Building Butter
Grease up your house with taste, your neighbors will think you are so slick
A Duckstack in hand is worth three in the bush1
Have you ever read the story of the three little pigs? According to the tale, various pigs build houses out of straw, sticks, and bricks, and only the house built out of bricks is immune to the enemy of pigkind. So we have decided to build everything out of bricks. Your mailbox. Your Toaster. The Bread inside the toaster. Brick ovens, and brick stoves, with brick fires toasting bread in brick pans, which is also bricks. Brick planes fly above brick clouds, and brick roads are pelted by brick snow. Brick beds are where your head goes, and brick libraries the public knows. Brick fountains, and brick seas, and brick futures unto We.
Does this surprise you? Is it heavy news? Do you need a toilet, to put bricks into? Brick animation on brick TVs, with bricks for brains, no wolf will eat me
I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE STOCK MARKET
This is financial advice
The United States is heading for a massive depression, and then it is headed towards apocalypse, and then The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is going to inherit the Earth. Those are the facts.
I’m not saying this to be a doomer or a prepper or a blackpiller or to get everyone feeling all glum, I’m just reading from the book of Revelations2. On the projections I’m running, averting any of the collapse points I’ve identified doesn’t seem likely- Despite every socially evolved institution shredded and inflation and war and plagues and rumors of plagues and mental illness numbers basically doubling every year3 some 20% of the population is liberals45. I jest, I jest. Somewhat. But what we do have is an exponentially collapsing fertility rate and a general political state of incompetence and ineptitude from both sides of the aisle so vast that most of the population thinks reselecting congress from a phone book, at random would be a good idea. Even if you could get a good politician in, the whole of government seems so infested with lobbyist bloat that pretty much every sitting leader in the country is hopelessly out of touch678. Check out these graphs:
I think both of these charts are conservative estimates. This is Black Death levels of depopulation. And Every sitting politician’s solution is “Import people from elsewhere” and we’ve been doing that for decades and what happens is they instantly nativize and get infected with the same viruses and they stop having kids too.
One of the things you have to note about this graph, about visualizing a society composed 50% of elderly retirees, is that their children will not be evenly distributed. Some of the elderly who need additional care will have children to do so, assuming the children have the inclination and competence to do so, but many of these elderly will have none. Picture, I don’t know, a nursing home replacing every single church in your town. A population that topheavy will require a total welfare state. This forecasts a greatly higher than 50% reduction in the labor force- you need young people to be garbagemen, plumbers, construction workers, electricians. Everything that actually maintains anything will have its available hands reduced to basically nothing. You can already see this in the service industry- if you look around, everywhere seems to be hiring, but millennials just failed to reproduce enough zoomers to fill the jobs. And we are just at the beginning. At some point, in the next decade, panic is going to set in9.
What follows is going to follow established economic patterns. Most people are currently asleep to the coming crisis, so institutions and groups that set up against the coming famine will have a huge lead for early adopters- essentially, bitcoin is currently at $10.
As more people wake up to the decline, you will find intermediate investors prepping as a hobby. They are not going to make good investments but it won’t really matter, because they’re still ahead of the curve, even if they have no idea why and their “investment principles” are bad. In this stage, most people will invest in the default, which is the United States Government, or possibly by then the U.N. By this I mean, they will take government jobs, police, military, etc, because taxes and such seem like a reliable source of energy. The government survives by siphoning life and energy from other places, so in theory as long as there’s “other places” people will feel like they can get by with just allying the biggest dog in the arena.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is currently the third largest landowner in the United States- and almost all of it is farmland.
The Church of Jesus Christ also has the most formal and well maintained welfare system in place out of any institution that doesn’t specialize in it. It has Bishops storehouse food distribution networks, it has its own farms to source everything from, it has thrift stores and jobs programs and safeguards against welfare abuse (such as: Monetary relief only for tithe payers10 and intensive learning programs to help recipients become self sufficient). It also has a strict hierarchy which makes distribution even sleeker- Each congregation of 200 people, with one Bishop who can "know" all of them, and a geographic chain of command. The Church is already a pseudogovernment.
