Category Archives: Needs and Government

What Are the Odds Against the Human Race?

Created March 18, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Today I gathered by Zoom with a few lifelong friends. One of them a man I’ve always admired and have learned a lot from about the advertising and media business. He’s as much a genius as ever and as much of a realist. And, whereas I’ve almost always been an optimist, he’s still a pessimist.

Today my mentor (I’ve been lucky to have many) argued persuasively about the end approaching. The quality of our leaders willing to put up with being endlessly mocked and slandered has fallen precipitously. Both our political parties taken over by their most radical activists, the parties locked into such hatred for each other as is hard to imagine ever going away. The leaders of big companies hypnotized, like Putin, by their own worldview, and seemingly unwilling to study the relevant facts and the numbers deeply themselves. Everyone below the top afraid to speak up because someone with greater power might be offended by something.

My friend sums up the problem as The Age of Me, which he perceives came in about a half century ago, replacing The Age of We. Now everyone is so self-focused it’s as if their IQs have been effectively factored way down.

Ahead he sees revolutions, a total breakdown in civilization, only a minority living through it and rebuilding. And then the cycle possibly repeating itself, first rebuilding, and then hubris setting in, and it all falling apart again.

I agreed that we have had a mental illness pandemic for a long time and that the only pragmatic cure for it is for each of us pull himself and herself up by carefully watching and clarifying one’s own thinking. I added that our ability to communicate with one another also allows us to help each other in this process.

My mind flashes back to when I was about five. I always listened to my parents’ conversations and stopped them to ask what was meant by certain phrases. They were very patient and always answered. I remember asking what they meant by “Life Imitates Art”. My father explained that it works both ways, art imitates life (he pointed to one of my mother’s realistic paintings), and life imitates art, people identify with characters in plays and learn from their experiences vicariously.

So, from very early on I was always aware that perceptions make reality, fiction becomes fact as fact becomes fiction. “Thinking makes it so,” as Shakespeare put it.

In Mind Magic I wrote that we tend to perceive what we expect to perceive.

In Connectedness I pointed out that foremost modern quantum physicist John Wheeler theorized that we co-create reality. Jane Roberts’ Seth book series reframed this ancient idea for modern minds in the 1970s. Many people first heard this idea from The Secret, whose Law of Attraction echoes the concept of Karma. People have been considering such out of box yet logical ideas for at least 10,000 years.

All of this is relevant to our moral imperative for the existential threat of today. Regardless of how dire things look right now, it only makes things worse to dwell on problem definition, one must build into one’s own mental reflexes the immediate switch to solution orientation, which presumes hope and not hopelessness. As songwriter and playwright Stan Satlin said on the Zoom today, “We can’t accept defeat.” Every time our mind turns back to concern we must rechannel it into positive next steps we can take that will help even if only in a very small way, help ourselves, our loved ones, everyone and anyone.

Pagliacci knew that a clown’s role was to laugh and make people laugh, even if on the inside he was crying. Calm, patient, empathetic, we can help people creatively clarify their options and optimize their decisions for the closest thing available to a win/win outcome. The more of us take on this attitude and role, the faster we will recover from the brink.

Don’t be attached to success. Whether we collectively pull out of the nosedive is not the point. Another thing my father taught me when I was five was “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, what matters is how you play the game.”

What are the odds against us? It all depends on how we play it. If we tone down the rhetoric and discuss calmly and soberly, the odds in our favor are excellent. If we continue the current raucous and insane behavior, we have to pray for divine intervention, it becomes our best hope.

Best to all,

Bill

Putin’s Test

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February 25, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Putin feels very deeply that his Mission is to resurrect the Soviet Union. What he has decided to do is a test. Are the Western democracies as weak as they seem, and will they pull a Chamberlain? The latter gentleman is always remembered for his backing away from a bully.

Cuba all over again. However, figuring the odds as Putin has, he is not in the US backyard, I’m in my own damn backyard, and economic obstructionism is his only risk.

From the West’s point of view, there is a strong inertia for the policy that came out from the end of WWII: contain communism.

These three species of subcultures have always been around, and always will be: Utter Freedom, Considerate Freedom, and Fake Freedom. After all, we are part of God’s experiment with free will.

Under Utter Freedom, as with most of the native American tribes in North America before Columbus, there was a Chief yet if you stayed far enough away from him, you were in effect under no rule at all.

