Category Archives: Resolutions and Intentions

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

How Can We Get the United States Back to Normal?

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Created July 30, 2021

“America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.”

–Ronald Reagan

The world is waiting to see how this unprecedented drama comes out. Billions of people had high hopes that America would lead the world to a fair break democracy for all. Now it’s looking like the whole idea of democracy is failing and the brutal bosses are restoring their clutches on the whole planet. The tyrants who used to wear masks as monarchies now wear different masks but they still get their way, one way or the other. They buy it, or threaten, or kill, but nothing stands in their way. Apparently not even the legal government of the USA. Because that legal government is no longer one thing, it’s two things:

  1. People who truly believe in what America is all about.
  2. People who only care about themselves and are betting on the Republican party, led by a splinter arm, to take over the country and maybe one day the world by using perfectly legal means, through their cleverness in gaming those legal rules.

It’s my best estimate based on studying survey results from Pew, Gallup, Dynata and others, that at least 86% of Americans do not back this splinter sub-party within the Republican party, we back America, democracy, equality, freedom, justice, truth, science, and perennial human values.

However, some of the 86% are loyal to the Republican party, it is deeply ingrained, all joining-group phenomena build upon the primal human need to belong, and simply out of loyalty these people have been giving their support to the individuals who are driving this bus.

The tools the drivers are using were not in the U.S. Constitution, but introduced a long time ago by politicians anyway, and now filibuster and gerrymandering are treated as American as applesauce. Filibuster being in place, it stops legislation which could otherwise depose both of these tools. In the next midterm elections coming up soon, prognosticators believe that the Republican party, although a minority, will take possibly permanent or at least multi-decade control of the U.S.A.

We have already seen how, at a time which was premature for a successful coup d’etat (voter restriction laws not yet in place, gerrymandering potentials not yet fully exploited), Trump attempted to remain president and got dangerously close to doing it, and retains his freedom to continue to translate the Trump-Republican sub-party ideas for popular allegiance. How much harder will such people fight to keep their control later on if they manage to ever lose an election again despite the use of false stories through all the media, filibuster, gerrymandering, State level voter rights restrictions, sponsored militias (possible but not proven yet), infiltrated police departments and armed services, and local intimidation.

How can we get back to being the beacon for righteousness for the world? It is not by standing helplessly by and allowing it to continue to be driven by a very small minority that prove by their actions they don’t care at all that they are breaching their oaths of office:

“I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.””

The Constitution contains the 15th Amendment:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The people who have proposed voting restrictions, blatantly designed to disenfranchise minority voters, have clearly breached their solemn oaths. All of these conspirators in a coup d’etat plot, anyone who stayed in a room where words were heard conveying this plan to sufficiently game the system and pack the courts and use every foul means available to gain and retain absolute power over a free people despite knowing themselves to be a minority, are traitors to the American Dream.

“Seditious Conspiracy” has already been mentioned by prosecutors in the cases against Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Florida 3%ers who are known to have coordinated their insurgency at the Capitol. We have to open our minds to wider consideration of such charges as investigators continue to trace the causes of the insurrection, from low places to high.

In this citizen’s opinion, they are traitors, guilty of treason; this is not intended as hyperbole. The indications of treason, to me, are disseminating false information in the media, undermining Americans’ self-belief and the world’s belief in us and in our elections, our Constitution, and our vaccines, causing large scale deaths and encouraging authoritarian foreign governments to escalate cyberattacks on the U.S. and other threats to the security of the world. We ought to overcome our hesitation to call a spade a spade and a traitor a traitor. If this is not treason, nothing is treason. They have lowered our chances to lead the world to democracy. Severely lowered them. They are not only traitors to the U.S.A., they are traitors to the human race.

If evidence is found sufficient for legal action, alleged conspirators ought to be removed at least temporarily from Federal and State office until the court decides what outcome is right and proper on a person-by-person basis. In Congress, these suspended lawmakers must be replaced by someone in the Republican party who has not disseminated false information or in any other way evidenced failure to keep their oath of office.

We should welcome people who have been acting solely out of loyalty, when they rediscover where their true loyalty lies, to the true America, the bastion for freedom and truth, for telling it like it is, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for practical idealism, for working together and reaching the best decisions under majority rule as the major principle that makes all the rest possible.

