Support The Venus Project.
Offline I'm not sure how many of you have seen Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist: Addendum, but watch them both if not. The writer/director/producer/composer for these films, Peter Joseph, is just awesome. His insight on all subjects, quotes and interviews is just riveting.
On the second Zeitgeist movie, Peter Joseph goes in depth with people involved in a non-profit group called The Venus Project and how they're trying to shape and mold aspects of humanity into a unified world through very attainable means. It's not a utopia or anything like that; it's what the lead developer, Jacque Fresco, said is social redesigning that reflects modern knowledge brought up to date. Watch Addendum because he said it much better.
Their website is here: http://www.thevenusproject.com/intro_main/whatis_tvp.htm
I highly encourage everyone to visit it, support these people in their development in any way that you can and keep your eyes open.
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Ah yes, THE FUTURE! As designed by somebody older than my WWII veteran grandfather!
I've looked at this shit before passingly. Reminds me of the sets Kubrick built for 2001--or alternatively, of The Jetsons. I especially like the 1970's vintage microwave sitting in his KITCHEN OF THE FUTURE!
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
The message of Zeitgeist Addendum (etc) came to me from more sources and people, than just from this film. Many individuals of various age, nationality and origin came up with a similar ideas, often identic or equivalent. In generalized form, they're spread among the population, who shares the same complains about the state of the world. Thus, I encourage people to listen to the voice of people, the voice of Zeitgeist and other such sources.
I actually support this for some time, by the link in my signature, by living a slightly ecologic life, by spreading an alternative worldview, and so on. I'm irritated by people in a certain untitled rich states, who would rather want to sterilize or kill masses of hungry, poor and sick human beings elsewhere, than to live a modest life style and share with them what they have more than they need. I welcome this economic crisis, I wish to get it deeper and more more critical than ever, as this is what the old order deserves and the new order needs. (it also gives me a fridays free from work)
In my opinion, it's not enough to be an atheist, one must be also an unbeliever in gods of a mythical economic system, media, politics, and evil terrorists, an unbeliever of the old system itself.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Yeah, well, being an atheist isn't enough, you're right. The thing is it takes word of mouth and the ideas of brilliant minds obviously as well as more of an acceptance of plans like the Venus Project.
I've known about Jacque Fresco since the early 1980's (apparently before some of you were even born). I read his 1969 book Looking Forward, and I talked to him on the phone a few times in the 1980's and 1990's.
From what I can tell, he doesn't have any real money or institutional support behind him, and he could die any time now. His ideas also leave a lot to desire, considering that he incorporates discredited intellectual fads like General Semantics and radical behaviorism from the early 20th Century. So I don't know why anyone would latch onto him now as some kind of savior.
As for the Zeitgeist movies, the grievance they express against fiat money and central banking sounds like crank stuff. At best they just provide evidence for putting banking and finance under better regulation, not for abolishing them in favor of woo-woo utopian proposals. Compare the banking situation with corporate misbehavior. Corporations do bad stuff all the time, but nobody reasonable argues for abolishing corporations, only for putting them under stricter regulation. Revoking the charters of a few of the worst corporate citizens might put the remaining ones on notice that they need to behave themselves.
The thing is that Peter Joseph is trying to get across is that everything is just too out of control now to fix by basic means and people behind the corruption and power are just way beyond simple talks; there needs to be a drastic change happening somewhere by someone and that's why I'm glad even if Jacque is old and might go anytime, he's at least trying to set a new direction in motion.
If you waste your money on 'The Venus Project', I will personally verablly bitchslap you.
Send your money to an actual organization that uses actual science, not an eccentric geriatric 'inventor' who claims to have built things that never existed and tries to take credit for other people's inventions. Jaques spends contributions building scale models and making additions to his property - nothing more.
And which people, exactly, are these?
Please don't swallow the garbage spewed by team Zeitgeist.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Gee, where do I send my money? After all, I know that head in the clouds, idealistic communist utopians are absolutly incorruptible. And now that we know that agricultural science is bullshit and all of Africa is arable land, lets all have 50 kids to live in this glorious paradise on earth to come!
Fucking idiotic commie pipe dreams!
It takes a village to raise an idiot.
Save a tree, eat a vegetarian.
Sometimes " The Majority " only means that all the fools are on the same side.
These bankers, financiers and alpha rentiers are cunning and powerful in their way, but they aren't comic book supervillains who can control the world behind the scenes like Lex Luthor. Look at how many of them fell for Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, for example. Or that German billionaire who committed suicide the other day after losing a big chunk of his fortune.
