 - We don't have the technology, nor are we likely to develop it.

Remember our intrepid Mars crew?

Assuming they arrived there alive (a large assumption), now they're stuck for two years.

Mars is a climate that is hostile to life as we understand it. The crew would have to find some way to grow food and make drinkable water - things that are abundant here on Earth, but don't exist on Mars.

They would need to carry (or generate) enough oxygen to keep the crew alive more or less indefinitely. They would need to have some method to build a shelter in which to live.

Generations have passed while people ponder a trip to Mars, and none of these technologies have been developed in any realistic way.

Remember our trip to Proxima Centauri? Traveling there would require more energy than the human race has produced during its entire existence up to now.

Reason 3 - Space is Hostile to Humans.

Human beings have spent the past two million years evolving and adapting to life on Earth.

In space, the lack of gravity quickly leads to muscle atrophy (30% to 40% in two months). It also leads to rapid bone density loss, in the range of 1% to 2% per month.

If our Mars crew ever made it home, after three years, you or I could probably crush their bones to dust with our bare hands.

During their trip, our Mars crew would have been exposed to hundreds of times as much radiation as the people who stayed home. The atmosphere on Earth protects us from radiation.

As mentioned earlier, there's no food, water, or oxygen on other planets, as far as we know.

Moreover, a human being in space not wearing a space suit would quickly die of asphyxiation.

The artificial environments that we build (on the International Space Station, for example), would have to be replicated and built to foresee and withstand any possible accident, with multiple redundancies in every system, this time far away.

We are nowhere close to developing anything like this, though I feel certain we will keep talking about it.

Maybe we should talk about how to live better on Earth.

ICE agent from a previous post, kicked into deep space.

Words of Wisdom

"I urge everyone to treat every day of the year as Earth Day. Planet Earth is the only home we shall ever know, yet we are relentlessly harming it."

- Jane Goodall

10 Things to do about ICE (with a bonus #11)

2026-01-30T21:21:00.000-08:00

Masked death squad from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gestapo unit harassing a cameraman in Chicago. These goons are on the streets of cities across America. What to do about them?

So the evil, masked goons from ICE have arrived in your town.

They're murderous, they're stupid, they lack a moral compass, or indeed, human emotions of any kind (except possibly fear).

The most terrifying thing about them isn't that they're armed - it's how dumb they are.

They are subhuman trolls.

You may be wondering what to do about these insidious invaders.

In the interest of Public Safety, Thee Optimist has compiled this handy, illustrated reference guide, with suggested methods for dealing with ICE agents.

Here goes...

10 Things YOU can do to ICE

1. Kill ICE with fire.

2. Kick ICE into deep space.

3. Beat ICE with sticks.

4. Throw ICE off of five-story buildings.

5. Dropkick ICE.

6. Bomb ICE vehicles.

7. Drag ICE with YOUR vehicle.

8. Unleash the dogs upon ICE.

9. Stalk ICE, terrorize ICE at home.

10. Strangle ICE with rusty chicken wire.

11. Bonus ICE Activity - Photograph ICE, dox ICE.

Unmasked ICE agents, photographed by an eyewitness. Yes, this is legal.

Before you go around photographing hostile alien ICE agents, make sure you know your rights.

This article from the American Civil Liberties Union will help you know what you can do, and what precautions to take while doing it.

If you do take images of ICE, you can submit them to the ICE doxxing effort, the ICE LIST. Go here to do so.

Through modern algorithmic magic, masked ICE agents can often be identified through partial photographs of their faces.

Be safe.

Words of Wisdom

“If…the machine of government…is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Clown College

2026-01-12T15:26:00.000-08:00

Masked moron from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goes to slip and fall school in Minneapolis, days after another ICE goon murdered local resident Renee Good.

Career path: Fail out of clown college, then join the goon squad of a failing empire.

These "people" are the worst of what America has to offer. Ninety years ago, these same guys would have been signing up to join Nazi murder squads en masse.

Concentration camp guards.

IDF and West Bank settlers.

Pinkerton strike breakers during the labor movement of the early 20th century.

More or less the same people.

Basically, offer a bunch of borderline retards a paycheck to carry weapons and brutalize civilians, in the name of the powers-that-be.

These mutts are likely too dumb to even understand that what they're doing is wrong.

Which suggests we should have compassion for them.

A rabid dog deserves compassion, as well. But...

Words of Wisdom

"Don’t be so quick to grow up boy," the Brownshirt told Josef. "We’ll come for you soon enough."

- Alan Gratz

Let's Talk About Sex Robots

2025-12-02T00:13:00.000-08:00

Thee Optimist wrote this novel more than a decade ago, in the guise of his alter ego, the author Patrick Quinlan. It is a thriller about mind downloading and humanoid robots. Mind downloading is still pretty far out. Listen to a ten-year-old podcast about these emerging technologies.

Back in the mists of pre-history, Thee Optimist was invited onto a futurism podcast called "Robot Overlordz," to talk about his novel Sexbot and the then-emerging robot revolution.

While going through his archives recently, Thee Optimist wandered into the deep end of the vault, and stumbled upon a digital file of the interview.

Enjoy this humorous conversation about mind downloading, sex robots, and the perils of actual human relationships with hosts Mike Johnston and Matt Bolton on Robot Overlordz:

Words of Wisdom:

"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

- Carl Sagan

Reflections on Death (with the legendary Rutger Hauer)

2025-11-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

Dutch actor Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty, in the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner.

About 20 years ago, Thee Optimist had the good fortune of working with the actor Rutger Hauer on Rutger's memoir, All Those Moments.

The book took about two years to write, and during that time, Thee Optimist came to know Rutger pretty well.

It probably goes without saying that Rutger was a talented actor. In addition, he was a kind and generous man, who also had what those in the West might call a morbid fascination with death, and with tragedy.

Thee Optimist knows many dead people, and it occurred to him recently that people often wait their entire lives to consider the inevitability of death, and what it means.

Thee Optimist has known people who have faced their own impending death in a low-grade sort of terror, as though the walls were closing in.

In certain other cultures, of course, death is experienced as an expansion, or a potential liberation.

All of this got me thinking about a couple of reflections on death, and mortality in general, that appeared in Rutger's films.

The first is very well-known, so well-known in fact that it has become a cultural touchstone, and has its own Wikipedia page. It is the "Tears in Rain" monologue from the end of the movie "Blade Runner."

-----

The background is that the living robot, or replicant, Roy Batty (played by Rutger) has returned to Earth from outer space in an attempt to gain more life from his creator, the inventor Tyrell.

Replicants have only a four-year, preprogrammed life span. Roy and his replicant companions go on a spree of murderous violence, and are hunted by the dissolute, probably alcoholic Blade Runner named Deckard (played by Harrison Ford).

At the end, Deckard has killed all of Roy's friends, and Roy is about to kill Deckard, when he realizes his four years are up. Roy takes pity on Deckard and doesn't kill him, demonstrating a level of compassion that the human Deckard does not have.

Enjoy:

The Room

In 2001, Rutger co-directed and starred in a short film called "The Room." Rutger was very proud of it.

The Room won best short film at the Paris Film Festival the year it came out. It is a quiet, haunting movie, and another reflection on life and death from Rutger, as he was growing older.

In this movie, an older man, with an undisclosed illness, rents an apartment in Amsterdam that he recalls being obsessed with as a young man.

You might have to watch this on the Youtube website.

Enjoy:

Words of Wisdom

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

- Roy Batty

Doh !!!

2025-10-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

Drone shot of the White House with the East Wing utterly destroyed, on October 23, 2025.

So The Fat Man is a moron. Toxic narcissist. Petulant "look at me!" baby. Far gone in dementia.

He thinks he is bigger, and more important, than the United States of America, everyone in it, its culture, its artifacts, and its shared history.

The last time someone did this much damage to the White House, the English burned it down in August, 1814 (during the oddly named War of 1812).

In other words, an enemy did something like this during a war. Is it time to admit that The Fat Man is the enemy of everything we hold dear?

Words of Wisdom

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly."

- Cicero

Ancient Republican gets KO'ed (by a woman's soft voice)

2025-10-17T14:31:00.000-07:00

Senator Mitch McConnell, more than a little befuddled.

Thee Optimist is not a fan of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Not even a little.

