Sunday, March 22, 2009

Zeitgeist Day New York March 15, 2009

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.\

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.

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.”

Thursday, March 19, 2009

UPDATE: Demonoid Invitation Codes Scam ALERT - 2

Unfortunately our friends have taken down any reference to
their 'update' for September 3 so no complimentary link to
this Blog now.

Up one day and gone the next............couldn't have been a very
important announcement????????????

And just as quickly, there's now no section for requesting 'Joost'
invitation codes.

I suppose they're 'stretched to the limit' trying to supply
Demonoid invitation codes for everyone!

You'll also find that the requests for a code in the Demonoid
section are now sequential since the 'Joost' code request section
was removed.

UPDATE: Demonoid Invitation Codes Scam ALERT -

Here's an update from our scamming friends:
(I've left the formatting and spelling mistakes as they were)

Latest site news:
3rd September

The Admin team would like to make it clear that we DO NOT:
Sell or pass on your email to anyone !
Collect Invite codes to sell on Ebay
If you get a spam mail that says it is from us then it is NOT !
We only contact you with an invite code or to tell you that
demonoid is open to register.

The only reason we run this site is so that people have a cental
hub to pass on Torrent site Invite codes.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://thebrandoneffect.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The above is untrue,we do not harvest emails...
If you think we do then please do not add your email to our list.
Starting from August 07 we are going to email everyone on the
list to inform them when Domonoid have open invites.
That way people who have just signed up will get the chance to
get a demonoid invite code without waiting to hit the top of the list.

You can see I've ended up with some free advertising from them.


As far as them saying,

"do not add your email to our list"

It doesn't seem to have deterred too many hopefuls as they're
up to 17000 requests and still going.

Realistically what do you think the chances are of #17000
having his/her request for a Demonoid invitation code filled?

How about even request #1000?

  1. Is there a large room full of people all sitting at computersworking their way through the database of emails trying to fill the requests?
  2. What's in it for the person(s) running this site if no money changes hands?
  3. Do you think the 'sponsored links' from the site are enough to pay their way?
  4. Maybe it's just one guy who out of the kindness of his heartspends hours sending out a Demonoid invitation code to everyone on the list??????
  5. Call me cynical but that would be some act of benevolence!
They also state,

"Starting from August 07 we are going to email everyone on the list to inform you when Demonoid have open invites".


I'd love to know how many people actually got an announcement as to when Demonoid registrations were open???!

Yes, I was a sucker for this scam too.

For the sake of having an email address bombarded with
junk-mail, it was certainly worth a try to get that elusive
Demonoid invitation code......................I thought so.

If you look carefully at our 'friends' site you'll notice that the
'post' numbers in the Demonoid request section aren't
sequential.

They've actually 'cut' requests from the 'Demonoid invitation code'
section and 'pasted' them into the 'Joost invitation code' section
which gives the impression that the 'Joost' section is also popular.

A bit of creative manipulation.

Here's a post by someone who somehow managed to slip through
the moderators although I have to say it was actually in the
'Joost Invitation Code' request section.

He doesn't seem too happy and rightly so. He was also kind
enough to list my Blog address too:

http://thebrandoneffect.blogspot.com/

I waited and waited, but I won't be getting no invitation code
right? Just a bunch of spam e mails. No wonder comments are
moderated...I'm going to try to find someone to bring down
this pitiful site of yours. Bye Bye scamers

Posted by Fuck on Monday, 09.3.07 @ 13:33pm #16869

You can look at their site to see this post for yourself but by the
time you do it will probably have disappeared off their list of requests.

I can assure you that at the time of writing this blog it was
definitely there.

I wouldn't go as far as to threaten "bringing their site down"
but I can appreciate his feeling of being shafted.

For those trying to obtain a Demonoid registration code, just keep
trying the Demonoid site at:

http://www.demonoid.com/

From what I've read, registrations seem to be open either late
Fridays or early Saturdays however the Demonoid site states
it's only open for registrations for a couple of days at the beginning
of each month.

If you do a search of Google for 'demonoid invitation code', which
I'm guessing you've already done, then you'll find different
forums where people will generously give out invitation codes.

These are worth a try but you need to be fast as they are
snapped up quicker than a "seagull onto a hot chip".

Your best option is to try a program called 'Torrent Tracker'
which automatically checks the Demonoid site periodically to
tell you when registrations are open.

