Steve Hughes

yesterday have gone? They sat and laughed at their jokes but a lot of what is often said by these men is no laughing matter, there is a point to it and the point usually is this, that the world is not as it seems and we the people have the power to change it as we see fit.

On a recent outing to London I had the pleasure of watching the enigmatic Steve Hughes. Like Carlin and Hicks before him, his show oozed satire and was under pinned with an important message throughout; that the world is run by blood thirsty war criminals that do not have our best interests at heart, that they want a war with Iran and will do all they can to ensure this happens. Unfortunately the whoops of approval and vigorous applaud were limited to myself and my two companions, in fact when Steve Hughes dared to utter the words “there will be a world war with the up coming intervention in Iran” someone heckled “No, there won’t be!”.

We felt the need to assure them that it was true, and so in true pantomime fashion my partner responded “Yes, there will!”.

It seemed as though Steve Hughes’ performance had a sense of resignation about it, to the fact that, for all his efforts to illuminate the lies we are told, the majority of people still do not seem to notice or care about the perilous road our supposed democratically elected leaders are taking us down. Hughes, like Carlin, seems to have reached a point where he believes there is no helping some people. He went on to say;

“Old people say things were better in their day, that’s because they are right, I am old now and it was better in my day… I cannot wait for the aliens to come and take me away, for a pie”.

The show was a visceral lambasting of the elites and their lust for power.

On the subject of Enya he reminisced about a show where a fan heckled that he in fact “hated Enya”, Hughes mused that “George Bush is alive. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair; these are real, life sucking, child killing monsters and this, is Enya. All I’m gonna say is if you are going to hate, hate positively.”

With people like Hughes, Carlin and Hicks wrapping up these pearls of wisdom in shiny packages for the public to only take away and discard as they exit the theatres, is it any wonder these people lose faith in our ability to over come the propaganda machine? Britain’s Got Talent, The Voice and all these other party pop, mainstream, processed production shows we must be switch off, they serve only to distract us from what is really going on and what is important in life. The price of not doing so is not worth thinking.

TO ALL ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT REGIONAL COORDINATORS AND THOSE WANTING TO BECOME A REGIONAL COORDINATOR AND THOSE INTERESTED IN FINDING OUT MORE ABOUT THE ROLE OF REGIONAL COORDINATION IN THE ORGANISATION OF TZM UK.

A full complement of RC’s will be two/region and three for larger regions.
We heartily encourage the acceptance of these roles to help create an organisation which accords with our bottom up, inclusive approach.
We need dedicated volunteers for these roles.

Regular attendance at ZMUK Admin Teamspeak meetings will be required. The better organised we are the fewer meetings will be necessary.
We will have a dedicated page on our site for general updates and summary of meetings updates.

ZMUK Administration

The Regional Coordinators will be charged with driving the region on and assisting local chapter creation. All RC’s will automatically become part of ZMUK Admin Team, this helps build the rational consensus model required in order to make decisions on a national level.
A list of all Chapter Coordinators will be constantly updated by this team.
This team will deal with all things related to zmuk admin of facebook, teamspeak and more importantly Chapter creation.  Regional Coordinators will be the communication link, interacting in a two-way process between ZMUK Admin as a whole and Chapters/Aspirant Chapters within their region.

Highland & Islands  SCOTLAND
Central  SCOTLAND
North West  ENGLAND
North East  ENGLAND
Yorkshire & the Humber
East England
West Midlands
East Midlands
Wales
N. Ireland
South West England
South East  England
Greater London

All regions listed will have an email address tied to it, all regional coordinators will have the emails coming into these accounts forwarded to their desired own email account.

Please send an email to zeitgeist-uk@thezeitgeistmovementuk.com

Including the following:
write your name.
Contact details.
Name of region you coordinate or the region you’d like to be a coordinator for.
Also required is attendance at teamspeak meetings on a national level, this does not have to be a weekly thing, but at least once a month from any RC for a region.
There may also be a requirement for additional meetings to get this off the ground, so as we can all find out whats required off us, ask questions, formulate processes etc.
These will be kept to a minimum.  So please also include which day of the week you may have an hour to free up for these meetings.

Its time for ZMUK to get organised, its only when we are fully organised can we function to the best of our abilities, your help with driving this direction is greatly appreciated.

Regards

ZMUK Admin Team

In the interview, Rou (lead vocals) talks about various topics such as freedom, police, the military, conspiracy theories and other interesting things.

