Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement

“Get old, you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ’em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.” – Bubba Ho-Tep

Hunter wanted to start a new delivery service, but Instagram® was already taken.

I’ve stumbled on a principle that I think is currently guiding the flow of history.  Being a very humble person, I have named this Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement.  Put simply, it’s the idea that if there are two more or less equal outcomes, the most amusing outcome will happen.  It’s like instead of being dead or alive, Schrödinger’s Cat had a choice of being a polar bear or nuclear warhead.

Amusing, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean good.  It doesn’t mean beneficial.  The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald (PBUH, who I’m sure was part of the branch of the MacWilder side of the family) put it this way, “The job of a comedian is to make comedy.  Comedy is when something unexpected happens.  So, what’s funnier than a comedian that tells a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh?”

Norm’s joke.

I think, for reasons to be explained below, that we are in a time in history where the most amusing thing that could happen, will happen.  And I have evidence.  And not the burn a body at a funeral home it’s a cremation, but burn a body at home all of a sudden it’s “destroying evidence” sort of evidence.  Nope, most every story is one you’ll be familiar with.

The Trump Election in 2016 was my first clue.  I’m fairly sure that Trump thought he was going to lose on election night, but after the polls closed?  Amusing as can be.  Hillary’s mental breakdown and gin-infused refusal to admit that no one would announce her as “Her Cankleness” at the United Nations?

Amusing.

Also amusing was COVID.  Remember the pictures of people collapsing on the street in China?  Yeah.  People fell for that.  In the end, it became a meme.  Again, I’m not saying it was positive, but how amusing would it have been if people had said, “Oh, it’s a really bad flu.”  Heck, there are still people who so mRNA addicted that they get the Pfizer® shot into their eyes every other week.

Why did Hunter sniff artificial sweetener?  He thought it was Diet Coke®.

Amusing.  Even more amusing?  If the mRNA vax didn’t actually help people and was instead an amazingly irresponsible experiment where we tested it on people before we tested it on mice.  Oh, wait . . . .

Not mine.

Although I wanted Trump to be re-elected in 2020, I have to admit that the 2020 election was amusing.  What happens when a bunch of well-funded Leftists and Globalists decide they want to change the rules and control information flow so a barely-living reanimated corpse of a political hack so limited in intellect that he plagiarized law school work and so limited in charisma that houseplants regularly get more attention gets close enough that they can commit (what is likely) the biggest electoral fraud in history?

And Biden is doing such a wonderful job that he’s making Jimmy Carter look like an effective and competent President, while displaying worse morals than Teddy “pants optional” Kennedy.  Sad that Biden doesn’t remember any of that from day to day, and that his son Hunter doesn’t remember the years 2008-2021, and that the New York Times® doesn’t remember anything bad anyone named Biden ever did.

When NASA shows a picture of a hole at work it’s a scientific breakthrough.  When I do the same thing, it’s an HR violation.

It’s certainly amusing, and probably more amusing than if Trump were in his second term.  And what if that child-sniffing dementia patient picks the most vapid and, well, retarded mentally challenged person to ever sit as Vice President?

Amusing as can be.  Mike Pence was boring, mostly.  Kamala Harris regularly shows that her knowledge of foreign policy came through watching game shows and infomercials.  Sham-wow®!

If Kamala was amusing, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even more so.  To have Joe Biden state, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a . . . .embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” less than a month before that exact thing actually happened?

Amusing.

Like salmon return to spawn in the rivers, COVID-19 laid its eggs and became the Ukraine.  The Mrs. heard one young high schooler say, “Hey, COVID’s over!  We have World War III!”  The Ukraine became the Next Big Thing.

And then?

Elon Musk.  Pretty much everything he does is amusing.  Twitter® is hilarious.  Beating NASA with 1/1,000th of their budget even more.  And selling electric meme cars to Leftists that now hate him?

I hear that Amber will soon be touring with Korn.

That’s amusing!  He even showed up in commentary at the Johnny Depp/Amber Turd trial.

I think, maybe, that The Market Collapse of 2022 is at least partially from the Left trying to take down Musk and keep Twitter™ as the main source of Leftist indoctrination.  It bothers them so much that they actually panicked enough to appoint a Ministry of Truth.

See?  Amusing.

Now, just this week, I hear that “men” are lactating.  And that “men” can have abortions.  Oh, and did I mention the Supreme Court decision?

Yeah.  Amusing.

The dead writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this (when he wasn’t writing about Oedipus) in his Future History.  He called it the Crazy Years.  The Crazy Years were just that – the years after society broke down.  Heinlein didn’t write about that period much at all, mainly because it’s not a great story.

I do hear he was a savvy shopper, so they called him Bilbo Bargains.

J.R.R. Tolkien was going to do a sequel to The Lord of the Rings.  He didn’t.  Why?  After the One Ring was chucked along with Frodo’s finger (note to self, that would be a good band name) and destroyed, things were good.  The world had been saved from Evil, and anything that would be a sequel would have been dark.  It would have involved (from his notes) Aragorn’s kids idolizing Orcs and slowly being seduced by a decadence that prosperity brought, eventually leading to degeneracy and corruption replacing morality and virtue.

Heyyyyyyyyyy . . . .

Most years, most decades, haven’t seen as much amusement as these last six years.  We live in those dark years that neither Heinlein nor Tolkien wanted to write about because it was depressing.

That’s okay.  We’re not in a story.

What we are in, though, is a history moving ever so quickly that the novelty content is ever increasing.

There is one thing that we can do, and one thing only.  In the darkness of years where degeneracy and corruption replace morality and virtue, be moral.  Be virtuous.  Stand for what is right, even when the world flows around you and tells you that good is bad, and men can breastfeed.  Be virtuous, especially when those around you count virtue as the greatest sin.

