But sometimes their hands and mouths are full and so they can't always be stickin' their fingers in their ears and goin' la la la la la, whenever some piece of ontology threatens the peace of their phenomenology.

And so bullshit was invented (or evolved by means of natural selection) to keep truth from disrupting the precious appearance of reality (or to keep the nature of reality from interferring with the precious survival of the species).

There's even a mathematical proof of this -- omitted here because following its level of abstract reasoning requires much precision psychoactive drug-taking, and because it, like the proposition it claims to prove1, is also, itself, utter fucking bullshit.

But just because a supposed proof of a proposition turns out to be utter fucking bullshit, does not in any way invalidate the proposition the proof didn't really prove -- just as actually BEING utter fucking bullshit does not invalidate the proposition itself, either -- because the preceding paragraph, which established it as utter fucking bullshit, may simply also, itself, be utter fucking bullshit.

Fortunately, the link between bullshit and survival can be shown by means of the following no-brainer gedanken experiment:

If the proposition Bullshit Saves is not correct, then it's opposite, Truth Kills, must be true. (By what's-his-name's law.) But if Truth Kills is true, and you espouse it as true -- then you're dead. And therefore Truth Kills is proved to be false by the final court of reason, Darwinian logic.2 And Bullshit must Save.

This proof in turn implies that bullshit must pervade all reality. But, clearly, if we saw it that way, we'd just be going around saying "Ehh, that's just a load of bullshit" all the time. Which obviously we're not, since SOMEONE must have green-lighted Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, and "Weekend at Bernie's II".

So, for the purposes of survival or the ego or whatever, bullshit has historically been referred to as culture.

And for the purposes of Darwinian existentialism, bullshit has come to be transduced across virtually all modalities (fungibility) as money.

No wait. Bullshit IS the modality underlying all modalities.

Money is just the surfacing or instantiation of this fundamental medium or an aspect of it, carrying the bullshit desire of the buyer, through the bullshit greed of the seller, through the bullshit "value" of the object of desire, through the bullshit emotion of acquisition, to the final abject despair of possession -- where "value proposition" is understood, too late, to have meant just another discount whore, spouting just another load of his come-and-get-it bullshit.3

-----------------

Notes:

1. no bullshit = no survival

2. a logic where the Booleans resolve to simply LIVE or DIE rather than TRUE or FALSE

3. Note that the real meaning of the popular wisdom: "money talks, bullshit walks", contrary to what everybody believes, is that while money is busy yapping away promising to do something, bullshit just stands up, walks out the fucking door and gets it done! Or, in the current analysis, bullshit is the will and the backbone that does the work, while money puts on the show and gets all the credit. And yet bullshit likes it this way. Essentially bullshit lurks smiling behind every dollar bill.

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We are the abandoned children of the super-rich, the super powerful, the people with connections up the wazoo -- the people, frankly, with wazoos up the wazoo.

We spent our infancy and youth waiting to die in ways no one had ever died before.

Our birth distortions were so massive, complex, and widely varied that not one of us has ANY point in common with any point on any bell-shaped curve of ANYTHING anywhere ever, physically, psychologically, sociologically, anthropologically or electrical engineering-wise.

In other words, even with infinity factored out, probability and statistics can not locate us anywhere in their vapid little domain.

On top of all that, we have been taught or learned (or maybe it was innate) to be true to ourselves.

But no one has ever been these selves before and so there is no road map to their truths. And so the only way we can even begin to figure out who we can be, is to watch everybody else being who we can't, shouldn't and wouldn't wanna be. And to watch the people who've learned to be true to someone else's version of self. And then to be NOT them -- to be anything BUT them.

To accomplish this, we watch televised entertainment industry awards ceremonies.

As the camera pans around, we try to guess which individuals are sitting there saying somewhere inside, man, this is so fuckin' bogus, how the fuck can I even be sanctioning this with my presence?

Occasionally, if we're lucky, we find someone who we all agree must be thinking inside: Man, a good fucking tsunami right now would just sweep this place clean.

Then we zoom in and research his life as a possible starting point for our own. Either to move towards or move away from, depending on surface conditions of the world and people.

Many candidate selves and not selves are auditioned in this way, thanks to the modern technology which allows everyone to see right to the core of everyone else's life from a distance, but not to the core of their own life from close up. This exciting new technology is called being a fucking moron.

But when no candidate selves ever become finalists, let alone first runners up, we realize we have to abandon all approaches that involve thought, despite their seeming internally consistent, and just keep talking so that no one else can start.

