According to the National Science Foundation, one in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth and, for over a decade, just to get a better idea of how far off the deep end Babylonians have actually gone in recent years, I routinely surveyed people online and discovered that over half of them enjoy making up their own definitions for words found in any common dictionary because, what almost nobody I surveyed was aware of is that, the common dictionary is as common as dirt, and merely contains the most popular definitions, listed in the order of how frequently people use them. Many of these people had advanced degrees, and were making the most well thought out and compelling arguments, but they were all essentially reenacting their own elaborate interpretations, of the classic Three Stooges comedy routine of arguing over the definition of stupid, and who is the better example. Almost none of them saw any significance in my survey, while almost all of them summarily dismissed my claim about the dictionary, and most preferred to keep right on arguing over their definitions, just as you would expect the Three Stooges to respond, if they were to stay in character. In ten years, almost nobody saw any significance in my survey or my answers, and the only other question I asked, was if anyone knew the simple distinction between a lynch mob and a democracy and, in over ten years, not a single person has answered correctly, not even close. If anyone really wants to know the answer, I give it somewhere in this book but, obviously, its not important to know. Attempting to discuss almost anything serious with Babylonians can be challenging, to say the least, because babbling and pointless arguing are time honored traditions, for which they even have a wide variety of intensely competitive schools of thought, but Rainbow Warriors tend to value their words as having a life of their own, that deserves our loving attention and respect. Despite our tremendous respect for words, we also treat them as living things that are just a lot of fun to play with as well, and Rainbow Warriors often enjoy spouting nonsense such as, “You follow the rabbit hole to a Wonderland, where a tornado carries you away to somewhere over the rainbow!” But, personally, I’ve never felt the slightest bit inclined myself to go chasing after rainbows, dust bunnies, butterflies, or mythological rabbit holes, much less, hunt down any damned tornadoes! Still, sometimes we discuss these things, late into the night, and quietly whisper about them amongst ourselves, looking for reassurance, because its part of our weird magical potty humor Poetry Pets mythology and lore, which have a life of their own, that nobody can predict. But the ancient wisdom, the weird mysteries of karma, irritating Poetry Pets, and the occasional inexplicable event, are a far cry from some damned fool actually tumbling down a real, live, magic rabbit hole! Some crazy hippie just took too much acid or something. At least, being a lifelong skeptic and agnostic, that’s what I believed for thirty years as a Rainbow Warrior, only to be rudely awakened upon bumbling down the very same mythological rabbit hole myself, and ending up in the middle of a nightmare episode of the “Twilight Zone” that never aired for good reason! As far as I’m concerned, “Murphy was an optimist who learned his lesson the hard way, that when the student is poorly prepared, the master can be rudely awakened!” That’s my tongue-in-cheek way of saying that the minute you think you know all the answers, you become your own worst student, and nobody’s master, by setting yourself up for a rude awakening! Which is why Murphy remained steadfastly optimistic, right up until the moment the pie hit him in the face! A series of perfectly innocent, mundane, dishwater, ordinary, common as dirt, everyday assumptions on my part, the kinds of stupid crap that nobody in their right mind would ever think twice about, eventually ensured that I would receive my own rude awakening, to the reality of Occam’s Razor being paradoxical in a universe ruled by instant karma! Every explanation being equally context dependent for any demonstrable meaning, makes the simplest explanation all that much more workable and attractive and, thus, all the more frequently, either pleasingly productive or woefully counterproductive! This was the kind of playful bullshit that I had been digging around for in the bowels of the Tao Te Ching, and in all the philosophy and physics that I had studied but, after a few drinks, Murphy was always the optimist in the family, while I required more proof. And, over the long intervening decades, as I diligently continued my research, I became increasingly confused as to whether I was watching the evening news, reality TV, or “Fantasy Island” and, when changing the channel no longer seemed to make any real difference, I realized all the Babylonian fantasies and reality TV were increasingly becoming indistinguishable, as the mindless masses progressively became more out of touch, with their own worst lowbrow slapstick. Thankfully, that meant I no longer needed a TV because, frankly, their fantasies are way too predictable, while their reality TV could not get any uglier! If you ask me, that’s why zombies have become so popular in recent years, because they can sometimes be much more realistic, and even quite attractive and interesting, in their own way, with some shows now having “Zombie of the Week” contests, and “Mystery Zombies”, whose identities are revealed at a later date. When all the Babylonians started to look like zombies to me, that’s when I decided it was time to live the quiet, peaceful life, of a hermit surrounded by Babylonian zombies all plugged into their shiny new devices, only to eventually discover that I had somehow become the recipient of the ancient Chinese blessing and curse of, “May you live in interesting times!” My first clue, that reality was starting to become indistinguishable from fiction, came over the course of routine research, upon my stumbling across the curiouser news, that the US government had admitted to classifying a few jokes as, “Vital to the National Defense” and hinted that congress is investigating and, of course, they have no comment. Growing up a military brat, I’ve met dozens of generals, admirals, politicians, CIA spooks, heads of corporations, and the like, and have some idea of how they think. Besides being injured, the one thing they hate above all else is “Big Surprises” and they’ll occasionally spout nonsense just to confuse their opponents, who often cannot afford to ignore them. Sometimes, spouting a little gibberish, doing a little fancy footwork, and waving your hands dramatically in the air, is all it takes to confuse your opponent and gain the upper hand, and nobody, but nobody, can spout gibberish like a politician! So, I naturally assumed it was either that, or a sadly misguided attempt, to acknowledge the many selfless contributions and tremendous personal sacrifices, made by the countless unsung patriotic clowns and comedians throughout our great country’s history, who are