In a moment, you're going to see him get knocked to the floor by a phantom... not even a punch.

A phantom nothing.

But let's talk about Mitch just for a second.

To be clear, Thee Optimist has no warm feelings for this Demon of the Underworld in any way, shape or form. In fact, Thee Optimist once imagined McConnell being Ungawa-ed by a group of Stone Age tribesmen.

Until the Donald came along, you might even say that Mitch McConnell was the person most responsible for the decline of American democracy.

Obviously, Mitch has been overshadowed by the Fat Man's walking corpse, its enablers (and the people behind the scenes who are using it to ram through their extremist agenda).

Even so, Mitch has done so many bad, racist, anti-democratic things, for so long, that it's almost hard to believe no one ever tried to get rid of him.

Like they did Cap'n Kirk, for example.

Just like Charlie, Mitch has been a champion and apologist for the gun lobby his entire career.

Mitch has also used his power to prop up the coal industry for decades, while simultaneously torching the renewable energy industry.

He is one of the people who bears the most blame for China's vast and unstoppable lead in energy generation, which will only get worse and worse as time wears on.

Bad man. Bad career.

He stepped down from his leadership position a year ago, but he's still rattling around the Senate, literally held upright by people pretending his rotting carcass has any business handling the affairs of state.

Just recently, Mitch got knocked to the ground in a Senate hallway, by a woman activist who asked him a question.

No, she didn't touch his frail chickenfat ass. She merely spoke to him. That was more than enough.

The woman's name is Stella.

The question she asked was:

"Do you support ICE taking working people off the streets and kidnapping them?"

Ka-POW!

Down goes Mitch.

Talk about a glass jaw.

Way to go, Stella.

"Hey Stellaaaa-ah!"

Did you hear what Mitch said to the camera when his minder stood him back up again? He said, and I quote:

"Heh. Geeu."

Abraham Lincoln, he isn't.

Now, of course, in most cases, we shouldn't mock people in the end stages of their lives. Mitch is in for some mockery just because of what a toxic personality he was, and how much damage he did.

And this latest humiliation gets at an idea Thee Optimist has visited again and again.

The United States is a sclerotic world power in terminal decline, where dark unseen forces use aging, obviously impaired, indeed borderline helpless political figures as puppets.

Words of Wisdom

"There might be a tomorrow, but we have no future."

- Ivan Illich

Weekend at Donnie's

2025-10-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

"Weekend at Bernie's," a 1989 dark comedy starring Jonathan Silverman, Terry Kiser, and Andrew McCarthy.

Many people of a certain age will remember an absurdist black comedy from the late 1980s called "Weekend at Bernie's."

It was made by the Bulgarian / Canadian film director Ted Kotcheff - who had a string of good movies in the 1970s and 1980s, including "Fun with Dick and Jane," "North Dallas Forty," and the inaugural installment of the Rambo series, "First Blood."

The premise of "Weekend at Bernie's" is two young finance bros in Manhattan are invited by their boss Bernie out to Bernie's house in the wealthy Hamptons for the weekend.

The bros have discovered an embezzlement scheme at the company, but are unaware that Bernie is behind the scheme, and plans to have them killed to cover it up.

Bernie gets killed instead, and the two bros spend the weekend propping up Bernie's corpse and pretending he is still alive.

The movie was widely panned by critics, but became popular because actual people enjoy low-brow comedy. Parts of the movie are insanely funny.

Like this part:

The Memes Write Themselves

A thought occurred to me the other day.

I thought, "I wonder if anyone has noticed the similarity of Trump Presidency 2 with Weekend at Bernie's?"

Basically, you have a living corpse in Trump, being propped up by certain individuals who are trying to preserve their own power and privileges, and ram through an extremist agenda.

It's been noted in many places now that Trump has dementia, and likely has very little idea what is happening. He is also in poor physical health, and his body will probably be gone soon, along with his mind.

If people are noticing, you'd think they'd start making memes about it, wouldn't you?

And you'd be right.

Weekend at Donnie's meme featuring Stephen Miller and one of Trump's odious, insufferable sons. Stephen Miller is a modern incarnation of the Medieval antisemitic trope of the malignant, underhanded, scheming Jew. When Trump goes away, the MAGA people will happily tar and feather him.

This is a fun one. It must be a bit old, because Elon Musk long ago fell out of favor with the Donald. Why would JD Vance prop up the Donald's corpse, when he stands next in line to become president? Simple. There is no MAGA movement without Trump. MAGA people don't care about Vance, they don't believe in him, he doesn't matter. He will become a half-term president, like Gerald Ford.

I would cite authorship of these memes, but I found them floating around the internet. I have no idea who made them.

Any event, the point is the Trump presidency, as awful as it's been, is already approaching its end.

It says a lot about the United States that we've had two presidents in a row who are old, sclerotic, and suffering from dementia - while backroom dealers scurry around the White House like rats.

Words of Wisdom

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

- Antonio Gramsci

Don't Just Like It, Love It. Discover New Art From Otto Von Miller

2025-10-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

It's almost Halloween, yeah? Here's a Halloween-themed painting from the genius Otto Von Miller. He refers to this character as Bo Jangle. Bo Jangle is 2025, acrylic and chalk paint on canvas. Read on to find more art from Otto.

Once upon a time, there was a religion called Gnosticism. This is thought to have begun around 300 BC, and continuing into the early Christian era, although the Gnostics kept popping up well into the Medieval period.

The Gnostics believed that this world was the flawed creation of a minor deity known as Yaldabaoth. On Earth, people knew Yaldabaoth by various names, such as Yahweh, Seth, El, and Saturn, among others.

In some versions, Yaldabaoth was inherently evil, and kept people imprisoned in the material world, forcing them to reincarnate again and again.

In others, he was benevolent, but didn't know what he was doing. The world was a botch job, created by an amateur.

The latter actually seems like the most likely explanation.

But never mind all that. Otto Von Miller has been at it again, and would like to share with you HIS latest creations.

Otto, much like the President of the United States, is not only a painter, he is also a doodler. While working at his daytime job, Otto often doodles little characters in the margins of notes he is taking.

The painting posted at the top descended from the doodle below, which appeared randomly on a piece of paper.

Bo Doodle. Pen on paper. Otto Von Miller scribbled this drawing while taking notes for a project he is working on. He liked it, and decided to make it into a (somewhat altered) painting.

I Lost My Marble

A few years ago, Thee Optimist made a post about paradigm shifts and why we need one now.

We never did get the paradigm shift in question, and it's unlikely we will. We are probably going to plow right along, reaping a harvest of increasingly unpleasant outcomes.

That's fine. As indicated earlier, the material reality we inhabit was badly engineered by someone with more confidence than common sense. That a country (or the entire world) would degenerate into a carnival of pointless errors seems right.

The post illustrated the concept of a paradigm shift with a photo by the Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders. The photo is called "Earthrise," and it is a shot of the Earth taken while Anders was in orbit around the moon.

Otto Von Miller is a fan of the photograph, and so decided to make a painting based on it, which you can see below.

"I Lost My Marble," acrylic on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Otto is relatively pleased with this painting, although there are things about it he might revisit at a later date. For example, he might add a couple of impact craters on the moon.

As you well know, the moon has no atmosphere, and so is constantly bombarded by meteorites.

One liner you can use on your friends:

"They opened a restaurant on the moon. The food was good, but there was no atmosphere."

"Looking @ You," acrylic and chalk paint on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Looking @ You

This painting is inspired by some of the butterflies you see around here, which have spots on their wings that look like eyes. The eye spots, of course, are there to frighten would-be predators.

A few butterflies even have eyes that look like owl eyes. Owls are apex predators, and generally terrify the type of small animals that might consider eating a butterfly.

Otto is very pleased with this painting. He meant it as a sort of optical illusion, where the butterfly appears to have landed on the canvas, instead of simply being painted there.

Words of Wisdom

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

- Albert Einstein

30 Years Since "The Unabomber Manifesto"

2025-09-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

Ted Kaczynski, also known as The Unabomber, after his arrest in 1996. His manuscript, Industrial Society and its Future, was published by the Washington Post on September 19, 1995.

He had what you might call an "axe to grind."