Here’s the Video – Enjoy

hardtimes.ca/entershikari2012

Find out more about the project here

Man Vs Machine

For anyone new to the idea of technological unemployment I have tried to lay it out in a quick fire blog.

Just as globalisation is a fact, so too is technological unemployment. It is all around you and you have experienced it your entire life, you just may have not realised it.

On a recent visit to the local cineworld cinema the man behind the kiosk told me that you can now buy tickets online and get a 10% discount from the usual ticket price, which is now a staggering £9.10! Firstly I was in a little shock at the price of a cinema ticket, they have steadily gone up over the past 12 months. Thank Joe Pesci I had already signed up for an unlimited card.

Now, you have the ‘choice’ of a self service machine, or a human. The man explained to me that by using the Internet I could bypass him and get a ticket cheaper by ordering from home and picking it up once I arrived, from the self service machine. As if this was not enough he then informed me that as an unlimited card holder I could do the same with this. This totally bypasses the need for any humans to operate the ticket desk in the pursuit of greater profit margins. I took a moment to highlight this to him and I do not think he had considered it until I used the words “technological unemployment”. Being a good obedient worker he was doing his job by informing me of my option to avoid a queue and do it all from home, but at the same time however he is contributing to his own demise.

This is not a new experience for me though as anyone who has been to the VUE cinema in Angel, London, will testify to. Inside the VUE cinema you pay for your tickets at a machine at the bottom of the escalators and do not even see a human until you want to purchase a coca-cola or some popcorn. This was a few years ago now, I wonder if they have upgraded the humans to vending machines yet?

The pursuit to increase profit margins continues and one way to achieve this is by reducing the workforce wherever a corporation can. Everywhere you look machines are replacing the need for humans, from the main library in the town to WHSmiths, they have all installed several self service machines and reduced the number of staff required.

Is this a bad thing? Yes and no, no in that technology has raised our standard of living since the very first caveman worked out how to form and use tools, it is just that in today’s society, driven by this never ending need for growth, this truth has been distorted. Yes in that the reduction in purchasing power of the people as technology replaces us, restricts the artificial growth that the “expert” economists talk about, and worsens the current economic situation. Machines do not need a lunch break, holiday, sick pay or any pay for that matter, they only require at present a few select specialists to oversee their maintenance. Remember that the construction industry was replaced by the service industry and now both these areas are heavily automated.

This is not something to be feared though, it is something that should be embraced. Technology can continue to revolutionise the way we live, generating abundance in resources for the planets population, through sustainable and renewable means and enabling us to achieve a standard of “civil”isation that we have not yet achieved.

Do not be fooled by Obama, Cameron, Merkel or Sarkozy. The credit crunch is not the cause of unemployment but it is a contributing factor.

Technological unemployment has only served to accelerate the flaws in the system we currently live in and as our technology increases in capability our reliance on human labour will continue to diminish and free us to pursue our lives in a much greater and enriching way.

Please follow the links below to see more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jGYZSGTQ3c

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBkFeA2pOQY

Z-Day’s an annual awareness-raising day the Zeitgeist Movement has to get people together through talks/lectures and discussions about the goal of a resource-based economy and the way forward to a healthy society. Last year I remember thinking “whoa, this is kinda like an Amway conference, but good!”. This year there were events in over 45 countries across the world, which is just incredible.

I met people early in the day with the intention of going to Radio 1 to see if we could let them know about the event or the movement. There was a good showing of people but to be honest it wasn’t the best idea because there was no way of getting past the security guard, but I left some flyers sticking out of things attached to the wall outside for someone to find and someone bumped into Craig Charles from Red Dwarf and gave him a copy of Moving Forward, so it was worth it.

At the event after a good intro montage-medley video of images and samples of ‘life as we know it’ today and a strangely downbeat reading out of the day’s running order we watched a documentary called The Economics Of Happiness as an example of other people reaching the similar ideas that we are through a different approach. It’s message was that localisation is a good thing to strive for over globalisation, it was a bit ineffective in trying to sell people a kind of return-to-farming-community kind of vibe as an image for the future but was still good for being practical-minded.