still proudly leading our great country from the rear to this very day, helping to secure our nation’s commanding position upon the throne of international politics and who, understandably, have always humbly preferred that their favorite politicians receive all the credit, for their warped sense of humor! Anywho, having some idea of how all these sales and marketing executives in the White House think, I shrugged it off as just another sign of the times, that all is well, and everybody can rest assured that the Three Stooges still remain very much preoccupied with hedging their bets, by erecting the next level of the Tower of Babel while, simultaneously, preparing for the inevitable collapse. But, of course, it turned out I could not have been more horribly wrong and, once again, the master was about to be rudely awakened, almost a year later, upon my foolishly letting it be widely known, that I was a certifiably brain damaged mentally deranged hippie dippy, intent on writing a book on potty humor, and all hell broke loose! Within days, I was forced to close two email accounts and put linux on my computer, as governments and corporations all began hounding me, and fighting amongst themselves, over who got to read what I wrote first... In the Matrix, they plug right into your brain, but I couldn’t afford anything nearly that fancy, and the only thing I had to get rid of was my crappy Obama phone and the TV that I paid twenty bucks for at an SPCA sale. The only reason I bought the TV in the first place, was that I kept hoping republicans would deregulate the emergency broadcast system, and do whatever they could to make broadcast TV and PBS more interesting, by finally exposing Big Bird as an evil commie plot. But, I guess that was a low priority for them and, normally, I hate talking politics, don’t vote, and prefer to keep my head down and mouth shut around most Babylonians on the subject because sadly, like I keep saying, they’re totally nuts! Half of them insist their political system is corrupt and, some of them, have even formed armed militias to fight corruption in government, and they now have a Tea Party ready to throw everybody else in the country overboard, but you just can’t have a corrupt government or rig anything whatsoever, when every Babylonian always votes for whichever clown screams the loudest! Every Babylonian knows damned well, that its already cash on the barrel head, winner takes all, buyer beware, my way or the highway, because Babylonians always vote for whichever clown screams the loudest! Seriously, they always vote for whoever advertises the most, or screams the loudest, and I wish them a lot of luck with selling their government to the highest bidder and, then, complaining about the service by hiring the loudest clown around but, I don’t even gamble, and I still prefer the idea of pulling a handle on a slot machine. At least that way, there’s a lot less risk of hurting myself like a damned fool, or unnecessarily hurting anyone else for that matter, because I can still distinguish reality from fiction, and when I have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning anything. Babylonian culture is based on people buying all sorts of crap they may never want, need, see with their own two eyes, or even know the first damn thing about. Sometimes, they buy so much crap they have to hire people to buy and sell all of their crap for them and, frequently, they prefer to never know what all these people are actually buying and selling for them. But the best example, is the government they call evil, and claim they are ready to defend to the death, while they secretly prepare to storm the White House with knives and pitch forks! Anthropologists have debated the origins of language, but they now believe it has something to do with being able to make better weapons, win arguments, and spout a good line of crap that people will buy. Their politicians figured out long, long ago, that all they had to do was get enough idiots to keep on listening, and if they kept making up lots of creative buzz words, brand names, and other bullshit, then most of the idiots would just keep on sending them money, or would start to pay other people to shut them up. They actually want you to pay other people to shut them up, because that’s what Professional Wrestling is all about, is lots of good smack talk and a little action. But, its hard to call it “rigged” anymore when the TV guide is the best way to predict the next president, and Donald Duck was only elected president, because its still illegal to vote for Mickey Mouse in the state of Maryland. Around the world legislators literally wrestle on the legislative floor, to prove to their constituents back home, that they are fighting for them, but my personal favorite was a popular porn star they elected to office in Italy. She had quite a brain on her and defended their interests like nobody else ever could have, and was re-elected passing the baton on to her understudy but, everybody knows, Donald Duck was never close to being as popular as Mickey Mouse and, in my opinion, Americans are not quite ready for Mini Mouse yet. Anywho, their culture is based on everybody trying to talking each other to death or attempting to shut each other up, which is why they made it illegal to vote for Mickey Mouse in the state of Maryland, because everybody voting for Mickey would cripple their entire economy. They have 500 TV channels alone, all attempting to talk everybody into giving them more money and, of course, so long as fools keep paying for things they may never see, or never really want anything whatsoever to do with, everybody will just keep on asking them for more money, and they just keep on foolishly listening, or paying more people to shut them up. One of my sisters collects crap all over the house, and has yard sales all the time, so she can make room for more, because she’s a patriot, and a real people person. Their congress has what they call “filibusters” on TV, where they attempt to talk each other to death, and come pretty damned close if you ask me, and they have TV news shows where they rate their performance like sport casters, and invite reality TV celebrities for their input. I lived in the Washington DC area, and everybody in the area knows that all the hot air comes off capital hill, so damned hot, it never stops even when congress takes a break in summer, to avoid overwhelming the air conditioning system, and possibly killing all the tourists in the immediate downtown area, who aren’t used to the local heat. And, everybody also knows that Babylonians today have more money than they do time, and they frequently give people money just to shut them up, and make them go away. Sometimes to make their own husbands, wives, and kids go away and, sadly, all too often today, spending money and making people go away, are some of the very few things remaining in this Mad, Mad, Mad World that makes a lot of Babylonians feel good anymore. But, I had no money, I was never any good at bugging people for money, never cared to be around people who don’t want me around, and never cared