This is apparently what allows us to breeze into the presidency -- along, apparently, with promising that, if elected, we would use the full force of government to get back at all the women who'd screwed us over when we were just a boy trying to score.

Once in the White House, we dream of vultures getting all the carrion they can eat just by virtue of dreaming it, but when we wake up, there are no sleeping vultures -- just awake people -- jingling change around in their cupped hands and pockets, waiting for us to join them.

So our first presidential act is to order the Supreme Court to uninstall the human nature package, but they come back claiming that when they tried, their uninstaller seemed to hang in the middle after a warning that their browser would no longer work.

We are barely reelected, the next time. The margin of victory is less than a book. But later, the exit polls showed that when people said "book" they really meant "placebo".

Which really meant "belief".

Belief that, one day, the rich will take out the garbage.

That Bo Diddly Studies would be the first academic discipline accepted into the Olympics for competition and medals.

That death would be the worst thing that could happen, except for no death.

That we'd almost be drunk enough not to notice that we weren't quite drunk enough to go on. But not quite.

That the reason we were stuck looking for something to look for in the first place, was simply because all the low-hanging fruit had already been picked by those careerist hacks: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Marvin Minsky.

And that the only place to make discoveries now, was WAY the fuck out there, in the realm where there are no answers, and where even computation wouldn't go -- even if it could.

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To drastically decrease the numbers of these people, the new society has modeled all its institutions -- from universities to churches to DMVs -- after bars.

This is not so much because everybody needs to be shit-faced all the time (though it helps), but because, in this way, all information exchange will be properly contextualized -- i.e. everything said by authorities of knowledge, morality, or the state, for example, will be heard as slurred speech coming from some arm-flailing drunken loser about to fall off a bar stool.

Thus freed from the cognitive drudge work of scraping bullshit off everything (because now there's guaranteed to be nothing underneath so why bother), people will suddenly have the time and energy to concentrate more fully on enhancing the depth of their analysis of other things -- like the fine structure of vomit, or what it actually FEELS like to be fog.

Meanwhile, the new social institutions of the new society will find their natural constituencies via market forces: the lamest, most ignorant, most incompetent, worthless, fascistic, low life, money-grubbing, lying, scumbag, pieces of shit will run the society based on their affinity with the people at large, and their likeability and "authenticity". All they have to do is say "we are scumbags, vote for us" and democracy will take care of the rest.

In the workplace, humans will do the jobs that machines don't want to or can't do. Mostly these are jobs recognizing and responding to visual patterns designed to distinguish between human and machine respondents. As a direct outgrowth of this, humans will ultimately be used for all jobs involving dishonesty, or violation of law, or total breakdown of ethical standards.

But after years of enduring this mind-numbing and invidious work, and as trust between machines approaches zero, human access to machines' filthiest little secrets will have approached infinity.

Thus making the new race of humans impervious to the bots' last ditch attempt to install a whole new semantics into world language to reveal whether the speaker's a machine or not.

So that not only would humans ultimately survive and not only ultimately take over, but they would do so not in spite of, but because of living in a too far advanced society where the Turing Test is on everybody's lips.

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I wanted to say something or do something. But before I could, I had to understand the nature of physical reality and the nature of consciousness -- otherwise every word or every act would be utterly meaningless. Or might not even exist, so why bother?

Fortunately, when I looked it up on the internet, it turned out that all these issues had been thoroughly thought through and resolved by the great minds of history over the last few thousand years,1 and so I could just go ahead, standing on the firm foundation of their answers, and say or do whatever the fuck I wanted to say or do, without fear of utter meaninglessness, and even though I really have no desire to even want in the first place.

EVENTS

It was the day after the leader of World Terrorism had gone on world television, live, and, in the middle of a heated rant about ripping out and eating the hearts of his murderous fascist enemy, suddenly broke down crying uncontrollably.

But the leaders of The Free World, cowering in their bunkers out of fear of his ubiquitous omnivorous invincibility, had all missed seeing or even knowing about it.

Because, rather than getting constant hot news updates from their staffs, they chose, instead, to listen to nothing but 24/7 tapes of soothing maternal voices saying everything's gonna be all right. No one's gonna take away your ultimate infinite potency.

A day later, when he had recovered his composure, the leader of World Terrorism came back on world TV and blamed his breakdown of emotion on abandonment in childhood, fear of failure, loss, and innocence.

He also expressed his criticism of the practice of breaking off pieces of the world and selling them for spare parts.

"While you humans are busy trying to reproduce yourselves in machines, and trying to distort or shift your preordained bell-shaped curves by means of rabid fundamentalisms and genomics," he told them, "the cosmos is busy opening up whole new metaphors, far beyond the puny similes of physics, cog psych, and MTV."