Between 1978 and 1995, former child prodigy (with a genius-tier IQ of 167) and Harvard graduate Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered sixteen homemade package bombs, which altogether killed three people and injured 23 others.

Over time, the bombs became increasingly sophisticated, better targeted, and more deadly.

His final two bombs, mailed in late 1994 and early 1995, killed a New York City advertising executive and the president of the California Forestry Association.

Uncle Ted was an environmental extremist who felt that he was "getting back" at a technological civilization run amok, which was in the process of destroying what was left of wild nature.

He was the subject of an intense manhunt (the most expensive FBI investigation in its history), and equally intense speculation.

At one point, FBI profilers thought he might also be the infamous San Francisco Zodiac Killer. His bombs were carefully crafted to leave no clue as to his identity.

In 1995, he offered to stop his bombing campaign, if the New York Times or Washington Post would print his 35,000-word manuscript, Industrial Society and its Future.

The Washington Post printed it exactly 30 years ago, September 19, 1995. The above link is an edited version they uploaded three days later.

They've been kind enough to leave it up all this time, with no paywall. Definitely click on the link, to read it, and for the Wayback purpose of checking out (or reminding yourself) what the internet looked like in 1995.

Uncle Ted's official US Marshalls Service mugshot, April 1996.

The Man Must Be Crazy

Thee Optimist was already an adult in September 1995 (I know - let's not talk about it).

Thee Optimist's penchant for unusual material was already well-established by then, so he read the so-called "Unabomber Manifesto" as soon as it came out.

Even the name the newspapers gave the document was designed to subtly mock it. A crazy person was sending people bombs in the mail, and now he wanted a major newspaper to publish his unhinged ravings.

At the suggestion of the Attorney General and Director of the FBI, the Washington Post did so.

It would be hard to overstate the reception it received in the mainstream media of the time. The manuscript seemed to prove that the mad bomber really was just a simple lunatic, writing some kind of delusional science fiction.

The essay described an emerging technological dystopia in which regular people lost control of their lives and privacy to the demands of machines, and to the tiny corporate or government elite who controlled the machines.

Thee youthful Optimist, once something of a prodigy himself (tall, good-looking, well-hung, AND smart - doesn't seem quite fair, does it?) couldn't make heads nor tails of the thing.

The only reason the Washington Post agreed to publish it was in the hopes that someone would recognize the writing style and turn the writer in.

Ted's brother David Kaczynski read the manifesto a week after its publication, and did just that - informed on his own brother.

Brutal.

Then, over the years, something funny started happening. Some of the events and conditions described in the manuscript began to appear in real life.

As the decades passed, it became clear that Industrial Society and its Future was accurate in its predictions, just far ahead of its time.

It is widely recognized now as one of the most important written works of the 21st Century - published five years before the century began.

Uncle Ted in prison in 1999. He spent the rest of his life in custody, mostly at the federal Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado. He died in June 2023, of suicide, at the age of 81, after a two year bout with cancer.

Let's read some, shall we?

The following excerpt from Industrial Society and its Future, describes a couple of scenarios where machines become more intelligent than humans, and what might be the result.

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand, it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or person computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.

Uncle Ted's hand-built cabin in rural Montana, where he originally went to escape the modern world. He lived here from 1971 until his arrest in 1996. A census taker in 1990 described the inside as "a bed, two chairs, storage trunks, a gas stove, and lots of books."

Words of Wisdom

"Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners..."

- Ted Kaczynski

Sorry, Charlie

2025-09-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Blowhard grifter turned martyred saint. Professional troll Charlie Kirk, on stage at a live Utah Valley University event, seconds before he was murdered. If you're the type who would witness him dying in uncensored horror, scroll down. I have the clip and will place it all the way at the bottom of this post.

So a guy named Charlie Kirk bit the dust yesterday, in spectacular fashion, during an event that he was hosting at a large, primarily conservative college, in the primarily conservative state of Utah.

Thee Optimist was no fan of Charlie Kirk. He also didn't hate Charlie Kirk.

He was aware of the name (and probably the face), though he kind of thought Charlie was older, maybe mid-40s, and not the tender age of 31.

Right. Maybe Thee Optimist had him confused with someone else.

Charlie could pass for mid-40s. He often wore MAGA caps in public. They probably shouldn't kill you for this. But to be fair, people have been killed for a lot less.

Blues For Mr. Charlie

Anyway, to the extent Thee Optimist did know who Charlie Kirk was, he just figured Cap'n Kirk was another in a long, mad parade of grifters and conmen, making money off the (real and imagined) grievances of angry, disenfranchised, conspiracy-minded people all across this great land of ours.

In fact, a little bit of post-mortem research reveals that's exactly what Charlie Kirk was.

He was a right-wing grifter, so he made his money by pushing loopy ideas such as the following:

- black people shouldn't be airline pilots.

Thee Optimist has a slightly different take on this - he thinks young people shouldn't be airline pilots. He longs for the days when every commercial airline pilot was a crusty old dude who had flown in the Vietnam War;

- black people go out prowling around at night, specifically looking to find and hurt white people;

There may be a handful of black people who do this. Lord knows I do it, and I'm not even black.

- we should hold Nuremburg-style trials to convict (and I suppose execute) doctors who perform sex-change operations;

- Taylor Swift, the multi-zillionaire pop star, should be submissive and obedient to her husband (that one's kind of fun to imagine, actually);

I'm not even going to put a caption. Nope. Won't do it.

- immigrants should be hunted down and deported (including, I assume, the people who keep the food supply going);

- Jews are secretly bringing immigrants to the United States, to undermine the pure white race;

In this fantasy construction, whites are the only race of MEN who can stand up to these manipulative, backstabbing Hebrews (this is the so-called Great Replacement Theory).

This one, of course, assumes that Jews, the vast majority of whom hail from Central and Eastern Europe, are not themselves white people - so that's also fun in a nutty, conspiracy kind of way.

The idea becomes even more fun when you consider that most people who believe it are fans of Donald Trump.

The Donald tends to surround himself with Jews (Roy Cohn, Jeffrey Epstein, Stephen Miller, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and his own daughter Ivanka, to name a few).

And those conniving Jews (yes!) are trying to... eh... replace Trump's supporters with... Mexicans. Mmmm.

Has anyone told him?

- the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

This one is patently false, and easily debunkable by anyone. The US was founded by rich, well-educated white men who were primarily students of the Enlightenment, and the liberal ideals of John Locke.

Some of the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, were Deists, who strictly speaking, rejected the idea of Christ. And others, like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, combined Deism with Christianity.

All of them believed in the separation of church and state, and they made that clear in the First Amendment, which was adopted in December of 1791.

Honestly, it's hard to know if Charlie even believed what he was saying, or if he just got so caught up in trolling the libtards, he would say anything.

Here's the coup-de-grace, which I will quote word-for-word, because the irony is too good to pass up:

"I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."

- Charlie Kirk, April 5, 2023

In the end, Charlie was just another gun death this year, which protected our other God-given rights.

It was a pretty good deal, yeah?

Prudent, you might say.

-----

All right, if you came this far, we all know why we're here.

I DO NOT recommend you watch the following video. It is a short, graphic clip of a gunshot victim bleeding out from what appears to be the carotid artery.

I post it in the interest of free speech, and public, eh... what have you. Education. Whatever.

We're killing each other out there, it's ramping up to a fever pitch, and this is what it actually looks like.

You're grown. You watch this at your own risk - once seen, you will not be able to unsee it.

Words of Wisdom

“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.”

- Charlie Kirk

“For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn't be one of us — that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country… Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for.”

- Spencer Cox, governor of Utah, describing his xenophobic prayers that God would retroactively make it a foreigner who killed Charlie Kirk.

Now, you might say, "Why would he pray like that? The murder already happened. The killer is the killer. The action is in the past. God can't make the killer into someone else."

Wrong. God can do that. He created space and time, which are part of this reality, not His reality. He stands outside of it. Causality is meaningless. Until we see the killer, the identity of the killer is still in flux.

God can reach in and mess around with the timeline and the characters, both in the past and the future. That's why I keep losing my keys. God is a prankster, and keeps moving them.

But alas, God chose to leave the killer a young white guy from Utah, raised as a Mormon, taught by his dad to value guns, and be quite good at using them.