for reality TV, Professional Wrestling, commie propaganda, or whatever the hell the young people are calling politics these days and, so, I eventually just got rid of my TV and telephone. The Babylonians were still fighting over exactly how to carve up the entire world wide web into new and exciting competitive sales territories, (with, of course, the occasional quasi-third world puppet-dictatorships, the ones with all the really neat sweatshops, where you can find great deals on counterfeit items if you buy in quantity), and I figured I might be able to use the Internet for maybe a year or two longer, and avoid all the robocalls and endless gibberish on the radio and TV but, of course, then they hacked into my computer and email accounts. These days, any graphics card that can play modern video games can crack an email password in 30 seconds flat, and what Microsoft and Google were arguing with the NSA over was, who gets the first chance to put spyware on my computer, read all my emails, and rape me of 40 years of private research. The French, Russians, and everybody else you could shake a stick at, were all getting in on the act, but if the Chinese were there, they were quiet as usual. The whole bunch were following the paparazzi around, like a half dozen or more packs of wolves, just leisurely strolling behind the vultures, snapping at each other, while surveying the landscape, slobbering and sniffing the air, licking their chops, and looking around to see who had the tastiest morsels to gobble up first! The whole scene reminded me of sheep herders in New Zealand who kept finding sores on the backs of all their sheep and, finally, one of them they got a hold of an infrared night vision camera. They watched in morbid fascination as a small parrot flew down from the trees in the dark, landed on the backs of one of their sheep, and began pecking away at its back to get an easy meal. Of course, sheep can’t see in the dark and are so stupid that, they would stand perfectly still, and protest mildly because they could not sleep. Except, these were not tiny parakeets attempting to prove the superiority of the dinosaurs, on the contrary, these were wolves and vultures on the Internet, the likes of which I am somewhat familiar with, because I grew up around CIA spooks, Navy Seals, politicians, and the like who can raise the hair on the back of anyone’s neck, without ever having to say a word, and make a lot of people suddenly crave a hot shower. Since the end of WWII, the European Union had repeatedly complained about US submarines being used to tap underwater phone lines, and other high tech equipment being used to spy on all their phone calls, in order to give away their industrial secrets to their American competitors, and the EU had made quantum encryption a priority. Without a doubt, I knew that the wolves and vultures I was seeing on the Internet, were capable of making even the Mafia more paranoid, because they represented the very tips of enormous icebergs capable of sinking any ship in the world, and that could casually vaporize little old me with their latest particle beam weapons, as if I had never existed in this universe. These vultures were vicious opportunists, that actually prefer to eat their food while its still alive and, assuming it was already dead, the crap they eat would make you puke just to look at it, while the little nibbles the wolves take out of your email account and personal computer, are just to see if they like the taste! One of my best friends in high school was a Navy Seal, just like his proud father, who spent most of his career tracking other billionaire vultures in the South American drug cartels, just waiting for the word to pull the trigger. While my other best friend in high school was the son of a CIA spook and, without ever having met these people, I knew who they were almost as well as I know my own family, with my father once introducing me to Stormin’ Norman himself in the Crystal City underground. He was likely to become the next president of the US, that is, before he fell from grace in Pentagon political circles, after posing for an underwear commercial. Heads of corporations, AI experts, physicists, philosophers, gurus, artists, and people from all walks of life, began lining up online to talk to me, about my exciting new book on potty humor, that I had just begun to write! I’m pretty sure Oprah sent someone to my front door, because I don’t have a back door, and in the grand democratic tradition of capitalist markets everywhere, privacy and freedom of speech had become priceless regulated commodities, bought and sold whenever possible, on the NY Stock Exchange. Already cops across the country had started confiscating people’s cellphones and cameras whenever they attempted to use them to photograph them in action while, for the most part, the sheeple just blinked in confusion, and shrugged it off, along with everything else they had tolerated, so long as they themselves felt safe and secure and, of course, the money and the guns kept coming. Soon enough, the government would have the technology to cheaply install high resolution cameras across the country, tracking systems that can trace any gunshot instantly back to its source, bullets that can follow people around corners, gigapixel cameras in orbit that can read every gum wrapper on every sidewalk on Manhattan island, simultaneously using a single photograph, cellphones that can look right through your cloths from across the street, shoe boxes that can look through the walls of your house, and drones that are indistinguishable at a glance from a swarm of butterflies, or other insects, and can hover so silently, you’d never know they were right behind your head, prepared to track you down to the ends of the earth, just to record the expression on your face when they explode. All in response to the American Empire finally dominating the Soviet Union, with one wit noting that, the price of freedom in the free world shot through the roof, the minute the Soviet Union collapsed. A few Americans started immigrating out of the country, to such far away exotic places as Canada, which has something more closely approximating a functional government, far fewer social problems, a higher average standard of living and, of course, endless real estate in prime locations for global warming! Having first conquered the Germans and the Japanese, and successfully compelling them all to go back to work for the banks, and having finally vanquished the Russians halfway around the world, and successfully compelling the Chinese to also return to work in their sweatshops and supply them with cheap products again, the Empire was now preoccupied converting a great deal of their resources to suppressing the peasants and terrorists in the far flung provinces starting, of course, with those at home. They were developing cheaper automated ways of being able to keep track of everybody, predict their behavior, round them up like so many cattle and, if necessary, kill them without spending a small fortune blowing up mud huts and searching through caves, or making an unnecessary