 

 

After the true conspirators have been weeded out and it is once again possible to function under the U.S. Constitution without filibuster, gerrymandering, or any other loopholes that can be gamed by traitorous actors, we can decide together how to refine the Constitution itself so as to ensure majority rule prevails, such as by elimination of the Electoral College (or by means of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact), and by some adjustment to the equality of States in the Senate. Both of these Constitutional rules are evidence that our Founders were worried that unbounded democracy could lead to bad outcomes, given the fact that most people at the time lacked education (still true today). So they built in rules to provide a cushion: the Electoral College and States’ equality in the Senate. However they did not fully visualize how those cushions could undermine the entire structure of the World’s Greatest Most Daring Experiment. In this century two presidential elections were won (by George W. Bush and Donald Trump) despite the popular vote going the other way (that also happened three other times in U.S. history). In 1776 the difference in population between the most and least populous States was only 12 to 1; today it is more than 62 to 1. A person in California’s vote is worth only 1/62nd of a person in Wyoming in terms of Senate voting. If the Founders had been even more clairvoyant than they were, there might have been codicils to adjust for the uneven growth of the nation.

So many great heroes gave their lives to give us this, the greatest and realistically ONLY hope in the world for a fairer society on this planet. In a short time we have managed to smear ourselves with the excrement of falsity, fascism, paralysis, racism, sheer lunacy, hate, violence, power madness, unmitigated greed, abject stupidity, and a taste level that even P.T. Barnum would sneer at. We can rebound as quickly as we plummeted. We lost every battle in WWII for years but in the end our victory with our allies was inevitable. We are supposed to win. It’s in the cards, in the heavens, in the script. Good triumphs over Evil. Always preceded by a dramatic rise in Evil which seems to be winning and the odds of success seem miniscule. Here we are again.

OVER THE TOP! (What Americans and allies said in WWI before leaving their trenches to face almost certain death. But we won. And we will win this one too. It is our Mission.)

That these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

–Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, November 19, 1863

 

Best to all,

Bill

Belonging, Unity, and the Future of the USA

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Created May 28, 2021

Belonging (a sense of social acceptance) is one of the 15 Motivations uncovered by the scientific* work I have been doing for the past 30 years or so.

Belonging is the most complex of the 15 Motivations in the sense that it contains more variations within it. It contains 25 Need States, such as Nationalism and Levity, and 220 of the 265 DriverTagsTM, each of which is a highly specific state of mind. It’s possible that Belonging is a hard-wired instinct, at the core of our nature as social animals, perhaps one of the survival characteristics that has caused homo sapiens (and other species) to be able to still be standing.

That’s why it hurts so much to be cast out of your belonging group. Like in the case of Liz Cheney, for example.

Although political parties were not mentioned in the US Constitution, 20 years later they sprung up and were bolted onto the constitutional system called the USA. Whether the political parties have done more good than harm is still a matter of debate. But one thing they have definitely supplied is the opportunity for belonging, something we all need. This would explain why 59% (Gallup) of Americans today belong to one of the two parties.

As the need for a sense of belonging is a constant, it’s possible that getting this mood-enhancing brain “drug” from political parties has become more important in recent decades as the power of the family might have declined, with children caring more about belonging to their peer group than their family, happening at earlier and earlier ages (hypothesis).

Religion for sure has lost a lot of its hold as a means for transmitting a sense of belonging.

Race has possibly become elevated as a means for generating the sense of belonging, as in the case of white supremacists.

Hypothesis: as the sense of belonging has deprecated from its traditional sources, that created an urgency of need which increased the emotional connection of party membership as a self-identifier.

Rhetoric is the art and potentially science of using words so as to cause people to believe them, whether they are true or not. Rhetoric existed before the media, but then the media became a means for applying extremely powerful rhetoric. Hitler used this in the case of cinema and other media. Today’s internet and social media are analogous to the atomic bomb version of rhetoric.

During the Greatest Generation’s watch, it would have been spectacularly unsuccessful to try to use rhetoric to pull the wool over people’s eyes to the extent that is happening today. I see it as having reached a point of mass hysteria.

Today it would probably entrain belief in the minds of at least ten million Americans if QAnon added another story that all fish can fly. Their fish minds have been taken over by devices used by the Democratic party obtained from pedophilic socialist aliens. They won’t let you see them fly, they only do it when you aren’t looking. But some day, there will be skies filled with dangerous fish swooping down on American patriots to wipe them out.

When you look at the strength of the need for a sense of belonging, how the traditional sources of this have been petering out, how political parties have always known that a populist charismatic leader is the thing to have, and then layer in the mind-bending power of the media (wait for artificial reality media to add to this brew), it’s possible to understand better what is going on today around the world not just in America.