Confabulator-in-Chief

2025-08-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

Donald John Trump as a small child. Many elderlies return to a childlike state as they approach the end of their lives. HUGE head, though. Big brain. His hands have hardly grown at all.

When Thee Optimist was a yoot, he worked with a very lovely, very pleasant woman in her 40s.

She had two grown kids, and had just entered her second marriage. She and her new husband decided they wanted to do the raising kids thing all over again, but it was too late for them to have children biologically.

So they went the adoption route. While going through that process, she visited her elderly father in what would now be called a "memory care facility."

She sat down with him and said, "Pop, I want to tell you. We're going to have a baby."

Her father looked at her very seriously, and said:

"Am I gonna be the baby?"

That's where we are with the President.

Trump rambling on about God only knows what. Compare hands with the previous image, if you like.

That time Trump's uncle knew Ted Kaczynski

Before we begin, let's just put something out there.

Since prior to the inauguration, Thee Optimist has been privately telling people that he wasn't concerned about Trump's newest deranged presidency, because Trump will be dead by Christmas, 2025.

There. I said it in writing. Trump will be dead by Christmas.

That couch fucker JD Vance as President of the United States?

I dunno. You tell me.

-----

Anyway...

There is a thing called "confabulation."

It is defined as "the unintentional creation or distortion of memories, where a person produces false information and genuinely believes it to be true, without any intent to deceive."

This behavior is closely associated with cognitive decline and dementia. It can happen after strokes, or when there is a brain aneurysm.

Recently, Trump told a story in public about his uncle, who really was a professor at MIT. So far, so good.

It is story about how his uncle had the infamous Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, when Ted was a student.

(Yes, absolutely click on the above link - it is "Industrial Society and its Future," by Ted K - if anyone in power really cared where this shit train is headed, it would be required reading in schools)

Ted Kaczynski as a college student.

Here's how Trump told the story, word-for-word:

“I said: ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr. John Trump.’ I said: ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said: ‘Seriously, good.’ He said: ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

Trump related this story in a warm, fireside chat sort of way, which he is very good at doing.

But there are problems with the story itself.

Problemo Numero Uno:

Ted Kaczynski was a student at Harvard, not MIT. John Trump never had Kaczynski in his classes.

As an aside, and also somewhat infamously, student Ted was subjected to mind control experiments at Harvard, as part of the CIA MK-Ultra program.

Problem #2:

John Trump died in 1985, eleven years before Ted Kaczynski was outed (by his own brother, no less) as the Unabomber.

Before he died, Professor Trump couldn't have known that things didn't work out for this seriously good student that he never had.

This is a textbook example of confabulation.

Trump at the podium. What's going on with the side of his head? Is that the part the bullet took away?

Things Could Always Be Worse

And they are.

They're already worse.

Back in July, during a press conference, Trump was asked a friendly question by a right-wing pundit.

Q: “What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?”

In part, the following word salad was Trump's answer:

"I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night. You buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and... I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

I agree.

I prefer to get pummeled into submission by the shower. I like my skin to be hot and lacerated, as though I've just undergone a thorough whipping.

But the President appears to believe he had Congress approve a law that shower faucet manufacturers can no longer put water flow restrictors in their products.

Get ready to have your skin peeled off by nice, powerful water pressure. It's the law.

"Am I gonna be the baby?"

Words of Wisdom

“There is a moral task of caregiving, and that involves just being there, being with that person and being committed.”

- Dr. Arthur Kleinman

Enjoy! New Art from Otto

2025-08-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

"Disfruta!" Pencil on paper, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.
If time and circumstance allowed, at this juncture, Otto would likely spend most or all of his time doing art. Click to enlarge.

Let's be absolutely clear.

The social contract was shredded by the ruling elites, not in 2008, or 2010, but in the 1990s. It fact, it probably started back in 1981, or even earlier.

It took a while for everyone to catch on, but I suspect most of us have by now.

There is no meritocracy. It's a lie.

There is no social contract. You don't owe them anything, least of all your allegiance.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

Thee Optimist, in the guise of his alter ego, the genius Otto Von Miller, will do some art.

He is saturated with other responsibilities at the moment, but a time is coming, perhaps at the end of this calendar year, when that will no longer be true.

In the meantime, the sketch above is meant as an homage to Havana nightlife in the 1950s. Specifically, the woman is supposed to be a showgirl at the Tropicana.

Otto has been a denizen of Havana at numerous points in his long life (although well after the 1950s - he's not that old), and he enjoys Cuban culture a great deal.

The Spanish word "disfruta," means "enjoy" in English, and is a command, as in "enjoy yourself," "party," or "celebrate."

As mentioned elsewhere, Otto is an admirer of the female form. He did some of the shadow work here by simply smudging the pencil with his finger.

"You Are Here," acrylic on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Remain in Light

Otto has spent much of his life living near (or on) the water. That's very nice. It's not because of anything special about Otto Von Miller.

Maybe it's just the luck of the draw.

The painting above is of a spot between two palm trees near where Otto lives, on the Gulf of Mexico. It's a sunset, and you are watching it.

Otto first took a photo of the sunset, then painted a sort of idealized version of it.

The painting is a little splotchy and unrefined - it suggests the situation rather than showing it in detail. Otto was trying to capture the sense of light more than anything.

Otto believes that light evokes memory and emotion, so he is trying to become proficient at painting it.

"Lite Haus," acrylic on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Run to the Lite

This is a painting Otto did for one of his many sisters.

She also lives near the sea (albeit a different sea entirely), and she enjoys lighthouse images.

There isn't much to say about this one. It is an entirely made-up, imaginary lighthouse.

To me, the sky and the yellow/brown grass indicate New England in the autumn.

In terms of brushstrokes, everything is moving up and to the right (suggesting time flying, or a fleeting moment, or winter coming).

The lighthouse itself stands firm against that. It's been here a long while, and will remain.

Words of Wisdom

“Do not worry if all the candles in the world flicker and die. We have the spark that starts the fire.”

– Rumi

China, Russia and Iran all have hypersonic missiles. The US has none. Ruh-roh?

2025-08-08T23:21:00.000-07:00

A gleeful Vlad the Impaler superimposed in front of the new Russian Oreshnik hypersonic missile. The Oreshnik ("hazel tree" in Russian) is thought to fly at Mach 10, or approximately 7,600 miles per hour. It carries six warheads, and each warhead releases multiple cluster bombs. The Russians tested an Oreshnik during the Ukraine War in November 2024. It worked!

Before you were born (probably long before you were born), there was a much-beloved man named Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He was a United States Army general who was "Supreme Commander" (gotta love these titles sometimes) of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II.

Later, he became President of the United States during a time of relative peace, prosperity and stability (1953-1961). He was a Republican.

When he was term-limited out of office (he almost certainly would have been elected again), he gave a farewell address to the American people.

In his address, he struck a dour note that no one expected. He warned his fellow Americans to watch out for the undue influence of a group he referred to as the "military-industrial complex."

Apparently, that group was already well-entrenched by 1961. By now, 2025, it is of course the most powerful grouping in the country, often referred to as the dreaded "Deep State."

Why do I mention this in a post about weapons that OTHER people have?

Because while all-consumed in their madcap quest for more control of our lives, more wars, and ever more of our hard-earned greenbucks, the military-industrial complex has also managed to leave us naked in front of our supposed enemies.

They've been doing a heck of a job, Brownie.

Quite Impressive

The video above shows an Iranian missile attack on the city of Tel Aviv, Israel, near the end of the recent "12-Day War."

For the first moments of the video, missiles are raining down, and Israeli interceptors are firing upwards, all very war-like and exciting.

At the 55-second mark, a missile comes down moving very fast, much faster than all the previous missiles in the video. It has the tell-tale flaming plasma sheath at the front, a hallmark of a missile moving faster than the speed of sound.

It makes impact untouched, and hits a building. It is thought to be Iran's Fattah-1 hypersonic missile, capable of reaching speeds of up to Mach 15.

To be clear, it's well-understood in military intelligence circles that Israel is not able to defend itself from Iranian missile attacks.

In the recent war, the United States Navy (warships parked in the Mediterranean Sea), France, England, Jordan, and even evil little Israel itself were working together to shoot down Iranian missiles, with mixed results.

Iran appears to have launched a handful of Fattahs - all of them evaded the combined missile defenses of five countries, and hit their targets.

