Walt Disney

"I don't make pictures just to make money. I make money to make more pictures."
-Walt Disney

On this day, Dec 15, 1966, Walt Disney passed away at age 65. This year also marks the 110th anniversary of Walt's birth on Dec 5, 1901. I was raised on everything Disney with Micky Mouse & friends on the wall, Disney records as Christmas gifts (I still love the soundtracks to Robin Hood and Aristocats), Disney story books, Wonderful World of Disney on TV, watching Jungle Book at the theater, visits to Walt Disney World, etc. This all seemed quite natural at the time but an article on PJ Media points out Disney was quite the innovator and "invented" many of the experiences I took for granted.

1. Animation

Steamboat Willie (1928), starring Mickey Mouse, is credited as the first animation synchronized with sound and music. Watch it on Youtube to see how clever it was and remember - sound was NEW! Four years later Disney produced Flowers And Trees (1932) in Technicolor and won the first Academy Award for animation. The Old Mill in 1937 was the first short film to use a multiplane camera and it also won an Oscar. [Multiplane means the sun/moon is painted an one cell layer, then middle ground, then foreground and then the "actors" on top. They are stacked with space between each layer and filmed together. The advantage is 3-D depth to the film; you can move in for a close up and the moon in the sky remains small while objects in the top cells get larger.]  1937 also saw the release of "Disney's Folly", a full length cartoon called  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. To the surprise of everyone (but Disney) it was a smash success and won another Oscar for Walt (along with seven honorary dwarf Oscars presented by Shirley Temple).  Disney never stopped experimenting with Animation. Fantasia (1940) mixed classical music with dinosaurs & dancing hippos; Song of the South (1946) mixed live actors with animation.

2. Education

Disney "had a long history of commitment to artists’ training." He held regular classes taught by masters of various media. Zookeepers brought live animals in for the animators to learn how to replicate natural movement. Many animators that created companies to rival Disney were trained by Disney studios. Walt promoted the creation of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the school opened on land donated by the studio.

By the way, something to look for in recent Disney films; not content just to copy from the past, each film has a visual theme that motivates the animators. In Hercules look for Greek design with red/black colors, sharp angles, pottery & patterns. Look at the Asian animation style in Mulan, etc.

3. Merchandising

We expect toys from films today but Disney was a trailblazer in merchandising.  The studio earned 2.5 to 5% royalty on every item bearing the image of Mickey Mouse (and they are legion). Some of his movie/TV songs became hits like “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and  Davy Crockett. You would think Hollywood had learned the power of merchandising from Disney but when George Lucas made Starwars, Hollywood saw little profit in it and let Lucas keep all the merchandising rights (big mistake).

4. TV

As early as the 1930's Disney refused to sell the rights to his films to others,

…everybody wanted to buy all our old product. We wouldn’t sell it. We wouldn’t hear of it. We wanted to handle it ourselves, make good use of it.

And indeed he did make "good use" of his films. He discovered he could release the films every 7 years to profitable runs. He made a TV Christmas special in 1950 on NBC and another the following year. In 1954 Disneyland the TV series debuted on ABC with a mix of B&W and color. A few years later he moved to full color back on NBC with  Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.  Walt reused films and created new content for his Wonderful World series. He also started another new hit show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Today we have an entire TV channel owned by and featuring Disney material.

5. Theme Parks
An entire park dedicated to cartoons? Who would have believed it? Since 1955, "Disney theme parks led the industry as the gold standard of excellence in amusement park entertainment."

Bottom Line

PJ Media sums it up nicely,

"Disney filled many roles in his 65 years: artist, husband and father, philanthropist, anti-Communist, filmmaker, and even the original voice of Mickey Mouse. But his greatest role was as an American innovator. From animation to television to theme parks Disney left his mark on our culture and enhanced our lives."

P.S.

The 1928 release of Steamboat Willie resounds to this very day. It's my personal theory that Disney Studios will do anything to keep the copyright from expiring on Mickey Mouse. In copyright law 1923 is a special date, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain. Works from 1923-1963, published with notice and with copyright renewed, are protected for 95 years. In theory Mickey becomes public domain in 2023 but as has happened many times in the past century, US copyright keeps getting extended for longer and longer periods. In 1998 the Sonny Bono Act (also called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by Lawrence Lessig) added 20 years of copyright protection keeping Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain in 2003.

Debt Collectors

“Some debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them.” -Ogden Nash
Some debt collectors will do anything to collect from you including harassing your family, friends, coworkers, etc. But you have rights.

The Consumerist features several useful posts.

Let's begin with a sample letter that one should send immediately after first being contacted by a debt collector: http://consumerist.com/2007/07/sample-letter-for-disputing-a-debt-collection-notice.html

The letter asks for four things:

* (1) the amount of the debt;
* (2) the name of the creditor to whom the debt is owed;
* (3) Provide a verification or copy of any judgment (if applicable);
* (4) Proof that you are licensed to collect debts in (your state)

The letter goes on to mention...