There were a few talks; Shivani Verma gave a good talk about communicating with people effectively and Adam Maloney laboured the opinion that essentially we’re not entitled to our own opinions because it’s unscientific, which I don’t agree with at all but I agree with the point behind it – it’s dangerous to have opinions that aren’t credibly backed up. Then followed a Q&A session between the audience and some principle people who been involved in the UK. This was the point where I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing as one of the panel complained he was pissed off with the progress because we should have things like material showing people how to build their own solar panels etc, instead of saying ‘here’s the material I’ve worked on showing you how to build solar panels’. Anyone who doesn’t get you’ve got to be the change and lead by example really isn’t getting it. Anyway, someone who’s been putting out very high quality videos and lectures, Ben McLeish, was on the panel and I felt he fielded all those issues pretty clinically. The questions from the audience were of general high quality.

Things got back on the right track with a talk by Myles Dyer, a YouTube celebrity who sporadically gets asked on mainstream news and TV for his commentary on digital media. He injected the real creative, can-do spirit of activism into the air and talked about his charity Stickaid and his Universal Solutions Project, which is a call to create together an information database of solutions to problems; what it says on the tin. The Zeitgeist technology team then came on stage to talk about their success with ZeitNews and their plans for a new website called ‘ZeitWorld’. ZeitNews is a site that promotes new and useful technological developments for social progress and it’s become respected; it gets 5000-7000 hits every day. One of the team said that after people had been saying to them though that the “news” in their title didn’t cover non-technology news it gave them the idea to start a new website for news. The idea as I understood it is to have news stories on there but only ones that are scientifically verified as accurate and for every article, have a scientific solution to the problems covered at the bottom of the page. If this can work well to my mind it would create THE go-to site for whatever kind of news it covers, I think it’s an outstanding idea. I can’t wait to see what happens with it. I can’t say how much respect I have for everyone involved with it and how good it is that it debunks the idea that what TZM is doing is just a load of talk.

Then Ben McLeish finished off with a talk about the consequences of the prison system that he’d been studying for the previous year and by this point I realised he blows me away. I can’t even recount it well enough because by that point I was dizzy; when good people get together for a good cause I get high off of it but I’ve been loving Ben’s videos recently, his combination of intelligence and confidence is huge and he gets things across in an understandable way. The whole day ascended to send me out of the venue bursting with such a strong, reinforced feeling of drive and positivity. Counting out the last event because it was the main event globally, this event was 25% more well attended than the previous time, I think it was over 500 people; it was nothing but a success and I’m so proud of everyone involved for showing how strong and necessary this movement is; and how well it can be represented by anyone anywhere. It truly is leaderless and holographic – the ideas can’t be taken out by silencing anyone, there’s too many people involved who understand the train of thought now. Shout out to Jai Newton and my new people Thomas-Shaw Weston and Ayami Andrews, all of whom are so cool.

The next day we had our event in Cardiff at The Full Moon. Justin Lilley from Positive Money came down to talk about the idea of making money work in a healthier way through a ‘full reserve’ banking model (as opposed to the fractional reserve banking system we have now). He was rigorously questioned by the room as to whether it’s a patchwork kind of idea that doesn’t go far enough but he was firm in his focus on Positive Money being a good transitional path to an resource-based economy, because he is flexible enough to want that and seems to be refreshingly open to ideas outside his own. So check out their website and see what you think.

After him we had Adam Buick from the World Socialist Movement come and explain how from their socialist perspective, what we want is essentially communism in its purest form, just repackaged in a slicker and more social framework, rather than political. The path from world socialism to TZM is enabled by it being a social movement rather than a political one, doing away with all the image problems that come with that. Great anyway, I don’t care what we call what we’re doing as long as it’s the right direction and it works. What was great by this point in the event was how Adam was referring back to Justin and trying to find common ground with him while disagreeing on other points. The flow of how everyone was interacting with each other was honest but still really respectful and satisfying. This kind of emotional intelligence is what I love this for, I’ve never seen people coming together to problem solve and treating each other this way before until this point in life. It’s progress; a lot of what we need to do to get to where we want is just treat each other right in how we deal with each other.

