The copyright on Mickey Mouse – or at least the copyright on the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse – has expired and he’s now in the public domain meaning anyone can use that version of Mickey and I used the news about Mickey Mouse to take another whack at Donald Trump which I’m clearly not doing often enough.
Despite the fact that he’s been charged with 91 crimes and thinks Michael Corleone wasn’t vindictive enough, Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination and right about here seems like a good place for one of those literary tangents I seem prone to.
Die-Hard Trumpers
A while back I read an article in the Kansas City Star written by a retired psychologist named Robert Pawlicki and Bob came out of retirement long enough to write a piece about Donald Trump and concluded that if Trump got convicted of all 91 crimes he’s been charged with, it wouldn’t change a thing for Trump’s Most Extreme Supporters.
(Which sounds like a celebrity endorsed athletic supporter for overweight men who want to swing a golf club without having their left testicle explode.)
Anyway…
Pawlicki pointed out that people get illogical once emotions are involved and just because we know smoking causes cancer that doesn’t mean people will stop smoking and even though we know COVID killed millions that doesn’t mean people will get vaccinated and even though we know too many cookies will make you fat we don’t stop eating them and that last example comes waaay too close to home.
As Bob wrote: “When beliefs are deeply entrenched, facts become irrelevant.”
Which helps explain how a wide variety of courts can say over and over that there was no significant election fraud and Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election, but 69% of Republicans still believe Biden is an illegitimate president.
Emotions are involved.
Pawlicki wrote that Trump bonded with a certain demographic when he stuck it to the Liberals and beat Hillary Clinton on a TKO and capitalized on the U.S. having a Black president and even though Pawlicki didn’t come right out and say it, I will:
If you’re Sexist and Racist, Trump’s your guy no matter how many times he gets indicted or threatens to put the Constitution through a paper shredder.
And let me add another category of Trump Supporter, even though Pawlicki (a name that keeps reminding me of a well-groomed cat) ignored it and that category is:
Fuck ups.
If you’re the kind of person who didn’t do your homework and couldn’t get to your job on time and couldn’t follow the rules about not making sexists jokes at work or not taking office supplies home with you, Donald Trump probably seems like a kindred spirit, a feeling that is probably not mutual because while Trump has somehow convinced millions of blue-collar voters he’s got their best interests at heart, I get the feeling that if those blue-collar voters burst into flames on the 18th tee at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump wouldn’t bother to piss on them.
But you probably shouldn’t take my word for it because emotions are involved.
Why we like conspiracy theories
In an excellent movie you probably never heard of – Vengeance – B.J. Novak’s character explains why people like conspiracy theories; because otherwise they’d have to admit they screwed up their own lives and their shitty circumstances are the result of their own bad choices.
Timeout while I disagree with myself…
As always, there are exceptions to every rule and one of the reasons conspiracy theories continue to gain traction is that some of them are true.
Kennedy did get shot from the grassy knoll, corporations and the people at the top are greedy and willing to cheat the people at the bottom and Bigfoot is the result of a CIA experiment gone wrong.
(OK, that last one might be bullshit because I just made it up even though it sounds a lot like something the CIA wouldn’t mind doing if they could just figure out how and Bigfoot agreed to carry an M-16 next time we invade somebody.)
Anyway…
I’ve come to think part of Donald Trump’s appeal is he tells his followers that the Liberal Elites are out to screw them and it’s not their fault they live in a rundown trailer park and had their rusted-out pickup repossessed and he’s the only one who can stop those Liberal Elites and to his supporters the fact that Trump keeps getting indicted doesn’t mean he’s a criminal; it actually means the government’s out to get him.
Y’know who else the government was out to get?
John Dillinger.
Maybe that was because Dillinger robbed an impressive number of banks and just maybe the government is after Trump because he lied and kept documents he wasn’t supposed to have and encouraged a bunch of knuckleheads to overthrow the government we’ve been talking about.
But if your emotions are involved, that theory probably won’t work for you.
Despite a fairly consistent track record of getting things wrong, people keep trying to predict the future and right now I’m thinking of an article from Bloomberg Opinion in which the author said the majority of economists were incorrect when they predicted a recession.
The article also said economists had yet to figure out why they were wrong and even though I left my economics degree in my other pants I’ll give it a shot.
In no particular order, the article mentioned: nominal price and wage stickiness, output-inflation tradeoffs, aggregate demand, negative monetary policy, disinflation, old-style Keynesian macroeconomics, broken supply chains, M2 growth and the Infield Fly Rule. (OK, I threw in that last one because the paragraph was starting to get really boring.)
