Pages

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Peter Joseph gets death threats he says

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Peter Joseph's failed ZDAY prediction



Two hours into Z-Day, the educational forum associated with the online movie “Zeitgeist,” Peter Joseph, the film’s director and the evening’s M.C., stepped out from behind his lectern and walked forward earnestly on the stage.
In his goatee and mustache and tieless in a brown suit, Mr. Joseph had been lecturing for nearly 90 minutes on the unsustainable nature of the money-based economy; on cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, corporate malfeasance and piles of poisonous waste. “It’s time that we wake up,” he intoned, speaking solemnly through a wireless clip-on mike. “The doomsday scenario, the big contraction, might be happening right now. The system of monetary exchange is in the face of advancing technology completely obsolete.”
This drew wild applause from the sold-out crowd, a patchwork of perhaps 900 people who paid $10 a head on Sunday night to sit in a packed auditorium at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street near the West Side Highway. Z-Day events were taking place from New England to New Zealand, but this was the big one: the marquee happening with the marquee names.

There, in the crowd, was Jacque Fresco, an industrial designer and the engineering guru of what people unironically called “the movement.” Mr. Fresco, an elfin 93-year-old, sat beside his partner, Roxanne Meadows, smiling self-effacingly.






Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

Mr. Joseph, back on stage, waited patiently as some of the crowd, still cheering, refused to leave their feet.

If the election of Barack Obama was supposed to denote the gradual demise of churlish, corporate governance and usher in a new, sustainable era of visionary change, there was little sign of it at the second annual meeting of the Worldwide Zeitgeist Movement, which, its organizers said, held 450 sister events in 70 countries around the globe.
“The mission of the movement is the application of the scientific method for social change,” Mr. Joseph announced by way of introduction. The evening, which began at 7 with a two-hour critique of monetary economics, became by midnight a utopian presentation of a money-free and computer-driven vision of the future, a wholesale reimagination of civilization, as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his “Imagine” days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.
In other words, a not entirely inappropriate response to the zeitgeist itself, which one young man, a philosophy student in a roomy purple blazer, described before the show began as “the world as we know it coming to an end.” As the evening labored on with a Power Point presentation, a panel talk with Mr. Fresco and a spirited question and answer session, some basic themes emerged: modern economics is a fraud; global debt will crush the planet; society itself is dying from the profit motive; and people ought to wise up to the fact that more than legislation or presidential administrations needs to change.

Though they were never actually shown as most in attendance had seen them several times Mr. Joseph’s two films, “Zeitgeist: The Movie” (released in 2007) and “Zeitgeist: Addendum” (released last fall), were the subtext of the evening: online documentaries that have been watched, he says, by 50 million people around the world.






Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

The former may be most famous for alleging that the attacks of Sept. 11 were an “inside job” perpetrated by a power-hungry government on its witless population, a point of view that Mr. Joseph said he has recently “moved away from.” Indeed, the second film, the focus of the event, was all but empty of such conspiratorial notions, directing its rhetoric and high production values toward posing a replacement for the evils of the banking system and a perilous economy of scarcity and debt.
That’s where Mr. Fresco came in, an author, lecturer and former aircraft engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio who has spent the last six decades working on the Venus Project, a futuristic society where (adjust your seatbelts, now) machines would control government and industry and safeguard the planet’s fragile resources by means of an artificially intelligent “earthwide autonomic sensor system” — a super-brain of sorts connected to, yes, all human knowledge.
If this sounds vaguely like a disaster scenario out of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Fresco did not seem worried in the least. Machines are unemotional and unaggressive, unlike human beings, he told the crowd during the question-and-answer phase. “If you took your laptop and smashed it in front of 50 other laptops, trust me, none of them would care.”
The audience white, black, young, old, baseball caps and business suits alike received such words like a tonic, and the questions kept coming: What would family life be like in the future? What would happen if the automated system decided that a person had to die? Mr. Fresco and Ms. Meadows are planning the production of a major feature film to bring the Venus Project to a wider, global audience. Before the night began, Mr. Fresco, a small man with a V-neck sweater and a hearing aid, sat signing books and answering questions from a dozen or so college students gathered like acolytes at his feet.
As the evening came to a close, someone finally asked: So what would it take to actually put such a program into action? A grassroots movement, Mr. Joseph said.
“We already have a quarter-million members,” he insisted from the stage. “At the rate things are going, this will be at Madison Square Garden next year.”

Friday, March 6, 2009

The Zeitgeist Movement: Orientation Presentation


Jacque Fresco admits he doesn't have a PHD

Fresco and having a degree

What is the best way to use the information that Fresco perhaps misled/lied in interviews about a degree? This is one example in link below, when he claimed to be a Dr. with a degree in psychology from Sierra University Los Angeles. He also allowed himself to be introduced as a doctor on his Larry King interview. Source about his academic background from old newspaper article preserved. [5] Earl King Jr. (talk) 05:41, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
If there is a third party source that addresses the issue then we can report what they say. However, whether it has due weight would be arguable. The best available is the 1961 article that talks about his psychology consultations.--Biophily (talk) 06:18, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Fresco lied obviously about his education and this proves it from this article [6] If you remove that information you are acting as an employee of Venus Project and promoter and not interested in neutral presentation. Since you work for Fresco... have made a film about him and spent so much of your time advocating and promoting him you must refrain from removing critical and interesting information. Fresco claimed to be a Doctor. He did that again on Larry King show. Period. Earl King Jr. (talk) 14:53, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
If you'd pay attention you would see that I didn't remove that info. And actually, I don't know it is a lie. How do you know it is a lie?
Furthermore, keep in mind that info is included because it has due weight, not because you have a grudge against it.--Biophily (talk) 02:37, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Fresco is not a Doctor, or a "social engineer, structural engineer, architectural designer, industrial engineer"... He doesn't even finished elementary school! May be he can call himself social engineer or architectural designer because these are not college degrees, but the other two are. Germanburguener (talk) 04:44, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
For some reason the article previously went on and on about all the things that Fresco did when many of the things he claims he did never happened or if they did happen had little to no effect on society. Fresco has promoted himself very adamantly. Perpetuating that he is a doctor is really bad. At least now the article makes it more clear that he claimed to be a doctor though was not one. Earl King Jr. (talk) 12:35, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
The world BEHOLD! The Crusaders of Truth and Righting of Great Wrongs!!!
Regardless of your prejudices, it is not up to Wikipedia editors to emphasize that point. Nor is it up to us to make those clarification. Unless the sources emphasize and clarify the "doctor's degree" issue, it really doesn't have due weight. The best thing to due to downplay that whole issue until sources publish on that issue.--Biophily (talk) 19:19, 22 December 2013 (UTC)