At this moment, the Fattah-1 is considered extremely difficult, if not impossible to stop with existing missile defense technologies.

Chinese hypersonic missiles have been in development since at least 2008.

What is China doing?

The Chinese are believed to have the most advanced hypersonic missile program in the world, and by a lot. The Russians and Iranians are pikers, compared to their friends the Chinese.

China has at least five hypersonic missile systems - the DF-17, the DF-27, the DF-41, the YJ-21, and the "Starry Sky 2."

The Chinese are known to be developing their hypersonics as so-called "ship killers," designed to take out the kind of large naval ships the United States prides itself on.

In almost any war scenario between the United States and China, the war mostly takes place in the Pacific Ocean, near Chinese shores, pitting the US Navy against the Chinese Navy, and missiles launched from the Chinese mainland.

This is because the spark for the war will likely be Taiwan, which is a series of islands about 80 miles from China.

For several years, there has been concern in US military circles that China is building a larger navy than we are, and because of their vastly superior manufacturing base, in a long war will be able to replace their ships much faster than we will.

The unveiling of hypersonic missiles in combat have taken those fears to a new level.

It doesn't take a genius to see that if China has weapons we can't defend against, our huge, slow-moving ships in the Pacific will be sitting ducks.

In fact, late last year, when he was still a TV host, our drunken Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested the Chinese would take out all of our aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and an American aircraft carrier, both living on borrowed time.

What is America doing?

The United States has invested billions of dollars in hypersonic missile technology.

The Air Force is working on something called the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile. Developmental delays have led to its scheduled release being pushed back to sometime in 2027.

The Army is working on "Dark Eagle," which was supposed to be released in 2023, but is also years behind schedule.

Since at least 2021, the Navy was working on its "Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (that is a fucking mouthful) (HALO)" missile. Earlier this year, they cut the program because it was too expensive.

In fact, despite dropping billions into each program, so far the US hasn't fielded a single operational hypersonic missile, and (as indicated previously) has no apparent way to intercept the ones our scary enemies already have.

Maybe we will do it through prayer.

Christian Taliban, eh... faith leaders pray over Donald Trump inside the Oval Office.

A Modest Proposal

Even if the US can somehow get these missile programs off the ground (questionable), they can't mass produce the missiles in the quantities required to fight an actual war.

This is because the US is dependent on China for the rare earth metals needed to manufacture sophisticated weaponry. Between 70% and 80% of the rare earth elements we use for our military come from China.

Yes, I know. Quite silly to threaten a war against them, no?

Anyway, China has gone us one better now. Since April 2025, they have essentially banned the export of rare earth metals to military contractors outside of China.

In other words, we can't get our hands on them for any amount of money.

Maybe it's time to admit that:

1) the military-industrial complex in the US was just a very bad idea;

2) it's full of greedy, stupid people; and

3) we should stop trying to fight wars against everyone, everywhere.

Hey, maybe going forward, we could use some of that previously malinvested "defense" money for (I don't know) healthcare, infrastructure, education and housing.

August 2024 - bizarre parade in which the real Taliban showcased weapons, ground vehicles, helicopters, and even a few airplanes the United States left behind in its mad rush to evacuate Afghanistan at the end of that war. The US spent an estimated $2 trillion in taxpayer dollars over 20 years in Afghanistan.

Words of Wisdom

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."

- Sun Tzu, the Art of War

Donald Trump is Pretty Good at Drawing

2025-07-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

Obviously photoshopped image where The Donald holds up actual drawings he made, instead of a bill he signed into law.

Donald Trump is a pathological liar.

That much I suppose we can all agree on.

The entire American enterprise is circling the toilet, and one of our last elected presidents is broadly representative of the ruling class as a whole - morally bankrupt and illegitimate in almost every conceivable way.

Except one.

Trump is pretty good at doodling.

Yes, he's probably pretty good at doodling underage girls, but that's not what I mean in this case.

I mean doodling actual images.

"The Money Tree," by Donald J. Trump

Wonderful Secrets

You may recall that in recent days, the Wall Street Journal (of all things), released a story claiming that Trump sent Mossad agent, and the preferred pimp of uber-wealthy and Western politicians, Jeffrey Epstein, a letter for Epstein's 50th birthday.

Many people did this, as part of a book the procurer Ghislaine Maxwell was putting together for Epstein. For example, "Pedophile Bill" Clinton also gave a letter.

Below is the alleged text of the Trump missive:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

This bizarre and rather queer-sounding (in the sense of homo-erotic) imaginary conversation was framed in a doodle-like drawing of a nude woman, complete with the scribbled word "Donald" as the woman's pubic hair.

Trump immediately denied writing the letter, and sued the Wall Street Journal for making such a claim.

The basis of his denial?

That he doesn't draw pictures.

Well, well, well.

"Empire State Building," by Donald J. Trump

"I never wrote a picture."

Since at least 2004, Donald Trump has drawn numerous pictures that have been auctioned off for charity.

The money tree picture above sold for $8,500 at auction to support the Blowing Rock Stage Company in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.

The image below, "Manhattan Skyline," sold at auction in 2017, for $29,184, ironically enough to support a literacy program carried out by a Connecticut public radio station.

"Manhattan Skyline," by Donald J. Trump

Full disclosure: Thee Optimist enjoys The Donald's artwork. This is a side of him I've never seen before.

His art doesn't necessarily "say" anything, but many of the drawings have a New York City theme, and Thee Optimist hails from that large place.

"George Washington Bridge," by Donald J. Trump. Sold at auction for $4,480.

The Infamous Epstein List

You know how there's this big brouhaha about the alleged "Epstein List," and who might be on it?

Thee Optimist is intrigued by all of this, even though he doesn't follow the news that closely.

He imagines YOU might be intrigued as well.

So he's just going to give you access to Jeffrey Epstein's book of personal contacts. It is a large PDF file. You can download a copy if you like.

Yes, really. Just click on the link.

But don't waste time - I have no idea how long it will be up. Also, don't tell nobody who gave it to you.

The trick with this thing is the people who are circled are allegedly members of Epstein's sex ring. The artist formerly known as Donald J. Trump is on page 80 of the file (hand-numbered page 85), and is circled.

Who else is circled on this list?

Ghislaine Maxwell, of course.

The singer (and widow of Kurt Cobain) Courtney Love. Yeah, very strange.

Former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak.

Deceased CEO of Victoria's Secret (and Israeli intelligence asset) Les Wexner.

Numerous "massage" providers in various cities.

People who are in the book, but not circled, are supposedly just friends or associates of Epstein. They include former Prime Minister of England Tony Blair, the actor Griffin Dunne and comedian John Cleese, among many others.

Enjoy!

"NYC Skyline," by Donald J. Trump. Originally drawn to support St. Francis Capuchin Food Pantries in 2005, the drawing and photo fetched $20,000 in a resale by Heritage Auctions in 2017.

Words of Wisdom

"Rest assured, I hold all the levers, and have all the cards."

- Donald J. Trump, July 2025, while threatening to have New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani arrested

China is Eating Our Lunch

2025-07-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

From left to right, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), Senator Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), celebrate the passage of Donald Trump's big beautiful bill, which will largely destroy green energy in the United States, and surrender the whole thing to the Chinese.

Notice how the tallest guy does the talking? That happens a lot.

Is Lindsey Graham picking his nose, or what?

By now, it's no secret that as world powers go, the United States is circling the drain.

This has been going on for quite a while, in a gradual way, possibly since the end of the Eisenhower presidency. The violent coup that ended the Kennedy presidency was a step in the wrong direction, certainly.

The Vietnam War.

The various drug addiction epidemics.

The Clinton administration ramming through the North American Free Trade Agreement, which put a stake in the heart of US-based manufacturing, and eliminated millions of middle-class jobs.

George Dubya Bush.

Two trillion dollars spent in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with... the Taliban.

You get the picture. We got a brief, 10-year reprieve when the Soviets went down the tubes, but the overall trend in the United States is also down.

Now we have Trump and the big, beautiful budget bill.

A lot has been made of how the bill will cut healthcare to millions of poor people (yes, those four assholes again), in order to give tax cuts to the rich.

That's bad, but Republicans always do that.

Another aspect of the bill will help China replace the United States as the world's pre-eminent power.