fuss or a scene, blowing up children’s hospitals or whatever. Whoever has the best AI to keep track of it all, can charge a premium for the slightest bit of privacy and freedom of speech with, of course, the government to back them up, and regulate the market because, obviously, as George Orwell himself already pointed out, Big Brother’s problem was he was too busy indulging himself in the pathetic souls of the mindless masses, when he should have paid more attention to the business at hand, of going for their wallets first, by selling them a better line of crap. When someone once defected from the Soviet Union and reporters asked him his impression of the free world, his only criticism was, “We knew we were being lied to!” Whether she wanted the job or not, Oprah’s only choice was to either play welcome wagon, or little red riding hood, but she had not one, but a hundred wolves to contend with! What I soon discovered with a little investigation, is that many of them were after the bullshit fuzzy logic our Oneness Poems contain, because their mathematics can be used for anything from predicting the weather, to designing 800mph cruise missile guidance systems! When is a joke no longer just a joke? Whenever nobody is laughing or it just so happens to have practical applications, and I had stopped laughing because my stupid potty humor jokes, had way too damned many practical applications! While vultures and wolves nobody in their right mind would ever want to have any business to do with, were attempting to steal them, and taking way too much interest in me as an individual, for my personal comfort. Corporations were spending billions of dollars on research, including at least two computer systems dedicated to nothing but spitting out jokes, that could be analyzed for any useful mathematics. Some of my most cherished childhood memories were being used for research into weapons of mass destruction, artificial intelligence, and quantum mechanics and, the wolves were feasting with impunity all over Babylon in recent decades. Corporations were taking out patents on people’s DNA without even requiring their knowledge and consent, and had attempted to patten even the rectangular shape of a cellphone, with enormous high tech companies transforming their entire business models to researching whatever fundamentally new ideas and technology they could buy, steal, develop, copyright, and patent, and they were now in the process of converting over to AI, based on potty humor jokes older than monuments, which had suddenly become more valuable than gold. The problem was, creating them was as much a mathematical art as anything else, and nobody had a clue as to how any of the new artificial intelligences they had created actually worked, only that they were all critically flawed in unpredictable ways, nonetheless, they were also increasingly indispensable due to their being outrageously faster and more efficient than any other available technology, and slowly replacing even the stock market traders. The Pentagon warned congress that they faced not only increased terrorist attacks, but a national security crisis due to both the military and civilian corporations becoming increasingly dependent on unpredictable artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies still currently under development. In response to the imminent threats, from both without and from within, congress turned gerrymandering into a modern science, authorized the military to round up citizens like so many cattle, made all the necessary preparations, constructed camps to house them in, and had long since suspended our constitutional rights indefinitely, with the Pentagon having a Christmas sale, selling military grade weapons, armored personal carriers, and robots to police departments across the country. All around the same time that, in the ancient Roman tradition, they finished walling in every ghetto, importing twelve million peasants, crippling the unions, replacing countless mental institutions with prison dungeons, and destroying small towns and family farms across the country. Then proceeded to use blue smoke and mirrors to put the American taxpayers, with a balanced budget, over 20 trillion dollars in debt and put the entire EU and rest of the world in even worse debt, without anyone ever going to jail. When Iceland refused to bend over and grease their ass for the banks, and proceeded to throw those responsible in jail, both the US and EU protested, but tiny Iceland was self-sufficient, and not even worth bombing off the map. The Babylonians had been babbling nonsensically for so long, none of them had a clue as to how they could defend themselves, and when a third world man in the middle of nowhere set himself on fire to protest the pigs confiscating his fruit cart, his only means of making a living, it was the spark that ignited protests around the world. An estimated 1,700 international conglomerates, now ran the entire world economy and, when Occupy Wall Street began, I could see right away that some of them where likely part of my Rainbow Family, and I knew exactly what they were doing, and could possibly even give them a few minor pointers, despite never having done anything remotely like that in my life. But, that’s only because I know how they think, better than I know how all the insane Babylonians think. Anarchists, like those in my Rainbow Family, have not participated much in American politics for over a century but, one of the hazards of thinking differently, is that you never know where it will lead you next, which of course, in politics is more often the ancient Chinese blessing and curse. Sometimes, you takes your chances, and try to be open to the endless possibilities in life, and these hippies simply decided to try something, anything short of setting themselves on fire or throwing themselves to the wolves, and it just so happened to work, far better than any of them had ever imagined in their wildest dreams. They stayed just long enough to teach the Babylonians the difference between a lynch mob and a democracy, to show them how to shut their mouths, wait your damned turn to talk, stop spouting crap nobody else wants to hear, and learn how to listen if it kills you! And, only then Grass Hopper, does it become possible to appreciate the raw power of any group with the conviction of knowing they all think, speak, and act with one voice and purpose, because they trust each other to not waste their time, ranting and raving like a mindless mob, or pushing their private agendas. Teaching them how to learn to be still or embrace the silence as golden was beyond their ability, but they did what they could to encourage the Babylonians to stop babbling, to start listening, to relearn yet again how to trust their own people, how to gain each other’s respect as equals, and how to organize. But, to do all that, required that they learn their first and hardest lesson, that they had forgotten how to listen to their own hearts and had become self-defeating, mindlessly ranting and raving, while voting for whichever clown screams the loudest. Only when you can