People didn't know how to respond.

Some thought, in these final days, of giving the world a lifetime achievement award in appreciation of providing a permanent home for what had previously been the nomadic 7 Wonders of Nowheresville.

Instead, they just awarded her a new disease -- but a disease that killed without suffering or pain and, in fact, killed with a long slow period of utter bliss ending in a golden moment of absolute joy, user-adjustable as to degree of subtlety.

"This is so you can save your population the embarrassment of being shaken off into space," they told the world, "when their piece of geography or tribe or virtual association gets packed up and carted off for resale."

As it had been during the Cambrian Explosion for a different blockage, today they thought Universal Immorality was the only way to get past that lump in the throat of evolution: consciousness.

----------------

NOTES

1. Though today's great minds or hundred-year Shakespeare typewriter monkeys still pretend these questions remain unanswered and continue to pretend to tackle them in voluminous numbers of words, really they are just dotting the i's and crossing the t's in their footnotes, till tenure runs out.

This, of course, isn't anybody's fault, it just happens that the vocabulary and library of routines for functioning in this space are already well established, and so all that's left for the people who use them is to, at best, reinvent the wheelie or reconceptualize the nuclear dump site, over and over again.

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"Your last email," he wrote, "depressed me so much, I went out and tried to kill myself too, in solidarity. So I'm writing this from an ICU I assume is not much different from the ICU you're reading it in."

The authors and runners of spybots, worms, phishing sites, and other forms of identity rip off, had agreed to drop their infantile egoist achievement syndrome which had no higher goal, no higher purpose, and rarely even made money, and contribute all their fruits to a central cause they didn't know the details of, but it DID have the kind of historico-sociologico-psychologico planet-wide goal and higher purpose they all blindly sought unbeknownst to themselves and with no motivation other than human nature making them do it.

"I didn't wanna say ROTC and Ritalin don't mix," he wrote, "but aren't you the near-not-living proof they don't?"

Dear Earthlink Subscriber

Recently, many Internet users including EarthLink subscribers have received fraudulent but highly personal, highly denigrating emails ostensibly from close personal friends, family members, acquaintances, or business associates.

These emails are fake and are part of an internet-wide international social-engineering exploit (hack) which is attempting to mess with peoples' minds rather than with just their computers

Here's an example of how the exploit works:

A virus or spyware on your friend's machine obtains your address from his email address book, and then scans any saved emails sent between you for keywords and bits of information. This information is stored in a central data base and the emails being sent to you under your friend's name have been generated by software which uses this information in derogatory and often obscene ways, designed to provoke anger and humiliation.

It appears now that many millions of internet users are involved, some have been directly infected, but many more are simply the recipients of these emails.

Anecdotal reports from several cities and towns large and small across the US show a dramatic increase in assaults and homicides in just the past 24-48 hours during which time these emails have been circulating.

****************************
TIPS FOR AVOIDING THIS SCAM

****************************

DON'T BE FOOLED!

Verify all email coming from friends, family members etc., especially email that is highly insulting with no reason to be. If possible call the sender immediately.

Once you contact them, if they haven't sent the email you received, tell them to have their machines scanned for viruses and spyware, and to immediately inform all the people in their address book about this scam and to disregard obscene and insulting email sent from them.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: DO NOT RETALIATE and send off emails saying all kinds of vile and ugly (and possibly true) things you may regret later. Things that may permanently damage a lifelong friendship or family or business relationship.

This is possibly the goal of this pernicious hack -- to spread discord among otherwise decent loving people.

Please do not get involved in this potentially huge war of personal retaliation and vengeance on a global international scale.

And to check if your own machine has been compromised, download our free Scam-Guard for only 19.95.

--------------------

Sincerely.

The Earthlink response team

"I want you to understand," he wrote, "I have no qualms about what we did. I have qualms about you having qualms. Because how can you have qualms??!! We both knew it would end up like this -- with people killing each other, with the social fabric of the world shredded -- and we both agreed that this was the only way to do away with hatred and stupidity. To stick it in their face so they had to back off. You agreed it would bring everybody closer together in the end. So why did you try kill yourself? I need to know, because, as I already said, I tried to kill myself because you tried to kill yourself -- so your reason is mine, and if I die here, I at least want to know what it is."

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Unfortunately, most of his work was lost in the recent blaze (or flood), including the manuscript of his 450 page in progress magnum opus, "Jane Air".

Miraculously, however, some of the end pages (the notes and the list of illustrations and photographs) of this work managed to survive the devastation entirely intact.

