What Barry Meyer Thinks, Maybe!

A sort of type of thinking that gives me a really comfortable feeling at night – or anytime when I'm on the verge of sleep – is this fantasy of being like one of these current-era suburban or country doomsday preppers who is lying in wait for alien zombies or reptilian aliens disguised as government people or politicians. And, having and hording weapons and hi-tech equipment and things.

But what I think of is aiming a Springfield Armory M1A SOCOM with a side-mounted laser optic and other fancy fruit at some tin can or metal sign or something and blasting some fragging round into it. Or into a zombie alien, literally – that is, if such a thing existed; which it does do of course in that place between awake consciousness and deep dark sleep.

Caption? Are you kidding!

The worst thing I could think of, and not comforting at all, is shooting a human being. Even the odd few real villains and enemies I know, I'm not really certain it would interest me to shoot and kill them...

Self-defence? Not really an issue with me. I have an unusual amount of prescience, you might even say, capacity to read minds. At fifty-three I don't bother to argue the 'science' of it anymore with my own mind – I have done it too many times to bother or care to doubt myself anymore. But you don't have to believe that bit of course.

I can appreciate a piece of mechanical engineering, whether of fine wood, or machined metal, or complex synthetics – just for what it is, rather than what it claims to be able to do.

I come from a long long and ancient line of people who really know how to be angry and to cause a lot of damage.

All this nonsense that spreads out everywhere these days about people being scared of evil conspiracies and crooked governments and corrupted banks and malicious dark overlords against whom there is a deep social angst – is all simple-minded nonsense to me.

You have a choice to slump into or wallow in a myre of all-deprecating self-misery and anti-everythingness. Without wanting to turn off here, those who admire him, Richard Dawkins is another one of these one-sided self-proclaimed super-'scientific sceptics.' If anything at all, though, to me, he does genuine science a great disservice. There is a modern tendency to keep saying 'science knows thus far, but it could change its position when further science tells it different...' No. It doesn't and it couldn't. Dawkins is symptomatic of a grand social malaise that stems from the inability to take charge.

The most dangerous person you know is a philosopher, that is, the genuine philosopher. Not the mad or even the mind-controlled gunman. I have read in several different places that the head of Warner, Barry Meyer, thinks that if he can control the roughly-on-average 3000 thoughts a day that the average person thinks, he can affect directions of business and buyers' interests and tastes.

And I think he's right – that is, if indeed he ever did really say such a thing.

But there is such a thing as a David-and-Goliath effect in philosophical thought, too. A densely-packed complex idea with a small cross-section of signal, can be leveraged up against all the photons of Fox TV, if it is capable of being augmented by other intelligent minds. That is, it has to be rational. Can be wildly unlikely, but still possible...

Let me give you an example:

I learnt this from J. Paul Getty, who I met once as a young boy in Singapore through my uncle who was then a director of Shell Far East.

Getty said that he was able to observe the incredible value enhancements of technology – for instance as they did away with entire office blocks and stenographers and typists (and their attendant costs), through for example the invention of the Xerox copier. And that he adjusted how he himself operated along with those technological advancements that he could see cut down capital costs and operating expenses.

If I look at Daimler the automotive manufacturer, and consider the huge capital investment base they have to work from, I have to laugh about what they consider is a great achievement for them, say, something like their Mercedes SLS AMG. How can you produce what is essentially only a copy of someone else's past design, admittedly with current materials and technology, when you have so much capital at risk?

The car has some nice aspects, but it also has some desperate flaws.

The Alfa C8 Competizione gets me more interested...

We are thinking entirely incorrectly when we still give face to banks and governments and so-called ratings agencies and to the pop media and their running dogs in politics. Cut all of this expense out. In the sense of stop being concerned that the big financial solutions to modern markets must come from any of these. The big solutions will come from guys with just a few computers, iphones, ipads, usb sticks, video cameras, printers, satellite connections, and basic (by modern standards) software programmes. We make a huge mistake in not personally accounting for the frankly, billions of dollars of capital cost savings, that we make, when we can successfully integrate these bits and pieces of common technological gadgets, and link with even half-way decent individual brainpower.

I'm not really in the mood for self-critique, or morose whining about moribund banks and sharemarkets, when right now I get to play with effectively greater resources than NASA had in the Sixties. Okay, maybe I'll come up with only a decadent way of using them. But so what?!! There's a lot of freedom and power in there. And I'm not feeling either powerless, or suppressed, or concerned that there will be a lot of hyper-deflationary forces out there. Those forces are only applying to the dying economy of the office blocks and the sunset methods and thinking styles.