We need to disabuse ourselves of this "Illuminati" nonsense about our society's ruling class, especially the way cranks like Alex Jones portray them. Sure, we have multigenerational wealthy families who tend to run things and have access to a lot of power through inheritance and patronage. But a lot of these people with famous names are surprising ordinary if not borderline stupid, like the Bushes, Kennedys and Hiltons. They have to take a shit every day, just like the rest of us.
Ok so, since most of you seem to think this is a gigantic waste of time, what do you propose we do about our issues? Seriously, can any of you come up with anything better?
Apparently Jacques can. He's selling the property. Why don't you move to Florida and take over the dream, Sagey Boy?
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Something constructive would be nice, dickhead. My question was serious. If you're going to insult me, then fuck off.
In any case, my question still stands to posters with input.
I don't know if I'm going to fuck off just yet, Sage. I'm trying to point out in my own dickheadish way that Utopian ideas like those forwarded by your friend Papa Smurf are just as irrational as those held by religious folk and crystal gazers and the rest; if you came to the RRS thinking that we all just hated religion and wanted it to go away so that we could all live in harmony and kids in Ethiopia could have full bellies and play Nintendo, then you were deeply mistaken.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Nah, I was just hoping for more constructive criticism than what you said before. It was bullshit and wasn't needed.
You say this project is utopian based, on par with irrational religious speak, etc., but you can't even answer the question that I proposed and that is can you do any better and do you have any ideas to set our world on a better path? If not, then piss off and knock off assumptions on what you think I hoped to gain from coming to these forums or what kind of people I thought I'd be interacting with.
To answer your question Sage, I get up everyday and go to work. I study pathogenic bacteria that make children sick. I take home a paycheck, spend it wisely and enjoy my life. Everybody in the western world and by growing proportions in the rest is free to do the same.
They can also complain about the lack of opportunity when shit isn't easy.
But that's not what Hamby does. That's not what Sapient does. That's not what DG or Darth or Desdenova or Renee or BobSpence do. They make the world better by inches, by living in it. From what I can see, you're the arrogant one, presuming that we all want to overthrow the Rothschilds or the Government or the ZOG or whatever you pinpoint as the source of all evil in the world so that we can travel in tubes and live in a bubble house.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Societies tend to organize from the bottom up. I don't know if scratching the "do something" itch for centralized "solutions" will make things better. As Voltaire shows in his nouvelle Candide, at best most of us can just cultivate our own gardens and let the screwed up world go on its own way.
If people really believe this nonsense about the Rothschild supervillains, why hasn't anyone tried to assassinate them? They aren't bullet proof, as far as I know.
Speaking of the Rothschild supervillains, consider the fate of banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild, one of the richest men in the world in the early 19th Century. He probably ran his hands through the gold coins overflowing the strongboxes in his possession, like the comic book character Scrooge McDuck. Yet he died in 1836 from a bacterial infection that we can cure today with antibiotics costing literally a waitress's daily (fiat) tip money. In his historical context, having all that "real money" in gold didn't do that Rothschild one bit of good when he got sick. So much for these guys' ability to "control" the world for generations.
I also get up and go to work every morning, but that's at 5 AM and I'm doing a dull, mindless work for 8-10 hours. It's just a several simple actions to do, check a car, write the result, and every next minute and half move onto another car to inspect, or the conveyor belt will run too far with me and I'll have a problem. It's a crime against humanity, a disgusting form of slavery, by reducing a person capable of art, on a machine. And it's my last desperate attempt to get a miserable paycheck. (about 33% of what you in USA consider as miserable, maybe less) Everything hurts me, and when I come home, I've got a few free hours when I can hardly do anything, and then I sleep and go again to the work. If anyone around would do something for the Venus Project, bubble homes and tube transport, it's me. All my co-workers have an exactly the same opinion. Billions of people have this opinion. But no, you're OK, and those who aren't, are just complaining about a lack of opportunities.
In October 17-19, 119 millions of people, together with their governments and heads of state made a worldwide demonstration called Stand Up Against Poverty. I have not seen anything about it in media, except for an independent, international, low-budget press. Isn't it something wrong with the world?