Not that China needs much help - according to Australian Strategic Policy Institute (which keeps track of such things), China is the global research leader in 37 out of 44 high-tech industries, including defense, space, robotics, biotech, and artificial intelligence.

And also, yes - renewable energy.

China, in general, is so far ahead on energy that even "experts" are starting to notice. And where they kill us dead like a roach is renewables.

The world's largest solar farm in Xinjiang, China. Roughly the same size as New York City, it could power all of Los Angeles, or the country of Luxembourg. The small pic doesn't do it justice. Click to enlarge. Put it up on that giant flat screen of yours.

Renewables Were For Fags

Remember when renewable energy was kind of faggy? No, scratch that - it was very faggy.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. Thee Optimist was alive in those days.

Everybody thought that was about the most un-masculine thing a US president could possibly do. Carter did it in response to the repeated oil embargos by OPEC, and the steep recessions they caused in the United States.

A real man would have simply invaded the entire Middle East and seized all of the oil. And a real movie cowboy, Ronald Reagan, had the panels removed in 1986.

Of course, in those days, you could barely make a cup of coffee and blow-dry your hair with 32 solar panels.

Times have changed.

But Republicans tend to live in the past.

The Gansu Jiuquan Wind Power Base on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China - the largest wind power facility in the world.

Who Owns Renewable Energy, Owns the Future

So, you're aware that fossil fuel energy like oil and coal are a dead end, yeah?

They cause global warming. They're highly polluting.

If there is a future for modern human civilization, that future runs on renewable, cleaner energies.

Solar power, for example, is not only becoming vastly more efficient, it's about 60 times cheaper than when Jimmy Carter hung those unsightly panels on the White House.

You know these things. So do the Chinese. The Europeans know. The Biden administration knew.

The Trump administration appears not to know.

The big beautiful bill will end tax credits and business tax breaks to solar and wind projects, killing all of these off by the end of 2027 (some were in place since the 1970s).

It also gives leasing incentives and tax breaks to coal producers.

In essence, the new bill seeks to revive the coal industry, and severely hamper the renewables industry, if not destroy it entirely.

That's fun. What else is fun?

China installed 277 gigawatts of solar energy in the past year. The United States has installed 121 gigawatts total, in all of recorded human history.

China has built 41 gigawatts of offshore wind energy. The US has built 174 megawatts (less than 1/200th as much, for you math majors).

Electric vehicles are now more than 50% of new cars sold in China. In the US, the number is about 10%.

The painful truth is China is going to become the Saudi Arabia of solar and wind energy.

America is going to be the England of prosperity.

A big yellow Tonka truck mining imaginary coal on the living room floor, as witnessed by a five-year-old boy.

Words of Wisdom

"If you love China so much, why don't you just move there, you prick?"

Do You Love? To Read? Here's a Free Ebook for You. It's Easy.

2025-06-29T02:34:00.000-07:00

SMOKED, by Patrick Quinlan.
Discover how to get the ebook version of this novel free, for a limited time.

Many years ago (surprisingly many), Thee Optimist harbored an ambition to become a novelist. In particular, he wanted to write thrillers.

It seemed like a very silly idea, and most people he knew didn't take it seriously.

To support himself, he worked long hours at other jobs (public relations, fundraising, politics, etc.).

What a waste of time to then work long hours late at night, trying to write novels, with no guarantee of success.

Why not have fun instead?

Thee Optimist's secret weapon in all this was he didn't sleep that much. As a young man, he was gifted with something like boundless energy.

That's not fair, but nothing really is.

Thee youthful Optimist, demonstrating boundless energy during Thee Writing Process. He had fun, too. Probably a little too much.

He wrote a few novels that were real porkers, eh, corkers. He had acquired a literary agent while still in his 20s, but major publication eluded him.

Usually, he would submit a novel, only to find out months later that it had been rejected by dozens of publishing houses.

This situation changed abruptly in 2004 (yes, I know). That year, Thee Optimist wrote a crime novel called SMOKED.

Two weeks after submitting it, he had a North American deal with a New York publisher. A few weeks after that, he had a worldwide deal, in English, with a London publisher.

Publishers from other countries purchased translation rights. The book became a bestseller in various places, and was optioned for film three times.

SMOKED changed Thee Optimist's life dramatically, and for the better.

Of course, all of this took place in the era before ebooks.

But ebooks are here now, and the ebook version of SMOKED will be free during the month of July. Click here to get it, or keep reading this blog post to learn more.

An early paperback version of SMOKED, that used to appear in airport bookstores and drug stores. Many versions of the book came out over the years, but this somewhat rare cover is Thee Optimist's favorite.

Get Your Free Thing Right Here

There is a website called Smashwords. They sell ebooks on that website. It's pretty much all they do.

They are having a large ebook sale this July (2025, if you are visiting from the future).

SMOKED is free to download in any format you might like, as part of this sale. You can probably find many other free or steeply discounted ebooks there as well.

You will probably have to make a Smashwords account, but doing so is free of charge and only takes a couple minutes.

Click here to get SMOKED for free on Smashwords. You can also click on either of the SMOKED covers above.

Click on the above image of Thee Optimist to discover some other, totally different person with the same name as Thee Optimist. It's a common name.

Yes, Thee Optimist knows this person, a little bit.

He is cool.

This is the Dutch translation of SMOKED. In Dutch, WRAAK is a word that means "revenge."

Words of Wisdom

"Energy and persistence conquer all things."

- Benjamin Franklin

Chaos is the Whole Point

2025-06-20T22:59:00.000-07:00

Palestinians in horror after Israelis opened fire on an aid distribution site. The Israelis have killed hundreds of people at aid sites, in just the past several days.

A funny thing happened the other day. It was after the G-7 "Leaders" Summit in Canada - you know, the one The Donald walked out of halfway through because apparently he had better things to do.

Now, all by itself the G-7, or Group of Seven, is a funny thing. It is made up of the United States, England, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. It is a sort of last gasp of the declining West (and their steadily declining ally Japan) to dictate reality to the rest of the world.

One funny thing about it, for example, is that once Trump left, the remaining countries had a combined population of less than half of China, and a combined GDP roughly the same as China's.

China is one member of the rising BRICS group, whose member states comprise more than four billion people. That will give you some idea of how irrelevant groupings like the G-7 are fast becoming.

Anyhoo, the major item on the agenda of the G-7 meeting was the war between Israel and Iran. When the summit ended, as the remaining members came out, Chancellor of Germany Friedrich Merz spoke to reporters there, and he said the quiet part out loud.

He said, and I quote, that the unprovoked attack on Iran was "dirty work Israel is doing for all of us."

A face even a mother couldn't love.
Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz.

The Grand Chessboard

Many years ago, when you were still quite young, Thee Optimist made a post about a concept called the Grand Chessboard. Things have changed slightly since that post, in the sense that China has risen.

The concept has been American foreign policy in Eurasia since at least the 1970s, and British foreign policy in Eurasia since before the year 1900. No matter what political party is in charge, the policy remains the same.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who wrote the book on all this.

The idea is that the Eurasian landmass is the most important place on Earth. Most of the people on the planet live there, and the vast majority of energy resources are there.

Since it is so important, it is crucial that The West keep the place destabilized, by any means necessary. No country, or group of countries, can be allowed to rise, and challenge Western hegemony over that region.

It's why the British partitioned India and Pakistan. It's why the United States supported Iraq's eight-year war against Iran, and later invaded and toppled Iraq. It's why they paid for the collapse of Syria and Libya, and supported Al Qaeda in Syria and Afghanistan. It's why NATO bombed Serbia.

Israel, which was largely created by England, is a creature of this policy. Its constant wars, and the barbaric bloodshed it revels in, keep the Middle East agitated and unstable. The United States foots the bill for all of it.

Famous New York Times photo of Israelis gathered on a hillside to watch bombs being dropped on helpless Gazans. Yes, they brought snacks.

The story goes that the Israelis are there to restore an imaginary empire that a minor war and storm god from a long-defunct Bronze Age pantheon of gods, promised them 2,500 years ago.

This idea is so silly that many Zionists don't even believe in it. Which is good. Israel is there as a Western attack dog, at best. It may also be turning into a sacrificial lamb. Or better put, a bargaining chip.

