The Kingdom Come Institute

Truly ancient history

Part 1: The Kingdom Come Institute

(The Kingdom Come Institute, in that it does not genuinely exist, is regretfully unable to accept any responsibility for the effects that particular arrays of patterns of light and darkness may have on your mind. By reading further you are implicitly accepting the responsibility for all possible consequences of reading further. Not Responsible for Advice Taken. Read further for more details.)

The Kingdom Come Institute has no legal or economic presence. Hence in the cultural paradigm it does not genuinely exist (=There is no such Thing=).

The Kingdom Come Institute may be viewed as a work of fiction in progress or a multidimensional narrative construct exploring speculations on the possibility of a worldwide personal transfer of collective power from the few to the many, mediated by text interchange technologies and a variety of commonplace social control gambits

In a sense the Kingdom Come Institute exists only in a mind. From one point of view, it devolves into a mere coincidence of interacting physical events. From another point of view it is the only event of genuine meaning (Trees, Forest).

The Kingdom Come Institute is a conceptual/perceptual extension of an identity which is contained within a physical being. Yet in observing it, become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute.

This concludes the briefing. To those who seek a deeper knowledge the answers to many questions begin in the dim corridors of the F.U.Q.s

All that ye may discover herein is protected by the magic sacred rune of the small letter c enclosed within the mystic circle. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Frequently Unanswered Questions

Is there something else I can look at instead?
Does this mean something besides what it seems to?
Who made this?
How much is this going to cost me?
Did you say something?

Why is everything so boring?
What the hell was that all about?
How do you spell that?
Can I help you?
How long have you been doing that?

Is this some kind of trick?
Was that the end?
Who is paying for this?
Have I seen this before?
Did something change when I wasn't paying attention?

How do I make contact with someone in charge?
Is there something I'm forgetting?
What happens now?
Is this done yet?
How do I open this?

Does that mean anything?
Is someone standing behind me?
Are you listening?
Should I keep doing this?
Am I asleep?

Many people ask me, "how do I become a member of the Kingdom Come Institute?" The more sophisticated ask how they may become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute. The answer is simple: Although I cannot assign anyone membership of the set, I can provide this simple test to determine whether or not you are already a member without yet realizing it.

1. Am I going to die? Y/N

Welcome Aboard. As our newest member you are now Captain.

I get asked this a lot: who is this They, the mysterious They who hike taxes, sell build insane freeways, buzz my home in night-silent black helicopters. We all talk about the they, but when most people ask it's always as if it were a rhetorical question. The implication is that there isn't an answer and that noone's really in charge, noone's really to blame. I'm not like most people. I'm referring to someone specific: They are responsible and they are to blame.

This is not about the Antichrist, the Beast of Revelation (which some say, will come in the form of "an Amazing Super Computer Robot"), Atlanteans, Illuminati, Knights Templar or an incredible race of Super Salamanders that dwell in the indescribable heat and pressure of the Earth's molten core. It's not even about more garden variety conspiracies of government spooks and chemical magnates meeting in darkened rooms to plan the assasination of JFK Jr. (you think that little plane went down by accident?)

"They" are, quite simply, the majority shareholders in the world markets. There is nothing secret or mysterious about Them. Their names are public knowledge and much bandied about, likewise Their tactics. In a recent article about layoffs in the chemical industry, I heard Their primary tactic referred to as the "Shareholder Religeon," which I thought was a very appropriate phrase. The question of money versus value versus wealth is another file's tale, but the name of the game and the god of the religeon is wealth. Because shareholders control corporations, all corporate actions are meant to result in shareholder wealth. When a business talks about corporate citizenship or customer or employee satisfaction, they're full of shit. It's all lies. Sometimes these things occur, but only as a means to an end. The sole purpose of business on the cusp of the twenty-first century is to see Trickle Down Economics actualized: their job is to make sure that by the time it gets Down to us, it's just a Trickle. That's what profit means. The whole point of a profit motive is that you extract the greatest possible value for the cheapest possible product.

Sure, they buy off politicians, they own the media, they probably occasionally kill enemies or perceived enemies. But for the most part what they do is right out in plain sight, unambiguous financial transactions. They do not control the media through some secret shadowy conspiracy where Tom Brokaw gets encrypted orders through a pneumatic tube that connects Zurich to the bathroom in his dressing room. They control the media by simply owning it. They don't care how their posessions behave, good or ill, as long as they practice and follow the Shareholder Religeon. Once the End is established, They trust the Means to take care of themselves. And they do, they do.