Btw, it never came to my mind to send mr. Fresco money, that's a nonsense. What we have to do is to raise a public demands on governments for them to pay much more money than we could, on such a project or a better one. We already pay the taxes and they steal them or use them against our fellow men, we must express our opinion loudly and publically, if a justice should be upheld. Usually that needs a catalyst, like someone who can get the crowds into streets by an impressive speech.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
You can quit your bitching too, Lumey. You live in a modern western nation just like the majority of the people on this site. You own a fucking computer and you have internet access. How about sell the computer and start sending the money you spend on the monthly ISP charges to Africa--or better yet, learn how to farm or provide basic medical care and get on a fucking boat or a plane and help people who don't have clean water or electricity. Most of us who profit from the unfair system find some way to give back. As far as I can tell, you sit on the internet everyday trying to figure out which race of aliens is going to beam you up and make you their king.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
Whoopee. You want a fucking medal? You talk like your shit doesn't stink. That's a great career, but that doesn't give you the right to downplay other people at making the world a little less shitty by at least trying. The Venus Project has ideas. That's all that they are and the people involved have good heads on their shoulders. I don't think they will succeed in what they want to do because not enough people are ready to embrace their methods. By the same token, you have no right to slam them as harshly as you do because you really have nothing to contribute except calling them utopian and ridiculing those that actually want to get things off the ground in some way. There's nothing wrong with ideas; give it a try someday.
You want to rely on the world you're living in as it is waiting for people to change, even though they aren't and not giving anything or giving a damn, that's fine. Sit in your lab with your petri dishes and make sure when the government cuts your funding because of ridiculous budget bullshit, you won't weep too hard.
Sage. Look at what Jacques has proposed.
We're to automate absolutely everything, effectively trasferring our labor workload onto machinery. It's not that there 'aren't enough people ready to embrace their methods' - what's being hypothesized is downright silly.
How do we get all of this machinery? How do we program it? Maintain it? Rebuild it after an accident or act of nature destroys some? There's a point at which the automization breaks down and a group of people are going to have to step-in and do some work for us. So how do we convince this ground of people to do that?
You (and Jacques) don't seem to understand that economies are not 'invented', they're emergent. Attempts at designing economies have always failed because such an attempt flies in the face of the nature of economics.
He has every right to slam them. They tout their ideas unrealistically as being the be-all end-all solution to everyone's problems. Sound at all similar to a certain dogma that we're all used to being harped on about?
Cool it, cowboy. I doubt that DDA is quivering in his booties; microbiologists tend to be rather 'in demand' in most areas.
Uh. Also: How is the development of means for defeating pathogens 'not giving anything', out of curiousity? Seems to count for a Hell of a lot more, in my book anyway, than building toy science fiction cities and claiming credit for other people's work.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
I wouldn't worry about that. Our discipline is always in demand. Biomedical research is something that there is always money for.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
I wouldn't be so surly if DDA wasn't such a dick in the first place. There's no need to mock me for just thinking TVP has interesting qualities, designs and insight that I find kind of intriguing.
By the way, biomedical research is very important, but nothing is untouchable nowadays. Just hope you and DDA can keep on doing your thing without any crap.
If this is all you mean, then yes, I agree. Jacques does have really neat looking models and drawings, I'll give him that, and some of his ideas are excellent (subtracting vehicle legislation in favor of technical solutions, for example).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Yeah, all I'm really saying is that Jacques and his team have a lot of insight and just support these types of people by acknowledging this. Donating money to them is kind of pointless, I agree, and I should have clarified that in the beginning when I said support them in anyway you can.
I just wanted to share this with some people around the forums and hope they realize that they mean well.
You also have to take into account the fact that at least a third of the adult population needs some level of zoo keeping to keep it out of trouble. Look at all the people out there with harmful religious obsessions (the Fred Phelpses of the world), low IQ's, impulse control problems, frequent violent outbursts, drug and alcohol addictions, inability to delay gratification and plan for the future, etc. And what about certain ethnic groups which disdain education and efficiency and tend to engage in criminal activity? We can barely sustain the kind of civilization we have now with that dead weight; no telling what damage these people could do to sabotage "utopia." Instead of addressing these problems, Fresco waves his hand that his behavioral engineering scheme can make most people function and behave themselves.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an "invented" economy a priori, just because we had some bad experiences in the 20th Century. The first people to try anything new usually fuck it up as part of the learning process that eventually gets it right. It took centuries of trial and error before people figured out how to run banks and corporations profitably.
The criticism of running a planned economy based on the problem of coordinating dispersed knowledge as formulated by, for example, F.A. Hayek, has lost its force in the past couple decades because of information technology. Today's big corporations like UPS and Wal-Mart can track every significant datum in their globe-spanning operations from a computer terminal, a development that would have astounded both Hayek and Soviet would-be economic planners in the 1930's. I seriously doubt that the people who planned and built up Wal-Mart ever heard about the alleged impossibility of what they've accomplished; they just went ahead and did it.