sometimes real life tumbles into the rathole of philosophy. this sentence has been produced by all media: manti te'o's dead girlfriend never existed. maybe my ex-wife never existed too! that would piss her off though. yo the present king of france is bald, bitch: check the online pics. but i sympathize with te'o. it's hard to lose somebody you love so much to leukemia, even sadder to lose someone you love so much to the sheer implacable fact that she never existed at all: the loss is retroactive and total. indeed, it would be hard to die of leukemia; but it would very, very difficult never to have existed. it makes death look like a picnic. worst of all would be never to have existed at all and to die anyway. that surely is the worst of all impossible worlds, and it is being reported as a fact this morning on cnn. anyway, please give me a russellian analysis of these propositions?