What follows, then, is a verbatim transcript of these extant pages, unreconstructed, unretouched, unedited, and unabridged in any way.

-- Ed.

I. Photographs and Illustrations

p. 12 - Men in protective gear, in a safe room, having opened a lead-shielded box and taken out a lead-shielded notebook, stand and watch in abject fear while one of them, seated, nervously tries and repeatedly fails to turn its pages with his bulky lead-shielded gloves.1

p. 14 - Smiling children from around the world stand close together in a circle, looking up at the camera, their tiny fingers all resting side by side on the nuclear button. (The button had previously been enlarged 45% in order to fit all 35 fingers without any touching or overlap.)2,3

p. 25 - The first punch in the fan fight following what was supposed to have been4 the most exciting game in all football history but, instead, turned out to be the utter most fucking boring one. Despite the fight's spreading to the streets and growing, without pause, into the 3rd civil war in our nation's history, no one with a pulse rate could blame the fans for being more righteously pissed off than they'd ever been in their lives.

p. 41 - Keanu Reeves is consoled5 after resigning the US presidency.

p. 69 - First known picture of the soul in the act of being commodified -- superimposed over the only known photo of sex NOT being commodified.

p. 90 - Urban Traditional Sofa superimposed over Rural Modern Dining Room Table; the combined effect is supposed to produce epilepsy in the unstable. If you experience any suspicious symptoms, please avoid consulting your physician immediately. (ditto photo 5)

p. 100 - Artists conception of what the world would look like if its people disappeared themselves on a whim.

p. 114 - Crowd of protesters demonstrating outside the Office of Economic Opportunity over jobs of the "blow" and "hand" variety not qualifying for unemployment benefits.

p. 115 - Presidential spokesperson adamantly denying that, of the many new jobs created this year, 99% are of the "ream" variety.

p. 141 - A typical organism grown from the new human genome which has been modified to eliminate the whole messy no longer necessary procreation thing.

p. 145 - Cover photo from the popular novel: "Fahrenheit 178: The Temperature at Which MP3s, CD-R/RWs, DVD-R/RWs, and Brains Begin to Burn".

p. 164 - Perfection. (though, by the time you see this, it won't be anything like that anymore).

p. 184 - Artist's conception of the recently discovered unnamable elementary particle whose defining property is always being someplace else.

p. 214 - A man oscillating (in real time) between being the scum of the earth and the salt of the earth. Scum, salt, scum, salt, scum, salt, scum, salt.

p. 251 - Extreme close up of a small subsection of the Rube Goldberg device known as the universe, showing the system of levers, floats and pressure switches gone awry which correspond to amoebae indigestion.

p. 331 - The only hand gun you can still play REAL Russian Roulette with.

II. Footnotes

1. Rebecca Kramer and Nils Lofgren, "Redesigning the Human Genome to Survive on a Climatologically Devastated Earth," Journal of the Centers for the Prevention of Cruelty to Power, 555 (1996): 11.

2. Rebecca Kramer, "Democratizing the Nuclear Button," Pseudo-Scientific American, 108 (2009): 15-67.

3. The belief that the nuclear button was a universal good and should be shared by ALL simultaneously was a popular notion among all ages, classes, genders, and races at this time.

4. Alana Smithee, Buying Off Capitalism (Newark; Asbestos House, 2010), 12-444.

5. Steven Pinker, Your Steenking Piece of Shit Brain, (in progress)

6. Myself and I, "Me, the People", Random House Daily News, 12 (2020): 12.

7. Nature v. Man v. Robot, Circuit Court of the 7th String-Theory-Dimension, 20 Fed. Cas. 1033 (2005)

8. Anonymous, Capitalism and Sex; Love At First Sight (New York; Radon House, 2005), 300.

9. R. Smithee, "Dodecalectics: Why Dialectics is/are for Losers", Zap Comix, 3 (1968): cover.

10. Anonymous Smithee, Planck's Constant and the Speed of Light Walk Into a Bar: A Novel of Manners, (No York; Deterministic House, 2001), passim.

Notes

1. Ditto dying.

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But not one of us would have worshipped him until we were certain that everyone else here worshipped him too. Without a split-second timing among tens of thousands of us that blurred the sequential/parallel divide, celebrity would never have existed.

So where did celebrity come from? Certainly not from us. We were just blindly following each other's lead.

These days we had to go farther and farther just to feel. Maybe it was those genetic things they did to previous generations that we inherited, but the world of people today is all trumped up emotion. Sometimes we even speculate what it must be like in the world of animals.