How often the tracker program accesses the Demonoid
registration page is entirely up to you.

You can find the program here:

http://www.brothersoft.com/tracker-checker-64477.html


Easy setup instructions can be found here:

http://torrentfreak.com/get-into-private-bittorrent-sites-with-tracker-checker-2/

After weeks of trying I managed to get lucky and was stunned
when I found they were open.

Even now that I've got one I still can't create an invitation code
for a friend. I believe you need to have uploaded a certain amount
of data (about 1GB) or have been a member for a period of time.

Maybe someone can correct me on this?

Hope you have luck in obtaining your Demonoid invitation code.

Demonoid Invitation Codes Scam ALERT


















**Please read the following posts if you want to be informed
about a SCAM site supposedly offering you a FREE Demonoid
invitation code or go directly to the text in RED further down this
page for instructions on how to get a Demonoid invitation code**

Have you signed up at the following site for your Demonoid invitation code?

" http://www.demonoidinvitationcode.com/
"

DON'T DO IT!!!


Your email address will be reduced to a junk-mail folder in a
very short space of time!

Chances are you've already done it as the site is listed at #1 on
Google whereas this Blog has only been as high as #3.

A search on Yahoo! for 'Demonoid Invitation Code' will show a
#1 listing for the bogus site but this Blog isn't even in the Top 100.

Nobody likes to admit they've been duped but at least you
haven't lost any money!

I fell for for these hustlers out of desperation to get an invitation
code for Demonoid.

It's merely an email-harvesting racket to get your email address
without actually giving you an invite code for the Demonoid
BitTorrent tracker site, which you can find here:

http://www.demonoid.com/

If you don't believe me then try it by opening a new email
account at somewhere like Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo, etc and
only use this account for signing up.

In theory your new email address should only receive your
supposed Demonoid invitation code and not unsolicited mail.

Well, watch the junk-mail start pouring in and guess what
..........no Demonoid invite code!

It wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to on-sell the Demonoid
invitation codes they do receive (if any) to other people who are
desperate for them.

You'll notice how they don't give any recommendations from
people who've received Demonoid registration codes and only
list people who are requesting them.

They're up to around 13500 requests so far which would make
it quite lucrative for someone selling a 'live' email list or trying
to make a 'fast buck' selling the Demonoid invitation codes.

There's no shortage of listings for them on eBay.

The Demonoid site is very difficult to register at because
of it's popularity with people wanting to download torrents,
therefore it's rarely open for new registrations.

If you think that I'm affiliated with Demonoid in some way or
I'm just someone who received an invitation code but got banned
and is simply p****d off, then I can understand that.

You have nothing to lose by trying to get a Demonoid registration
code except to have your email address used as a junk-mail inbox.

In which case, go for it!

I've got nothing to gain by doing this as I'm not asking you to
send me an invitation code, email address or money. I don't even
have any sponsored links from this site.

I'm just trying to steer people clear of these sharks.

So if you don't like being deceived to 'line someones pockets',
then you might want to try somewhere else.

Here are some sample postings by people requesting at the
bogus site who've realised it isn't as genuine as it claims to be:

I have been waiting for over a month for this. I feel this site is
bogus, collecting e-mails. Beware.

Posted by Mikey on Wednesday, 08.15.07 @ 20:37pm #11989
this shit is so fake, never got my code!
Posted by fake shit on Wednesday, 08.15.07 @ 21:02pm #11996
dont do this this is all a big trick to send u junk mail!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you will not ever get a code
Posted by dont do ittt11 on Friday, 08.17.07 @ 17:22pm #12572

this is fake i did this like 2 weeks ago still no code. I got something that said the person only had 3 and 4 peope wanted it i had to register to other sites and the person who sent it gets 5 dollars every time you register so beware!!!!! Posted by maxpayne on Friday, 08.17.07 @ 15:51pm #12545

Even a humourous hopeful request:
My lowly sense of suplicatory grovellatation is matched only by my fervent and zealous desire to have and use the code for good and right in an evil and poosuckious world. Long live the code holders! Hooray!Hooray! Up with Data! Down with other things of various sorts! Love be to you, o' code holding Lords of Demonoidica! As of August 22 they are now moderating all comments posted so you won't hear about anyone who's realised it's just a scam, only the people pleading for a Demonoid invitation codes.

Too be continued:
== == ==

Works to block mobile card readers and ID scanners