hear the hearts of others, can anybody else ever truly appreciate your words, and only when the majority can hear the hearts of the people, is true democracy possible. Eventually though, knowing that they had done all that they could to encourage the Babylonians to stop babbling, and try to listen to their hearts, listen to each other, and build trust again, the anarchists all left, having learned from personal experience, that the Babylonians had a long road to walk down. In the name of National Security, the government sent spies among the peaceful protesters attempting to identify them, and take down names. Soon afterwards, the pigs pepper sprayed an 80 year old grandmother right in front of the cameras and pepper sprayed some 30 college students sitting peacefully on the ground, shot a veteran in the head with a tear gas canister giving him brain damage, and then Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of NYC, had his pigs arrest 26 reporters in one day, only to get a slap on wrist. The mass media declined to sue the man knowing that, even with all their full time lawyers, they could never make any money trying. Likewise, few newspapers ever bothered to run the story as a front page news item, knowing perfectly well, that Americans today could not care less about such things. Despite all their denials, a clear majority of Americans also insist that the government they call evil, lie to them for their own protection, while they all run around shouting, “Off With Their Heads!” Babylonians invented yellow journalism, and even their television news these days sometimes legally define themselves as “entertainment” shows, so they can spout all the vicious lies their viewers demand, without getting their asses sued off. One court in Florida found Fox News perfectly within their rights to fire two reporters, for refusing to lie on the air about an egregious public health hazard, and the idea that democracy requires an informed electorate and impartial judicial system, had long since been replaced with the requirement, that the mindless mob at least be distracted and entertained. Asking people afterwards, I discovered that, predictably, few knew that reporters were being arrested, nor did many appear particularly concerned. Guns and money were doing all the talking worth listening to in Babylon and, in Texas, they had just acquitted a man of killing a hooker for stealing a hundred dollars. My anarchist brothers and sisters were all too keenly aware, that the national response to terrorism had been to make life cheaper to buy with each passing year, depending on your state, locality, and the ethnicity and social status of the individual. Already, half of all homicides go unsolved, there are more gun dealers in Babylon today than there are gas stations, and fewer gun laws than most third world countries, with some of the gun rights advocates finding creative ways to commit mass murder using automatic weapons. Meanwhile, the KKK has declared they are transforming their entire organization, into a kinder-gentler form of racism, and have made such a successful comeback, rumor has it they might soon have their own cable TV channel bundled with Fox News, Professional Wrestling, and all the televangelists, who are banding together in self-defense, because reality TV is taking over everything, even moving into the White House! As entitlements have gone up, the poor have abandoned church services en mass, and now watch televangelists to pass the time, while waiting in their social security offices. Of course, Americans are a classless society, who only import peasants for cheap labor, only wall in the ghettos to protect the occupants, and only offer their military personal food stamps, in recognition of their service, and not to imply that they have a surplus of cheap cannon fodder, which they are about to replace with robots. The embattled middle class is now attending church services in record numbers, praying for more free time, guns, money, and next generation iPhones while, of course, discretely conducting a little business on the side... In Arizona, the courts decided it was legal for the cops to claim they smelled pot and bust down any door they wanted, without ever requiring a warrant. When the pigs got the wrong address, they shot a two time Gulf War veteran 32 times in front of his mother, as he shoved the rest of his family in the closet and grabbed his assault rifle. They were acquitted, of course, and some courts have even begun to compel people to testify against themselves, deciding they were guilty until proven otherwise. One of the Babylonian senators wrote a book called, “To Harass Our People”, comparing the IRS to the Nazi SS, and showing they had more power and abused it more often, to push different political agendas, with the public complaining whenever the IRS updated their computers, that they were targeting the little guys. Congress had given the president the authority of God almighty himself, to torture and kill anyone on the planet, or to even declare war if he wanted, without so much as ever having to bother to mention it to anyone. All across the country, cops were using warrentless searches and wiretaps, the NSA was routinely reading a third of the country’s emails, while the Babylonian constitution had become an expensive piece of toilet paper that, nobody I knew could afford to buy! Yet, the Babylonians just kept mindlessly ranting and raving in their growing frustration, at their continuing inability after nearly half a century, to eliminate corruption in their government, by voting for whichever clown screams the loudest. The south was determined to rise again, at least onto its knees, and the Governor of Texas threatened to secede from the union, while the Mexican cartels warned him, that they would start to take it personally, if he kept spouting that kind of smack. The Babylonians now have the best justice that money and guns can buy, but nobody I know in my Rainbow Family has ever wanted either guns or money and, meanwhile, I had just learned that my entire family and their living legacy were in danger. In that moment, I swore an oath to never reveal the ancient secrets of our magical potty mouth nursery rhymes to the insane Babylonians, unless I was absolutely, positively, certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the insidious-alien-anal-probe-mind-control-conspiracy-behind-the-Illuminati, could never possibly taint the memory of my most beloved childhood potty mouth nursery rhymes and whack-a-mole Rainbow Warrior Poetry Pets! Which, as irritating as they can be, they are still very much a cherished part of my family damn it! And, one of the few fucking things left in this Mad, Mad, Mad World that has any damned meaning for me! Wondering what my childhood hero, Mr Spock, might say under the circumstances, or if I should consult Dr Spock instead, I debated the wisdom of ever cracking another joke. How was I going to break the news to my loving Rainbow Family, that their amazing timeless tradition of harmless, potty humor, and Oneness Poetry Pets, that billions of people worldwide enjoy