Three years ago, after failing to make it (get on the gravy train) as composers, and after being laid off from Kudelski, we were suddenly free to (or forced to) roam around Europe and the States broke, cutting things up and running them backwards to look for emergent phenomena -- i.e. unexpected patterns that, when transduced to the right medium in the right way, become significant either to the individual or to his sworn enemy, society.

Eventually we started the first of our many NGOs, Boarding Houses Without Boarders, but quickly experienced the exterminating power of love.

After that, all our subsequent NGOs were based on quantum physics -- if ya know what I mean.

Of course, immediately, the cultural icons of high mediocrity called down their powerful failure of imagination upon us.

And we were forced to retreat to our Alaskan subsidiary, Boarding Houses Without Snow Boarders, where we immediately sat down and fabricated from scratch, a fully-registered and ID-carded, living, breathing, on-paper human being, just to see how far we could shove him up the ladder of straight-ass, kiss-ass achievement in the world of flesh, without a single nucleic or amino acid, let alone the least bit of actual genome.

And now we were sitting in the audience of our "success".

The man on-stage hadn't come from Central Casting, though. He'd come from Central Wipers -- a stretch of abandoned Afghan moonscape beyond the outskirts of Central Square, where all the beat up aspects of reality go to be refurbished again, and so where, obviously, people who try to fabricate a human into the world go to put together his reality when suddenly, like a run on a Ponzi scheme, his existence is questioned by too many people not to answer.

So we rented this stadium and took all the old clothes and stuff we'd bought for practically nothing and laid them out on stage at random and hoped either someone would actually materialize within them or the audience would create a person out of them, in their minds, so that reality would, once again, have to do absolutely no work that day.

And, though we didn't really know what it was that had us all hoping and dreaming and cheering and crying and screaming out now for celebrity-hero salvation, "only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled"1 would have had qualm One about our immediately being whisked off to Stockholm, all expenses paid, to have forced down our throats an emergency combo Nobel Prize for Selfishness, Irresponsibility, and Failure To Come To A Full Stop At A Handwritten Stop Sign 63% Obscured By Mud And Snow.

------------------

Notes

1. Goffman, p. 16

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The Playboy Channel of Schadenfreude would be a channel that, when you turn it on, you'd always see sexual desire pushed to its absolute extreme and then smashed to a whimpering mass by absolute denial.

Attractive men and women of all ages and types would be shown crying screaming tearing themselves apart over sexual desire maximally aroused and then cruelly rejected just moments ago.

The unsophisticated would refer to it as the Blueball Express Channel.

My detractors of course would say, so what's the big deal, it's just more lame reality TV.

But that wouldn't stop me.

I'd go on to invent the Fox News Network of Schadenfreude which would just be all the Fox News anchors and commentators and staff sitting around, on camera, crying and moaning cause the Rapture happened today, and Christ didn't take THEM!

Then I'd create the NFL of Schadenfreude, where every play's a dropped pass, fumble, interception, fumbled interception, failed field goal from the 5, with 3 or 4 career-ending injuries per play on each side, and nobody ever scores and overtime goes on forever, till eventually the players' wives and children have to come in and take over for their deceased and injured spouses and parents, as do the wives and children of the fans.

Then I'd have Julia Childs do a Weekend at Bernie's kinda thing and call it the Cooking Channel of Schadenfreude, where of course not only would all the food taste like shit and come out burned to a crisp, but all the eaters would admit it and get sick on screen, so it's endless eating of charred ugly vile-tasting food and then vomiting it up in exotic restaurants around the world, where it's almost worth it to be eating and puking up shit-tasting food because the surroundings are so exotic and beautiful and the climate is so perfect -- until, that is, the tsunami hits just before dessert.

Then there'd be the History Channel of Schadenfreude, where people would just tell the truth about what happened in the past as well as today.

After that, I'd retire to the planned city I'd build on an island or in Florida -- called Schadenfreude City -- where, all day and night, animatronic people would move around the streets and malls, battered, destroyed, constantly complaining, drunken, broken, impoverished, dismembered, former celebs, fallen stars, in constant pain and rain and snow, while the human (non-animatronic) residents of Schadenfreude City, as well as the many non-animatronic tourists, walk around smiling and happy and carefree and filled with feelings of loving and giving -- and for reasons, they admit, even THEY don't fully understand.

"And if I couldn't do that," I'd tell the people who'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, "then I'll probably be something that ends with the suffix '-pathic' and starts with the prefix 'psycho-' or 'socio-' or 'homeo-'.

"And is followed by the word 'healer'."

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