It only took four years to push the USA back into its share of world power position (a measure of the perception of all people in the world) to pre-WWII levels.

Now as we attempt to restore ourselves to what we were there are also wild behaviors happening outside the US which we ourselves caused during those four years, not to mention a potentially genocidal mutating pandemic and an “edge city” environmental situation.

It certainly is a good time to pull together and figure things out by focusing objectively with high performing teamwork and enlisting more help from rich people to make the world the heavenly place it can be. We can actually do it.

Not the best time to have to reach 60% majority vote before we can go to the toilet. The filibuster has been rationalized as preventing “the tyranny of the majority” and “preventing action that has not been fully thought out”. The Founders did not lock in the need for a 60% majority in passing bills, so despite being some of the greatest pragmatic geniuses in history, these considerations somehow did not occur to them? More likely they did consider such things and left it to the voting outcome whether razor thin or unanimous to settle legislative issues.

To people whose careers are in government, it’s easy to see why filibuster might appeal to them. It gives power to stop legislation if one is in the minority. Think of how harmful this would be within a corporation. That’s how harmful it is in government, especially under the emergency conditions we are now faced with. Yet because a politician knows that it’s likely that half his or her career life will be spent as the minority, filibuster will be a floor under how bad one can feel. We non-politicians have no such swaddling cloths in our lives, we make our own successes and failures, we have no special entitlements that keep our control of others high when we have not earned that by majority vote of the people or by our individual performance in the eyes of our employers/clients/customers/users.

Unity is more than belonging, it is a highly desirable condition in which people work together toward common goals. That’s what we meant when we called ourselves the United States of America.

Unity has always been a strength of the Republican party, they are able to band together as a voting block (sic) whereas Democrats in the past have always been all over the lot in the diversity of their thinking. But today the Republican penchant for unity is allowing 4251 people who at best represent only about 14% of eligible voters in the US to impede the rest of us – polls showing that more than 60% of Americans like what the present administration is doing – from getting things done at the federal level, but even more dangerously are taking advantage of the powers which the Founders gave the State level.

Unless we the people speak up loudly enough, the future of America is that a number of States representing a minority of the population will drive out non-white people and many important businesses, who will migrate to the States where non-whites are offered equal opportunity and a sense of belonging.

Internally divided, we will still stand, but will not be the country we could be if we had unity restored.

Our degree of perceived vulnerability with a civil cold war will be exaggerated in the eyes of One Man Rulers abroad. They will come after us. It will not be heavenly at all.

That scenario must not be allowed. The only way to stop it is to use all your own social media efforts to put a stop to the self-destructive urges we have collectively been entertaining. Participate in polls, speak your mind, when the referendums come participate in them too.

Do not add to the problem by hating the 34 million of us who disagree, or the One Man Rulers of other countries, or any group or individual. Hate has no constructive outcomes. Hate erodes Reason. We need our ability to think clearly to rise to the top and to drive all of our behaviors. We need our emotions to be courageous enough to rise above fear and hate and to leave our minds open to win/win unity where dissenting voices are respected and included. Everyone must be included or we will never escape the downward spiraling cycle of divisiveness.

My best to all,

Bill

*When I say “scientific” what I mean is observing patterns in data, forming hypotheses from that, and then testing those hypotheses by means of controlled experiments, with the intention of discovering new and useful truths. The data I have used relates to the content that millions of anonymized individuals choose to consume on television and the Internet as measured by set top boxes and log files. This body of knowledge is meant to complement and inform the psychology systems (link to relevant example emanating from centuries of science using other data types.

 

Orchestrating Palestinian Israeli Cease Fire

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Created May 20, 2021

Because the US and other countries do not recognize the legitimacy of terrorists, they have been addressing Israel in their requests for cease fire. This makes it look like all the blame is being placed on Israel, when in fact the Palestinians started it.

That is not helping.

The US and its allies should publish a recommendation to both countries.

Israel should apologize for sending forces into the holy shrine of all Peoples of The Book, and promise to never do it again.

Palestine should apologize for over reacting with thousands of rockets, and promise to never do it again.

Soon thereafter, Israel should offer a peace branch to the people of Palestine, agreeing no further Israeli settlements unless invited, and ask for the Israelis already settled in Palestine to be warmly welcomed unless they prefer to come home and be warmly welcomed.

Israel should also offer help in economic and educational/training and in the development of tourism to both countries once there are safe places to visit.

In my humble opinion.