Under Considerate Freedom, there is a very active government that is well-intentioned.

Under Outright Totalitarianism, everyone knows who has the power, and how to stay invisible.

Let’s assume that most Americans would agree that the one of the three choices we all want is Considerate Freedom.

A small minority of Americans might prefer Utter Freedom i.e. anarchy but it’s hard to realistically imagine how a country the size of the USA could cooperate enough to remain militarily strong as an anarchy.

If we want to achieve Considerate Freedom everywhere in the world so that we can all get on with life without the war games of yesteryear, how would we deal with Putin’s Test?

Consider:

Some Ukrainians want to move closer to the West (this is using the normative taxonomy – reflecting a bias to consider Russia NOT part of Europe which goes back millennia). Some Ukrainians feel closer to Rus (the original name of the enormous landmass between what we call Europe and India/China).

In Rus, the leader feels so strongly about Russia regaining a former greatness, and the people feel so strongly about the threat of falling out of step, that they will follow the leader into a path which could literally mean the end of the world.

They are all figuring the odds and until the first nuke is tossed they hope it can all be walked back with blarney no one will question anymore since anything goes now in the way of public statements.

Realistically, the West will wage economic war but will not want to be the first to put the torch to the kindling. Not until an inch of NATO soil is touched, at which point, head for the hills.

The comparison with Chamberlain will be answered with “This has always been part of Russia, what business is it of ours.”

It’s all a balancing act.

People will say, “If people want out of the Ukraine, they should move West and we should welcome them in.” Why not? More people will move to Considerate Freedom from Total Totalitarianism the longer we can keep the game going without flameout.

What’s the best positive outcome of the situation?

The hopeful possibility that this will bring all Americans together.

The need to be externally strong does not permit of internal squabbling and separation. We should naturally unite and forget trivial differences when faced with a common threat several orders of magnitude larger. That would be the sane response.

If we do not unite internally we will morally forfeit the leadership of the world we’ve had for three quarters of a Century.

The outcome is still up in the air. Economic sanctions will follow first. We will see what they accomplish. Completely excluding countries that practice aggression from the benefits of world trade and cooperation may take a long time to fully work. Such methods may never have worked before but that’s where creativity can come in.

We will hear about the awful treatment of Ukrainians at the hands of Russian soldiers and our blood will boil.

But we cannot put out violence with violence. We cannot end hatred with hate. Escalation reached its natural limit in 1945 when atomic weapons were first used and their implications immediately understood.

Creativity and consideration are the only tools which will get us to the promised land here on Earth. We had a chance to go that way when Joe Biden took office. But instead our leaders fought each other and fell back into the predictable old ways of warnings and threats to other world leaders.

How long will it take for the human race to outgrow violence and childish thinking?

Mr. Putin has just turned the clock back a hundred years.

Obviously we cannot think of ending the arms race at the present moment. We must continue to carry the big stick. But we can at least speak in the soft voice. It will be a start to walking back this test of our skills.

The alternative ways of being have all been proven bankrupt. What is left to us is creative diplomacy and military readiness.

Best to all,

Bill

If We Spoke Compassionately

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Created January 27, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

If We Spoke Compassionately to Everyone, It Would Make a Big Difference

Let me start with a very extreme case to prove my point.

If we spoke to Putin compassionately it might make a difference.

Soon after the Inauguration I wrote a series of three posts sort of like science fiction depictions of what the new President Joe Biden could do to make a clear break with the past and talk with the Russian and Chinese leaders as if there were no history of bad blood.

President Biden I guess did not read my posts or didn’t consider them as serious options.

It’s too bad because we all put our pants on the same way, we’re all human beings, a band of brothers and sisters whether we recognize it or not.

It would have had the advantage of surprise.

And not like Pearl Harbor.

More of a positive surprise, after all the hatred and suspicion.

Why continue to choose to fight when there’s a minute in which you can choose to proffer peace?

Right after being elected is just such a minute.

A window passed.

How long will we wait for another such opportunity?

We can do it right now!

We can really choose peace at any time. It just takes an authentic compassionate statement or two to stop the world. Stop the momentum of decades since we were allies. We were the best allies Russia and China ever had when we were fighting the Axis together.

Let’s remember those days when we were all larger than life heroes and not the blithering idiots we appear to have become. But that idiocy is just illusion being allowed to take over our minds.