and some 350 million people even worship as a religion, has become the latest battleground for governments and corporations fighting over profits, AI, and weapons research? Should I even bother to say anything, knowing there’s virtually nothing anyone can do to stop them? Thankfully, I soon discovered that there is light at the end of the tunnel, in the news that supercomputers will soon be capable of spitting out Rainbow Warrior poems by the thousands, along with the mathematical foundations for a “Theory of Everything!” Rejoice all you adorable clowns! Comedy is about to get the high tech treatment, and neither academia, Vaudeville, nor the rest of the world will ever be the same again! As exciting and just plain mind-boggling as the news was, and still is for me personally, nobody I know can really wrap their head around the idea that the next scientific revolution will be based on a joke. Which is one reason I finally decided to write this book, to explore the implications and, ironically, in the hope of inspiring Babylonians to start taking some of their own worst lowbrow slapstick a little more seriously. For a Theory of Everything to be capable of describing everything, it must also describe humor, and civilization is about to receive the biggest pie-in-the-face in the history of humanity, a “Bullshit Theory of Everything and Nothing”, with the biggest question yet remaining to be answered being, who has the deepest pile of crap imaginable, that actually fits all the scientific observations. All the leading theories incorporate cartoonish yin-yang push-pull dynamics, but knowing all that did not solve my immediate problem, with all these insane Babylonians running around online, stealing potty humor jokes older than monuments, from even infants! Right after the evil corporations steal all the candy from the babies! With EA video games even beating out Bank of America for the worst company of the year award! Growing up a military brat sometimes has its advantages, because it was immediately obvious to me that all these governments and corporations had known all this for possibly decades and had been preparing all long and, in the ensuing confusion, were now attempting to take full advantage of the situation. These are people who tend to have twenty year plans and perfect crocodile smiles they practice in the mirror, and many of them had planned for this day in elaborate detail. They knew damned well that, very soon, computers will be so powerful there won’t be anything remotely like a database, of any size on the planet, that they won’t be able to instantly squeeze like a grape, for every last drop of valuable information they want. That means whoever has the biggest database, fastest and most efficient computers and robots and crap, wields the biggest stick with which to pound their competition into the dirt but, without the Theory of Everything, all these governments and corporations still required the mathematics contained in potty humor jokes older than monuments. Once your computer is big enough and fast enough to handle just about anything your business might conceivably need, for say the next ten or twenty years, many would assume you really just don’t need anything better, and they get rather expensive. But, already over a third of all stock market transactions are done by computers, and if you don’t have the biggest, fastest, and most efficient AI, robots, and all that crap out there, you are quite possibly the next little fish about to be eaten. And, these wolves online were making long lists, for the next twenty years of fine dinning in which they intended to indulge themselves in, while keeping an eye out for anyone they might possibly sucker into buying something, and how they might best thin out the herd, as well as their competition, to their own advantage. Of course, you have to stay in shape, watch your waist, and your supply lines too, but its modern Game theory, which suggests that evolution is all about staying two punch lines ahead of your opponent, so they never see it coming. Most of these governments and corporations were probably well aware that the next generation of supercomputers were about to spit out a Theory of Everything, and were merely taking advantage of all the confusion in the interim. Its what’s known as “disruptive technology”, and the problem was that the Pentagon and the corporations had created their own monster, with the technology now advancing so rapidly that nobody could keep up. Size does matter, and the Pentagon spends more money in a year than most countries make, with an entire city next door, Crystal City, dedicated to nothing except developing, buying, and selling weapons, which happen to be the largest manufactured export of the US but, now, the technology itself has begun to take on a life of its own and is rapidly becoming more unpredictable every year. Already, it had become clear, that almost the entire bureaucracy of the government and corporations, could much more efficiently be replaced with the newest AI in development. Isaac Asimov had it backwards, and robots cost money to build, while the technology actually made it cheaper to replace most white collar jobs first, rather than blue collar ones. Yet, despite the deepening mystery of quantum mechanics, and of all of these critically flawed and unpredictable AI being based on potty humor jokes older than monuments, nonetheless, they were indispensable for their outrageous efficiency. Nothing could compete with the newer AI commonly being not only indispensable for certain tasks, but a thousand times more efficient than all the available alternatives while, inexplicably, quantum systems can be well over 100% efficient, and there was a race to be the first to develop the technology. In addition to all of their other problems, in their rush to dominate the Soviet Union and the rest of the world, the Pentagon had been delayed by fifteen years, when the current electronics revolution was unexpectedly derailed, by the unforeseen discovery of a physical limitation in silicon, which forced the entire industry to convert to much more complicated multicore processing. After fifteen years of progress slowing to a steady crawl, decades of dedicated research throughout the entire industry, were all coming to fruition at once and, the only thing that anybody knew for certain was that, within another two decades at most, nothing would ever be the same again. Their technology was rapidly becoming indistinguishable from magic, and even the experts and science fiction fans could no longer agree on what might come next. That might sound like an exaggeration, but NASA was planning to test the first reactionless drive in space which, inexplicably, produces thrust in a vacuum without radiating anything or spitting anything out the back, in direct volation of Newton’s third law of motion. What haunted the Pentagon, was all the uses that eight billion people could think up for all that technology that was starting to boarder on magic, when they were already struggling to comprehend and control the monster they had already created. One thing was