* because I have disputed this debt in writing within 30 days of receipt of your dunning notice, you must obtain verification of the debt or a copy of the judgment against me and mail these items to me at your expense;
* you cannot add interest or fees except those allowed by the original contract or state law.
* you do not have to respond to this dispute but if you do, any attempt to collect this debt without validating it, violates the FDCPA;
...
Should you pursue a judgment without validating this debt, I will inform the judge and request the case be dismissed based on your failure to comply with the FDCPA.

What is debt validation? The collection agency needs to prove that they own the debt. They can claim that the debt was sold to them but you have the right to ask them to prove it. Often the proof is flimsy or wrong. There are many stories now of mortgage factories signing fraudulent papers assigning mortgage debt for illegal foreclosings.  The Consumerist recently featured a story of a of a collection agency forging the signature of a dead woman thousands of times to establish validation of ownership.
http://consumerist.com/2011/01/dead-woman-tried-to-collect-on-thousands-of-debts.html

Another debt right to be aware of is the Statute of Limitations. A company can not appear out of the blue and say you failed to pay a debt from 20 years ago.  Well actually they can (and will) say it, but will very likely lose in court if you challenge them. Each state has its own limit on when debts expire. See http://www.creditinfocenter.com/rebuild/statuteLimitations.shtml for details.

Bottom Line

Search the Internet to know your rights. Read the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre27.pdf

But if legal language makes your head spin, the FDCPA is explained here,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Debt_Collection_Practices_Act
and here
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/consumer/fair_debt_collection.html
and here
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre18.shtm

Good Government?

"Peace, order and good government" - British North America Act, 1867, part of Canada's Constitution.

While Urban Legends predate the Internet, they thrive there and it often pays to double check facts and quotes you see in email and on websites. I’ve read many great quotes which after a little research turn out not to be authentic (for the person quoted). Does this make the quote less “real”?

I just finished reading the novel “Time Travelers Never Die” and in one plot line, lost Greek plays are rescued from the ancient Library of Alexandria. They are anonymously given to a modern Greek scholar who translates them and believes them to be real despite the scorn and skepticism of her colleagues. When one of the plays is successfully performed to acclaim, the Director says, Who cares if the play is an “authentic” Sophocles, it’s still a great piece of work.

One of my favorite quotes is

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

This is attributed to Edmund Burke, an Irish statesman pictured above, but wikiquote says there is no evidence to support this attribution. However Burke did say something similar in 1770,

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Perhaps someone paraphrased this quote and improved it unintentionally? Is the quote less effective for being falsely attributed?

What inspired this blog post was a quote I read for the first time today,

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

The quote became popular during the 2000 US election and is attributed to historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (sometimes misspelled Tyler) (1747-1813). The website Snopes.com, which investigates urban legends, calls the attribution “apocryphal”.

And yet someone created this great quote. The real question should not be “who” but rather “is the quote accurate?” There is much evidence in the world today, be it Greece, California, or soon the US, that elected officials have been way too generous in handouts to appease voters. They have undermined the financial stability of the country/state/city they govern. And the saddest thing is, those on the receiving end feel entitled to it. In California, the unions are saying there’s nothing wrong with the pension system that another $40 Billion in new taxes won't fix. The fault, they say, lies with the fall in the stock market which made it impossible for California to pay what the contracts require. At the Illinois capitol last week, the Teachers Union held a protest aimed at state legislators demanding more money for schools (and salaries) and higher taxes to pay for it.

Bottom Line

When municipalities are hemorrhaging money, why is anyone asking for “more”? Whatever happened to civic responsibility and promoting the common welfare?

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country"
- JFK

Sometimes I wonder if the seed of destruction lies in the Declaration of Independence itself with the famous line,

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A marvelous quote often misunderstood:

1. “all Men are created equal” should be interpreted as all are equal in the eyes of God and the Law. No class entitlements (e.g. a king vs a commoner). It does not mean that all people have equal talent or that everyone should make equal money. Some use "equality" to declare that being wealthy is “unfair” and try to pull down the rich to pull everyone else up.

2. “certain” unalienable Rights – as a nation founded on rights it is unfortunate that there is no definitive list of rights. The Bill of Rights listed many rights but did not close debate. We still argue law over hand guns and free speech after 200 years. And people claim new rights such as a right to healthcare, to housing, or to unionize. Is there a right to government subsidies?

3. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. The original quote by Locke is “"no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Possessions was changed by Thomas Jefferson, with the endorsement of Ben Franklin, to “Happiness”. But the pursuit of Happiness may well destroy this country. Higher taxation is an assault on property so we are seeing the sacrifice of possessions for the happiness of others (civil servants, uninsured, etc). Over a third of my earnings are assaulted to pay for others' healthcare, unemployment, subsidised housing, disability and retirement.