All it really takes is getting in touch with our own humanity and putting our self in the other guy’s shoes for just a moment.

“Vlad, I know you’re pissed off because after all your hard work, the Soviet Union collapsed. I know you’d like to continue to play your cards to restore Rus to the greatness it deserves. I want you to succeed,” the US leader could say.

One country winning does not have to mean other countries losing.

“Vlad you say you and the Ukraine are one people, and I agree that you have been since the ninth century, but how can you welcome them back while threatening them with force? Isn’t there a cleverer way to win them back? I’m willing to help. I’d rather that brothers and sisters stayed unified. We’re all brothers and sisters, and one day we will all be unified. Then we will wonder how could it have taken this long to stop the bloody fighting among the human family?”

It cannot stop there with a nice moment and then back to business as usual. It has to be a permanent change, each of us is the only one who can do it.

If we all start doing it, it will spread like wildfire. Everyone wants it.

Stick to your principles, but offer them in a respectful and empathetic way, not with insults and threats. Show that you understand the opposition’s perspective, and where you agree with it. Show how those agreed principles led you to different conclusions; step by step, as if speaking to a beloved.

The tone of your voice has more of an effect than the words you use.

We Just Won an Emmy

Wednesday night January 26, 2022 I got a call and a link telling me that Next Century Media, my 1990s company, has won an Emmy for “Pioneering Development of Technologies to Collect granular linear TV Viewership Data including STB’s, ACR, Connected TV’s for Measurement, Marketing & Advertising”.

Three other companies each won the same award, and they had all built upon NCM’s technology to different degrees: Bell South, Cablevision, and DIRECTV. Bell South had integrated directly with NCM, and Cablevision and DIRECTV had adopted NCM algorithms that had been given pro bono to the industry as a standard, based on the request from then Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) CEO Jim Spaeth.

Many more people and companies deserve recognition for the invention of Set Top Box Data (STB). It’s always that way. It takes a community to accomplish anything of significance. Being able to work together and make it enjoyable is a master key to life. It seems like it’s going to make you go slower but it actually speeds up the upside outcome.

Bob Block built logging channel changes into his Telease set top box in 1972, although it didn’t have the algorithms yet to make it research currency grade data. John Malone and John Hendricks gave NCM the chance to deploy in what was then the world’s largest MVPD, TCI, later acquired by AT&T and today the largest part of Comcast’s footprint. John Malone’s Liberty Media owned TCI, and the NCM deployment of STB and addressable commercials (and personalized program recommendation and programmatic buying) was triggered by Discovery founder John Hendricks’ Your Choice TV (the conceptual grandfather of Hulu).

The NCM team was world class. My partner the late Len Matthews had been CEO of Leo Burnett then Y&R, President of the 4As and Undersecretary of Commerce. Deep thinker and award-winning copywriter Burt Manning had been Chairman of J. Walter Thompson. Lester Wunderman needs no introduction. Omnicom Chairman John Wren and global media head Arnie Semsky made the greatest use of our technology, and 20 other agencies and innumerable advertisers and media used it too. IBM, EDS, Groupe Bull all helped us get off the ground. Gian Fulgoni and Ed Dittus joined the Board.

NCM’s dedicated multinational multicultural full time team of 34 people in North America and Europe included the former CTO of the French NASA. The late Gerry Despain was a soft spoken genius who had led business optimization teams at GE and at Honeywell, and at NCM led the software development team of French and Belgian developers based in Versailles. Talk about agile rapid prototyping! I’ve never seen people turn my visions into working code so quickly.

NCM days were some of the best times of my life. The TRA technology and the RMT technology came out of NCM. Visible World and Invidi carried on NCM’s work brilliantly and now TV is rapidly becoming addressable everywhere, and granular clickstream (a term we coined meaning naturally-occurring audience data) is available universally in digital (who learned a lot from NCM, especially Dave Morgan) and fast becoming universal in TV.

I’m thrilled that we were recognized by the Television Academies. My humble gratitude will be expressed at the ceremonies in Las Vegas on April 25.

I must say, with the rewarding work I’ve been given through RMT and Bill Harvey Consulting, it feels to me like the 90s right now, all over again.

The best is yet to come for all of us.

Best to all,

Bill

Partners – We Need Each Other

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Created August 6, 2021

Good-natured rivalries are a constructive force for the betterment of all concerned. Unsportsmanlike vicious bitter feuds bring down all concerned.