certain, there would soon be a mad scramble to reinvent the entire world economy in somebody’s image, or the computers and robots would start to reshape the world in their own. Not that most Babylonians would ever notice any difference for many years to come. If ever, with Babylonians today increasingly preferring to replace each other with machines, and preferring to deal with machines exclusively. A 13 year old boy was once treated for refusing to speak anything other than the computer language known as “basic”, and the machines had begun to master languages, with the Japanese specializing in making them much more friendly and approachable, than your average Babylonian. Which, of course, is pretty easy to do, and has inspired the porn industry and the Pentagon both, to invest heavily in virtual reality and robotics, while Japanese women have been loudly complaining in recent years, that it is already difficult enough to get laid, in a country of extremely polite workaholics. Top of the food chain predators, casually feasting, feuding, joking, and jockeying for position at the feeding trough so heatedly, that even Hollywood and the Mass Media would never touch this one with more than a ten foot pole, for fear of loosing more than just a few fingers. Jokes older than monuments had suddenly become state and corporate secrets, spy-verses-spy stuff more valuable than gold, and crucial to the latest AI and spooky quantum weapons research, but Hollywood would never film a remake of “Spy Hard” or “Its a Mad, Mad, Mad World” until after the “Bullshit Theory of Everything and Nothing” was revealed. That way, they could not only survive the experience intact but, using all the new AI technology provided by the theory, they might be able to film an endless series of new classics on a budget, all in virtual reality using different AI, and never have to deal with the actor’s union or the writer’s guild again. Nevertheless, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep a lid on the reality of the situation, that they were all fighting over potty humor jokes older than monuments, and not a single one amongst them had a damned clue, as to what the hell all this insanity was leading up to! Countries around the world began rushing to establish their own multi-billion dollar industry consortiums, all dedicated to fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, and quantum mechanics, with everyone paying talent scouts through the nose, to find anyone vaguely resembling Steve Jobs, Dr Strangelove, Pee Wee Herman, or Pinkie and the Brain, working out of secured places like area 51. Everybody was taking every opportunity, to steal talent, jokes, and data from one another, import from all around the planet, and double checking, just to be sure that Elvis has left the building. Due to the technology predictably becoming cheaper, the biggest players were now orchestrating the entire feeding frenzy, and fighting over the spoils, with the whole industry now poised worldwide, to begin adding AI to every computer chip manufactured, so they could more easily control the distribution of information. Britannia may have ruled the waves, but the question on everyone’s mind is, “What doesn’t the American Global Empire dominate?” The Babylonians rule both above and below the waves, the north pole and the south pole, the clouds and outer space, routinely winning half the Nobel Prizes and half the Olympic gold medals, dominating global economic markets, installing puppet dictatorships in countless countries whenever convenient, all in a day’s work, with the dollar underscoring virtually every economy in the world, and the Empire now seeking to dominate the distribution of goods and information worldwide and, of course, become your one stop source for all your shopping needs and financial investments. While I had rather modest ambitions myself, with my wildest fantasy being when I first began writing, that I might develop the first self-consistent, nontrivial, and demonstrable Contextual philosophy, that reconciles eastern and western philosophy. That is, linguistic analysis, not exactly Vaudeville material, light reading, or political commentary, nor did I ever intend to publish anything. Since I’m not trained in anything, never really expected to get anywhere, and it was never my intention to write a book, much less, this damned comedy! Nobody, but nobody, has ever considered me more than mildly funny before, often complaining my sense of humor is corny if anything, nor have I ever written anything remotely like a book before, since I only have a high school education. But, that was the whole problem, is that even living as a hermit, without so much as a damned telephone, the really awful lowbrow slapstick kept dogging me at every turn, invading my private research and life, as if the universe itself were mocking me. There’s a guy I know, who knows a guy, who lives in a cave in Maine, where the weirdest thing in the whole state is Stephen King and, I started to think to myself, maybe I could rent a room and cover the walls with tin foil because, the one thing every military brat knows all too damned well, is that military intelligence is an oxymoron! Three Stooges slapstick, spy-vs-spy stuff, jokes older than monuments, Donald Duck, Dr Strangelove, Steve Jobs, Pee Wee Herman, Pinkie and the Brain, combined with unpredictable artificial intelligence, Star Trek technology, and quantum mechanics, is a sure fire recipe for total disaster! And, I simply could not ignore the fact that NASA was already making plans to test the first reactionless drive in space, which is essentially a sealed microwave oven, without so much as a door or window, that can cook your Thanksgiving day turkey in record time while, inexplicably, producing thrust in a vacuum. Its a stupid microwave oven, and nobody has a damned clue how it works, while Babylonians are insane enough to give such technology to anybody with the money to pay for it. And, what I knew about all the other technology under development, was enough to make anyone think twice about moving into a cave! That is, until it became overwhelmingly undeniable, that the obvious explanation for everything was that I had somehow stumbled off the reservation, and was simply no longer in Kansas anymore Dorothy! Somehow I had unwittingly plunged head first into a real live magic rabbit hole leading to a Wonderland, that was a constant reminder of why, to this very day, I remain a die-hard science fiction fan! From the very beginning, no matter what I did, I just could not eliminate the awful thread of humor in everything that I researched and wrote, all coming back to haunt me every time, until I finally decided to explore the humor by extrapolating Rainbow Warrior poetry for the first time, using my favorite, the incredibly lucid, Peter Merel GNL interpolation of the Tao Te Ching. Most westerners prefer more flowery romantic versions, Asians tend to prefer impenetrable mysticism but, being brain damaged, my only interest has always been in the mesmerizing depths of the Tao Te Ching’s outrageously convoluted bullshit fuzzy logic. It