Then to finish Vivak Shori gave a very detailed lecture called ‘Deflation: What Is It And How Will It Affect You?’ He chose to pull no punches and explained, partly informed by the work of Nicole Foss and others, how if we continue in this paradigm he thinks a deflationary spiral (contraction of the money supply) is going to slide us down into a financial depression worse than that of the 1920s and as such we should be focusing on having or developing practical skills, making sure we’re useful to people to have any kind of secure place in the future and being prepared to have to find it much harder to get by as we operate more as a gift economy in light of money and employment being hard to come by. It was hardcore because apart from saying we can always have capacity for joy with each other he didn’t choose to end it on a very encouraging note; although he supports the Zeitgeist Movement he even questions whether a steady state economy (an economy of relatively stable size that features stable population and stable consumption that remain at or below carrying capacity) is possible based upon the sort of information promoted by ‘the automatic earth’ and ‘the oil drum’ websites. He did it consciously because he said he wants people to be “psychologically inoculated” to be ready for the changes, so they don’t become headless chickens if society does collapse.

In summary from me, we can still only do the best we can and the best we can achieve through global co-operation is the best we can hope for. I’m loving how lately I’ve been hearing people outside of the circles I’m used to being familiar with and talking about a resource-based economy, I don’t wanna overuse the phrase but that’s what it’s all about. In my life it really seems like it’s out there in peoples’ minds now. For anyone reading who finds reading this all a bit weird and alien, with me mentioning all these people you’ve never heard of, that’s the point – I like making celebrities out of people who think and talk well, regardless of their status in the world. If we agree on using the scientific method to govern society then the people who deserve the most attention, in regard to social matters, are the ones who follow the scientific method the best.

I think activism’s the most important thing in the world right now, seeing as it’s growing to unprecedented numbers through Zeitgeist, Occupy and all the other groups out there with similar intentions and I’m caught up in how strange and interesting this whole uprising is. I know reading that might scare people who do care – because most people do care – but think that the word activism is a bit too much like a word that means you change your life into something that’s too different from what you know and like. No, it just means you actively try and make the world better instead of doing nothing and expecting anyone else to handle it. You can be active without ever setting foot in a protest, meeting or conference. Just talking to people makes a big difference, conversation is such a big part of this while we’re still in the phase of trying to make as many people as possible in the world aware of the idea – the idea that we can unite as a human race, co-operate and allocate resources scientifically and rationally to try and solve the debt, resource, energy and employment crisis that’s become insane and is becoming even more insane, causing death and suicide, before it might become absolutely unbelievable. Outside of any doomsday scenarios and my humanitarian concern I love paying attention to this because I love being where the cutting edge is but at the end of the day all that’s left is it’s all up for everybody to decide for themselves – what matters?

- Ruffstylz AM

On the one hand, I do think there is too much inertia when it comes to making a positive difference at the moment. We all know how urgent things are, but often doing something to change the world at large takes a back seat to our more menial capitalist tasks. It can be difficult to do something for others when so much of our time and energy is taken up by doing what we can to survive ourselves.  Plus sometimes there are barriers for people to push through when it comes to activism, like having the confidence to go out and say what you believe to people when it is different to the status quo. So let’s not get caught in the trap of judging people on how much they appear to do, or pressuring people into doing something they don’t want to. This will simply turn people off more. Let’s make encouragement and innovative thinking the pillars of our efforts to increase campaigner activism.

Everyone can contribute in their own way. Some people are more suited to going out and talking to people face to face, some people may be better at blogging and posting things on social networks while others may want to get involved in a self-sustainability project. I think it’s wrong to say there are any specific actions that a movement has to take in order to start making ‘real progress’. Indeed the ultimate goal is not the progression of any movement, but world peace and sustainability right?

That brings me on to my main point. We do not have to do anything specific to any organisation or campaign to make the world a better place. It doesn’t have to be arranged two weeks in advance or targeted at a specific group of people. Everyone can make a positive difference every day. Whether it’s giving someone the benefit of the doubt, letting someone pass in front of you in a crowded station or getting up a bit earlier so you’re in less of a rush in the morning. All the small positive actions we take contribute positive energy to the overall energy field which encompasses us all. This is scientifically proven by the way; it’s just something else which is commonly misunderstood in our current society. When the energy changes we change, as we are the energy and the energy is us. So this tells us that everything we do makes a difference, everything counts. The world we experience is simply a reflection of the energy it’s made up of. It shows you how misguided arguments like ‘there is no alternative’ or ‘we can’t change anything’ really are.

So there’s never a need to give up, nothing is static. It’s worthwhile to keep raising awareness and understanding of key issues the world faces, and to keep looking at ways of transitioning to a more sustainable system. But without the understanding of the source of it all, the inner everlasting field, we will not achieve any lasting progress.