The state of play at the moment between the two U.S. political parties is at the worst extreme observed in my lifetime. That can’t be a good thing. A house divided against itself, cannot stand. Who said that? Abraham Lincoln, one of the country’s first Republican party presidents, and one of the greatest of all of our presidents.

In this post I am setting out to document that the two political parties form a natural complementariness. That would not be the case with any two political parties. If, for an extreme example, our two parties happened to be Communism and Fascism, they would not complement one another nor work hand in glove together, because oil and water do not mix.

On the other hand, Republicans and Democrats names both mean almost the same thing: Res Publica in Latin means “public affair” and is usually taken to be a synonym for “commonwealth” (generally defined as “an independent community founded for the public good” and used as a synonym for “republic”); and Demokratia in Greek means “the people rule”.

However, Democracy specifies that the people call the shots, whereas a Republic exists for the public good but does not require that all the people together constitute the rulership.

This is not a fine point, it is the whole basis for the dynamic between the two parties.

The Democratic party takes the position that people should be able to reach decisions together by majority voting. That The People can be trusted to reach the right decisions.

The Republican party takes the position that The People are not always wise, they can be swayed by persuasion to make horribly wrong decisions, and must be protected by wiser heads.

No one can deny that there is truth and value in both of these opposed positions.

Especially today, when social media exposes how rampant madness is.

And social media probably adds to the madness.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians – the wiser heads – in the republic? That is the key to the success or failure of a republic – the people trusted to make the decisions. Solomon, Socrates, Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, FDR, Walter Cronkite… we’re probably all in good hands. Most human beings who come to mind are not quite as rock solid.

The Founders were aiming for something optimized by combining Democracy and Republic, checks and balances everywhere. The U.S. Constitution they created established the principle that the power to rule comes from the people who invest that power in their chosen representatives in the U.S. system, a representative democracy and a democratic republic.

The Constitution didn’t mention political parties, and George Washington quit 20 years down the pike when political parties erupted on their own in 1796.

Yet our two parties, balanced as they are around a question of responsibility – can the public be trusted to have total responsibility, and if not, what is the proper interaction between the public and government itself, to achieve the optimal results? – have spontaneously evolved and their respective ideologies are extremely similar. If we had to have parties, these two are the perfect ones, on the face of it.

And one is conservative (in most cases) while the other is more progressive (in most cases). The Republicans coming from a place of getting people to stand on their own two feet, where the Democrats sympathize more with those who have fallen off their feet. The balance between these opposing Goods is where the greatest Good lies.

We need a degree of conservatism more than we ever needed it before, simply because we have been printing money to the extent that many economists fear a hyperinflation that could lose the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency and have global economic effects possibly worse than the Great Depression.

Both parties have been taking advantage of the printing money alternative, and so we are under-representing the conservative ideal. It would be good to see us able to balance the budget and pay down debt. Both sides have good creative ideas and it’s a shame that filibuster prevents or delays debate which could lead to synthesis that is satisfying to both sides and to most citizens. At least let’s modify filibuster to require debate aimed at such synthesis, even if we retain the 60% supermajority requirement to pass a bill.

Let’s get back to using each other’s complementary skills and viewpoints to reach even better decisions and creative ideas than ever before.

The other party are not bogeymen. They are us, Americans, with very slight differences in point of view which are valuable, because they cause us to think, and the combination of two viewpoints causes a synthesis that is more perfect than either of the two original viewpoints.

Although the Founders did not visualize this taking place as two parties, they definitely foresaw that debate was going to be the modus operandi for the infant democratic republic. So let’s debate! The more we debate in a cooperative manner the quicker we shall unearth creative solutions for win/win. It makes no sense to delay debating, it is delaying the creative process the Founders invented.

We can carry on the work of America by simply ratcheting up the cooperation and winding down the rancor. Please give it a chance.

We can all act like children some of the time. Let’s not let ourselves do that all the time.

Two Sides to Every Story

To set us off on the right foot, let’s begin by acknowledging the good that has been done by the rival party. Here is a compilation of my subjective top ten accomplishments of Republican and Democratic presidents over the past 30 years. I left out many others worthy of inclusion in a longer article, and provided a bibliography for serious students. Because I set out to help bring us all together, please let’s not get into knocking any of my specific choices below, that wouldn’t do any good. The main reason I put these lists below together is simply to demonstrate that regardless of party, we have in general chosen well, that our recent presidents have all strived to do the best job they could, and that nothing irreparable has been done to damage the U.S.A. or to prove that our system is no longer functioning.