can turn anyone’s brain into a pretzel and, due to my brain damage, I may struggle to remember your name, but I can work a Rubic’s Cube in my head, and our Oneness Poetry is all about symmetry, or mathematics. Merel’s version neither hides nor exaggerates anything, only has three minor flaws in its logic, and its available for free online! Of the well known schools of thought, my personal philosophy is similar to “Philosophical Taoism”, “Chuang Taoism”, and that of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stephen Pepper however, rather than knowledge, authenticity is the central issue. The particular combination of tools and knowledge that I just happened to bring to the table, as an obsessed brain damaged amateur hippie, would prove to be unbeatable when combined with my beloved Rainbow Warrior poetry. The Tao Te Ching has always struck me as containing a hidden systems logic, buried somewhere within its depths, that can make a great deal more sense out of the text, but in the 2,500 years since it was first published, nobody has ever figured out what that systems logic might be exactly, and the idea that a brain damaged mentally deranged hippie dippy like me could ever figure it out was laughable. Despite being brain damaged, I like to think I’m a pretty smart guy and know a thing or two, but I don’t know Chinese, never so much as took a Tai Chi class in my life, only have a high school education, and I know people with a 180 IQ or better who can easily make me feel like I’m three years old. Not least of all, I know that intelligence can only take you so far, and doesn’t mean squat, if you can no longer appreciate what’s missing from this picture, which is why “Gonzo the Muppet” is a flaming genius! While I appreciate humor as much as the next guy, I was merely using the text to explore my personal philosophy, which is something that only a handful of people have ever expressed much interest in. Nevertheless, the persistent thread of awful humor invading my solitude, and now threatening my work, stubbornly refused to go away and, for the first time ever, I turned to extrapolating Rainbow Warrior poetry in order to find out exactly what the hell the joke was about, and how I might account for it better. Attempting a simple experiment, I quickly generated a reasonable “potty mouth lexicon” of all the vague words like “bullshit”, useful for writing a variety of jokes, then went through Merel’s translation as fast as I could, making changes almost Willie-Nilly when, four hours later my jaw hit the floor, as I realized I had managed the impossible, and the hit the jackpot. There are well over a hundred English language translations of the Tao Te Ching published today, a wide range of Rainbow Warrior poems and other Oneness Poems, and I’ve read a lot of them and I’ve also seen other people half-heartedly attempt to do what I had just done, and all failed miserably, spitting out essentially meaningless gibberish, of no redeeming value whatsoever. But, no matter how many times I looked it over, it was clear that I had only made four major logic errors, two of which were easy to fix, and two would be serious trouble, but were doable. Its a different kind of linguistic mathematics that are all about symmetry, and if you comprehend the basic metaphoric logic you can perceive the symmetries and see what will and won’t work. For over a decade, I had studied Contextualism and played around with linguistic analysis and, as I began extrapolating poems in earnest, I invented my own version of “Bullshit Linguistic Analysis” that combines linguistics, mathematics, and physics by merely attempting to describe what’s missing from this picture. This sort of lowbrow armchair philosophical speculation is popular among Babylonians, which is why it has never interested me, but my purpose was to merely use the humor to extrapolate the logic I was after and, quite often, I have to tell people repeatedly that, I just do the math, I just crunch the numbers, and allow the words to express their own emotions. Understandably, most people have difficultly conceiving of poetry as being mathematical, and assume I’m merely being modest, but Rainbow Warrior poems incorporate an enormous wealth of commonly used phrases, popular characters, themes, and song lyrics, precisely because everybody recognizes right away what works best and what doesn’t, and we really don’t have any choice as to what we write. Ironically, I’ve had women beg me to write more sexy poems, only to have to inform them that, sometimes, I’ve worked on the logic of a poem for decades, before having the slightest clue as to what the poem was supposed to be about, and I credit the mathematics, mother nature, and popular culture, for most of the aesthetics and, if I do my job right, its actually the poetry that provides me with greater personal insights as to what it all means, with the insights of each poem supporting those of all the other poems. The joke about Oneness Poetry is that the only requirement for writing our poems is you have to be masochistic enough to do all the editing it demands. It really is enough mindless editing to make anyone fall to their knees begging for mercy, but they’re all logic problems to me that just so happen to also express emotions, within the overall theme of mildly adult and childish potty humor and, if I get the bullshit fuzzy logic right, the words will express their own emotions. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my brain damage had transformed me a sort of biological computer for this kind of work, and I was about to unwittingly boot up my operating system for the first time, and plunge head first down a giant rabbit hole, that half the world knows as the “Mother of All” and “Great Void” from whence: Abandon All Hope, All Yea Who Enter!!! Of ever returning to the same planet again!
All the jokes in this section are a good example of how much mindless editing this style of writing requires, and why it took me seven years to collect and shuffle all the metaphors, before I could even begin to figure out what goes in the first chapter. The entire book expresses a fractal dragon equation, and attempting to guess where it leads next is counterproductive. You just keep shuffling and editing and attempting to see more of the big picture, and all the little details fill themselves in, until you think you've finally got it right. The entire book has to be rewritten at least five times in this manner, and many times I thought I had different parts right only to realize it had to be rewritten. I have some 300 pages of poetry and about as many chapters, all jamb packed with metaphors that have to be shuffled simultaneously like a giant jig-saw puzzle. It requires studying six to ten English language translations of the Tao Te Ching for at least fifteen years to be considered to have any chance of ever finishing a book like this. The Chinese sometimes call poetry extrapolated from the the Tao Te Ching "The Book That Can Never Be Written", in part, because to express the entire book would require 4,430 poems, some of which, are pornographic in Chinese.