And there aren't a whole hell of a lot of Them. Check Forbes and you'll see Them nicely listed. Nothing clandestine about that: their best trick is getting half of us to believe that some crazy shadow conspiracy is running things, while the rest assume that noone is running things at all.

May I just say that I find it objectional that a considerable percentage of Corporations supply their coffee addict wage slaves with free access to their drug of choice, while my cigarette habit is self-funded yet nevertheless denigrated and relegated to cold back alleys and crowded doorways? Now, I realize that coffee is viewed by most of these pathetic junkies as an absolutely essential aid to getting a damn thing done in the morning, tired and grey as they all are from having their circadians screwed seven ways from Sunday by the agricultural paradigm that people should get up early to work. I realize that they get terrible headaches and cannot take a proper shit without their fix. But even so, isn't the leading principle of America equality? Just because I choose to screw up my mind by burning a leaf instead of boiling a propagule, should I miss out on the benefits of employer-supplied stimulants? Cigarettes are, after all, the most profitable product in this modern world. You would think this would count for something among the business classes. Of course, they don't provide free work related access to any of the remaining three of the five pillars of the Shareholder economy (gasoline, alcohol, and electricity). Which makes me wonder: just what is it about coffee? Who's running THAT confidence game?

Concerning terminology. It's a shame that more people don't put in some heavy time considering the roots of language, the meanings of the terms they throw around as if newly minted. There is a wealth of knowledge and power (some would argue they're the same thing) to be found in the constant evolution of language, and a world of strange surprises. In the realm of computers the story is doubly interesting, since so often the terms that seem so new have very old roots. It's a text centered culture, and computers are no exception. Consider the concept of the reboot, a term used only in computers, but anchored in the venerable colloquialism of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps.

Better yet, consider the term war in naming our dear little electronic matrix. The Matrix is a better term for it, I think, now forever consigned to be associated with a second rate science fiction movie starring a third rate action hero. But it's moot, anyway, since it's down to the Internet and the World Wide Web. My take on it is that Internet is the nominal winner, as it sounds more technical, and for all the attempts to bring it to the people, this is still a very technical media. That's all going to change, so maybe the more happy friendly World Wide Web will win out. But what strikes me as funny is the fact that the base terms of these rival nomenclatures, Web and Net, are not only completely nontechnical but mean exactly the same thing. That's language.

But if I really want a chuckle I always think about the term =scrolling.= This is a nice case, a term who's root concept is so lost in antiquity that the average person will never ponder where the word came from. It has no use outside of the world of electronic display, and yet at it's core is a document form that was basically old technology a thousand years before a computational engine was even conceived.

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Regarding Spontaneous Generation: There's a big temptation, in a secularized scientific worldview, to talk about the formation of life in terms of an incredibly improbable event. The idea is that because conditions were just exactly right, this crazy coincidence occurred and boom, there's your life. This kind of thinking fails to recognize a couple of core truths about the scientific idealization of reality. The first is, there's no such thing as a coincidence in science. The whole principle of science is that every cause follows its attendent effect, according to set and predictable laws of exchange and interaction. (Okay, science is a bit more complicated than that. I've read my share of the philosophy of science, believe you me). If life arose from sheerly physical interactions, as a result of molecular bonding and energy exchanges and all the rest, it did so because the arrangements of living systems are, so to speak, built in to the laws of thermodynamics. Life may be rare (another currently unprovable point of severe contention) but that does not make it any less fundamental to the nature of the universe. In pure science, nothing exists that is not fundamental to the nature of the universe.

It's twenty five years since Chris Chubbock blew her brains out on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, and Paddy Chayefsky's visionary film Network has seen glorious realization in an endless procession of "real video" evening programming on some of our popular television networks.

Our case in point finds two teenage girls pushing the envelope of control in a stolen vehicle of the extra-large size commonly known as the Sports Utility Vehicle. The young adventurers are engaged in a wild chse with multiple police cruisers, living out the very best of the American dream as exemplified in cultural classics such as Bubblegum Rally and Smokey and the Bandit. After a series of narrow escapes and accidents of increasing severity, the junior high criminals are brought to bay by threat of arms. The commentators final analysis: they were two girls with more car than they could handle.