Further, it's beyond absurd to suggest that any of this has to do with the Iranian nuclear program.

Iran is allies with Russia, China, and North Korea, all of whom have lots of nuclear weapons. Any one of them could simply hand nuclear weapons technology to Iran at any moment.

The strategy is destabilization.

That has been the strategy since before you and I were born.

Shadid Bolsen, Message to the Israelis.

Words of Wisdom

"It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America."

"As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

- Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Grand Chessboard

Who Pulls the Donald's Strings?

2025-06-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Donald is often portrayed as a marionette, manipulated by Vladimir Putin. But there's more to the story.

Thee Optimist has it on good authority that his blog posts are too long, too verbose, too wordy.

People - who spend much of their time doomscrolling through six-second videos on social media - can no longer muster the attention span for lengthy articles.

That's fine. The society is in terminal decline, as I might have mentioned elsewhere. The idea that we can't read any more aligns perfectly with that decline.

So I'm going to experiment with shorter articles. Here goes:

Another "Trump as marionette" image. This is a widespread theme. There are also plenty showing him as a sock puppet.

The Peace President

You may recall that in the recent election, Trump cast himself as the Peace President.

Since Genocide Joe Biden was such a filthy war monger, Thee Optimist was willing to play along with this idea of The Donald as a man who would prefer to negotiate.

His previous absurd turn as president went badly in a hundred ways, but he was not a war hawk, at least not compared to the two presidents before him, or the one after him.

So what happened?

Vladimir Putin simply ignores and mocks The Donald's entreaties for peace in Ukraine. Meanwhile, The Donald verbally attacks Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the unelected president of Ukraine, every chance he gets.

Even worse, in recent months, Donald the DealMaker honestly seemed to be attempting to negotiate with the Iranians over their nuclear program.

More talks were scheduled for tomorrow, Sunday, June 15.

Of course, the maniac Netanyahu scuttled these talks with an unprovoked attack on Iran on Friday. Netanyahu can't allow peace to break out, because he will lose his iron grip on the Zionist entity and go to jail if he does.

Somewhat poorly rendered Benjamin Netanyahu, as a ventriloquist, using The Donald as his talking dummy. This cartoon appeared back in January, in the Toronto Sun, and was accused in some quarters of being antisemitic. To be clear, there is a large and obvious difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Peace Treaty

After Netanyahu demolished the peace process with unilateral violence (again), a funny thing happened.

Instead of showing public anger with Netanyahu for destroying his negotiations, The Donald suddenly flipped his script.

The new narrative is he knew the attacks were coming all along. He was only pretending to negotiate. The attacks were, in fact, "excellent."

And suddenly, the Donald is making explicit threats targeted at the Iranian "Supreme Leader," and moving American military liabilities to the Middle East.

Of course, the Donald owes his second presidency, in part, to the financial support of the rabid, octogenarian, right-wing Zionist billionaire, and widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson - Miriam Adelson.

There are no puppet images that I can find of Trump being controlled by Miriam Adelson. But there may soon be.

Maybe I will draw one.

Incredibly, unbelievably unflattering, anonymous cartoon of Miriam Adelson. Thee Optimist would not ever draw her like this. Why is she going to eat a basketball player? I have no idea.

Anyway, it's a little hard to believe that Trump would pretend to negotiate in good faith, simply to give the evil Zionists cover for a surprise attack on Iran, and convince the Iranians to let down their guards.

I mean, Joe Biden's secretary of state Antony Blinken did do that repeatedly, both to Hezbollah and Hamas.

However, Blinken isn't human. He is a literal demon from the netherworld, who has taken human form and walks among us.

Scary to think about, I know. He's outside my window right now, peering in at me. And he's saying:

"Invite me in, Otto. Why don't you invite me in?"

Former US secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

But two administrations in a row? Two administrations who despise each other, and aren't on the same page about almost anything else?

If we really are that underhanded, wouldn't it mean there's no reason for any country, or non-state actor, to trust the United States ever again?

Donald Trump, Israeli sock puppet.
See? Lots of images. Much fewer words.

Words of Wisdom

"I want to have an agreement with Iran. We are fairly close to a pretty good agreement. As long as we're close to an agreement, I don't want [the Israelis] going in."

- Donald Trump, June 12, 2025 (one day before the Israeli air attack on Iran)

New Art You Will Love - Proven Results! Guaranteed.

2025-06-04T23:04:00.000-07:00

"Beach Car," acrylic on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.
Discover more wicked cool paintings below.

Thee Optimist once read a book by a man from Hawaii who was considered to be a "kahuna," in the shamanic sense of the word.

Kahunas in Hawaiian culture can be experts in a number of fields, especially medicine, but also spirituality and sorcery.

This man had a radical take on the nature of reality, which was that when you paid attention to a thing, you made it so.

In this worldview, all of reality is a sort of very large and complex Schrodinger's cat. Until you pay attention, it isn't actually happening.

Whenever he became aware of something unpleasant, the man would apologize for bringing it into being. Mostly, he thought of pleasant things.

Thee Optimist is a fan of this idea. Except that if he embraced it fully, he would spend A LOT of time apologizing.

Over the years, Thee Optimist has brought some very bad things into being.

But these are not those things. These are recent paintings by Thee Optimist's alter ego, the artist Otto Von Miller.

Ready? Me too.

"Night Beach," acrylic and chalk paint on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Ocean Themes

Otto Von Miller lives near the ocean. He has spent much of his adult life at the beach. Enviable, eh?

Maybe you should think of pleasant things more often.

In the meantime, while we're waiting for you to do that, Otto is working on developing his own style.

His recent paintings rely less on lines that he draws with paint, and more on using blocks of color, and layers of color.

They also rely less on copying the works of established artists, and more on his own imagination.

The above painting has about 15 different colors in it, and required about 25 different paint brushes. Otto is also amassing a formidable array of equipment.

The painting below uses only a handful of colors, namely white, yellow, blue (specifically Prussian blue) and black.

"Ocean @ Night," acrylic on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Randomize

Otto has also been working on ideas that aren't necessarily easy to categorize.

Such as:

"Concentric," acrylic paint on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

This is an unfinished painting. Well, it could use another coat, but otherwise, it's okay. It looks better in person.

It just occurred to Otto one day to make circles against a square background, and color them in.

It was related to the idea that many people like what are referred to as "neutral" colors for the interior walls of their homes these days.

Otto is also acutely aware that many people prefer art with either a benign message, or no message at all. Some of Otto's art has a dark message.

The above was an exercise in creating something that would complement neutral wall colors, and that was devoid of meaning, other than the aesthetics of the art itself.

And finally, there is the somewhat risque painting below. Otto Von Miller has long been an admirer of the female form. Just for fun, this is a somewhat exaggerated version of it.

The pink socks are a result of Otto not yet mastering the depiction of feet.

"Pink Socks," acrylic on canvas, 2025 by Otto Von Miller.

Words of Wisdom

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."

- The Buddha

Here is the DC Shooter Manifesto

2025-05-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

Elias Rodriguez, the DC shooter, shouting, "Free, free Palestine," while being led away by cops to whatever fate awaits him.

So a guy shot and killed two people in Washington, DC the other night.

The shooter was a somewhat regular young guy (not anymore) who is upset about the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The two people were a young couple who worked at the Israeli embassy.

The shooter wrote an explanation for his actions (what he calls an "explication"), which I have posted below.

If you've read this blog before, you probably know where I stand on the Gaza genocide (against). You also probably know where I stand on free speech (for).

If you'd like me to offer some encomium for the dead innocents - so bright, so deeply in love, who were shot down like dogs in the street, while still in the flower of their...

Yeah, nah. Wrong website. You can find plenty of that elsewhere.

The document is not long. It is quite eloquent. But it is also A WALL OF TEXT.

I've resisted the urge to break it down into reader-friendly chunks. If you're interested in reading it (which is a worthwhile thing to do), you're going to have to work a little bit.

Before we begin, I'll just put this here:

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here's an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those "ten thousand" under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in "Protective Edge" and "Cast Lead" put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians' forgiveness. They've let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they'll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they're doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can't let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who'd been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha's Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry's lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara's "very posture, telling you, 'My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you'll have to lump it.'" The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying "Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn't so fine, was it?"