We can spread positive energy all the time, whether through our words, our body language or our actions. The message of this energy is – choose love, not fear. As long as we operate from this, we’ll make the progress we seek.

Chris A.

In March last year I wrote about a wonderful new invention called ‘Lifesaver Bottle’ as demonstrated by Michael Pritchard at TED talks in 2009.  This device enables you to pretty much drink anything.  If you are near a water source the Lifesaver bottle is able to filter it and provide clean drinking water.  This of course would have numerous benefits for areas affected by disasters (man made or otherwise) where access to clean drinking water, essential for life, is limited or absent altogether.  So in light of this, plus my aversion to bottled water, I decided to invest in this technology and find out for myself.

I bought the device from Amazon through the Internet and within 3 days it arrived at my doorstep.  Excitement and apprehension came all at once but having read numerous reviews from the website and YouTube I decided to suck it up and get on with it. On my first free day I headed to the nearest source of unclean, standing water in town….the river lea, where I filmed what happened.  Suffice to say I have lived to tell the tail and the video explains a little more, if I can fathom out the technical difficulties I am having then this video shall be yours to see!

It is an amazing piece of kit and goes to show once more what technology can do for us and the 884 million without access to clean water. Until access to clean drinking water for all is realised this tool could greatly reduce the 3.6 million unnecessary deaths that occur every year.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXepkIWPhFQ

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTxEHzMxroo

At the weekend the local newspaper reported a story on how Vauxhall had won the chance to venture into the future and design a state of the art electric police car. The piece was written by Sophie Scott of the Luton on Sunday. The car itself could be put into action by a police force in as little as 3 years it is claimed.

High tech policing of the future is described by Chief Inspector Mick Trosh of the Association of Police Officers Intelligent Transport Systems with the car able to access the Police National Database whilst mobile and potentially revolutionise policing. It all sounds a bit Knight Rider but without the looks of KITT, however I feel this is all the more reminiscent of the police state that is being ever increased and one for the documentary Suspect Nation by Henry Porter. Police are dealing with symptoms and not the root cause of criminality, the environment.

The main feature in all of this is the fact that the car is electric and the savings to made by police forces if this is rolled out as a concept. The bad news is that this car still relies on fossil fuels and, as the majority of us know, electricity is not a power source of its own accord; it is a by-product. Not only is it running on electricity but it is made from fossil fuel (namely oil) seven barrels of oil per tyre, not to mention the plastic dashboard, seats, steering wheel and Gucci gadgets. Everything in and of the car is made from oil.

In a world where our resources are finite it amazes me that we continue to build these machines with a limited shelf life using old technology whilst the corporations market it as a leap forward in innovation.

It is not and anyone with even a passing interest in history will know this is a deception. Electric cars have been around for over 100 years.

The appearance of the petrol powered automobile killed off the electric car (which held the land speed record at one time) as it was faster and cheaper to purchase. This has robbed us of over 100 years of innovation as the oil companies secured the market for automobiles and their construction. Where would we be today if the electric car had been allowed to be properly developed  for the benefit of humans? Who knows but to get a sense of perception consider the mobile phone.

In 25 short years we have gone from the car phone (because you needed a car to carry the weight of the battery) with a yuppie in a limousine or Porsche 911 and the top down listening to Duran Duran, to a youth in a tracksuit with his hood up listening JLS on his iPhone 4S. Well maybe not the JLS bit but you see the point.

This is why a Resource Based Economy (RBE) is becoming a necessity, it will enable us to make better use of our resources, ensuring that things are built to the best technical specs and with the greatest durability available to us at that time, thus reducing the waste that currently as a society we are drowning in. We must break out of this cyclical consumption cycle not for ourselves but for our future generations.

It is interesting to see the emergency services moving in this direction (the fire service I am sure will get it all wrong) but it is not enough, a total overhaul of our current system is required. If we keep just modifying it a bit here and there then it will continue to be wasteful and ineffective, just not quite as wasteful or ineffective. This slow process of tweaking things could take decades, something we do not have, and is unacceptable when we have the technology to make revolutionary change now.

People will, and do, say the RBE cannot work. The defeatist, ‘can’t do’ attitude is one all who advocate an RBE I am sure have encountered, but do not be deterred or lose faith. To say it cannot be done because something like this has never been done before is the reason why it can and will work.

Remember that mans reach exceeds his grasp. Keep calm and RBE on

A year is a long time and a lot can happen.