Bill Clinton (Democrat)

Presided over longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history
Unemployment dropped from 7% to 4%
Poverty rate dropped from 15.1% to 11.3%
Federal investment in education and training doubled, 3000% increase in educational technology funding, Internet-connected schools increased from 35% to 95%
Largest crime bill in U.S. history caused crime rates to decline for eight years in a row and in 2000 were at their lowest levels since 1973
Made approximately 300 free trade deals
Helped end the war in Bosnia
Helped negotiate the Oslo Accords between PLO and Israel
Reduced the deficit for the first time since Truman was president, and reduced inflation
Led the fight to pass GATT which lowered tariffs on manufactured goods by more than one third

George W. Bush (Republican)

Withdrew from Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ending the Mutual Assured Destruction era
$1 trillion tax cut
Established Homeland Security
Targeted Osama Lin Laden for 9/11 and sent troops to Afghanistan breeding grounds for similar events in future
Took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in order to prevent more than half of America’s mortgages from going under
Signed No Child Left Behind Act
Signed Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia
Instituted new penalties for corporate fraud while proposing other reforms to “demand corporate responsibility and integrity without stifling innovation and growth”
Department of Justice guideline prohibiting racial profiling in federal law enforcement
Energy Policy Act of 2005 includes tax credits for wind and other alternative energy, identified ocean energy as a renewable technology

Barack Obama (Democrat)

Signed into law the largest annual increase in research and development funding in America’s history
Ended the 2008 recession: his last three years in office saw annual average growth of 2.3% in U.S. Gross Domestic product (GDP)
International Climate Change Agreement
Modernized the auto industry, raised fuel efficiency standards, and lowered carbon emissions
Reformed health care
Regulated the big banks
Eliminated bin Laden threat and withdrew troops from Iraq
Put 10 million people back to work
Established a new cybersecurity office, appointed a cybersecurity czar, ordered first nationwide cybersecurity assessment
World’s largest free trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Donald Trump (Republican)

Abraham Accords: the 2020 Agreement among Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain encouraged similar pacts with Morocco and Sudan
Space Force: recognized that a new branch of the military is now a necessity
More efficiency in striking down terrorists: continued the use of missiles and drones to kill key terrorists without putting Americans in harm’s way
Historic peace deal with Taliban in Afghanistan
Degrees of improvement in relations with most difficult countries such as Russia and North Korea
Called out China’s currency manipulation, product dumping, industrial espionage, and lack of trade reciprocity
Contributed $483 million to the development of Moderna, $456 million to the development of the J&J vaccine, and up to $1.2 billion to the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine through Operation Warp Speed
His first three years in office (before pandemic) saw average U.S. GDP annual growth of 2.5%
Record highs in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
Prior to pandemic, achieved the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years

Joe Biden (Democrat)

Quadrupled the level of vaccinations per week
Most diverse Cabinet in U.S. history
Rejoined the World Health Organization
Rejoined Paris Climate Agreement
Bolstered U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and other cutting-edge technologies
Provided a comprehensive plan for Covid relief and support
Proposed an Immigration bill that provides a path to citizenship and protects Dreamers
Brought troops home from Afghanistan
Restored relationships with allies
Gave fair warning to Russia and China regarding cybercrime and aggression

Interestingly, most of the Joe Biden accomplishments listed above were drawn from Fox News’ Leslie Marshall’s March 11, 2021 opinion column. The full bibliography of sources for this presidential review is included below.

We’re not as far apart as it seems. Sometimes we get good ideas from each other. Let’s stop the silly squabbling and “put the Beatles back together”.

Best to all,

Bill

Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton#:~:text=Clinton%20presided%20over%20the%20longest,for%20national%20health%20care%20reform.

https://clintonwhitehouse1.archives.gov/White_House/Accomplishments/html/accomp-plain.html

https://learnodo-newtonic.com/bill-clinton-accomplishments

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/achievement/index.html

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/george-w-bush-event-timeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Barack_Obama#:~:text=Obama’s%20first%2Dterm%20actions%20addressed,US%20military%20presence%20in%20Iraq.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/barack-obama/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2012/obamas-top-50-accomplishments/