Unabomber sale!

In a desperate bid to hang onto his fading fame, 1990s serial killer Ted Kaczynski is holding a crazy online auction.

The virtual garage sale, which was authorized by the U.S. District Court in California on Thursday, will benefit the families of Kaczynski's victims.

Items offered from his mountain lair include a hatchet, several of his infamous hooded sweatshirts, hundreds of history books, multiple versions of his manifesto and simple bomb-making tools.

"The Unabomber" was a media sensation in the 1990s.

His Luddite manifesto was published in big-time newspapers and his classic hoodie-and-shades look was heavily copied by wannabe hard players.

But home-grown terrorists lost their popularity after 9/11, because all terrorist activity is now said to be done by crazy Muslims from the Middle East rather than a crazy mathematical genius from Chicago living in a forest shack.

Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski was considered one of the finest modern minds when it came to advanced math such as geometric function theory, which is so complex that only a handful of people even understand the concept.

But for myriad reasons, Kaczynski was "socially retarded." So much smarter than normal people that he was pushed ahead to Harvard when he was only 16 years old, he never fit in and never had friends.

Suspiciously, he was chosen to take part in "psychological experiments" run by mad scientist Dr. Henry A. Murray, the psychologist who worked for the U.S. government's Office of Strategic Services -- which became the CIA after World War II.

Dr. Murray was instrumental in preparing the "Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler" for OSS spy chief William "Wild Bill" Donovan.

After whatever Murray did to the young, meek math wizard, Kaczynski was even more withdrawn.

He became a math professor at Berkeley in 1967, where he creeped out students and staff. In 1969, he quit without explanation and seemingly vanished from the world.

For a decade, he lived quietly in a mountain shed. And in 1978, he sent his first mail bomb. His targets were colleges, airlines, retail computer stores and even public-relations executives. His crude bombs eventually hurt 29 people and killed 3 victims.

The G-men gave him the codename UNABOM, for "University and Airline Bomber." The media eventually turned that into "Unabomber."

In 1995, the New York Times and Washington Post supported terrorism and printed his entire 35,000-word manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future."

The newspapers did this at the request of the U.S. Justice Department. While many were outraged over the federal government again supporting terrorists, FBI analysts argued that meeting the Unabomber's demand would actually help track him down, as somebody might be able to recognize his writing and theories.

And it worked, the FBI claimed, because Kaczynski's brother David reportedly recognized Ted's writing style and called the cops.

But the unintended result of the publication was that many of the top people in the technology industry were absolutely haunted by the Unabomber's conclusions.

Bill Joy -- "cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems and co-chair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research" -- found himself "most troubled" by Kaczynski's warning of a coming dystopia where robots either rule humanity or serve a tiny global elite who choose to exterminate the billions of undesirables:

"[T]he average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal 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."

Just 10 years later, much of Kaczynski's "paranoid fantasy" is reality. Total surveillance and constant bombardment by corporate and government propaganda has softened the citizens of industrialized nations to any possible rebellion.

Citizens are now "consumers," so addicted to the Internet that knowledge of constant illegal spying on their every online activity hasn't even led to calls to abandon the technology, let alone any actual reduction in usage. In fact, hours and money spent on the Internet have seen double-digit growth this year alone.

And instead of reducing dependence on telephones after it was revealed that all calls are illegally logged and tracked by the federal government, protest was limited to the suggestion that people concerned about civil liberties transfer their business to one of the few telecom companies that hasn't yet admitted complicity in the domestic-spying scandal.

A long government "health campaign" in the United States has succeeded in making much of the population sick from chronic disease and so obese that they're physically incapable of doing much more than sitting on a sofa watching war and crime propaganda, while federal education efforts have succeeded in significantly reducing the population's ability to read, write and think critically -- as compared to both earlier generations of educated Americans as well as modern-day populations in Europe and industrialized Asia.

The world's most populous country and fastest-growing "capitalist" state, China, has brutally enforced birth-rate reduction and brazenly killed and tortured dissidents with no reprisals from "democratic" nations that fuel its dynamic economic growth.

And in five short years, an ambiguous "anti-terror crusade" has replaced all humanist ideology, democratic debate and civil liberties in the world's lone military superpower.

Most American factory labor is already performed by robots. As millions of working-class people in the United States have already learned, the value of a human completely depends on his or her worth as a consumer. When a human is no longer required for factory labor or industrialized farming -- either because the work is now performed by robots or done overseas for pennies on the dollar -- their value as a consumer is obliterated.

As a General Motors analyst recently said about the nation's 110,000 auto-factory robots, "They're almost human, but they don't seem interested in organizing."

If the Unabomber's horrifying scenarios are correct, the next stage will be the culling of the herd, or the killing off of those who serve no purpose to the robots and their human masters.