Who is going to pay for my welfare and happiness?

British Commonwealth nations use a different foundational principle:

"Peace, order and good government".

This is tricky too – it sounds great and is greatly desirable but without Liberty this principle can lead to dictatorships. I’ll risk Godwin’s Law here and point out that Hitler was democratically elected under such promises to the Germans.

Plato in his Republic did not trust Democracies - the people are too fickle. He believed that peace, order and good government would come from a benevolent dictator. This may work in theory but fails in real world. America was founded in opposition to a monarch and a tyrannical parliament so we created a system whereby potential Presidential dictators are checked and balanced against a Congress and a Supreme Court. In particular the Senate, with 6-year terms, is supposed to act as a buffer against mob rule and the fickleness of fads and demagogues. The "Senators" (old men in the Roman empire) are supposed to add wisdom and deliberation to new laws. Sadly our Senators are not doing their job when they go along with a President who asks for volumes of new law in a hurry with no time for anyone to study it properly. Bad law can be worse than no law at all.

If only we could combine the best of the two foundations into a new principle of

“Life, Liberty and Good Government”

RELATED STORIES

Is a Bailout Backlash Building?
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Citizenship

“The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.” – President Theodore Roosevelt

I thought my notes for a Webelos Den Meeting would make a great blog post...

Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities. Social contract implies that people give up some freedoms to a government in order to maintain social order through the rule of law. We usually associate Thomas Hobbes (1651), John Locke (1689) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) with the modern theory of Social Contract. But the idea was documented in the East (India) in the Mahabharata around 800 BC:

It hath been heard by us that men, in days of old, in consequence of anarchy, met with destruction, devouring one another like stronger fishes devouring the weaker ones in the water. It hath been heard by us that a few amongst them then, assembling together, made certain compacts, saying, "He who becomes harsh in speech, or violent in temper, he who seduces or abducts other people’s wives or robs the wealth that belongs to others, should be cast off by us."

To be a member of society is to accept responsibility for following its rules, along with the threat of punishment for violating them.

In the US, people love to focus upon their Rights and often forget about the rules and responsibilities and duties of citizenship.
Ø paying taxes
Ø serving on a jury
Ø voting
Ø serving in the country's armed forces when called upon
Ø obeying the criminal laws

In ancient Greece, to be truly human, one had to be an active citizen to the community. Aristotle famously expressed: “To take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a god!” Today Americans want to “take” from the government and forget to "give". As “Active Citizens” we should work towards the betterment of the community through:

Ø economic participation
Ø public service
Ø volunteer work
Ø attending school and becoming educated
Ø recycling
Ø other efforts to improve life for all citizens

Social contracts are formed for the betterment of the governed (not for the benefit of the government or King.) The US Declaration of Independence cites social contract theory:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Despite the high-minded philosophy and theory behind US Independence, eleven years later (1787) when the US Constitution was approved, it listed no Rights for the people. Many States disapproved and the Constitution was ratified only after the addition of the Ten Amendments, our Bill of Rights. These rights include:

Ø (1) freedom to exercise our religion
Ø (1) freedom of speech or of the press
Ø (1) the right of peaceable assembly
Ø (1) the right to petition the Government
Ø (2) right of the People to keep and bear Arms
Ø (3) the right not to be forced to house soldiers
Ø (4) freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Legal Warrants are required.
Ø (5) Rights before the Law like due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination
Ø (5) eminent domain: private property shall not be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Ø (6) Our rights in Court: Trial by jury, rights of the accused, Confrontation Clause, speedy trial, public trial, right to counsel
Ø (7) A right to a trial by jury of our peers
Ø (8) Protection against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment.

Bottom Line

There are three ways to become a US Citizen.

1. Be born in the US (even if your parents are not citizens)
2. Apply for Citizenship and pass the INS Citizenship Test
3. Be awarded Honorary Citizenship by the US Congress. Do you know the six people so honored?
   1 General Lafayette
   2 Winston Churchill,
   3 Raoul Wallenberg
   4 & 5 William Penn & his wife Hannah Callowhill Penn
   6 Mother Teresa

National Indolence

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." – US President Gerald Ford

"Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free."- Harry Browne

While I’m a big fan of the Tea Party movement, one thing that it lacks is a clear vision and purpose. What are they opposed to and why? A simple answer is an opposition to a huge government debt (Obama has added more to the national debt than all prior presidents combined!) and the long-term effects this debt will have. But a better answer can be found in a lecture given by Canadian author/journalist Mark Steyn to Hillsdale College in New Hampshire in March 2009. It is titled “Live Free or Die”.

"The President [Obama] wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it's about 40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very Swede-like."