As things get worse, anyone that insists on atomization will simply die. Imagine a geriatric baptist church with one young family who then moves away and its just really old people attending and disappearing, and apply this to like, neighborhood grocers. As things get worse, the United States Government will gradually stop being able to “cash” its “checks”- it won’t have enough energetic youth to power its police force, or its fire fighting force, or to pick up the garbage every week. The value of the dollar will tank, organizations will become ghost towns, there won’t be enough people even interested in being the mayor to have one11. As things get worse, various organizations will cry for manpower, and these cries will take on an increasingly religious fervor. Walmart pitching "our employees are family" but not even believing it, walmarts employees are a tribe, they are at war with Smiths, there is nothing anyone can do to stop this. I'm imagining total ancapistan state of society. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been hoarding for decades and prepping for this, and will very rapidly become utopian by comparison. Not that our fertility rate is going to save us, but the church has been spending a massive portion of its resources trying to make up for that with infrastructure. It will become the clear favorite by virtue of having a century head start. In fact nearly all of the Church’s actions seem custom made for this sort of a scenario. For a while, the federal government might be able to send a bunch of 80+ year old IRS agents to collect taxes from the church, and coerce food storage from the church, which we will just pay. The leeches will not be able to leech fast enough to have the energy to leech more. Rapidly people’s family concerns will simply take priority- people have better things to do than provide manpower for bloatgov.inc.
After this phase of collapse, word will spread that the church is a Mecca- Even people with great disagreements with the church will want to literally or metaphorically “go to Utah” (or join up with their local ward unit) because its the only place that works. This will be a second renaissance for the saints, where our industry and honesty wins hearts and minds all over the place that were skeptical from luxury beliefs before. But this will still be an apocalypse scenario and the church’s currently hoarded $100 billion will not be enough. There will be a lot of hard choices to make.
What I wish to drive home is that unless old school morality is restored, this is simply what is going to happen. I’m probably off on one or two details about walmart, but there are not many other ways this can play out. The Church is going to replace everything by just osmosis, like an amoeba, because its the only institution that both planned that far ahead and got buy in that far ahead. It is a natural government, It will be the clear choice.
Now the question for you is, if you read this, and you are convinced of the coming disaster, then you are now positioned as an early investor. Things are not bad enough yet that the gears have flipped from building to maintenance- the need for welfare (and I don’t mean money or food) is not currently so large as to outweigh income. The needy won’t eat up all your contributions. If you put your kids in a community, they will be able to build something really good and capitalize on the famine, like Joseph in Egypt.
And if you are convinced of the coming disaster, then it is incumbent upon you to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is incumbent upon you to help. us. The purposes of community is to pool resources to build something greater than you would be able to build by yourself. This may take some humility if you aren’t the leader, if there’s things you disagree with. But personally I want my descendants to have the least amount of suffering possible, to be surrounded by the least amount of pain and death and need, to be able to live as good of lives as possible. This means thinking ahead. It means placing the best bets you can, on the best information available, as soon as possible. And I am deathly worried that your children, for you are my friends, will be forced to become beggars, because no atomized individual can prepare enough by themselves to provide the community required.
I think it would be great to be wrong, for me to be a little crazy here, everything is fine and will be fine we’re just having some economic speed bumps due to bad tariff policies or something. But the picture I’m painting has happened before. I do not enjoy being the bearer of bad news, I have a great aversion to manipulation and force and doomsday preaching smacks of both. But welfare is something I care about, and I believe God cares about, and it has been on my mind. If you don’t act, you run the real risk of ending up in the beggar position yourself, but too late to have anything to offer in return. A pilgrim to the Mecca The Latter Day Saints have built, but only once all the chips have already fallen, with no opportunity for pride and self respect. I don’t want this to be anyone who knows me, I don’t want anyone I know to have to live the prodigal son. I wish all my friends to look upon God with self respect on judgement day. I am not without need of repentance, but I know all too well what it feels like to finally drag myself to follow God’s promptings, only to find that I was far too late to have any impact.
history
The Duck family visited the zoo. The Duck Family looked at the Ducks12.
At the zoo we saw a “Spider monkey”, which had a habitat composed of trees and logs and bright yellow cloth strips which looked a lot like caution tape. Jethro asks: “Why is it using tape to make its web?”13
Jethro was telling me we were approaching our house as we pulled into the driveway, and I asked him “how did or house get here?” and he told me “it lives here.”14
The toddler starting to talk, all at once it seems. Can identify “spiderman” on his own. Threw a fit that Jethro got a “pierman” shirt but when he looked down his didn’t have pierman. He also says thinks like “help me” to get out of the crib, its remarkable.
