Hi John,

My name is Derek, and I'm a longtime fan. Yesterday was the 26th anniversary of my emergence from the womb, for which my girlfriend Stephanie handed me the personalized caricature you'd been working on with her secretive and deceitful electronic correspondence.

I've been told being birthed was an important moment. My memories are fuzzy, but it couldn't have been any cooler than yesterday.

I just wanted to sincerely thank you. I'm sure you hear that a lot, but from the bottom of my heart, the gift means a lot to me. If you would've told me when I was eight years old, watching Ren and Stimpy in euphoric glee, that I'm someday receive a personalized sketch from John K. for my birthday, I probably would've told you to shut up so I could watch the cartoon. Afterward, though, I would've peed everywhere.

Moistly,
Derek

If you wanna mess yourself too,

These folks have some stuff on their way to them.
This one is a gift, so I can't show you the whole thing yet.

Now here's some quality kitsch! Be the only one on your block to have an original authentic approved and official George Liquor on a slab of tree!

LOG MAN ON LOG

SEE LOGMASTER AT WORK!

To Give You an Incentive To Succeed at Something

That sounds good on the surface. If making money was an incentive for us to become an astronaut, or a biologist, or a great cartoonist or any kind of productive person who brings new and better things into the world that would be great.

Instead the incentives are to become CEOS or managers at companies that are already big because of some long dead entrepreneurs who did believe in something and our goals are just to find a level of management in which to hide and take advantage of the system - and keep it going even to the point of where it actually loses money.





If financial rewards encouraged us to make better products than our competitors, then products would get better and better all the time, wouldn't they? Is it happening?

I don't think so. All our products are being made in other countries and the only work left here is for managers - people who don't know anything about how the products are made, have no inherent love for the product and would take a job in management at any kind of company at all. How can you manage the making of a product you know nothing about? It happens all the time and is considered today, an all-American wonderful goal.

Managers aren't there to make money for the company, have no natural loyalty to anything except their own personal success-their credits, their bonuses. They jump from company to company like aphids, gobble up as many leaves as they can and then when they kill the veins, hop off to another company at a higher level and destroy even more.

There is no competition anymore.

It used to be that people did compete. Hearst competed with Pulitzer to sell more newspapers by making the best comics and content - by pleasing people. The idea was if your product was better, more fun, easier to use or was cheaper and just as good, then you would be rewarded and live in a mansion and be served by beautiful slave girls. That sounds completely logical to me. That's a system designed around natural human instincts and fosters something that was once known as progress. It gave us telephones, medicine, cars, movies, cartoons, Jazz music, Rock 'N' Roll, comfortable lives for millions (for the first time in history). This system encourages the individual to do great things - which is a democratic ideal.

Musicians competed by making more and more appealing music. Scientists competed by making newer and more astonishing discoveries.

Now the way companies compete is not through free enterprise as the system still pretends, -not by making better and better products, but by squashing any competition from people who actually can make things. Don't let them into the system. Then our products can be crap and the public will have to buy them anyway - because there IS no competition. Replace quality with marketing. Very few people are talented enough to make quality and progress, but anyone can be a marketing executive.

Should Capitalists Have To Obey Laws?

We ordinary people have all kinds of laws we have to obey. We can't just go out and kill someone who likes the girl we want. We can't steal someone else's food or bigger TV. We can't cross the street on a red light or make up our own rules. Otherwise there would be chaos and a fast decline in our safety and quality of life.

So shouldn't capitalists also have laws? They shouldn't be able to cheat the competition and the public should they? But they do. Should people who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of something be allowed to extend its copyright for decades and profit from it - while destroying it?A completely free market means there are no rules. The people who believe in this assume that it breeds competition, but instead it breeds individual advancement at the expense of the company, the product and the talented and skilled artisans who want to actually make good things.

It leads to decay of the products, the companies, the public and the country - as we have finally witnessed. I have seen this coming for 30 years and was amazed it took so long for things to fall. What held up these huge monster inefficient companies for so long?

One simple regulation that could help (and did once) - Distributors Can't Own Products Or Manufacturing Plants

I'm no expert on rules in general or politics and legislation but some things just seem totally obvious - espcially when they affect the business I'm in.

For example, if I owned Ren and Stimpy, cartoons would be way in advance today than they are.
Why? Because unlike networks who can't tell good from bad, who spend tons of money on waste instead of on the product, I like cartoons and always want to try new things and make each one a little better when I can. Look at the difference between the first few Ren and Stimpy cartoons, and then how they looked just a year later.
They improved just because a bunch of cartoonists finally got a chance to practice and experiment - which hadn't been done in mainstream animation in 30 years. I compete with myself out of sheer boredom and to try to beat out other cartoonists and get the biggest audience. I like people to laugh at what I do. I hire artists who are better than me and lean on them to be more creative all the time. I would constantly feed part of my reward back into the company and make better and better products - until I got too old and boring and some young genius (who probably would have learned at my studio) would come along and make something fresh and better quality. These are all natural good tendencies for my profession (and the country) that our system is designed to squash.

It used to be that a distributor couldn't own a product. For the reason that it could then make its own products and squeeze out other smaller competitors who might be able to make a better product, faster and cheaper.