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez

Words of Wisdom

First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

"We Are Burning." Palestinian artists killed by the Israelis in Gaza

2025-05-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

"We Are Burning," the last work by digital artist Mahasen al-Kateeb. The image depicts the death of 19-year-old Sha'ban al-Dalou, who made headlines when he was burned alive on October 14, 2024 by an Israeli airstrike on a makeshift hospital in Gaza. Al-Kateeb herself was killed by an Israeli airstrike four days later.

More and more, Thee Optimist sees calls on social media, and on the interwebs in general for people to preserve whatever evidence they can find about the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Not sure what this drive is all about. Of course, the large tech companies, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and numerous others, are complicit in the genocide, and will do whatever they can to disappear evidence.

The American, English and German governments are more than complicit in the genocide - in particular, the US is paying for and providing the weapons to carry it out.

But many organizations, like the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the like, along with media outlets like Al-Jazeera, are doing everything they can to preserve evidence.

Moreover, the Palestinians themselves have been livestreaming their own demise for the past 18 months. Israeli war criminals have been gleefully doing the same thing.

There is no shortage of evidence.

Thee Optimist is hopeful people are preserving evidence so that some day, the modern equivalent of the Nuremburg Trials can be carried out, and people like Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Antony Blinken and Donald Trump can all be publicly hung by their own intestines.

Genocide Joe Biden will likely be dead long before then, so he'll have to take a miss. Sorry Joe. Would have loved to see you dangle.

Then again, I understand cancer in the bones is rather unpleasant. And it takes longer.

That's not what this post is about, though.

This is really just some Palestinian artists that have been killed by the Israelis during their slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza.

The aforementioned digital artist Mahasen al-Khateeb. She was in her early 30s, and died during an October 18, 2024 Israeli bombing attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

A big part of genocide is destroying the culture of the victims

Thee Optimist is into art. This is well-known. He is something of an amateur artist himself.

He feels protective of artists. He dotes on them, and purchases their original artifacts.

More than a sideshow to the freak parade that is the human race, art is a bedrock part of it.

The world's oldest known art, the paintings in Indonesia's Leang Tedongnge cave, are thought to be as old as 51,000 years, well-predating the rise of civilization.

So art is important.

As part of genocide, the genociders often try to erase the culture of their victims.

The Israelis are doing this in Gaza - they are hoping to "cleanse" the Palestinians out of there, and destroy any memory of them.

Otherwise, why murder artists? They are non-combatants.

The fear is that some echoes of the people you are destroying will remain afterward. Artists create those echoes.

Dina Khaled Zaurub was a 22-year-old pencil artist killed this past April, by an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp near Khan Younis. She specifically drew pictures of people who had been murdered by the Israelis.

Dorgham Bassam Qreiqea, 28-year-old oil painter. He was killed on March 18, 2025, along with his wife and 30 members of his family (I wish I was making that up), by an Israeli bombing attack on Gaza City. The family had returned to Gaza City from a refugee camp in the south during a ceasefire.

A painting of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Old City of Jerusalem, by Palestinian artist Heba Zagout. Zagout was a well-established painter and novelist, who was killed with two of her children during an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City in November, 2023. She was 39 years-old.

Another painting by Heba Zagout.

Heba Zagout.

Before she died, she said: “I consider art a message that I deliver to the outside world through my expression of the Palestinian cause and Palestinian identity.”

Words of Wisdom

"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Ghost

2025-05-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

A homeless camp in Los Angeles County. Our society is in steep decline, which isn't really the end of the world. Empires come and go. But as the bottom drops out, each person who falls is a real human, an individual with their own story.

The following is an excerpt from a series of letters written by a homeless man. He was married at one time, a father of two children. Then he became addicted to opiates.

He lived for nearly two years in his own hidden camp in the dunes, just off the beach on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. He died of an overdose.

***

“The Reason.”

“What?”

“What is the reason and incentive for what you are doing?”

I respond simply, "Just to see if it can be done."

I break from my conversation and peer down the trail, looking again to see if they have arrived, “they” being the Glynn County Police. I do this every five minutes of every day, knowing they will inevitably pay me a visit, but only if a complaint is made.

They know nothing about any of this and when they find out I will be arrested, and the oceanfront oasis I created in the heart of a 30-acre county owned parcel will no longer exist.

“Someone in the dunes is doing God knows what,” they would exclaim with context only limited by imagination. "He’s probably cooking meth, growing weed or both, running around naked, high as fuck with a dribbling penis, covered in war paint or shit or whatever it is. It's probably illegal and requires the attention of the Glynn County Sheriff's Office.”

I think about that and what I would do if I was one of the neighbors less than 500 feet away in a multi-million-dollar three-story house with a view of the ocean over the treeline that I call home.

What I would do if some dirty hippie fucker was living down there, closer to the beach than I, for free.

Not only free from a mortgage payment and the property taxes, the power bill and all the other utilities, the staff required for daily maintenance - down there in the woods running around barefoot and naked, high on dope, eating lizards and wild rabbits, talking to frogs.

Maybe he has a loin cloth on - nah that's too primitive. He's probably wearing dirty board shorts or old navy cargo shorts pulled from a salvation army pile, something like that. But it doesn't matter because he's free, and good for him.

I'd like to think this particular neighbor would be as forgiving and optimistic, but I'm projecting. I know exactly who he is, his name, where he's from, how he made his money, when he's in town, what he drives, where he goes when he is not here, the home’s lighting schedule, and most everything else I need to know about him.

He's nice, but not that nice.

Oceanfront homes on St. Simon's Island.

Volunteer Public Beach Access Monitor

The other neighbors as well, I collect intel on all of those in eyeshot, important enough to keep tabs on, all except for the lady who lives in the house owned by an LLC.

I know nothing about her except that she lives alone, is retired and usually at home. Probably sitting in the living room watching her shows, only looking away to see who is traveling to and from the beach on the path adjacent her home.

Her adopt-a-pet vanity plate indicates that she is compassionate about animals and she has several long large cats, a wild bird's nightmare.

I'm almost certain if a call of concern is made it will be made by her. She definitely fits the description of a volunteer public beach access monitor, as it would be irresponsible otherwise.

I pass her sometimes when she is out in the yard watering her flower beds and I always wave. Big toothy smile, head up, shoulders back, pretending I belong there in the neighborhood, riding my bike out of the tunnel of wax myrtles due west from the beach.

She looks directly at me but never waves back, as if to say “Waving back might give you the wrong idea.”

Whenever I see her I want to stop and say hello, say something nice to convince her that although frequent, I'm not anyone of concern.

I made up a story I'll hopefully never tell her about a girlfriend - my girlfriend that I don't have that lives on Ninth Street. She is going through a messy divorce and asks that I travel to her house the back way so her nosey neighbors do not see me, get the wrong idea, and tell her soon to be ex-husband.

They were all part of the same peer group prior to the scandal that led to the separation and subsequent filing and he wouldn't be too thrilled about her moving on so soon. She doesn't want any more drama so I cut down the beach from fifth street like she asks.

I even wrote a subplot to my bullshit girlfriend story in the event I am toting construction materials in my dock cart and questioned as to why.

“I'm remodeling her bathroom,” I'll boast with a humble eagerness because I'm a good guy of course, unlike her soon to be bastard ex-husband who is having an affair with his secretary, ensuring the beach house was not his in the divorce.

I can imagine calmly explaining all of this to the LLC house lady, and her nodding in acceptance, familiar with the circumstances as decades earlier she was subjected to an outcome eerily similar, minus the rebound.

I would then offer to fix her damaged birdhouse, a big multilevel one designed for house finches. Last year a storm blew it from its unstable flimsy mast and placed it on the porch steps, waiting to be reseated.

I would be more than happy to repair and set it back on its pole. But for now I'm just the frequently observed stranger with dirty shoes, if any at all, that uses the beach access probably more than anyone else.

She either thinks I go to the beach a lot, or knows I am living in the dunes and doesn't care enough to report me. Whatever the case may be, I'm always conscious of her concern just like I am about everyone else's.

I don't want anyone in my shit. I want to be as invisible as possible, a ghost.

Words of Wisdom:

"You can spend the money on new housing for poor people and the homeless, or you can spend it on a football stadium or a golf course."

- Jello Biafra