The toddler has discerned that socks and shoes are sort of a password to get outside, so if I say “socks” anywhere in his vicinity he runs to the door and sits down so I can put socks on him. Very cute. Somewhat inconvenient when I don’t actually want to take him outside though.
The toddler unlike his brother loves baths. If he senses a bath is happening or may happen anywhere in his vicinity, he sprints into the bathroom and then starts pulling at his diaper, even with clothes on. It means he wants a bath but it really looks like he’s trying to tell us he needs to pee. Jethro will enjoy baths, but hates having his hair washed. “Papa, I don’t want you to wash my hair. Wait, speaking of hair, I don’t have any!”
This is a side effect of the radiation treatments- Because they’re to his full brain, his hair fell out, but we took him to his favorite haircut place before then and shaved him bald. Unfortunately the radiation is also to his full spine- This doesn’t quite “compromise” his immune system, but it does disrupt it heavily. His white blood counts drop because each vertibrae is being disrupted, so they have been sending us home with shots to give him, to help his immune system. So I’ve been giving him shots every night, while mama holds his hand. “Papa, I am going to be a little unbrave for shots”
He got a lot of prizes from the radiation place though, including an arts and crafts bag, and he thought the glue stick was chapstick. And he loves chapstick. So he put it on. Thankfully it is very weak glue and did not seem to bother him as much as it did me lol
He randomly told me this week: “one by one, that's how I march”
Duckstack Inventions: The Future
A limping, boring future, or an action packed future in technicolor? You decide
The Duckstack has recently acquired (illegally) several Greek Oracles, which we have locked in a room and given the job of producing visions, assembly line style. In the light of dim blue lanterns, they wail and clasp their eyes, or peer into a fountain in the center, or cut themselves and scry the blood upon the wall. We have been assured that these Duckstack oracles are highly reliable, and here is what they have to say:
Snow Sucker: Spraying snow around just spreads the mess.
Asteroid Belt: Full size asteroids jammed together in such a way that they’ll hold your belt right up, and with mass like that, surely nothing (else) will get you down. Imagining a classic maneuver: hoisting your shorts and straightening them by your asteroid belt. You will be the talk of the town.
Viopianoflutetar: An elegant instrument consisting of an arrangement of extremely narrow wind chimes, which you blow into like a harmonica, while you hold a bow and drag it across them to produce different pitches. The bow has a keyboard upon it which, when the keys are depressed, cause hammers to strike the windchimes, further altering the pitch, and the whole thing is handheld, propped delicately upon your thigh.
Our new Duckstack Visionaries assure us these visions are absolutely reliable15. We have not patented any of them because our generosity knows no bounds. Soon you will have everything you could ever have hoped for.
what on earth lol
No Books of Revelations were harmed in the making of This Duckstack
I am making these numbers up. This is financial advice.
like 60% of the population does not vote, most people aren’t liberal or conservative they’re just normal
This is financial advice
Unlike me, right? Hah Hah
I really hope I am not out of touch, actually. I figure that puts me ahead of just about every politician in that area though- because I care about whether I'm right, and they don't
care about whether they're right I mean. They probably don't care about whether I'm right either though lol
This is financial advice
This balances to a net loss for the church because obviously people who need welfare don’t exactly have high paying jobs but it is remarkable how many career welfare leeches this sifts out
I can’t be sure of any of this, of course. Feel free to check my work.
No Ducks were harmed in the making of the Duck Family’s zoo trip
Well you can’t have a web without sticky, right? Tape seems like a fine choice
“it lives here all the time. Next to the chicken coups” You heard it here first
“For what?” who cares
What's your take on the idea that the U.S. government is naturally resilient to collapse because of its structure of sub-jurisdictions that each (generally) have a cohesive cultural, religious, demographic, and political identity? It seems like, outside of the worst areas, everyone would already be living under a government that would only have to expand a bit to fill the vacuum, and already carries legal legitimacy.
I'm far from bullish on the U.S. making a comeback, but aside from some completely deracinated and dysfunctional states (NY, IL, CA), I can't imagine that, say, Mainers, wouldn't have the collective civic pride to pull through. Texas may not be what it once was, but the parts of it that are still Texas will probably likewise outlast the U.S., and Florida (doubts about its present governor aside) is full of young, ambitious right-wingers with the skillset required to live in an expensive, high-demand area.
Beyond that, individual neighborhoods can be pretty tough. I remember those popup militias during the riots three years ago.