If we had that regulation, then the networks and movie distributors would be encouraged to hire the most talented creators so that what they distribute would make more money than the other distributors.
When a network can own its own studio - like when Nickelodeon built one out of mine and used all the foundation (and money) that I generated and built up through my own natural impulses and urge to compete in a free market, they were then able to make their own cartoons in house and kill off any individuals who could make something better, faster and cheaper. They spent the money on hiring tons of executives, getting a big fancy place and painting it all up in primary colors to make it look like a wacky cartoon studio - and then didn't make a hit for 10 years. Not till Sponge Bob - which snuck by under their noses, and is a primitive imitation of the show that started the whole thing in the first place - and it's stagnant. It barely changes over the years.

Now you could take Genndy or Craig or any number of successful creators and say the same thing. What if they owned their own characters? Where would we be now? A lot further along, I'd say.

In this kind of system, the company has no incentive to hire the best people. Because the best people will believe in something and there are very few of them. But there are tons of people who are happy to take money under any kind of impractical system and these people will do anything to get ahead within a company - even at the expense of the success of the company's product and financial success.


How many huge multi-corporate giants are in debt? Check it out. What happened when AOL bought Warner Bros?

I have lots more theories on this subject, but this is too much to digest without getting an ill stomach, so I'll get on it again later...

Capitalism's great advancements and progress in 50 years.


Collect your own anti-capitalism hero doodles!

I usually get mad at Michael Moore's movies, not because I disagree with everything he says, but that he isn't ever sure of what his message really is. He just is mad about something and wants you to get mad with him. This time he actually encourages us to start a full blown revolution- but doesn't tell us specifically what to revolt against or how to go about doing it. I guess he just wants us to get shot in the streets.

"Capitalism - A Love Story" definitely made me mad, more with him than at him this time, but he's still pretty vague about what the problems really are and even more so on what the solution to the problems are.
He succeeds in making you hate Wall Street Corporate snakes and crooked politicians - both liberal and conservative, but did we really need a movie to convince us of what most of us already knew anyway?

Vague Message - Did Capitalism Ever Work?

Like in all his movies he implies that he believes in 2 opposite propositions. This time he suggests that Capitalism worked great under F.D.R. He shows clips of America during its most happy and prosperous times- the 1950s and early 60s, the age of the luxurious middle-class (which I actually experienced.)

But then, from the other side of his mouth he explains that this period of American prosperity was only possible because we went around starting unjust wars with the rest of the world and blew up all their factories. That killed all competition from kindly Nazis and other wonderful cultures and allowed us to be the world's greatest manufacturers and exporters, and therefore rich and happy in every class.

I thought this was extremely simplistic and dishonest.
He left out the fact that we used to make innovative and quality products that people naturally liked and then after the Hippies we stopped doing that.

College Loans

He, like many uber-liberals seems to think it's a crime that every kid can't afford to go to college and that the loaning companies charge exorbitant interest to the poor kids who just want a decent education.

This assumes that we all agree that every kid needs college, and worse that every college actually provides you with a practical education. No one ever questions these unproven assumptions, which I find astonishing.

Why does nobody do a documentary about how colleges are dishonest, charge way too much tuition and don't teach you anything useful?

I'm not talking about every college. There surely must be some practical ones - trade schools that teach plumbing, electricity or carpentry. Universities that teach math, science, medicine and technology. You can't learn those things on your own. You need experts from their fields to share their knowledge with you.

But do we really need kids to spend 4 years learning such subjective vagaries as "humanities" and "Liberal arts". Think of all the money wasted on this stuff, and all the time being stolen from the kids and the economy. This is a time when the average person has the most energy and optimism and could be spending their time doing and learning something productive. Instead they are sitting asleep at their desks learning about how the white man is the most evil of all races and that all knowledge is vague and subjective, and that you should spend all your time arguing against the man, but never accomplish anything tangible.

At least those colleges call their courses "liberal arts" which is somewhat honest, but now this "liberal arts" vagueness and political propaganda has migrated to what used to be honest trade schools and that's even more scary.


I can speak here from direct experience. I went to a trade school to learn animation, and they barely taught anything practical. The teachers themselves couldn't do it and could not draw as well as half the students- and it's gotten worse since then. They sure didn't teach you to be humorous.

Students have to come to work for me, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with student loans. Is that the fault of the banks who loaned them the money? Or the fault of the schools who just charged too much? This is never ever mentioned in any liberal argument that assumes we all want our kids to go to school and it's OK to pay way too much for it.

It's bad enough that the kids, their parents and the economy all have to suffer for these crazy expenses - but what did the students (and the country) really get for all this money changing?

As far as I can tell, practically nothing. Just about every student who has ever come to me with a diploma and a portfolio of 5 second life drawings has to be retrained - to just be able to barely function on a cheesy TV cartoon!

They have to unlearn their school style. This is very hard and very expensive - to me- because the kids don't even know they have a school style.

I've hired talented kids who taught themselves to animate at school by trial and error - but they couldn't read exposure sheets! This meant I couldn't direct them right away because they couldn't read my directions. So I had to teach them how to read the sheets.

They also would not learn how to clean up their own drawings because that was frowned upon by the school. In the real world, someone has to clean up an animator's drawings - but no one is being taught how to do it. The schools don't seem to regard the problems of the real world as being important.

The students also have real trouble breaking out of formula because they have not been exposed to a lot of different cartoon styles. They usually can only draw a handful of repetitive over-used "animation expressions" from bland 80s Disney cartoons.