The author concludes:
“The problem is that the real world is not as consistent as model builders might like.”
Which brings us (as all subjects do) to baseball.
When I was trying to get my mind around advanced metrics I asked a friend with a degree in mathematics to take a look at the Wins Above Replacement metric and tell me what he thought and here’s part of what he said:
Any time you try to build a predictive system you have to decide what factors to include and what factors to leave out and how to weight the included factors and if you get any of that wrong your conclusions will be off. Basically, the more factors you include the more places you can make mistakes and when he told me that, I said:
“Yeah, when they were coming up with batting average I’m pretty sure they were done by lunch.”
So does that mean we shouldn’t trust anything complicated?
Nope.
I wasn’t there when Guglielmo Marconi was working on the radio, but I’m guessing it wasn’t simple and I still don’t totally understand how one works and the same goes for TVs, phonographs and Duncan yo-yos (I suspect some sort of voodoo on that last one) but I can see and hear they do work and the only evidence I have that WAR works is WAR proponents telling me it does.
(I also don’t know how a cell phone works and about 42% of the time they don’t and what’s up with that thing where one person can hear the other person perfectly, but the other person can’t hear them at all and the best answer I can come up with was provided by The Sixth Sense when the Bruce Willis character was dead, but didn’t know it yet.)
Anyway…
The people who make predictions for a living are often wrong and now I’ll make a prediction which I’m 99.99% sure will be right: just because they’re often wrong won’t stop them from making more predictions.
As you might already be aware, lots of businesses decided they could save money by putting in self-checkout lanes and firing cashiers.
As you might also be aware, lots of businesses are now trying to walk back that decision because it turns out if you let people check themselves out they may not scan every item and shoplift instead.
According to a story in the Kansas City Star: Target, Walmart, Walgreens and Dollar General are limiting or dropping self-checkout lanes and the ones that are keeping them have employees “monitor” the self-checkout lanes, which seems like an impossible job because if you have multiple lanes and multiple customers checking out multiple items at the same time how does one employee keep track of all that and you might as well ask that employee to clean out the Augean stables.
And now we’ll take a break while you Google “The Twelve Tasks of Hercules.”
Just in case you weren’t a fan of the Steve Reeves movies Hercules and Hercules Unchained (which if memory serves, became a big hit for the Righteous Brothers) just for laughs the goddess Hera made Hercules lose his mind and while he was temporarily insane, Hercules killed his wife and children (a criminal record I don’t recall them mentioning in the Steve Reeves movies) and as part of his punishment he had to perform 12 impossible tasks (like wearing an orange jumpsuit and picking up trash along I-70) and one of the tasks was cleaning up King Augeas’ stables.
Which – according to the internet – housed 3,000 oxen and hadn’t been cleaned in 30 years, so it was almost as bad as a college student’s dorm room and I once visited one of my sons while he was going to college and his apartment looked he was trying to go all four years without washing a dish and was three-and-a-half years into the attempt.
Thank God he didn’t have any oxen.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/stables.html
So where were we?
Right, the bone-headed decision to install self-checkout lanes and fire cashiers and then realizing that you might as well put up a sign saying “SHOPLIFTERS WELCOME!” and then further realizing you needed employees to monitor self-checkout and if you have one employee monitor each self-checkout lane you might as well bring back all the cashiers you fired, which means they really didn’t think this one through.
People at the top
People at the top of Society’s Food Chain like to promote the idea that they’re at the top because they’re smarter and work harder so they deserve to be on Mount Olympus, but according to this article from Investopedia the majority of new billionaires in 2023 came from inheritance:
And while someone somewhere first earned that money, being smart (and/or lucky) in one area doesn’t make you smart (and/or lucky) in every area and if you don’t believe me just look at the self-checkout mistake or all the newspapers who decided to give away their product for free on the internet or all the geniuses who lost their asses in cryptocurrency investments or Elon Musk renaming Twitter or the publishers who rejected Harry Potter or Western Union deciding the telephone was just a toy or the guy who turned down the chance to buy Google for $750,000 or Decca Records taking a pass on the Beatles because: "Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished.”
So remember: Rich people do dumb shit, too.
And if you decide to put that on a t-shirt, be my guest, but send me an XL shirt because my dumb shit includes eating all the Christmas baked goods in our house under the theory that once I eat all the cookies and brownies in my zip code, the World will quit making them and I will no longer be tempted and you can probably guess why I like to believe that:
Emotions are involved.
This one piece alone is worth a subscription.
We're just not gonna mention what size tee shirt I need. 😀
Also, I happen to love self checkouts but I do pay for everything. Haha