Setting aside the obvious consideration of whether we may be a whole nation with more car than it can handle, it occurs to me that there is an interesting bit of historical comparison at work in these filmed rebellions against the basic order. Mao said that all power comes from the barrell of a gun, but the scientist demonstrates that that sort of power really boils down to a question of momentum. We have many millions of tons of steel lashing around on the roads. And most of us abide more or less by the rules, keep to our side of the road and wait our turn at the ramp meter. We ignore the obvious destructive potential of our costly posessions. And yet we are watching in fascination as one of our numbers suddenly breaks loose from the hive's dance and goes on the rampage, one last doomed and desperate bid to win free from the lines we have drawn so tightly around our lives

Why is there one thing, rather than another? We may ask, why is the world one thing, rather than another? By world we may mean the world most of us perceive ourselves as living in, the limited human spectrum of commerce, ambition and desire. Or we may mean the planet Earth or the whole universe. Some physicists at the far edge of theoretical cosmology claim that the fundamental question the physical universe poses to us is why there is something rather than nothing (presumably because the math with nothing is so much easier). I would call the latter question merely a subset of the former. We may set ourselves the question of ancient Greek philosophers, wondering whether the universe is secretly a plenum or a void. Really, there is no difference between these two possibilities. The fact is that the universe presents itself to us as neither: it seems to contain something, seems to be contained by nothing, and yet it does not seem to be full. All the questions return to the template, which is, why is there one thing, rather than another. In seeking to answer this question we may become so caught up in the supposed causality that led to a perceived state of things that we forget entirely just how acausal even asking such a question is. A causation based philosophy of things, such as the physical sciences strive for, eventually must either admit defeat in explaining the whole world, or else it must finally declare that there is no way that anything can be one thing or not another. Anything can only be what it is, because the effects that are perveived in the condition of a particular situation were predetermined by the causes that led to this condition; these causes in turn were once effects, caused by causes, and so on. At first glance, asking why there is one thing, rather than another, seems the very image of causal thinking. Seeing a condition, we ask "why," implying that there must be causes from which the situation arose. But the question also contains the acausal concept of the possibility of more than one possible condition. The significance of this question leads again to the mystery of the mind. We perceive, in the realization of our free wills, that it is possible for us to alter the seemingly inalienable laws of causation. Paradoxically, confronted with this unexpected power, we immediately seek to somehow use the laws of causation (as we understand them) as the agency of this will. This paradox contains the root from which the flowers of our suffering and the imprisonment of our wills grow.

The point of discussing evolution and the concept of scientific determinism is not, in this case, to provide a critiques of science itself, nor of evolution, nor to suggest some kind of alternative theory for the origins of life or the mind or the life of the mind, for that matter. It is merely an analogy by way of contrasting some fundamental worldviews. The tendency of science and its subsets is unquestionably towards reduction. Things (like the mind) are reduced to their components (brain structures, brain cells, and finally the chemical events that make up brain cells and everything that happens in them). The problem with this, at least in terms of life and the mind, is that it so far leaves some very big questions. For example, attempts to anatomically explain the mind - that is, to correlate the qualities of mind to particular structures and functions in the brain - have met with patchy results at best. Memory, for example, cannot be located in a particular area of the brain. Some patients may suffer a major physical brain trauma and experience little loss of memory, while other have what seems a relatively minor injury that nonetheless seriously impairs their recall. There are similar difficulties in understanding how a zygote, a simple undifferentiated cell, begins to specialize, to take on the qualities of an organism. Of course, the defense of science is always to insist that these things have simply not been discovered yet. And no doubt that's true, to an extent... But there is a level on which the process of reduction simply fails to explain what's really going on.

Do I have a price? Certainly I have traded my time for sums small and smaller, for causes good, ill, and neutral. But can I be bought. To the Shareholders, and I think you're well aware who you are, I say: Try me. I control the visionary genius necesssary to hand the world on a platter to one of the five richest men on earth (I'm well aware that all of you are men and that all of you speak-a my language, so in this one instance my use of the term men in the apparently implicitly sexist universal sense is in fact a literal usage of the common proper meaning rather than a biting social satire on the patriarchy as a whole). Anyway, I think I can probably throw a fair chunk of immortality in with the bargain: You just have to give me a figure. Make me an offer I can't refuse. I dare you. Bill, I think you know I'm thinking of you. You're young enough to have a really fine shot at a grotesquely long life.

this is what is up with this.