Why?  It’s right.  And it’s not at all what they’re expecting.

I guess that makes it amusing, right?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

26 thoughts on “Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement”

  1. Great post! Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” also is an insightful and prescient look at our current situation. And I was amused to find it under the comedy section at my local bookstore.

    1. Ha! The Mrs. introduced me to that one when we got married. I was going to do a post on it at some point . . . .

  2. We have to find amusement where we can in a dark world. As an added bonus, making fun of “Them” drives them (more) insane and that is always fun

      1. I like your thesis of Greatest Amusement. I am just as ready to believe in general incompetence as our root problem, tho. I have never seen any reason to dispute H L Mencken’s statement that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong”. All to often, our decision makers aren’t clued in enough to look past the obvious ‘answers’.

        1. I think these outcomes only happen because we are silly right now. In a world with more discipline, none of those would have happened . . .

  3. I can imagine that a trans-man (born female, if I understand the terms) could, with some effort, become pregnant. But then I can’t believe that such a person, having made the effort to BECOME pregnant, would suddenly change their mind and seek an abortion. I mean, that would be crazy… amusing, I guess.

    And on the other topic, it’s grimly amusing that the Russian effort to “rescue” their Ukrainian brothers from neo-Nazis, seems to require murdering a large number of them, and destroying their built environment. And it seems that the worst of the fighting involves the most “Russian” part of Ukraine.

    1. The Ukrainians spent the last 8 years shelling those cities and villages, killing 40,000 ethnic Russians.
      Ukraine was seeking NATO membership, bringing the NATO and the USA to Russia’s border.
      Ukraine went all-in on GloboPedo, which Russia has finally succeeded in kicking out of their country.

    2. Silly, men can have babies if they are “birthing people” – really, that’s the term they use.

  4. Where do you come up with all these amusing puns?

    I think you’re on to something with the Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement. There could not be a more amusing head to the Ministry of Truth than Scary Poppins. There could not be a more amusing First Son than Hunter Biden. There could not be a more amusing advocate for third trimester abortion than Aimee Arrambide.

    https://youtu.be/GVao-Gn-J5c

    I also think drone reconnaissance warfare is really amusing. You can almost hear General Russell Crowe down there screaming out “Are you not entertained!?!” as a barrage from Biden’s 100K artillery shells to Ukraine rain down…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL9SfbFTpu8

    One last note…um, it’s not NASA that releases the black hole photos…they are the ones that failed to fuel up the SLS moon rocket in three seperate tries during a recent pad test (very amusing). The National Science Foundation funds the Event Horizon Telescope. The NSF is also the funding source for the incredible LIGO gravity wave detectors in Louisiana and Washington State that is our OTHER big discovery machine about black holes. NSF does great science for tens of millions of dollars, not tens of billions like NASA. Credit where credit is due for incredible work that makes this an amazing time to be alive.

    https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=305148

    https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=297414

    1. Aesop has a really good QRD on what’s happening there with artillery . . . . and that’s a great picture of where the FBI lost Hunter’s laptop.

  6. John, I am working on a theory (thanks for making me think) that what we are really seeing is a trajectory that started with the end of the Cold War/started with Gulf War I (so 1990-1991). Looking where the US (at least) was, how did we end up here? Admittedly we are on an increasingly tail end of things going for the greatest amusement, but we did not suddenly get here. There have been a series of actions – by lots of people, not just one side – that got us to the point where in some ways, these seem to be the “inevitable” outcomes.

    To your last point – the greater the darkness, the brighter the stars shine. Although a very overused trope, it is true none the less: be a shining star.

    1. How did we get from there to here?
      1) After Ruby Ridge and Waco, we didn’t hang every member of the ATF and FBI, or burn Janet Reno at the stake.
      2) We reelected BJ Clinton.
      The trajectory was clear more than 25 years ago.
      Don’t blame me. I voted for Ross Perot, who predicted all this. With charts and footnotes.

      2. Dear Bubba Hotep,

        “Everything” except what you do for your grandsons. Grand-nevvy’s’ll do in a pinch,

        You’re welcome,

        A second-hand lion.

        Light those candles brethren and sistren: “In the end we win, they lose “.

        Enjoying one of the last Wilder Times at the old sod. The grass is green under my “settin’ tree”, the last of the bourbon, and the first of the mint in my glass

        Might be the last one ever, and a great post for it

    2. There actually is a reason for this. Events are getting so large and moving so fast that logic and normal human processes are ceasing to work . . . .

  7. What’s amusing to me is that no one in this Admin has any idea or even a grasp of the need for some kind of plan other than bad ones. And, what’s even more hilarious is that some of the NPCs in it think their “plan” ain’t bad.

    At least Herb Stein (Ben’s dad), who was Nixon’s Econ Honcho, had an answer on how long the economy would continue to recover. Herb’s reply was “Until it ends.”

    1. Indeed. I think they don’t have a plan because all they have is ideology. There’s no way it works operationally, and they don’t have time to learn that their ideology won’t help as the ship begins to list . . . .

  9. Amusing as an unobtainum car part is now engine replacement time with only a month to go at number two in the cue.
    Getting the much needed arm workout walking to the Sack-N-Save and back, about $100 worth is all I want to carry at one time.
    Fell flat on my face in some mud and roots the other day and just laughed while embracing the muck.
    I keep a smile on my face and laugh at the dullards who can barely drive down the road without mommygov and a Julia cartoon to keep them safe.
    They want you demoralized and despondent, laugh your ass off at the feckless faculty lounge f**ktards instead. (** added by Wilder)

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