European-style Big Government is not cheap and or even mathematically possible in the long run. It consists of “unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme.” But Mark goes beyond the rhetoric of the Tea Parties to show that the real problem is NOT cost but rather the very nature of the entitlements:

They're wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. … When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back.

Mark Steyn describes five stages on the path to Indolence and loss of liberty.

Stage 1: "The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear."
This is the fun and easy stage. Everybody wins!

Stage 2: "The state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior."
As AIG, Chrysler, and bank TARP recipients have learned, government handouts come with strings.

“If you're a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you're an individual, the impact is even starker. … Under Britain's [free] National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements.”

But instead of fearing the new rules, citizens of every Western nation are eagerly dumping freedom for government ‘security.’ Sacrificing “the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.”

It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care.

Stage 3: "When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts."

[Today] too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it.

Stage 4: "dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as ‘hatred.’ In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control."
In American the rights of Free Speech are being eroded as anything controversial is labeled as ‘hate speech.’ Consider the furor over Miss California for publicly saying she is opposed Gay Marriage.

Stage 5: Stupor - "Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor,"

"When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas
of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome." -
Charles Murray in In Our Hands.

"In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct." - Mark Steyn

Bottom Line

Mark Steyn summarizes the five stages of Indolence as:

1. Stimulus or bailout


2. Comes with quid pro quo strings attached


3. You’re told what to do


4. You told what you’re forbidden from doing or saying


5. Results in the infantilization of a population with no responsibilities or cares

The results can be demonstrated by a Dutchman commenting upon the accelerating Islamification of Holland,

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

Self Control

“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” - Helen Keller

"The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it." — Thomas Frey

In the classic treatise, “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mills tried to discover the proper limits for government jurisdiction. How does one determine if a law is tyranny? Mill’s solution was the concept of “Self-Regarding Acts.”

"As soon as any part of a person's conduct affects prejudicially the interest of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of understanding.)" - On Liberty

The youth of American culture has embraced this philosophy. Who hasn’t heard, “Hey man, back off! I’m not hurting anyone (but myself).” This principle pops up in many arenas – private sex between consenting adults, books or images you view at home, smoking, drugs, alcohol, etc.

I have to admit that while the theory sounds good, like many things, “the devil is in the details.” Over time some actions that used to be considered “self-regarding” have been discovered to ‘prejudicially [affect] the interest of others.” Take smoking for example. Everyone now knows about “second-hand smoke” which may in fact be more dangerous for others than for the smoker (who is inhaling through filters). Many state laws now prohibit smoking in restaurants and work places where the public is exposed.

Now another “Self-Regarding” activity, Alcohol Consumption, is coming under the microscope. England’s Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, wants the public to recognize the dangers of “passive drinking.”

"In his 2008 annual report, launched on 16 March and entitled On The State of Public Health, Donaldson lays bare the shocking toll from passive drinking in England. The list includes 125,000 instances of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence; 2 million victims of alcohol-related violence; 39,000 sexual assaults; 1.3 million children adversely affected by family drinking; 6000 babies born annually with fetal alcohol syndrome; 660 children killed or injured in alcohol-linked road crashes; 7000 non-drinkers injured by drink-drivers; and 560 fatalities due to drink-driving. There were also 1.25 million recorded instances of alcohol-related vandalism. Binge drinking has made city centres no-go areas for many. A survey of 30,000 adults in the north of England found that 45 per cent avoided town centres at night for fear of meeting drunks." – New Scientist.com

Very few so-called “self-regarding” acts are in fact limited to the self. Drug addicts rob banks and mug people to pay for their habit. Pornography increases rape and sexual attacks.

Bottom Line

Although I’m against “big government”, I’m not an anarchist either. There is a legitimate role for government as Mill’s notes, to protect against an act that “affects prejudicially the interest of others.” This includes the obvious like assault, theft, and murder. The government errs when it tries to protect people and companies from acts that harm themselves like over-extending oneself on a mortgage or selling loans to high-risk individuals. The boundaries become less clear where there is a cause and effect relationship to harm. Government becomes a nanny state when it tries to “protect us” from the cause our own excesses. To discourage drinking by heavily taxing alcohol is an attempt to enforce good behavior through the wallet and is a penalty applied to the just and the unjust. Instead I prefer the blood alcohol level method used for driving. A line is draw – below the line you are “self-regarding”, but above the line you become a danger to society and subject to fines and jail time.

Sadly too little social stigmata are assigned to being intoxicated. It should be recognized by all as a crime against society where you have exceeding the limits of self-control. Society exists because of self-imposed self-restraint. Those who refuse to restrain themselves have violated the social contract. How is it right to penalize everyone (including those who drink responsibly) through taxes instead of increasing efforts to apprehend the few who act irresponsibly? Could it be because taxes make money for the government bureaucracy while law enforcement costs money?